A few weeks ago, I concluded my six-month Listen To This series, which compared six of the leading portable media players, and ultimately chose the one (or more) which I felt really excelled in each of several areas.  No sooner had I posted it (can you still say the ink was still wet?) than I received an email from one of our readers, darkcorner, asking why I had not included the Cowon S9 which, in his opinion was the best sounding media player available.  Well, that is pretty high praise, and once a few other folks confirmed that opinion, I knew I was going to have to review this one.  So, I headed over to Newegg, and dropped a couple of hundred dollars to find out what was the big deal with this media player.

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The variety, and might I make up a word, weird-ocity,  of proprietary connectors for individual phones to charge from, has never made any sense. It has always seemed to be a bit of a “make it up as you go along” sort of randomness. Maybe dependent on designers, or device manufacturers, thinking they could make users retain a branded device because the proprietary charger would be re-usable with latter devices. Although that sort of continuity hasn’t evolved. In that, I’m looking at two Samsung phones, that have different connectors. My Moto Razr had a mini usb connector, my Tilt has a Mini usb connector, my old Nokia had one of those funky proprietary connectors. iPhone has a proprietary connection as does the iPod. It doesn’t make sense,why can’t we all just get along.

Somewhere, in a land far, far away, someone hit upon the idea that it would be sensible to use one connection to charge all phones. Thus relieving the frustration of finding the right cable for your phone on any particular day, and reducing the cost of a phone, by adding a standard option to them all.

It seems like it has taken a long time for a decision to be made, but pretty much all of the major phone manufacturers have agreed, with the glaring exception of HTC and HP.

This is something that really has to happen, and not only from a user point of view. Standardising of the sync/charge connection, inevitably reduces the cost of device manufacture. One thing that strikes me here, if you make devices, you will not have to package a charger with every new device, therefore saving money. Which hopefully means the device cost up front, is reduced. For the User, a little bit of reduced redundancy, less chargers to throw away/ recycle.

A new EU norm should be created soon, requiring next-gen mobile phones to use a universal Micro USB socket. This would eliminate “unwanted phone accessories”, allowing users to charge phones made by different manufacturers with the same charger.

Hope this rolls out sooner rather than later!

microUSB Phone Charger Standard Agreed Upon

It has been with no small amount of interest that I have been following the latest developments in the news industry.  As a former journalist, I often wonder how my life could have been different if I had been involved with a newspaper first hand today.  I personally do not believe that the industry is dying, so much as it is evolving.  Metamorphosing into a whole new paradigm.  As evidence of these changes, Fluent Mobile, today, launched the Fluent News Aggregator, which draws news from over 30 different sources and delivers them straight to your iPhone or iPod Touch (or other device via its WAP based website).

The company describes this latest approach to news gathering like this: 

Fluent Mobile, a mobile content organization and delivery company, launched today along with Fluent News, its first application for the iPhone. Founded by a team of internationally recognized computer science experts, Fluent Mobile is dedicated to bringing the speed, reliability and convenience of desktop Web browsing to handheld devices. Fluent News is the first iPhone application to aggregate exclusively made-for-mobile content from the most trusted news sources across the Web into a single, easy-to-read and up-to-the-minute mobile newspaper. It’s the fastest, most convenient way to browse and read news on the iPhone.

What that means is a whole new level of coverage.  Unlike the AP Mobile News App, which gives you a great deal of coverage from only one source, Fluent Mobile offers coverage of the same stories from multiple sources.  This gives you not only depth of coverage, but also a significant breadth of coverage, as you will see the same story covered from a variety of different angles. 

I have to admit that I had a hard time understanding how Fluent Mobile was going to improve the mobile news scene.  But I think this quote from Fluent Mobile’s CEO, Micah Adler really puts the program into perspective:

We are going to redefine expectations for the mobile Web experience,  Over just the past two years, the mobile industry has seen great advances in device capabilities, bandwidth and the sheer breadth of mobile content. However, browsing the mobile Web can still be an extremely frustrating experience. Fluent Mobile is dedicated to narrowing the experience gap between mobile and desktop Web browsing by optimizing the search, organization and delivery of dynamic mobile content. At the forefront of the news industry’s transformation from paper to desktop to mobile, Fluent News is the just first step in our plans to improve the usability of the mobile Web.

To that end, although the application is currently available for the iPhone or iPod Touch, Fluent Mobile is available from any platform via their WAP site: http://www.fluentnews.com.

Although Fluent News makes it fast and easy to see a broad range of the most important news being covered by many of the top news organizations, there are still several key functions which are missing from this initial release.

First is customization.  Although Fluent News provides stories from many of the top news sources (including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, and plenty more), it does not give you the option of identifying the news sources which are important to you.  It would be nice if you could enter the websites for your favorite news sources and include them in the aggregation.  From what I understand, however, this feature is already in the works, and hopefully coming soon.

Along with customization is local news.  While it is nice to see this kind of coverage of national and international news, most of us are more directly affected on a daily basis by local news.  So, the ability to input your location (preferably by GPS) and access local news papers would make this an even more impressive program.

Filters.  Right now, organizing the entries you receive in Fluent News is not very sophisticated.  Sure, there are about a dozen sections which you can use to separate entries, but their is no way to focus a search.  So, for example, if I want to see the latest baseball news, the best I can do is select the sports category, and scroll through all of the sports until I find what I need.  It would be nice if, like other news resources, you could filter by keywords or sub-categories, so that I could separate baseball news from other news.

This kind of filtering would also allow Fluent News to magnify coverage in one area.  For example, if I select the latest headlines, then it will offer a broad look at the top 25 or so stories of the day.  But I should be able to dial that in to focus on one subject.  For example, the death of Michael Jackson.  Selecting that subject would then magnify coverage by giving me 25 stories using that keyword.  This occurs a little on the main page, but i really think this ability to focus in on a single topic, zooming in and out of the information highways and byways is the key to the whole program, and could be much more powerfully integrated and implemented in the program.

Despite these additional advanced features, there is a lot to like in the initial release of Fluent Mobile.  Most importantly among them is the instant access to complete articles.  If you see an article you want to read, just click it.  Unlike an RSS reader which will give you partial access to the article or a differently formatted article; Fluent takes you straight to the source, pre-fetching the full-length articles.

The other thing here is that the program constantly updates to find the latest news and bring it directly to you.  This “always on”connection means you will always have the best access to the most important news, as it is reported. 

The best feature, to me, however, is the integration of social networking.  You can use the sharing feature to post stories to your personal Facebook and Twitter pages.  This is fantastic, no longer will you need to cut and paste or try to remember the story until you can get to your desktop computer,  Just hit the button to share any story via Facebook, Twitter, or the more traditional email. 

I also thought that although the interface came across as a bit bland (no pictures on the main pages), it was extremely effective.  The aggregator lets you know exactly where your news is coming from by including the newspaper (or TV station’s) logo along with the headline and first couple of sentences. 

Additionally, since it is an application and not just a web site (at least on the iPhone and iPod Touch)  you will find full offline access whether you are connected to the Internet or not.   Hopefully, similar offline applications will be developed for other mobile platforms as well.

The best part of Fluent News is that it is currently available free-of-charge from the iTunes App Store iPhone or iPod Touch (though there are small ads inside the program).  Other platforms will have to stick to the WAP site until additional versions are released.

For more, check out Fluent News at www.fluentmobile.com .

Summer’s here and eSoft Interactive arrives to offer you some sizzling deals. For 1 week only, all of their mobile games have dropped in price to a mere 99¢. You can even get Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe for free! So what are you waiting for? Get in the game with eSoft Interactive and let the Summer games begin!

Technorati Tags: ESoft Interactive, Sale, Tjchan, Just Another Mobile Monday, JAMM

A few days have passed since HeroCraft released a round of updates to Ball Rush Aqua, but since it’s such a great game and is available for so many different platforms, I felt that it was worth mentioning!  Looks like they decided to incorporate enhanced touch controls and motion control on supported devices.  Looks like it is going to be even more fun to break stuff!  See below for the full scoop.

Modern technology brought to a legendary classic: Ball Rush Aqua is an enthralling Arcanoid style game that realizes the eternal ideas of the original, yet brings the whole experience bang up to date!

You can now travel through the underwater world! This game excels in its diversity — from the form and features of the bat through to the large variety of tasks involved: you don’t need to destroy all of the blocks, just open a way to the upper part of a screen to pass the level, and then to pass the next ones until you reach the top where you can really have fun and smash everything in sight! Over a hundred original locations are included alongside two levels of difficulty and a huge number of bonuses, which make the game even more captivating and attractive to play! Throw in 13 types of blocks which all have different margins of safety and you are ready to tackle the rewarding and absorbing experience that is Ball Rush Aqua. Some blocks restore after being crushed and some are almost indestructible. But don’t worry, your arsenal is ready for these trials because you can use fire and ice balls, missiles and bombs, which will hall help you to make your way to freedom!

Game features:

- Outstanding graphics

- Dynamic backgrounds

- 185 unique levels

- 13 bonus types and 13 types of blocks

- Record table

- Background stereo tracks

- High-quality sound effects

- Boss-levels

New features in version 1.4:

• Motion control
• New levels
• Improved touch control
• Minor bug fixes

I remind to all of the customers who have bought Ball Rush Aqua before – just visit our site and get this update for free!

The detailed information about the games, including screenshots, trailers and links for demo version are available on the HeroCraft PDA site – http://smart.herocraft.com/ball-rush-aqua.