Our good friend / colleague / mentor and all-round gadget guru, Judie Lipsett from Gear Diary, is at a Mobius event in Seattle this week – and was at a presentation this afternoon from Sony-Ericsson on the much-anticipated Sony SE XPERIA X1.

She’s got some news on progress being made on the X1, and lots of great photos, including some useful size comparison shots.

Well worth a visit to Gear Diary to check it out HERE …

I am one of those rare and mythical creatures – a (very) happy Zune owner.  I have a Gen 1 Zune and really have no complaints with it and use it all the time.  I have not been a fan of Zune advertising however, which I just may have mentioned in the past on this site.

This week I just caught a Zune ad on TV for the first time ever – and I was really almost shocked to find that I like it.  I think it’s a well done advert for the Zune … finally.

Things I like about it:

• No enormous pink bunnnies starring in it at all
• It’s simple
• The track used in it (I don’t know what it is) is not lame IMO
• It highlights the single biggest selling point of the Zune – the Zune Pass all-you-can-eat music plans
• No pink bunnies

Have any of you seen the ad yet?  (if not, click the image at the top of this post to have a look) What do you think?

The platform wars are going mobile. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows Mobile, the mobile platform that will win in the end will be the one with the best and broadest collection of applications.

I hope that thought – from TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld – proves true.  I think in the mobile space there have tended to be other big factors in determining success and failure for individual devices and even platforms, and many smartphone users have barely scratched the surface when it comes to mobile apps usage. 

Hopefully we’ll see that change as more and more of our computing activities are done on mobile devices, and as more great mobile applications are developed.

Today, Blackberry became the latest mobile platform vendor to throw some *serious* money into the ring to help spark development of apps for the Blackberry (and other) mobile platforms.  Google started this recent trend with their $10 million Android Developers Challenge, then Apple’s iPhone SDK launch event brought news of a $100 million iFund for iPhone platform development ventures – and now RIM and its partners have upped the ante even further, with a $150 million venture capital fund "to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry(R) platform
and other mobile platforms."

That’s an awful lot of money being thrown out there for enterprising mobile developers.  Anybody else wish they had even an ounce of coding talent right about now? 

Very soon we should start seeing some of the results of all this funding and encouragement to all these mobile platforms.  I feel sure we’ll see some great apps, and hope that some of them will even start winning over some of those mobile users who’ve never gone past phone calls and texting up to now …

Via: Gizmodo

Here’s another fantastic MobileHeist deal – on a very popular iPhone ringtone making application.  This is a special offer from our partner, Efiko, for a major discount on their most popular product, iPhoneRingToneMaker.

iPhoneRingToneMaker 1.4.4 is a handy (Windows only) tool that let’s you create custom ring tones for your iPhone using music from your music library.  It’s the top rated ringtone maker for the iPhone and consistently receives rave reviews for ease-of-use and functionality.  This application is consistently one of MobiHand’s best-selling applications that normally retails for $14.95 but …

for two days, this Thursday and Friday, May 8th & 9th, we’re going to sell it for only $4.95.  That’s $10 off the retail price ! This special pricing will be in effect starting at 7PM PST on Wednesday, May 7th and running until 11:59 PST on Friday, May 9th.

You don’t need to use a coupon code to get this deal – just add iPhoneRingToneMaker to your shopping cart and you’re good to go.

Just go HERE to check out iPhoneRingToneMaker and get your savings …

HTC has a ‘big’ event scheduled for this Tuesday in London, and there’s already been plenty of speculation about what they may be announcing at it.  This weekend Engadget has a post up on another exciting possibility – and this time it’s a very high-end Windows Mobile device – the HTC Touch Diamond. 

The rumored specs for this thing are:

    * 2.8-inch VGA display
    * WinMo 6.1 Pro
    * WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0
    * eGPS, FM tuner
    * Quad-band HSDPA 7.2
    * 4GB internal flash, microSD slot
    * 528MHz CPU
    * 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
    * 10.7mm (0.47-inches) thick
    * Supposedly also features an orientation sensor / accelerometer

That’s one heck of an impressive list, and sounds like it would be a real flagship device for HTC as well.  If those pics are close to accurate, it’s also pretty damn sharp looking.

Tuesday should be interesting – and hey it’s just nice to have someone other than Apple generating a little bit of buzz and speculation ahead of an event right about now