3GSM blog

Showing that its Web application priorities extend to the mobile world, Google on Wednesday demonstrated a version of Gmail for the iPhone that could be used even when the phone had no network connection.

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, showed off at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona what he called a "technical concept" of Gmail even when the iPhone was offline. In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail for desktops and laptops, and like it, the mobile phone incarnation runs in a Web browser, not as a native application.

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network. To watch a demonstration, check the demo video on iPhone Buzz.

Offline applications can't of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, e-mail is stored in a local database on the phone, even when online.

"You'll note that it's very, very fast because it's using that local database," Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his in-box.

I'm sure I'm just setting myself up for disappointment one of these days, but I've come to expect big things from HTC at trade shows, whether it be CTIA or Mobile World Congress. The company has consistently delivered some of the hottest product announcements at these events, so can you blame a girl for thinking such thoughts?

Thankfully, I wasn't disappointed at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009 (well, maybe a little, but I'll get to that in a bit) as HTC debuted several new handsets. The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer kicked off the show by debuting the HTC Touch Diamond2 and the HTC Touch Pro2, which replace the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.

HTC Magic

(Credit: Bonnie Cha/CNET Networks)

I stopped by HTC's booth on Wednesday to have a look at both smartphones, and I was impressed with the design improvements and enhanced technologies. The Touch Diamond2 probably wowed me more than the Pro2 because of its extremely thin and solid design. The device doesn't feel as plasticky with its brushed metal face and sides. Also, I can't tell if it's the sleeker design, but the screen pops out that much more and grabs your attention.

HTC has also worked on the user interface, providing a new Start screen where you can easily access your applications. It's also customizable and features more user-friendly icons. The touch-sensitive toolbar is a cool little feature. I didn't think it'd make that much of a difference but it definitely makes it easier to zoom in and out on Web pages and e-mails.

The Touch Pro2 is a monster, and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. It's bigger than the Touch Pro (4.5 inches tall by 2.3 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick versus 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide by 0.7 inch thick) but again solidly built. The navigation buttons along the bottom are smaller than I like, but that's a relatively minor complaint.

HTC Magic

(Credit: HTC)

To our disappointment, there hasn't been a ton of Google Android news to come out of GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009 so far. Huawei announced on Monday that it plans to start selling Android devices later this year, but other than that we didn't see a T-Mobile G2, and Samsung already said it would not show its Android phone at the show as it has been delayed until the second half of 2009.

However, we did get one device announcement. The bad news is that it's not for the U.S. market. On Tuesday, Vodafone said it will bring the HTC Magic to market this spring--the first Google Android device for the carrier. The Magic will be a Vodafone exclusive in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, and France and will be available on a nonexclusive basis in Italy.

The HTC Magic features a 3.2-inch HVGA touch screen and trackball navigator, but doesn't have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard like the T-Mobile G1. The quad-band smartphone will offer various e-mail options, including Gmail (of course) and POP3 and IMAP accounts, and will support Google applications like Google Maps and Google Search. Vodafone customers will also have access to the Android Market, from where they can download more applications and games for their smartphones. Other goodies include a Webkit browser, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HSDPA/WCDMA (900/2100MHz), and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

The HTC Magic will come in multiple colors: white for United Kingdom, Spain, and France; black for Germany; and both colors for Italy. Exact release dates and pricing schemes were not announced at this time, though there was mention that the Magic would be "available for free on various price plans." Vodafone also plans to release the HTC Magic in other markets over the next few months.

Photos: Hands-on with the HTC Magic Android phone

This is a mock-up of the Google Android phone Huawei is showing at its booth at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009. Design-wise, it looks pretty similar to the iPhone.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon CNET News/CBS Interactive)

BARCELONA--Chinese handset maker Huawei Technologies said Monday at the GSMA Global World Congress 2009 here that it plans to start selling phones using Google's Android operating system later this year.

Details about the upcoming phones are still scarce. But the company said it's partnering with a design consultancy company. The device is still in development and is expected to hit the market in the third quarter of this year.

Huawei is a large telecommunications equipment maker that has been manufacturing handsets it sells to wireless operators, which then resell the devices under their own brands.

To date, the company has had little presence in the U.S. market. It currently sells one handset in the U.S. called the M328, which is sold through low-cost regional carrier MetroPCS.

Edward Chen, head of Huawei's devices unit, told Reuters that the company is also considering phones that use other operating systems, including Symbian, the leading smartphone operating system on the market. The company has also considered using Linux from the LiMo Foundation.

While the rest of the cell phone market is contracting amid the global recession, Huawei told Reuters it expects sales to grow. Chen said he believes the company will sell between 40 million and 45 million phones in 2009, compared with 33 million in 2008.

Chen also told the news service that Huawei is readying a phone for late this year or early next year that operates on the 4G wireless network technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE). AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the U.S. have each announced that they plan to use LTE to build their next-generation wireless networks.

Well, here's the first disappointment of GSMA Mobile World Congress. Samsung will not be showing off its first Google Android smartphone at the show; in fact, we won't be seeing it at all until the second half of 2009.

Initial reports said Samsung would release its Android device some time in the second quarter of 2009, but according to an article in The Guardian, the head of marketing at Samsung's mobile division, Younghee Lee, said the company is "planning internally" for a release in the second half of the year. Lee added that Samsung is in negotiations with a number of operators to bring its Android device to market.

While obviously disappointing, we do know that Samsung will be holding a press conference at Mobile World Congress, so we expect an announcement(s) of some sort. Check back on February 15 for more!

Added more details 2/12/09 at 10:15 AM PT.

(Credit: LogMeIn)

Few see Google Android in its current state as a serious platform for business users. Like the iPhone, it launched without support for the Microsoft Exchange, so there's no native support for syncing to your Outlook calendar and contacts. Android also lacked a lot of native productivity tools to edit online and attached documents, a key collaboration requirement.

Yet this week, LogMeIn announced a version of its remote maintenance software for corporate IT teams and carriers that can support the Android platform. LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile downloads a small application on the employee's company phone. If the phone breaks or otherwise misbehaves, administrators in the office can attempt to diagnose and repair the software while the employee is on the road.

We've seen LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile demoed on a Symbian phone and it looked pretty useful for companies with a sizable mobile workforce. While the product makes a lot of sense for companies handing out corporate BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile smartphones, we would have developed for the Palm (in anticipation of the forthcoming Palm Pre) or iPhone first, and would have waited for Android to pick up functionality and traction, not to mention some real corporate street cred.

Of course, stories are creeping up about new Android-run devices in the works. Or maybe LogMeIn is banking on Google fine-tuning Android into the kind of secure, tool-laden device that can steal business users away from BlackBerry and the rest.

Either way, it may be that the majority of LogMeIn's Android beneficiaries won't have their corporate IT administrators at all. Carriers, too, could purchase LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile to help subscribers fix their phones remotely.

Related software
LogMeIn (Windows | Mac)
LogMeIn Free (Windows)

Updated 2/11/09 at 6:50 P.M. PT to add more context to the licensing debate and to correct Amnon Sarig's title.

(Credit: TuneWiki)

Back in October, we took a look at close look at TuneWiki, a media enhancement application for Google Android that scrolls through a song's lyrics as you play a song or YouTube music video. The company announced this week an update to its free Android application that will let you also stream Internet radio on your phone. The update, which will be submitted to the Android Market this Saturday, will give streaming songs TuneWiki's lyrical capabilities, as well as its social networking enhancements. As a moral perk, many of the lyrics will be legally licensed. We'll lay out the program's highs and lows, general availability, and some legal particulars.

We mostly liked TuneWiki when it first came out--certainly the idea of it, and in general the application's performance. It is also the first application of this type that I've seen for mobile phones. (The free-to-try application MiniLyrics has been around for a while on the desktop.) TuneWiki wasn't always as stable as we'd have liked, and syncing wasn't always on-point. We looked forward to the media application's next steps. Lyrics precision and a few stability issues were still present in our preview version of TuneWiki; hopefully the latter will be addressed by the time TuneWiki 1.0 reaches the Android Market.

Streaming Internet radio
Providing Internet lyrics, and legal ones at that, are the two biggest points of interest in this update. First let's tackle the streaming Internet feature. Like Pandora, Last.FM, and Slacker Radio, TuneWiki's Internet radio feature (designated by a microphone icon on the application's navigation menu) lets you choose stations by genre and popularity, and save favorite stations. In addition, TuneWiki can display a music map showing you where else the song is playing at that moment, and can stream lyrics that users have uploaded into TuneWiki's database from its Web site--the 'wiki' element of TuneWiki's service.

TuneWiki's streaming lyrics component only works for some stations, and then the lyrics are only as good as the user-generated database itself. If you're lucky enough to get a station compatible with TuneWiki's lyrics software, making them sync with the streaming song is your next challenge.

TuneWiki tasks you with finding your place and then tapping on it, after which the software takes over and highlights the lines for you. This TuneWiki did, but on a song with a quick tempo, the feature didn't kick in until two more lines had played. This is by far the application's biggest drawback. In addition, artist credits were only present on stations that could stream TuneWiki's lyrics. For many stations, we were left in the dark.

Of legalities and lyrics
In addition to streaming Internet radio, TuneWiki is announcing a partnership with a major music publishers association that grants TuneWiki the rights to stream lyrics for almost 2 million songs. Music law is complicated stuff, but as TuneWiki's President, Amnon Sarig, explains it, the licenses let TuneWiki legitimately give the green light to many user-submitted lyrics. Those that fall outside the licensing scope are protected under the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Wikipedia). TuneWiki isn't breaking any laws--for now--by streaming any unlicensed lyrics its users upload, unless the rights-owner asks for a take-down. (Sarig told CNET in an interview that his company complies with publishers' requests to block song lyrics.) This is interesting stuff, especially in light of Warner Music Group's lawsuit against Seeqpod for its role in corralling copyrighted MP3s for users to play. Perhaps TuneWiki's show of good faith and latest licensing gains will shield it from similar lawsuits.

Availability
TuneWiki plans to submit the free version 1.0 of its lyrics application to Google's Android Market. By March or April, the company expects to release TuneWiki for BlackBerry, J2ME, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. These versions are currently being tested in a closed beta program. It is also possible to download TuneWiki onto jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches, though there is currently no listing in the iTunes App Store.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

(Credit: Crave Asia)

Phone madness continues on in Barcelona, Spain, as the second day of GSMA Mobile World Congress comes to a close. Vodafone's CEO said he sees the mobile web as the future, Microsoft announced MSN Direct availability on Windows Mobile devices, and Yahoo launches OneConnect, a new tool that lets mobile phone users to aggregate their social-networking updates and messaging in one spot on their phones. T-Mobile also finally announces plans to launch 3G in the U.S. by summer 2008. There's also hope for an Android phone, as well as an Austrian version of the iPhone by the end of the year on T-Mobile. Nokia knocks out another announcement about Nokia Maps 2.0, a much improved maps application for its smart phones.

HTC P3470

(Credit: HTC)

But let's move on to what you really want to know about--all the new and shiny gadgets. We take a closer look at the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, the first Windows Mobile smart phone by Sony Ericsson. It's tricked out with a huge 3-inch screen, an arc sliding QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA/HSUPA, a 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, and Wi-Fi. HTC, a well-known Taiwanese manufacturer of smart phones, also announced a couple of new devices. The first is the HTC P3470 (we highly suggest a nicer name), a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone that comes with built-in GPS and TomTom Navigator 6 software, plus a 2.8-inch touchscreen, and a 2-megapixel camera. HTC also announced a revamped HTC Advantage with TouchFlo software (a la the HTC Touch) and hints at a new version of Windows Mobile.

LG KF700

(Credit: LG)

LG also announced a few new phones. One of them is a Symbian-powered smartphone dubbed the KT610, which has a 2.4-inch screen, a QWERTY keyboard, and HSDPA. Then LG introduced yet another touchscreen wonder, the LG KF600, which is essentially the GSM version of the LG Venus. Bonnia Cha took a closer look at the LG KF700, and marveled at its beautiful touchscreen, as well as its slider keypad. The KF700 has a music and video player, a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and 90MB of internal memory, and a microSD expansion slot.

Samsung SGH-F490

(Credit: Samsung)

Samsung made the biggest splash today though, with a huge array of new phones. We already mentioned the Samsung Soul on Day 1, and on Day 2, Samsung showed us the F400, the F480 and the F490. The F400 is a phone with a definite multimedia focus, complete with a music player, stereo speakers, an amplifier with Bang & Olufsen technology, and a 3-megapixel camera. Both the F480 and the F490 look a lot like a certain phone from Apple. The F490 has a large 3.2-inch touch-screen display, a 5-megapixel camera, Google Search, plus a 3.5mm headset jack that isn't recessed. The F480 on the other hand, has a 2.8-inch touch-screen display, a 5-megapixel camera, FM radio, and e-mail.

Taking a departure from the touch-screen phones for a bit, Samsung also announced the G810, a slider phone running on the Symbian S60 operating system that has a 5-megapixel camera, TV out, GPS, and Wi-Fi. The P960 is a little on the lower end, with a 3-megapixel camera, an FM radio, and Bluetooth.

To round up the day's coverage, we took a look at a funky looking Sony Ericsson Bluetooth speaker, plus a closer look at prototype phones running the Google Android operating system.

Google's Android platform has emerged as one of the sleeper hits of the GSMA World Congress in Barcelona. Though it exists only in prototype, show attendees are flocking to the Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and ARM booths were demos are available. The TI booth was was packed to the gills when I passed by, so I headed to the ARM booth instead. There, I got a short demonstration of a prototype. As my colleague Maggie Reardon reports, there's not a lot to say at this point. The welcome screen featured a plain black background with a series of generic icons along the bottom. The icons open features such as the Web browser, calendar, messaging, Gmail access, and Google Maps. The main menu page was also pretty basic. It was just a series of icons on the same black background. Remember, since Android will be a open platform the design will vary by developer. In any case, there's no knowing what it will look like in its final form. I can say that with a 200Mhz processor, the prototype was pretty speedy. Check it out for yourself in our Google Android video.