New smartphones from HTC, including the Legend and Desire are schedule for launch in South Africa on 12 April 2010. These and a range of other new models from the Taiwanese manufacturer were announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona in February.

The Desire is comparable to the Nexus One, which is manufactured by HTC and sold by Google. There are still no plans to launch the Nexus One in SA, but the Desire is a practically identical phone with the same 3.7″ AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera and, most importantly, Android 2.1 operating system that you’ll find on the Nexus One. (more…)

After threatening to pull out of the People’s Republic following hacks on its systems, internet search giant Google is likely to make good on its warning and is preparing to shutdown its operations in China according to an insider at the company who spoke to the Wall Street Journal last week.

Google Search is one of the last major international internet services accessible in China after the government in that country banned Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and several other sites in 2009, making them inaccessible to local internet users. (more…)

The battle for differentiation in mobile is at fever pitch. iPhone has the app store, BlackBerry has cut-rate, unlimited internet access, Android has… well… Google and Nokia has a mounting collection of services that includes an extensive, and now entirely free, mapping solution.

Nokia Maps was an early play from the Finnish mobile giant that has put it ahead of the pack when it comes to affordable mapping and navigation on your phone.

The service has been mostly free for some time, offering maps of the world and their updates to Nokia users for gratis. Voice navigation and a few other bits and pieces were levied via subscription, however – but these are now free as part of the re-branded Ovi Maps product announced by Nokia this week. (more…)

With the preview of Google Wave underway there are a lot of questions being asked about the platform, especially surrounding when it will be made available to the public, what new features Google is working on and whether or not more invites are going to be issued for early testers.

I discussed Wave with Lars Rasmussen, a member of Google’s technical team who is based in Sydney where he developed the product with his brother Jens. The audio is available for streaming or download in this post.

[wpaudio url="http://www.simon.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/lars_rasmussen.mp3" text="Talking Wave with Lars Rasmussen"]

The Apple iPhone is possibly the most near-perfect mobile phone product I’ve used. But it does lack some features that I feel are key. Some of them would be challenging to implement while others really should be there and I’m confused that they aren’t. That said, the iPhone also gets flack for missing some things that I honestly couldn’t care less about.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.
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