Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking at statistics about mobile browsing in the Philippines. I wanted to find out what mobile phones I would need to support on the new version of the Ortigas Online web site when it comes out on the second quarter of this year. One of the things that I found out is that Nokia is still the dominant mobile phone brand in the Philippines according to a recent article by admob.com on advertising statistics.

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The Nokia Betalabs has released Maps 3.0 Beta. The new version of Nokia Maps now supports the S60 3rd Ed FP1 platform. In addition, there are also some new features/enhancements to the previous release:

• Start-up sequence takes you to your current position as soon as position is found. If your position is not found in few seconds, you are taken to last known position
• You can rotate the map, so you can for example view 3D landmarks from all directions. Just press 4 and 6 in map view. Pressing 5 takes you back to ‘north up’ view
• In 3D view mode, you can tilt the view by pressing 2 and 8
• 2D/3D mode works with all map modes, i.e. with Map/Satellite/Terrain
• My Favourites menu is cleaned up and History list is moved higher in menu
• My Places has option “Point me to” for any saved place/landmark, you the direction to that place on the map
• In addition to the synchronisation of Favourites and Collections with Ovi MapsBeta and vice versa (use in online mode, enable Internet connection), you can now plan routings on Ovi MapsBeta and synchronise to your device
• Lots of bug fixes

Maps 3.0 Beta works with all Nokia devices based on:

S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (E71, E66, 6110 Navigator, N95, N95 8GB, N82)
S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (N96, N85, N79, 6650, 6210 Navigator, 6220 Classic, N78)

Download from the Nokia Betalabs to try it out.

If you have an Apple iPod and are using Ubuntu Linux, do you notice that whenever you plug in your iPod into the USB Banshee or Rhythmbox (and other Ubuntu Linux media players) is able to detect it automagically? You can actually setup your other devices like cell phones, external USB storage devices and other media players to be detected as well.

The only single requirement for you to be able to do this is that Ubuntu Linux should be able to detect your device (mobile phone, other media players) as a external USB storage device. The procedure is actually very simple and easy to setup. All you need to do is create a file named “.is_audio_player” in the root storage directory of the device.

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When my wife got her free cell phone for her post-paid mobile phone service. She received a Nokia 3110c mobile phone and turns out that this multimedia mobile phone that has a rich set of features at a price that is affordable if you’re going to buy it. If you’re shopping for your next mobile phone, you can check out the new Nokia 3110c.

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If you use the Eclipse IDE for mobile development, version 0.9.1 oft the Mobile Tools for Java is available now. You can update your current MTJ version using the Eclipse update manager.

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Several months after the official launch of the T-Mobile G1, I have yet to see the second commercially available Android-based mobile phone. The title of “Second Android-based mobile phone” is still up for grabs since someone has yet to deliver on their promises and someone has yet to blog about their just delivered Android mobile phone.

As far as I am concerned, all of these articles going around the Net is simply just vaporware and marketing hype. Poised to come out with an Android-based mobile phones next year are companies like Motorola, Asus, Toshiba, Vodafone and Sony Ericsson.

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With the mixed opinions on how well the T-mobile G1 Android based mobile phone performed against the Apple iPhone, it looks like Nokia is sending a loud message — “Watch and learn boys!”

I really love the idea of having an open mobile platform such as Android because of the freedom and possibilities it gives to mobile phone owners but I guess I will have to wait a while before the mobile platform will mature. Apple with its exquisite engineering prowess has always led the world in creating great engineering worksmanships like the iPod, Macbook and the iPhone.

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The VirtualBox team has released version 2.0.6 of its VirtualBox virtualization software. I thought is was going to be something that adds support for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope but guess what, it’s something better!

For those of you who are using Ubuntu as the host OS and have installed VirtualBox to be able to use Nokia’s PC Suite, the changelog says “USB: Fixed support for iPhone and Nokia devices (Linux host: bugs #470 & #491)”. This is good news since a lot of Ubuntu users seem to be particularly interested in running the Nokia PC Suite under a VirtualBox guest machine running Windows.

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University of California (Berkeley) and Nokia Research Center have come up with a unique idea to use GPS-equipped cell phones as traffic monitoring probes that will help analyze traffic flow and travel patterns in the San Francisco Bay area.

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Nokia has announced the top 10 developers of its Mobile Games Innovation Challenge. The winners, to be announced at an exclusive awards ceremony later this month, will take home a total prize value of EUR 70,000.

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