TechTalk: Exploring the Latest Technology News, Updates, Reviews, and Gossip

Intel and Nokia have jointly announce the oFono project, an open source project for developing an open source telephony solution. oFono.org will bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license and also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends.

The mobile phone is possibly one of the greatest inventions of our time, maybe not greater than ‘Sliced Bread’ but definitely one of the top five on the list. It’s literally brought people closer than ever before. Sure Mr. Alexander G Bell made it all possible, but the technology has certainly come a long way since then. The basic technology may remain the same, but the forms they come in with the kind of features provided in that form is a whole other story. The mobile handset has been toned down, built up, reduced considerably in size and built to be an office and a playground. I don’t want to give you a history lesson, but this is just a reminiscence of the good old days of the mobile handset and as cheesy as it may sound, the ones we left behind. So here are some of those mobile handsets that really turned things around for the industry. First Mobile Handset The world’s first cellular call was made from this handset. Even waaay back in the 1970’s, even though the technology was bra...

Google Inc's Android operating system is gaining support in the mobile industry, with 8 million Android phones to be sold in 2009, up 10-fold from a year ago, research firm Strategy Analytics said on Monday. With the overall handset market shrinking as economies slow globally, the mobile industry is focusing investment on more advanced smartphones and their software. Google's Android was introduced in the United States in the second half of 2008, and now all top cellphone vendors except Nokia have said they would use Android. "Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years," said Neil Mawston, a director at Strategy Analytics. Mawston said handset vendors and operators like T-Mobile and Vodafone are attracted to Android's relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google's support for services. Despite the 10-fold growth forecast for 2009, with 8 million phones sold A...

It seems like Nokia may be adding a new handset to their SuperNova range according to reports. The slider handset being called the 7100s (yet to be made official) looks a little similar to Nokia’s 5610 XpressMusic handset. According to these reports the handset will have a Symbian S40 UI and come with features that include a media player, FM radio and a 1.3MP camera. Other features will include Bluetooth 2.0, Flash Lite 2.1.1 support, microSD card support for external memory and an Opera Mini browser. Since there’s nothing official about the handset yet, there’s no pricing or date for its release.

Nokia is launching its N96 in Delhi today a few days before the iPhone 3G is launched here in India. The N96 was initially set to launch first in the UK on the first of October. But Nokia seems to have changed their plans and are launching it here first. The timing is so wickedly correct. Even as we wait for the iPhone, Nokia is dropping this fully loaded beauty into our laps and we estimate the price to be somewhere in the vicinity of Rs. 36,000. The quandary about what phone to buy just got bigger and more complicated with these two behemoths launching so close together. The Indian market is truly getting to be the biggest mobile market on the planet and personally, being spoilt for choice, we have no complaints whatsoever.

Nokia introduces four new handsets under Supernova series Nokia has unveiled its Supernova series with four new models namely 7210, 7310, 7510 and 7610 targeting the fashion conscious people. The models 7210 and 7310 are candy-bar phones equipped with features like 2 mega-pixel camera, microSD support, FM radio and plus EDGE support. Another clamshell type model, 7510 incorporates a 2.2 inches QVGA display along with 2 mega pixel camera, LED flash, FM radio, A-GPS support and accessible to Nokia Maps 1.2, Widsets, said the company. Featuring a 3.2 mega pixel camera with dual-LED flash, the model 7610 has an additional feature called Theme Colorizer enabling to capture any color and applying it to key illumination and phone wall-paper, claims the company. The models 7210 and 7610 will be available for $189 and $354.3 respectively in the third quarter while the model 7310 and 7510 will cost $244 and $283.5 respectively