Thglimited - Heavy Industries

What's new in the wonderful world of mobile communication?
German weekly Der Spiegel talks about Motorola's shift to design in order to get its mobile business out of the slump it is in. Interestingly, Moto seems to mistake "cosmetics" for "design" and fails to see that their biggest (and probably only) success in recent years the RAZR was just an amazing engineering feat... in terms of asthetics, I always felt the product was not well thought through with its random use of details.
Anyhow, it doesn't look too rosy for the US phone maker, as Motorola is planning to lay off 2,500 employees.

And speaking of American brands in a slump, Palm is trying to recover from their losses on the market with a new device which - leaked in Bill Gates' CES keynote - seems to enter a heavy testing phase at present.

Sony's Mylo 2 could be one of the coolest phones out there... if it could just make phone calls...
While it still does not accomplish this feat, the latest software update adds WMV playback capability and shoutcast support to the device.

Interesting things are happening in the mobile devices OS sector. With Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian dominating the market over the past few years, Apple has generated quite some buzz with its ported iPhone-OS X, but has been criticized for locking it down pretty much.
After Apple announce its iPhone SDK and Google's anticipated Android software platform is just around the corner, there also seems to be a release of the first open source Linux Mobile platform imminent in late 2008.

And speaking of software: the iPhone keeps on getting better and better, just by new (and unauthorized) software being available: Fring is a mobile chat client, that finally allows me to make Skype calls to Germany via VOIP for only 2.4 cents per minute or use Skype's newly released unlimited international call feature for just US$9.95 (!!!) per month.
Another addition of capabilities comes from China: HWPen is a handwriting recognition software that recognizes both the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters - albeit not the Traditional characters used in Taiwan... :-(

Microsoft on the other hand is obviously exploring opportunities to counter the iPhone's interface. In a literal twist of technology, a recently revealed Microsoft patent shows an alternative user interface that uses a technology that allows users to apply force to their portable device in order to carry out on-screen actions, such as flip a page in a document or switching between applications.

Verizon is the first mobile communication service provider that addresses the needs of the growing market of elderly people.

And to end this post, here's something funny.
We have recently purchased the book "Transmaterial 2" (check it out!) and Fernd pointed out the "artificial meat-like material" in it. A clever Japanese businessman has finally found out an obvious use for this: for ¥7,000 (or about US$69) you can wrap your iPod in a tasty layer of artificial Grade A beef... yummy!