The Olympic Games are coming fasting and furious. Before you know it, the games volition be underway (first step ceremonies are on the 12th). Carl Rogers (NYSE: RCI) Wireless is look to help out the throngs of citizenry drift to the Vancouver area via a new SIM card ‘Visitor Pack’. Available in Vancouver only, the new pack runs $29.99 and contains single GSM SIM circuit board and a $20 prepaid ‘Pay As You Go’ voucher. The coupon tin only be activated on any current Pay As You Go plans. So, if you have an unlocked GSM device, you can pick up the Visitor Pack and activate it for manipulation while you’re at the games!

[Via: MobileSyrup]

The partnership with rudiment News wasn’t the only matter advent from mobile medicine overhaul Slacker at CES 2010 – they’ve also announced a new app for the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre and Pixi, as wellspring as radio caching across their iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) clients onto microSD or device memory. Sideloading the high gear-quality versions of favourite stations via USB was a number of a chore for folks who were looking for a wireless streaming medicine service, so this is a much-needed rise, and is especially admirable for coming out on all of their mobile apps at once. Most of us spend a reasonable amount of meter wallowing in a Wi-Fi zona, so wirelessly caching stations for offline access should be a painless procedure. Hit up Slacker for more info.

UPDATE: Oh, also, Slacker’s advent to Canada this workweek. Woot!

A new year is a time to reflect on our achievements in the past tense twelve months and to set goals for the coming 12 months. That goes for habitue folks and multi-subject corporations alike. In the heart of mending what’s legal injury with their mobile earphone businesses this class, our favorite cellular telephone manufacturers rich person submitted to us their own New Year’s resolutions. Hera’s what they’re resolution to accomplish in 2010:

Research In Motion (RIM) We resoluteness to rich person fewer BlackBerry overhaul outages in 2010. Notice how we aren’t promising to prevent all outages. Also, notice how we father’t make any mention of our terrible vane web browser. HTC First, we’d like to confirm our New Year’s resolution in a tweet. We’ll probably just unconfirm the tweet with a subsequent tweet, but for now just consider it “confirmed.” We resolve to not completely overshadow Windows Mobile computer hardware like the HD2 with our Android offerings. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) The iPhone is badass, and it’s ours. We don’t really see anything wrong with our business. If you don’t like something, wherefore don’t YOU shuffle a resolution to change your linear perspective on life. We’re done here. Motorola (New York Stock Exchange: MOT) What, didn’t we already prove that we’re making changes for the bettor? The DROID is awesome, everyone is saying so. You distillery motivation a solving from us? Fine. In that case, our New Year solving is to not make the same mistakes that we made with the RAZR. We resoluteness to not beat the DROID’s designing to death by flooding the global smartphone market with iteration after iteration of DROID lookalikes. Wait, too late. Damn. Nokia (New York Stock Exchange: NOK) In 2010, Nokia resolves to make Symbian prettier, get Maemo 6 out the door, and try to convince anybody that volition listen that Apple is treading on our patent portfolio. We would resoluteness to slow the consumer marketplace share declension we’ve been eyesight, but our ancient S60 UI just can’t compete with iPhone or Android, so we’ll just see what happens. Samsung Samsung Mobile River knows that most of you don’t like the TouchWIZ UI. We also know that TouchWIZ combined with our new 3D Cube is just knit confusing. So, Samsung Mobile resolves to kill off TouchWIZ or the 3D Cube or both. As a position note, we also architectural plan to liberation a superintendent-tranquility apparel automatic washer/drier jazz band powered by the Bada OS. LG We didn’t realize how badly Windows Mobile River would hold up against the iPhone and Android platforms. We regard we had known this when we professed our undying love for Ballmer and Windows Mobile at shoemaker’s last class’s Mobile River World Congress. We resolve to shuffle better decisions about smartphone chopine in the future. Oh, and we also promise to look into making the S-Class 3D UI bettor… somehow. Palm (NSDQ: PALM) We don’t have any real resolutions for 2010. We just hope the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi can amplification more traction on Verizon’s net than it did on Sprint. We rich person no estimate what else to do. Bono and Elevation Partners will be pissed if we go under. Sony Ericsson (New York Stock Exchange: SNE) Our smartphones tend to be pretty but never really catch on as global phenomena, like the iPhone. We know our XPERIA lineup is the shucks. You know you want an XPERIA X10 when it launches. We resoluteness to marketplace the hell out of the X10 and ignition lock down partner carriers volition to subsidize a big chunk of its cost.

So, there you have it, folks. Only time volition tell if these mobile phone makers follow through on their resolutions. If they’re like us, though, they’ll last a week. Okay, maybe more like 5 days.

Apple has approved the iPhone/iPod app ‘Drum Kits’, by Makayama. Drum Kits is the first base programmable drumfish motorcar with 160 mixable tracks and a completely new approaching to rhythm composition.

It allows you to compose beat generation and patterns by touching dots on the screen. It turns your iPhone or iPod into a drumfish sequencer and transcription studio apartment. Just by tapping on the screen, you create a drumfish rhythm. You have 16 banks, up to 160 tracks, from 40 to 200 BPM. It contains 50 sample rhythms, such as hiphop, drumfish&ere;bass voice, disco, jazz, salsa, merengue, techno, house, and so on.

It has 16 different sampled drum kits on gameboard, careen, techno, drum&ere;bass, break beat generation, jazz, brush, hiphop and many more. Looks like an easy to manipulation music rhythm writing instrument that net ball’s anyone create drumfish patterns – schweet!. The app is $3.99/2.99 EUR after a 3-twenty-four hours free trial period.

Check out the video recording of the app here:

Drum Kits ($3.99/2.99 EUR) [iTunes link]

31st October 2009

Some very high gear-end handsets were announced this calendar month, hotting up the fight between contender smartphone operating systems.

Android

The Motorola DROID is the world’s first Android 2.0 handset, with a huge exhibit and vastly improved software system, including free people turn-by-twist seafaring… although intially the DROID is a CDMA-only phone for Verizon in the US, a GSM version should be in the works. A more conventional Android phone is the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica which is aiming for a more mass-market than the high gear-end DROID.

Motorola DROID