Mobile Archives — Page 28 of 28 — LIRNEasia


Nalaka Gunawardene calls mobile phone a murder weapon. According to him, what the mobile has already stabbed, and is in the process of effectively finishing off, is the development sector’s over-hyped and under-delivered phenomenon called the ‘telecentre’. So how is the mobile phone slowly killing the telecentres, asks he, into which governments, the United Nations agencies and other development organisations have pumped tens of millions of dollars of development aid money in the past decade? Well, it’s rapidly making telecentres redundant by putting most or all of their services into literally pocket-sized units. If everyone could carry around a miniaturised, personalised gadget that has the added privacy value, why visit a community access point?
A La Mobile, a San Ramon, CA based open source handset software development, has deployed Google’s Android platform into an HTC Qtek 9090 smartphone. The company is touting it as the first functioning Android-based handset. The company included in the suite of applications a Google browser, phone dialer, audio player, maps, camera, games, calendar, contacts manager, calculator, tasks manager and notes. “While mobile Linux has made steady progress in the industry since 2006, Google’s advocacy with the unveiling of the Android framework further substantiates the position of Linux as a major mobile operating system alongside Windows Mobile and Symbian,” a la Mobile’s president and CEO Pauline Lo Alker said in a statement. Read the full story here.