Wireless jammer. - The Red Ferret JournalHow long before this puppy becomes illegal?

The Red Ferret Journal spotted the wireless jammer on Spymodex. A bunch of others have picked it up and are touting its capability for disturbing bluetooth and WiFi devices. I personally am more impressed by the fact that the puppy also jams wirelesly transmitting video cameras. And that is probably going to be the reason why these things are going to be declared illegal very soon.

On a sidenote: am curious what the split is between wired and wireless surveilance cameras, especially how the split works out with regards to the private/public (ie. non-police and police) cameras. The interesting thing is that the device could, in a way, be your cloak of invisibility, knocking out broadcasts from all cameras in your direct neighbourhood. Ofcourse this won't work on more long-range cameras but then again, you can't have it all. In spite of this problem, my guess is that this is a pretty good device against casual surveillance - as long as noone is actually looking for you, you can make sure that you aren't registered as you're walking through town.

Symbian: Symbian OS phones: FOMA M1000

Motorola splits into smaller fractions... since they are also releasing Symbian phones. The FOMA M1000 is an NTT phone for the japanese version of 3G. Ìt supports multiple networks: W-CDMA, GSM, GPRS and `802.11b. All in all decent but shows pretty little vision...

Motorola's going all girly...

Motorola seems totally incapable of making up its mind. They've a mixed track record with MS for phones (see the 220x communicator) and they're doing the razrberry/franklin/q on MS for phones. Yet on the other hand now they've gone off and released a spanking new triband GSM phone with bluetooth and WiFi (including a handover functionality between the various networks) based on Linux and Java... Can you people make a platform choice? Are you guys men or whimps? Afraid of commitment?

Sorry, this ain't a gadget...

Beer anyone? Now available, through the net, your open source beer recipe. Cook it, brew it, cool it, drink it.

External controllers for the PSP

Yes Virginia it is possible to attach two controllers to a PSP, as www.hackaday.com has shown. My only question is: why?

Whill Nokia dump Symbian?

ARCchart has published an article asking: Will Nokia dump Symbian? in which they conclude that this would make sense since Symbian has proven problematic when ported to new hardware platforms. The good people ar ARCchart seem tohave missed one additional issue Nokia's facing, namely a dwindling profit margen. Businessweek reports of Nokia's problem maintaining high average sales prices.

A reason why the average sales prices of Nokia's devices is dropping is the fact that a large part of the growth in the handset market is coming from developing countries. The Economist wrote (subscription) that the biggest source of unit sales growth will be the developing world but at the same time warns that the handset makers won't be able to demand the prices they are used to in the developed world, especially since the local operators are not subsidizing handsets. In the same article the Economist suggests that the handset maker best qualified to thrive in this high volume, low profit market is Nokia. Nokia produces more components of its mobile phones itself than any of the other handset makers. A noteable exception to this advantage is the OS, which in high end phones is licensed from Symbian.

It would seem logical fo Nokia to bring its OS development inhouse and to tailor a 'master' OS for different classes of handset. In this manner, Nokia could achieve even greater volumes in compoents. They would not have to support different hardware platforms for different OSes for different markets. Furthermore, Nokia could speed up its development cycle by removing possible waits due to a lagging OS. All in all, I think that an OS migration by Nokia makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't be too surprised if the development of the Nokia 770 tablet running Linux turns out to be a precursor to new Nokia Linux based phones in Q1 or Q2 2006.