Smartphones in Battlefield

Posted by BA on Jul 22, 2010 in Android, Handsets, Mobile, Mobile Apps, Smartphones, Technology | 1 comment

Soldiers will be using smartphones in the battlefied. Here’s what this latest Reuters article says:

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google’s Android operating system.

The software could potentially be powerful enough to pick up aerial images from an unmanned aircraft or satellite and then focus in on details such as license plates on cars or a person’s facial features.

A typical soldier’s use case:

• Searching for a UAV nearby
• UAV found, Connected!
• Requesting enemy unit locations nearby
• Enemy units and buildings found at these coordinates, touch to view photos
• Incoming orders, move north, keep moving, wait for further orders
• Incoming missile, take shelter
• Your primary weapon is running low on ammo, reload!

And then there can be problems with the software or the handsets:

• Cannot retrieve orders, network not found
• UAV connection lost
• Battery low
• Uh.. the phone software stuck … urgh!
• Waiting for GPS ………………….
• … why dare you touch the phone, it’s an iPhone, remember?

Here’s the whole post.

Widsets no more, its Nokia Ovi store

Posted by BA on Apr 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

First Mosh and now Widsets, merge and become Ovi store. Ovi store is Nokia’s application store that hosts applications, games, themes, content and more for Nokia S60 and S40 devices. Widsets has been an application that allows users to download and add widgets that eventually run inside widsets application. Widsets has no doubt been very popular at least as an rss reader and content delivery platform for mobile users. This move of merging Widsets into Ovi store will definitely give Ovi-store a head start and alot of users will migrate from widsets to Ovi-store. Following apple store’s success story, a big number of mobile app stores have sprung up including Ovi and Blackberry store. The transition from widsets to ovi-store will take a month or so to complete and from 1st June, widsets users will lose their current accounts and they will have to sign-up for ovi accounts.