Mobile Phone News

It’s hard not to love the promise of the White Space Coalition, which includes players like Google, Microsoft, Dell, Earthlink, HP, Intel and Philips. Those crazy kids want to bring us wireless internet over the “white space” bandwidth in between TV broadcast channels, and we say let ‘em. One little problem though, FCC says the concept doesn’t work. The prototype that the Coalition submitted for review was designed to sense existing TV signals and transmit around them, but the FCC found it inconsistent in this aim, and won’t be giving its stamp approval to a device that interferes with existing broadcasts. The FCC does say that it’s open to looking at the next generation of the technology, since better performance is certainly possible, and the White Space Coalition wasn’t too downhearted: the group is “encouraged that FCC engineers did not find fault with our operating parameters and remain confident that unlicensed television spectrum can be used without interference.” Between this fledgling technology and that upcoming 700MHz auction, things are really looking up for WiFi-jilted mobile internet users across the States.

Filed under: Misc

The Intel P55 Express chipset snafu that caused iPhones to lose their syncing minds has at this time been remedied — at least by one motherboard maker. Gigabyte has issued a BIOS update making things all hunky-dory between the phone and the mobo, putting your troubles to an end. The P55 is Intel’s latest midrange chipset and orchestrates things for newer Core i5 / i7 machines. The other two P55 purveyors, ASUS and MSI, were also caught by the bug, and there are anecdotal reports of success with an ASUS BIOS update, but not official fixes as of yet. Given the competitive nature of this market, though, we’d be surprised if those two companies didn’t quickly follow suit. All’s well that ends well, right?

Had the device you’re peering at above come out just a few months later, it would’ve taken two full years to go from introduction to on sale. Thankfully, the good folks over at Garmin and ASUS (and Garmin-Asus, as it were) were able to get the nüvifone G60 out to AT&T before the holiday shopping season of 2009, but were they still too late? There’s no doubt that this very smartphone had a lot of folks drooling in early 2007, but to say a lot has happened in the mobile realm between then and at this time would be Makethe truth a grave injustice. The iPhone 3G has fallen to $99, a slue of Android handsets have hit the market and dedicated PND (portable navigation devices) have found their persons in the bargain bin. Oh, and some pretty fantastic GPS software has managed to land within Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. In other words, competition couldn’t possibly be hotter, and considering that the specifications haven’t been updated on this $299 device since it was originally declare, you’re probably wondering if it even deserves a chance. Read on to find out the answer.

Continue reading Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 review