DOES your favourite app seem to be taking longer to load than it used to? That may be due to ever-richer graphics and overloaded cellphone networks, which take their toll on smartphone apps and increase the time they take to boot and retrieve information from the network on, say, train times or the weather.

A way to make them boot faster, developed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, could mean your app might one day be ready and waiting for you the moment before you need it.

Tingxin Yan and colleagues have borrowed a trick from computer science to achieve speedier loading. Called predictive caching, it involves guessing which software routines are most likely to be needed for the next stage of a computerised process - so that the right app is primed to run when called on, without booting from scratch. The system uses the phone's location and motion sensors to learn when the user typically runs the app, Yan will tell the MobiSys conference in Windermere, UK, which starts on 25 June.

Imagine that, as you walk to a railway station each day, you normally get to a certain street corner and open a train times app to see if the trains are running to schedule. The software checks the time you usually do this, senses that you are walking and preloads the app, with the current train info retrieved by the time you arrive at the corner on which you normally request it.

In tests, the software cut 6 seconds from the average 20-second boot-up time for apps on Windows phones - although it gobbled 2 per cent of the battery per day while doing so.

App author Peter Bentley at University College London sees issues. "This works great if the things being cached are entirely predictable. But what happens in an emergency when you need to use a rarely used but essential app and the phone has preloaded lots of massive apps which then have to be cleared first?"

It would be better, he says, if coders designed apps to boot faster in the first place. It also depends on the type of app. "I would see this technology better suited to those apps that are designed to be used for 30 seconds or less and which need to go online and download/upload new data."

Apple

         
         solo                                          solofx

Slip your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS into a slim-fitting iSkin solo and instantly give your beloved device a fashion makeover with bright, bold color and glamorous style.

The iSkin solo and the new solo FX feature an ultra high-gloss

finish, and are designed to perfectly encapsulate the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS' contours, giving you the sleek look of a hard case, but the shock absorbing protection of a soft case. The iSkin solo FX raises the bar with an embossed designer pattern that screams chic, and features a unique mirror screen protector for the ultimate look.

iPhone Email with Pre-Formatted Text with speed up

iPhone: Emails can be unique, but sometimes you just need to tell the boss you're "Running 10 minutes late," or ask a spouse what they need from the store. Pastie makes sending common text blocks to contacts fast and easy.
Pastie gives you a space to type out common messages, then decide whether you want to assign those messages a specific contact and delivery method (email or SMS), or decide when you click the "Pastie." For non-email and SMS purposes, Pastie also allows for quick clipboard copies of your text snippets to be pasted into any other app. The free/Lite version limits users to three text blocks, while the $1.99 full version does no such thing.
Both apps, annoyingly enough, refuse to install on iPod touch models, claiming they "require a microphone"—hence the stock screenshot used here. To see Pastie in action, check out the video demonstration

Nokia Nseries phones Losing to Apple’s iPhone

Nokia’s strategy is to take market share only when the company believes it to be sustainably profitable in the longer term, Nokia has not broadly participated in the recent aggressive pricing activity - as it believes that the negative impact to profitability would outweigh any short term incremental benefits to device unit sales.
For now, the main sales for Nokia comes from mid range phones as the expensive Nseries phones cannot stand against the comparatively cheaper iPhone 3G. In North America almost all the Nseries phones are available without carrier subsidies at whopping price range from $560 to $895. The major price cut of the Nseries in Canada before the launch of the iPhone 3G has not helped much in gaining sales speed.
LG and Samsung too are not doing good on the smartphone front though the two firms did manage to sell a good number of mid range phones. Motorola and Sony-Ericsson are still going downhill on sales.

Apps are what make the iPhone great: Apple’s latest iPhone 3GS

Think of the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and the iPod touch without the applications in the App Store. It would just be clunky devices right? Applications and games in the App Store made the iPhone models the king of smartphones. There is application for anything, from near useless ones to super handy apps. Search basically for anything starting from fart, flashlight to handy healthcare applications, the results would sure be amazing. Apple has in some way acknowledge the contribution of developers in making these Apple devices great in their latest video
There are two new video ads that blabs about the iPhone 3GS and seriously they are not actually about the device but the applications that make it a real Jesus phone.
The first ad shows the phone’s ability to share contact simply by flicking and bumping two device. The second one highlights the convenience of traveling with the iPhone 3GS. The travel ad shows how easily you can find places even in a strange country using navigation apps and share those rare moments using applications such as the Postman app.
Those apps are all good and the hidden message of course is “thank you developers for making our device super cool.”

Phil Schiller says Apple didn't censor a dictionary

                                                                          
Yesterday's story about Apple censoring the Ninjawords dictionary seems to have made some waves in Cupertino -- none other than Phil Schiller followed up with Daring Fireball's John Gruber to provide Apple's perspective on the situation. According to Phil, Apple's objection to Ninjawords was that by using the free Wiktionary.org dictionary, it "provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries," and that the App Store reviewer initially suggested the developer resubmit when iPhone OS 3.0 was launched with parental controls. Since 3.0 hadn't been released yet, the developer censored some of the words in an effort to get onto the store early, and that's how Ninjawords ended up both censored and rated 17+. Sure, okay, except that Gruber points out that the App Store reviewer flagged some pretty generic swear words, not the smack-your-momma vulgarities Phil claims are the issue. Still, the larger message remains the same -- the App Store review process is maddeningly inconsistent and in dire need of reform -- and on that note Phil says Apple intends to "learn and quickly improve," so it sounds like there's hope yet.

MS confirms Win Mo 7 multi-touch, iPhone rivalry

Microsoft has confirmed in a preview of Windows Mobile 6.5 that version 7 of the mobile OS will include multi-touch and will be targeted at the same high-end market as Apple's iPhone or most current Android phones. The company promises to the Inquirer that multi-touch will be a core feature of Windows Mobile 7 and that many of the experiences of competing phones will be "knocked in the different realm" of Microsoft's new platform.
At the same time, Microsoft also admitted that it's targeting the very high end and has been setting high specifications for the first phones that will launch with the new software. Calling 7 a "premium" experience, a spokesman said it will actually co-exist with the just-launching 6.5 release rather than replace it as all Windows Mobile releases have done in the past. While it's shipping on high-end phones like the HTC Touch Diamond2 (shown in the video), 6.5 will eventually be reserved just for budget phones while 7 will only take its place once the hardware is inexpensive enough.

The OS approach is in stark contrast to that for most operating systems. Apple, Google and Symbian all typically ship a near-identical version of their core software on more than one device and normally only have slight differences between them, such as the absence of phone-related apps on the iPod touch or Symban S60 5th Edition's touch-oriented features.

Windows Mobile 6.5 has been acknowledged by Microsoft as a stopgap release and primarily adds a few more touchscreen-ready interface elements, an accurate HTML web browser and direct integration with Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft's attempt to shadow the success of the iPhone's App Store as a central software portal.