TRUE CALLER TAKES CALLER ID TO A NEXT LEVEL

Today the Swedish entrepreneur behind the service TrueCaller presented a new functionality for their mobile caller id. TrueCaller has in cooperation with directory services worldwide distributed information to its users for 1½ year. The service already has over 800 000 users performing well over 35 million searches per month. TrueCaller users have since start been able to see name and address information belonging to a certain number. But as of today, users will even be able to see a picture of the person who’s name or number they have looked up. TrueCaller is the first service in the world able to offer picture caller id.
According to the founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam this progress is a logical evolution within this field.

”We constantly try to work with innovative angles of improving the areas we’ve noticed as troublesome. One very common problem has been that seeing the name of someone is at times not enough information to be able to associate a person to a specific number, even whit address information. By performing well defined user-experience research we were able to determine that the best solution to fill in the gap for lack of association is by taking advantage of the possibilities given by pictures.”

The founders realized early on that it’s not enough to perform a simple person search on Facebook. Instead Alan and Nami worked on an intelligent method with which they could, with high accuracy, reveal a picture of a person or number searched for through TrueCaller. TrueCaller is now ready to display pictures of thousands and thousands of lookups which in short will become millions!
TruCaller works with Symbian, Android and iPhone.

FIREFOX 4 BETA FOR THE NOKIA N900 AND ANDROID - ITS FASTER THAN EVER!!!

The Firefox team has released a new Firefox 4 Beta version of their Web Browser for the Nokia N900 and Android devices. You can get Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta from the Android Market to test on your Google Android device or go here to get Firefox 4 Beta on your Nokia Maemo device. This release is the fastest performing Firefox 4 Beta for mobile yet. You will notice faster start-up, page load times and responsiveness to panning and zooming. The Firefox Mobile Add-ons Gallery also offers more than 100 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of your Web experience.

New Email app for Symbian S60v3 devices

Nokia released todays a new Email app for Symbian S60v3 devices such as the Nokia C5, E5, E55, E72, E75, N78, N79, N85, N96, 5320, 5630, 5730 and 67xx model phones. Get the new Nokia E-mail app and get a great e-mail experience on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and most popular e-mail providers. See your e-mails as they are meant to be seen. Download it now go to Menu > Applications > Tools > SW Update.

MOBILE APPS DOWNLOADS TO SURGE 77 BILLION BY 2014

The mobile apps market is set to explode, with downloads expected to surge to 76.9 billion by 2014, according to analyst firm IDC. Apps downloads reached 10.9 billion worldwide in 2010, with approximately 300,000 mobile apps introduced by developers over the past three years. From 2011, mobile apps will expand onto other devices, such as connected TVs and the general connected home, IDC said. Meanwhile, worldwide mobile apps revenues will surpass $35bn in 2014, IDC predicted.More after the break........

Emoze turns your mobile phone into a fully functional personal communication device

Emoze turns your mobile phone into a fully functional personal communication device. Emoze pushes all your emails, calendar, contacts, etc. to your mobile phone in real-time. Read your emails, download selected attachments, schedule meetings and access your contact information with no need to carry more than one mobile device. emoze supports Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo, OWA and ISP mail services.

To download Emoze, visit Emoze.com or visit m.emoze.com via your phones web browser

New Symbian Features
1 Push Content –
1.1 All users get Push Content by default with next update
1.2 Push content includes Weather, Breaking News and Sport Updates
1.3 This is in addition to the Football updater.
2 Total HTML support (was not supported for some of the higher end Nokia phones – E97/5800/X6)
2.1 Retain format when using Reply/Forward
2.2 Supports embedded images/tables/rich media text
2.3 Much better user experience, more friendly
3 New Shortcuts – easy to see on menu/easy to use
3.1 In general, the shortcut menus are easier to use as they are right there on the menu
3.2 Just press the number shown:
3.2.1 [1] Reply to sender
3.2.2 [2] Reply all
3.2.3 [3] Forward
3.2.4 [4] View in HTML
3.2.5 [5] Delete
3.2.6 [6]View Attachments]
3.2.7 [9] Change to Read/Unread
3.2.8 [7] Download Images
3.2.9 [*] View message details
4 View menu
4.1 Supports message preview of either in 1 line or 2 lines
4.2 Enables user to hide header fields (To/CC) to increase viewing area on screen of mobile device – both in read and compose message
5 Support for BCC – this one is very important!
5.1 Now can send blind copy
5.1 BCC alert to make user aware that they are BCC (if you are BCC’d and reply to message alerts that you were not in the obvious recipients)
6 Support downloading larger Attachments
6.1 All MS Office documents up to 6MB
6.1 Jpeg and PDF – 4MB – all other – 3MB
6.2 Emoze supports download attachments to phone/memory card
7 Ability to add a contact from email header to native address book directly
7.1 Choose add new contact or update existing
7.1 New contact adds all data, update just changes email address
7.1 Do not synch contacts and calendar
7.2 Ability to respond to calendar invites with accept/decline/tentative and edit
8 Supports Google Contacts and Calendar – supports all fields
8.1 Respond to calendar, not able to invite or open event description from Google calendar)
8.2 Social Media – (Facebook/Hi5) synchs all friend in a virtual mode (have access to all friends via the mobile device but the names are not stored in the phone’s memory)
9 Text to Speech – emoze supports this feature if it is native on the mobile device
10 Signature – ability to make a customized signature (default is sent by emoze question whether this default is replaced? –[Moshe]YES)
11 Ability to select how the push functionality connects
11.1 Possible to connect either via WiFi (free) or Cellular Network (2g, 3G)
11.1 In supported devices, set up priorities for Access Point letting the mobile device find the best connection given each circumstance, so users can give the Wi-Fi higher priority than 3G connection.
Enterprise Edition
1 Ability to synchronize and control more folders and sub folders like Sent
2 iPhone now fully supported
2.1 ability to download Config file so iPhone can automatically configure itself on the device
2.1 (Needs screen messages and iPhone manual – especially for Enterprise)

Review of vReveal video enhancing software for cell phones

I recently started testing out a piece of Windows software called vReveal. Now why, you might ask, would I be telling you about this on a mobile tech site like MobileBurn.com? Well, the answer is that vReveal takes low quality video footage, such as that shot by many cell phones on the market, and spruces it up in a number of ways.
The software, at US$40, is not exactly cheap, and results vary greatly depending on the quality (or lack thereof) of the source video, but if you are looking to get the best possible video quality out of your phone, then read on.

MotionDSP is the company that makes vReveal, and it received an investment from video powerhouse NVIDIA. In fact, the vReveal software will take advantage of the inherent graphics capability of a PC's NVIDIA graphics card (or chipset), if it has one. MotionDSP says that vReveal analyzes multiple frames of video at one time to smooth out the jaggies, reduce camera shake, improve contrast and brightness, increase resolution, and remove noise.

The CLIQ shoots video at 352 x 288 pixels, the Bold at 480 x 352, and the DROID and S8300 at 720 x 480. The videos were all processed with vReveal's "one click fix" mode that applies a default set of settings. I did, however, add the image stabilization fix to the sample DROID video. It's worth noting that image stabilization costs you a bit of resolution, but that vReveal zooms the video when its is saved to keep the original pixel dimensions intact.
vReveal will save its enhanced versions of videos in a number of formats, including WMV, MJPEG AVI, uncompressed AVI, and even DivX AVI, if the DivX Pro software is installed. I saved the images out using DivX, since I had it installed and it creates smaller files. Image quality seemed to be pretty much the same when using WMV, though. While vReveal can upload videos directly to YouTube and FaceBook, I uploaded all the videos to YouTube manually. Surprisingly, the YouTube versions of the videos retained most all of the originals' traits, making them still viable for comparing before and after enhancement versions.
So how did this $40 piece of software perform? It does a great job of fixing dark videos and those with a lot of noise - like the Samsung S8300 video. Anybody that has ever used a phone to shoot a video or photo in a dark room will be familiar with the color specks and banding that vReveal does a great job of removing, and the increased brightness is also a huge improvement. The split-screen before and after view of the videos makes that much obvious, as you can see in the screen shots above.
When it came to videos shot in good lighting, however, the improvements are harder to notice, though still there. If you look at the tree branches, the sky, and the house siding in the enhanced Bold 9700 video, you will see the smoother, more natural look of the vReveal video - if you pay attention. The motion stabilization in the enhanced DROID video is fairly obvious, and you'll notice some generic smoothing in high contrast areas, like the top edge of the passing train cars. When it came to the resolution doubler feature that's on by default in low-res videos like those from the CLIQ, though, I saw no real benefit at all.
So the software works, that much is clear. Is it worth $40? That's going to be a judgment call that depends on your personal finances, how poor a job your phone does with video, and how often you shoot videos in bad lighting. While I personally like the software, I don't think that I would have purchased it with my own money if MotionDSP hadn't supplied me with a copy. If you are sitting on the fence, you can test out a trial version that imprints enhanced videos with a watermark, but is otherwise functional. More information is available at the vReveal website.

ORIGINAL VIDEO:



ENHANCED VIDEO: