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Mobile website Mobile Review has gotten a hold of some slides of Samsung prototype devices. (The slides have since been removed from Mobile Review.) Most of the devices are more convential cell phone devices, but three are Windows Mobile based. One, code named “B-Bop,” is a Phone Edition device. Another is code named “Javelin” is and Smartphone device. The third is code named “Thor” and not only has a 3 GB hard drive but is said to be running “MS Smartphone Magneto.”

Now don’t think for a moment that those 3 Gb are going to be useful. It’s there there to hold even longer, more annoying ring tones. The factory default will use bluetooth to sense when the owner is nowhere near the phone and then launch into a 4-hour midi retrospective of Nelly: the early years.

(on a side note, I often notice that people who have had their current handset for more than 3 months only make phone calls with them, any attempt to get the device to do anything else is usually aborted because the feature cannot be found in the user interface. During the first three months of ownership of their glorified PDA/MP3/Phone it’s “Take two bottles into the shower? Not me. Now I have a crappy shampoo and a crappy conditioner in one! Just watch me flick my shiny hair from side to side, and imagine I haven’t spent the last two hours in a stylist’s chair!”)

*sigh*

2005 is going to be another year of boring, stupid tech crap, isn’t it?

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Vonage, the No. 1 Internet phone company, will unveil plans Tuesday to offer subscribers a wireless Wi-Fi phone that can make calls over the Internet at homes or at public Wi-Fi hot spots. For Vonage subscribers, the phone could amount to a kind of limited-use cell phone that would cost nothing extra.

Several smaller companies have introduced Wi-Fi phones in the USA at prices ranging from $130 to $750. But Vonage’s move would mark the first mass-market rollout of the device at a lower price, probably around $100.

Next: free calls wherever somebody has failed to secure his wireless router…

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I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.

As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now — not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the — well, it’s called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

I’m not sure that they do benefit from them.

Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

Honoring service is what our theme is about.

Riiiiight…

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According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day�or about one every three seconds. Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting. Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: “Now you’ve got to pitch the bloggers too. You can’t just pitch to conventional media.”

Of course, it’s difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). But whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn’t usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone’s a publisher and everyone’s a critic. Says Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, and president and creative director of newspaper publisher Advance Publications’ Internet division: “There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word ‘sucks,’ just to see what customers are saying.”

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Those who have tried to game the blogosphere haven’t done much better. Mazda, hoping to reach its Gen Y buyers, crafted a blog supposedly run by someone named Kid Halloween, a 22-year-old hipster who posted things like: “Tonight I am going to see Ministry and My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult…. This will be a retro industrial flashback.” He also posted a link to three videos he said a friend recorded off public-access TV. One showed a Mazda3 attempting to break dance, and another had it driving off a ramp like a skateboard, leading in both cases to frightening crashes. Other bloggers sensed a phony in their midst�the expensively produced videos were tip-offs�and began talking about it. Suddenly Mazda wasn’t being hailed; it was being reviled on widely read blogs. “Everything about that ‘blog’ is insulting,” wrote a poster on Autoblog. Mazda pulled the site after three days and now says it never intended it to have a long run. “It was a learning experience,” says a spokesman. Tig Tillinghast, who runs the respected advertising industry blog Marketingvox.com, calls Mazda’s blogging clumsiness “the moral equivalent of doing an English-language print ad that was written by a native French speaker.”

“If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie,” says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. “The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You’re fighting with very powerful forces because it’s real people’s opinions.”

in one big picture

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Here’s a charming start to the day, an article on Microsoft getting two new patents, one on a compiler and the other on an “improved” system and method for editing software. Innovation marches on.

Obviously, if you are a programmer, you probably don’t want to be reading patents, but for the rest of us, the compiler patent, U.S. Patent number 6,836,883, titled “Method and system for compiling multiple languages”, is here and the editing patent, US Patent 6,836,884 titled “Method and system for editing software programs” is here.

The first is described as a method or “process involving the parsing and analyzing of more than one source language to produce a common language file that may then be read by the same or another front end system.”

Well. The world is crying out for a compiler that can do that. The patent cites the Free Software Foundation’s GCC in the prior art section. I’ll say.

The second patent appears to be a debugger/editor, which permits line-by-line “execution capabilities”, whereby you can stop and edit and then continue where execution left off, and it provides “support for common language runtime environments”.

The part that caught my eye in the compiler patent is this language:

“Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. As an example, other source languages may be included in the front end portion in combination with the first source and the common languages. Therefore, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.”

Way cool. We get to guess at all it can do. A patent on a secret. They used the same language in their patent application on .NET. (Mono Project’s reaction.) Next they can apply for a patent on their patent, “a method or process of keeping the threat of patent infringement lawsuits against GNU/Linux alive, whereby one obtains patents that could be easily debunked by multitudinous prior art if all the facts were placed on the table, but by means of partial disclosure of what the method or process does, you can hint that there is just enough there to require a court to debunk your claims, all of which costs money, which, happily, the FOSS community doesn’t have. This methodology creates anxiety in CEOs about using GPL software, without actually having to sue anyone, thus minimizing costs.”