The PhoneBoy Blog

Inbox Liquidation, Part 49

23 Jun 2009

It’s that time again where I sift through the debris in my inbox and pick five or so things to write briefly about. It’s kind of like Stefan Constantinescu’s series called Trimming in Public except I only write about the things that interest me. I think I’ll also take a cue and give it a cute name: “Inbox Liquidation”

Trapster Goes iPhone 3.0 and Android: While this isn’t a service I’ve used in quite a while, I love the idea of a user-generated speed trap tracking system. Trapster has been around for at least a year and now supports the iPhone 3.0 firmware, exploiting to great effect the new mapping APIs as well as the background notification services, making it much quicker to report traps as well as have the ability to receive trap alerts without having to run the Trapster application in the foreground! Of course, if you have an Android phone, you’re covered as well since you can run the app in the background.

ShoZu Going Pay, Sort Of: ShoZu is an application that takes pictures from your phone and automatically puts it in social networks and the like online. Their app had been free, but it looks like they will move the application to the various phone application stores and charge for the app. They are already doing this for the iPhone version of the app. It’s an interesting way to pay for what is essentially a “service”–buy an app to access said service. Not sure how this is going to play with ShoZu users, or how it’s going to increase their user base, but it will be interesting to see.

The Nokia Glock Model 40: My dad sent me this picture. It gives the phrase “sidetalking” a whole new meaning, if you catch my drift.

OnRelay Brings Fixed Mobile Convergence to Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1: OnRelay is announcing on 23 June 2009 that they are collaborating with Sony Ericsson to bring OnRelay’s Mobile PBX software onto the Sony Ericsson device. My response: So what? This might have been interesting several years ago, but the world has already converged on the mobile phone. PBXes do nothing for me, nor do they do anything for most of the people I work with.