29.5.10

Nokia, Opera side with Adobe to take on Apple

The battle between Adobe and Apple over use of flash in ipad/iphone apps has just got even more fierce with Nokia and Opera announcing their support for flash.

Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera -- the maker of most widely used cellphone browser and strong supporter of open Internet initiatives -- said on Thursday his company was supporting Flash.
"It is the only proprietary part of the Web we support," von Tetzchner told Open Mobile Summit conference in London.
"We support Flash as well," said Alberto Torres, chief of Nokia's solutions business unit.
Getting the support of these two companies along with Google's android already supporting flash means a big plus for Adobe and especially flash, since it was openly criticizedby Steve Jobs "for being proprietary(that was rich coming from him), unstable, insecure, a battery hog and not at all suitable for mobile devices." Jobs went as far as naming flash the number one reason fro macs crashing all over the world.
Even though flash is the most used technology for online games and multimedia Apple does not support flash on any of its portable devices. This has resulted in a bitter war between the two companies in last two months.
It should also be noted that Nokia and Opera are not the only companies declaring their support for Adobe, Time Warner and NBC Universal have told Apple they won't spend the time and money to rework their Flash-friendly video libraries to make them compatible with the iPad.
Source:
Nokia, Opera side with Adobe on Flash

4.5.10

What an Idea! Airtel Launches MY Tunes service

Barely a month after Idea cellular launched their Pretones service- where user can listen to a song of their own choice whenever they make a call- Airtel has also jumped in the fray. Airtel has launched a value added service for its customers called "My Tunes". The service is currently available only in Delhi.

Shashi Arora, chief executive officer, Delhi and NCR, mobile services, Bharti Airtel, said in the company statement, “Starting with the launch of Hello Tunes in 2004, Airtel has led the music on mobile revolution in India. With the My Tunes service, today we are putting the power and freedom of choice in the hands of the customer – the power to choose the content he wishes to consume along with the freedom to enjoy an unlimited music experience on mobile.”

The service when activated allows user to listen any song of his/her choice from the nation's library of half a million songs including Bollywood and regional songs as well . The My Tunes service is available at a subscription fee of Rs 15 per week or at 30 paise per minute of use. Creation of Playlist with unlimited tracks is also supported. Consumers who want to subscribe to My Tunes simply need to dial 54345 from their handset.

Keywords: Airtel My Tunes, Idea PreTones