– Sightless Touch Screen Dialling: A couple of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) engineers — T.V. Raman, who is blind, and Charles Chen, who is sighted — have developed software which makes the G1 more accessible to blind users by making the dialling pad relative to where the screen is first touch rather than fixed, reports NYT. Apparently more sighted people than blind people are using it, for times when they cannot look at the screen.
— Opera Mobile Turbo: Opera is looking to boost the speed of its mobile browser using the same server engine as for Opera Mini. “Opera showed off side-by-side versions of Opera Mobile 9.7 in action, one with the Turbo feature on, the other with it off. Turbo-ized surfing was indeed much faster when squeezed through the server, though photo quality predictably took a hit. Yet if speed is what you’re after–especially over shaky EV-DO, EDGE, or other 2.5G cellular networks–Turbo gives you options,” reports CNet. Opera is working on making the browser recognize the page it is reading to determine whether it’s appropriate to use Turbo — if image quality is more important than speed it will be turned off.
— Facebook On INQ Homescreens: INQ, the handset arm of Hutchison, will launch a service that puts Facebook status updates on the phone’s home screen. “INQ hopes that if consumers can use their phones to communicate more easily on popular Web sites, they will be more likely to spend on mobile data services…”The phone is just screaming at you – use me more,” reports Reuters. INQ handsets are currently only sold through 3 stores in UK, Ireland, Hong Kong and Australia.
— Mobile Sites Grow Seven-Fold: Registrar dotMobi reports the the number of mobile-friendly sites has grown seven-fold in the last 12 months, from 150,000 to about 1.1 million. The company noted that “the .mobi domain is the preferred entry point for sites that use a single naming convention — that’s to say, sites that use only one domain”, with 23 percent of those using .mobi addresses. Most companies modify their home domain name: The “/wap” identifier, which is used primarily by legacy sites from the initial WAP era earlier this decade, represents 22 percent of all mobile-friendly Internet addresses, but dotMobi expects this to decline. Other mobile content identifiers include: “/m” (13 percent), “/wap.” (10 percent), “mobile.” (5 percent), “m.” (5 percent) and “/pda” (3 percent). Less frequently used are “pda.”, “/forum”, “/mobile” and “/wireless”. (release)
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