Blackberry Business Application Development – The Next Big Thing?

It's enough to look around and see the booming increase of mobile phones and handheld computers; almost everyone has at least one cellular device, if not more. Increased simplicity has caused 'premium'-featured models to be introduced to the 'entry-level' customers. Today business-people actively perform functions on mobile devices that were formerly reserved for laptops or netbooks.

Netbook sales took off over the past few years, and for good reason: these tiny, light computers were tailor-made for the mobile user who increasingly performed most office-related activity online. Netbooks provide some of the convenience and functionality of a full-fledged notebook while weighing less than half of even the lightest units and boasting battery life that can in some cases take you through an entire day without recharging.

But many netbook users quickly bump up against the limitations built in to this form factor. Screens are cramped, and processors are barely adequate for running Windows. In addition, a notebook computer - even if tiny and lightweight - is still a notebook computer, requiring you to stash it, and the inevitable accessories, in some bag that you have to carry around with you.

Evidence of the mobile craze is everywhere. According to a survey by Synovate, a global marketing and research firm, 70 percent of users surveyed in 11 global markets use their hand held mobile devices for non-voice data applications and one-third use them to access the Internet.

According to Dataquest estimates, the total market size of enterprise mobile applications in India stood at Rs 560 crore in FY 09, up from Rs 347 crore in FY 08 a growth of 61%.

Mobile application development is a huge boom in the technology sector. These applications have expanded the use of wireless technology immensely. The new developing applications have bought the revolutionary changes in the use of mobile phones.

Competition is getting tough day by day with ever changing technology and increasing demands for more advance applications, innovation in this field is key to success. Several companies have entered in the field of development of mobile applications and they are introducing the latest apps based on the new technologies with ever increasing benefits.

A reputable web application development company that specializes in software application development can develop mobile applications to integrate your business transactions through mobile or wireless devices and content delivered systems. A mobile application developer with a solid background in project analysis, documentation, test plotting, and project maintenance can help you on the way to your making revolutionary mobile applications.

Business Mashups, a software development company headquartered in the the city beautiful, Chandigarh, is extending its software development services and this time for the latest BlackBerry platform.

Business Mashups has been one of the pioneers on the IT market to offer bespoke software development services using web technologies. Among the most requested solutions are business applications and sophisticated web-based systems. No matter what type of business need it is, Business Mashups leverages industry standards from HTML to AJAX, works alongside with Eclipse, NetBeans, and Java Development Environments.

The BlackBerry product line, created by Research in Motion (RIM), includes handsets and software both for individuals and businesses. The integration of smartphones and software provides advanced access to emails, notes, tasks, contacts, and many more.

With all the mobile platforms targeting their app store towards average consumer, enterprise mobile applications market in India has still not reached a critical mass, but is gaining momentum.

Business use of mobiles requires a different set of features, namely strong email support, web browsing, a good screen, software support and local connectivity options.

Blackberry was created with business use in mind. Blackberry wins for business use and security. Besides its e-mailing and call functions, blackberry developers have now provided applications to make the Blackberry a handy asset to both the small and medium sized businesses. The access to various third-party applications for the Blackberry has made it a vital toll in today’s business environment.

Business Mashups has long identified with the trend by providing offshore blackberry development services. Our experts can create appealing applications over different BlackBerry OS Platforms. Whether you need BlackBerry Apps Development for Store, business automation application, sales force automation, transaction management or intranet applications such as executive MIS on mobile, CRM,etc, we have a team of qualified hands to meet your blackberry mobile application development under your budget and timelines.

Nokia Booklet 3G Netbook Packs GPS, 3G, HDMI and...Windows

Nokia has finally confirmed its little laptop. Features include an HD-ready 10-inch display, Atom processor, built-in A-GPS (which works with Ovi Maps), Wi-Fi (plus 3G/HSPA option), HDMI, an SD card reader, and 12 hour battery.

The netbook will weigh about 2.75 pounds, and measure slightly more than two centimeters thin. Further details, including the flavor of Windows, specs, and pricing/availability won't be discussed until Nokia World on September 2



The mini-laptop also comes with an HDMI port for HD video out, a front facing camera for video calling, integrated Bluetooth and an easily accessible SD card reader.

Other premium features include the 10-inch glass HD ready display and integrated A-GPS which, working with the Ovi Maps gadget, can pinpoint your position in seconds and open up access for a truly personal maps experience.

The Nokia Booklet 3G also brings a number of other rich Ovi experiences to life, whether its access and playback of millions of tracks through the Nokia Music Store, or using Ovi Suite to sync seamlessly from your Nokia smartphone, to your mini-laptop, to the cloud.

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Kensington Launches World’s Biggest USB Pen Drive

The days when you plugged your tiny pen drive into your notebook or PC may be over; memory maker Kingston Monday unveiled the 256GB DataTraveler 300 — more hard drive space than many desktop or laptop computers.

Kingston has come up with the DataTraveler 300, a 256GB USB Drive, which is quite an impressive capacity for such a format. That pretty much tops the biggest SSD drives in 2.5" form-factor. Of course, you might not have the fancy controller and you won’t get SATA II performance levels, but the idea that you can backup most laptop hard drives on a single USB key is awesome. The sheer capacity is impressive, if you are willing to pay $900. Obviously, there are cheaper ways to backup, but most won't fit in this form-factor.

This pen drive isn’t meant to transfer a few MP3s or an occasional Word or Excel file. No, the European branch of Kingston reports the DataTraveler has bigger tasks in mind, like 51,000 images or 365 CDs. Could this signal a flash memory NetBook is possible?

Netbooks and touch screens: A good marriage?

Touch screens are undoubtedly popular in the mobile market, but they have yet to break through in the computing space. Will they be as revolutionary for PCs as they have thus far been for smartphones?

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Don Reisinger examines the pros and cons of touch screens in Netbooks and touch screens: A good marriage? | The Digital Home - CNET News

The Always Innovating Netbook is one of possibly many Netbooks to sport touch screens. (Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Dell's new Z

This is the yet unannounced Dell Latitude Z Series laptop. Not much to say at the moment, aside from the obvious Adamo influence, but I did spot a biometric fingerprint scanner, and an oddly-placed ethernet port in the back. This is the first Dell that has me slobbering in a very long time.

It has a 24in screen, backlit keyboard, Core 2 Duo processor, webcam with facial recognition, and DisplayPort, remote erase, FailSafe™ theft prevention etc.

Reinventing the Enterprise Desktop

The Windows-based desktop and notebook computers that your employees use haven’t changed much in a decade. Sure, they’re faster, have a lot more memory and have bigger hard disks. Of course, they mainly have sleek LCD panel displays instead of clunky CRTs. However, those Windows XP and Windows Vista boxes are still 32-bit machines running the same sort of applications they ran under Windows 98. Beyond Wi-Fi and faster Ethernet, their support issues are largely the same, too.

That’s going to change soon, driven by two factors: 64-bit Windows and new initiatives that will drive multithreaded software.

While Microsoft has offered 64-bit versions of Windows for several years, most consumers and enterprise users continue to run the 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. The 64-bit capabilities in modern Intel and AMD processors have sat dormant.

That’s changing. According to Microsoft, consumer pre-installs of 64-bit Windows Vista are exploding. The enterprise desktop may be on a similar track.

Next stop will be new multithreaded applications, both those being built in-house and upgraded versions of commercial software. Thanks to new tools from Intel and Microsoft, as well as new generations of multicore processors, developers will find it both easier and more compelling to write multithreaded code. That will push demand for end-user machines with two- or four-core processors. While that shouldn’t affect support too much, there is bound to be some impact.

After 10 years (or more) of static 32-bit desktops and notebooks, this is a welcome change.

Netbook: Evolving Category?

Laptops are evolving—and forcing the rest of the computer industry to change

A new class of cheaper, smaller netbook computers might upset the IT establishment this year and potentially usher in new players in a hotly competitive market.

Simple, low-cost laptops are not a new idea. There were several abortive attempts to make them in the 1990s, but big computer-makers soon dropped them for fear that they might undermine sales of traditional laptops. In 2005 a charity called One Laptop Per Child designed an ultra-cheap laptop for the developing world. That inspired Asus, a Taiwanese PC-maker, to develop one of its own, called the Eee PC, which it started selling in late 2007 for $250.

The timing was perfect. A few months later, the credit crunch hit. At the same time, Intel started selling its cheap and power-saving new processor chip, called Atom. By the end of 2008, Asus had sold nearly 5m Eees and all its rivals had jumped on the bandwagon. In total, 21m netbooks will ship this year, almost twice the number in 2008 and more than 15% of the entire market for laptops, according to Gartner, a market-research firm.

Yet as netbooks have become more popular, many of them have also become more sophisticated. Asus’s first Eee PC was a puny device with a screen measuring only seven inches (18 centimetres) diagonally, a midget keyboard and flash memory instead of a hard disk. It also ran Linux, a free operating system. But consumers in the rich world wanted more. As a result, most of the new devices on display in early June at Computex, a trade show in Taipei, boasted at least ten-inch screens, full-size keyboards and sizeable hard disks, and they ran Windows XP, an old version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. Many models now go for $600 a pop.

Though netbooks have acquired many frills and mutated into new forms, the theory behind them endures: computers do not need to be stuffed with the latest whizz-bang technology if they have a high-speed connection to the “cloud” of services available online. At Computex, a trade show in Taipei, firms showed devices equipped with WiMAX, a new wireless technology that allows for fast, ubiquitous wireless connections.

It is this combination of connectivity and cloud computing that makes netbooks and their successors so disruptive. Some mobile-network operators now throw in free netbooks if subscribers sign up for a mobile-broadband contract. This will put further pressure on prices, since mobile operators have more bargaining power than individual consumers, although it also opens a huge new distribution channel for computer-makers.

More important, netbooks and similar devices could weaken Microsoft and Intel, which have so far dominated the PC industry and extracted most of the profits. To keep Linux off most netbooks, Microsoft has had to discount Windows XP from $40-45 per copy to $10-15.

Intel, by contrast, has so far mainly benefited from the netbook craze, which has created a huge market for its Atom chip. The firm insists this has neither cannibalised sales of its other chips as much as feared nor put pressure on its lofty margins, since Atom costs less to make. Still, just as with Linux, there is a credible alternative to Atom: processors based on designs by ARM, a British firm, which already power most of the world’s mobile phones. Several Taiwanese PC-makers are working on a netbook-like gadget that would be powered by an ARM chip and run Android, a variety of Linux developed by Google for use on smart-phones.

At Computex, Acer announced that it would use Android together with an Intel chip. Other firms are expected to follow suit. Intel is also pushing another version of Linux, called Moblin. Its long partnership with Microsoft notwithstanding, Intel does not seem to care what operating system netbooks use, provided they contain the firm’s chips.

Netbooks are surging. At first, vendors thought of them as a way to sell cheaper, less powerful alternatives to notebooks, but netbooks have gradually come into their own—and now we're almost to the point where netbooks can be taken as seriously as their larger, weightier brethren.

It seems that netbooks, already hot, may benefit from improved functionality. It is unclear if the gradual improvements represent a new generation or simply incremental improvements as the technology evolves. Regardless, that the category is addressing some of the shortcomings of the past, such as “cramped” keyboards, small screens, slow processors, short battery life and too little memory.

The march of devices from consumers to businesses is occurring in the netbook sector. ADNH Compass, a 17,000-employee caterer in the Middle East decided to give workers Aspire One netbooks instead of full-size laptops. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is that the company’s ERP software manager is in the process of enabling the devices to access SAP applications via 3G wireless. This clearly shows that the netbooks aren't out of their league and are robust enough to support the heavier workloads demanded in business environments. IT managers who formerly scoffed at the idea of replacing laptops with netbooks are taking the concept far more seriously.

The netbook/MID/smartphone/laptop sector is perhaps the most interesting and fun to watch. For one thing, the sour economy means that nothing good is happening in many other sectors.

What do you think? Are netbooks the future? This industry always evolves toward smaller and less expensive. If netbooks can continue to harnass great computing power—as with the Acer AspireRevo—I think there's no stopping them. And that means a lot of PC manufacturers are going to see a lot of upheaval in their business models.