Motorola Delivers One Millionth TETRA Terminal

Schaumburg, Illinois-headquartered Motorola Inc reached the milestone of delivering one million TETRA terminals recently, when the Jordan Armed Forces (JAF) picked up a terminal for internal deployment. Considering that the 200,000th terminal was delivered to the Surrey Police as late as in November 2003, this milestone has come at a very rapid clip.

The company has received an order from the JAF for supply of TETRA portable devices such as MTH800 terminals, MTM800 Enhanced mobiles and CM5000 TETRA Gateway repeaters. These devices are to be used for security coverage across the length and breadth of the country. The CM5000 DMO Gateway / Repeater is used for radio communications where coverage is compromised such as inside buildings, underground locations, etc. The MTM800 control head is a rugged mobile that is resistant to dust and water and handy for policemen on motorcycles. The MTH800 is a GPS receiver that helps personnel in pinpointing and coordinating locations.

Motorola’s TETRA radios were very much visible during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where over 60,000 of these devices were put in force by the organizers to maintain communication between the ground-personnel. The company’s security-centric communications products are now in use in over 85 countries.

Read more about the latest milestone achieved by Motorola, here.

Vodafone Offers New Package To Businesses Using Microsoft Services

Berkshire, England-based Vodafone Group Plc has announced a new package offering to businesses that comprises fixed /mobile voice and data, plus customer equipment and handsets, and the Online Services of Microsoft.

The package utilizes the following Online Services of Microsoft to Vodafone’s business customers:

- Exchange Online, an application to manage email communications,
- SharePoint Online, an application to manage portals, collaboration, search and customized team sites,
- Office Communications Online for IM, and
- Live Meeting for web-conferencing and video-conferencing.

Vodafone is planning to initially launch this package to customers in Germany and Spain in the second half of 2009, following the success of which, the package will be fine-tuned and launched into other markets.

What the package means to business customers is a seamless solution that brings Microsoft’s applications to the customers riding on top of Vodafone infrastructure. One single bill will be raised by Vodafone for this package, making it easy for the customer to pay. All support for the package will be provided by Vodafone.

The two companies are scheduled to deepen their collaboration through creating synergizing solutions that leverage Vodafone’s Voice Services and Virtual PBX capabilities.

Read more about the latest package from Vodafone, here.

Nokia To License Qualcomm Technology For New Gen Mobile Devices

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Corporation has announced that it will utilize the chipsets and technologies manufactured by San Diego, California-based Qualcomm Inc to manufacture the next generation of mobile devices. These new devices will henceforth be built upon Symbian Operating System, which the company acquired ownership of when it bought Symbian Limited in December 2008.

Nokia will make use of Qualcomm’s “Mobile Station Modem” MSM7xxx-series and MSM8xxx-series chipsets for the new 3G, CDMA mobiles. The first devices based on these technologies are expected to roll out of Nokia’s facilities sometime in mid-2010.

The devices will be based on S60 (5th Edition) Symbian OS. Since S60 is now open source, it is expected that developers will be offered an SDK a few weeks before the official launch in order for them to come out with their applications running on the new phones.

For Qualcomm, which focuses on research and development in wireless communications technologies, the licensing of its breakthrough products is how it gets its bread and butter. The business model of concentrating on R&D and licensing its products makes it a collaborator and not competitor to players in the wireless products domain.

Read more about the latest development in the mobile world, here.

HP And Sun To Jointly Promote Solaris And ProLiant Products

The Solaris Operating System and ProLiant Server finally found soul mates in each other. At least for the next ten years.

Palo Alto, Santa Clara-based Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Development Company have entered into an OEM partnership agreement, lasting ten years. Sun has become a distribution partner for HP ProLiant server and blade system platforms with Solaris 10 OS pre-installed, so the package to the customer comes at a lower overall cost. HP has elevated Solaris to the top of the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant platform. HP will resell Solaris subscriptions, which includes entitlement to Solaris 10×64 and access to Sun Connection Services (access to patches and updates).

This partnership opens the market further for Sun’s Solaris on x86 servers, considering that HP ProLiant had a share of about 38.2% in Q4 2008 in the x86 server market.

Solaris 10 OS requires minimum 2GB hard disk space and 1Gb RAM to install, and has been configured for all Sun UltraSPARC-based systems, Fujitsu SPARC64 platforms, and all 32-/64-bit systems based on the more popular AMD, Intel and VIA x86 CPUs. HP’s ProLiant machines are all either Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron.

Read more about the latest partnership agreement between the two IT biggies, here.

Safari 4 Public Beta Released

Apple’s Safari 4 Public Beta launched yesterday and I have to say while playing with it for only a few hours, it’s fantastic! Apple got many New features from google’s chrome such as the tabs located on the top as wells as the Top Sites view. While apple did get these features from chrome. I believe they are implemented better. The Animations are very smooth and everything feels very snappy. The browser launches faster than any previous versions of Safari, pages are also rendered much faster.

A major feature is the Top sites view which will automatically place your most viewed sites in this section. You can pin sites down there and arrange them as you would arrange applications on the iPhone. I did however find that at the begging it had a hard time gather thumbnails of the sites, give it some time and it manages to get them all. This view is very nice just to get a glimpse of your most used sites. I find that images allow me to locate sites and pictures much easier rather than just text.

Apple also added in Cover flow view for all your history and a better search. This makes things much easier and more elegant, however it’s the not the fastest loading thing. Overall though I do like cover flow better than text.

Tabs on the top may not seem like a huge feature but I liked in chrome and I like it even more in Safari, it takes some time getting used to (For me anyways). In the long run it’s much better as it saves vertical space for your page. It also creates a much less cluttered view. Not only did apple clean that up but the refresh button has been moved in to the URL bar. With Safari 4 apple cleaned up the interface and sped up the browser.

I think apple has won me back again with Safari 4. Up until now I was using firefox for all my web browsing. But Safari 4 has won me over, the compelling interface and speed is fantastic. It is worth noting that it is beta so there will be issues as it’s not a final version. However I found it more than stable enough so far. So go download it now http://www.apple.com/safari/

Next Page »