We met for more than an hour today with a Palm product manager responsible of the company’s new smartphone the Pre. Then we received a live demonstration, shown here.

Palm assumed a substantial amount of debt as part of a private equity deal with Elevation partners, and paid out the majority of their cash as special dividend to shareholders. Then the company was battered with competition from Research in Motion and Apple.

Jon Rubenstein, formerly an Apple Executive, is Chairman of Palm and lead the design of the company’s newest offering. In our opinion, the device is substantially more advanced than an iPhone, offering all of the iPhone’s features plus a number of things Apple’s phone cannot do, such as true multi-tasking and global search for contacts and apps. Also, there is likely to be substantial third party development for the Pre because programmers can write applications in JAVA Script, HTML and CSS, which are very common languages. They do not have to conform to the more challenging development environments of iPhone and Android.

There is also a first demonstration by Palm uploaded as another video.

Duration : 0:7:18

[youtube E9h_mjA_oOA]

The first mobile Augmented Reality browser premiers in the Netherlands

Five Dutch content providers to participate in the worlds first AR browser

AMSTERDAM, Tuesday June 16th, 2009. Mobile innovation company SPRXmobile launches Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser, which displays real time digital information on top of reality (of) in the camera screen of the mobile phone. While looking through the phones camera lens, a user can see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs, healthcare providers and ATMs. The first country to launch Layar is The Netherlands. Launching partners are local market leaders ING (bank), funda (realty website), Hyves (social network), Tempo-team (temp agency) and Zekur.nl (healthcare provider).

How it works
Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.

Dutch launch
The premier launch is for the Dutch market. Launching content partners are ING (ATMs), Funda (houses for sale), Hyves (social network hot spots) Tempo-team (jobs) and Zekur.nl (healthcare providers). Layar will be launched per country with local content partners in order to guarantee relevent results for the end user. SPRXmobile is planning further roll-outs, together with local partners, in Germany, the UK and the United States this year. SPRXmobile wil continue with regular releases of new layers after each local launch. The Layar application will be available via the Android Market. Other handsets and operating systems are in development with a prime focus on the iPhone 3G S.

SPRXmobile

Layar is developed by SPRXmobile, a mobile innovation company.

Eventually, the physical and the virtual worlds will become one. Many visions on Augmented Reality have already been developed, but we are proud to be able to bring this one step closer to reality, says Raimo van der Klein, co-founder of SPRXmobile.

More information:
http://layar.eu en http://www.sprxmobile.com.

Duration : 0:2:8

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We met for more than an hour today with a Palm product manager responsible of the company’s new smartphone the Pre. Then we received a live demonstration, shown here.

Palm assumed a substantial amount of debt as part of a private equity deal with Elevation partners, and paid out the majority of their cash as special dividend to shareholders. Then the company was battered with competition from Research in Motion and Apple.

Jon Rubenstein, formerly an Apple Executive, is Chairman of Palm and lead the design of the company’s newest offering. In our opinion, the device is substantially more advanced than an iPhone, offering all of the iPhone’s features plus a number of things Apple’s phone cannot do, such as true multi-tasking and global search for contacts and apps. Also, there is likely to be substantial third party development for the Pre because programmers can write applications in JAVA Script, HTML and CSS, which are very common languages. They do not have to conform to the more challenging development environments of iPhone and Android.

There is also a second demonstration by Palm uploaded as another video.

Duration : 0:9:57

[youtube zaSw1r8U32M]

Duration : 0:6:13

[youtube YFBDkIA45a4]

Duration : 0:1:28

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