The Blarg of Fosnez

A pleasant surprise when I woke up today. An update seems to have been pushed to the HTC Dream in Australia overnight that enabled Latitude on Google Maps . What is latitude? In short it is a location sharing program that sits on top of Google Maps on your phone. It uses GPS and/or Cell Tower Triangulation to detect your location and share it with the friends of your choosing. It is of course, also shared with Google. If you are bumming around in a shopping centre and want to know if any of your friends are as well, it is as easy as firing up the app. So why are google doing this? Well the most obvious reason is location based advertisement, which, like advertisement in games , will be much more important when Augmented Reality becomes commonplace. The question now is... where is my cupcake ?

Good News Everyone! The official Google Australia Blog has just accounced that Aussies will be able to buy the HTC Dream (otherwise known as the T-Mobile G1 ) from Optus . Looks like it is only available on optus plans , but it is not locked to the optus network . I'm going to go and talk to them now and see what the go is. *Update* Well the girl at Central's Optus shop didn't know anything about it. She was somewhat supprised when I directed her to www.optus.com.au/dream HAHA!

Turns out the Kogan Agora is indeed Fail . Told you so . Tis a pitty tooo, because now noone will buy a phone from Kogan now.

No, not that one . Australia seems to be gearing up to be a real battleground for the Android mobile phone platform. I have previously spoken on the Kogan Agora , but some new news at hand seems to indicate that it won't be the only Android phone in Australia for long. (Yes, I know you can import a G1 Development Edition ). Smarthouse has apparently been speaking to a Telstra executive (whatever that means), and Telstra will apparently be releaseing a HTC built Android phone with a "huge screen". I'm wondering if the just-leaked " Sapphire 2.0 " is what they are talking about:

Well that just sucks. As you can see from the below picture, there is a lot to be left to desire in the new Kogan Agora . (The first Android Phone for Australia) Source , via Engadget Screen looks to be about 3/4 of the size it could be (although in fairness even the promo images had it this size) Screen resolution is only 320x240 Horrid silver border around the screen - it would appear that is only on the prototype 3G, not NextG - so basically useless anywhere except the CBD in Cairns The Kogan website wants to charge $159 to deliver to Cairns. Well stuff that! It turns out their websoftware is stuffed. Deleiver to Cairns should only be about $39 Oh well, I suppose I have to start looking for another phone now.