Author: Nicholas Deleon

The Sirius XM application for BlackBerry is now available. It runs on the Storm/Storm 2, Curve (8500, 8900), Bold (9000, 9700), and Tour (9600).

The application requires a Sirius XM subscription plus the additional online streaming feature, which costs $3 per month.

There’s something like 120 channels available, chief among them, in my opinion, The Virus, XM channel 202/Sirius 197. I sit here all day listening to the damn channel, and I couldn’t be happier.

Not available via the application: Howard Stern, which you can blame on contractual issues. Big deal: Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez are better anyway!

The rumor: Activision is looking to bring DJ Hero to mobile devices. You can assume the iPhone would be among the platforms supported. The facts: DJ Hero didn’t do too well, but Activision put a hell of a lot of money into it, so it wants to make as much of that back as possible.

Kotaku, which is essentially my home page (Drudge Report is, actually), says that Glu Mobile will be handling the port. They’ve made a lot of games over the years.

Also of note, Tiesto may well be in the game. That’s good news in the year 2005. The world needs a mash-up of “Nyana” and “November Rain“.

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It’s the case of the missing money. Or, less dumb, it’s a case of nobody knowing what’s going on. Several Windows Mobile developers have complained loudly that they’re owed monies by Microsoft. Microsoft is all, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get it sorted out,” but then doesn’t, in fact, sort it.

The deal is that several developers are owed, or at least feel that they’re owed, money for applications they’ve sold on the Windows Marketplace of Mobile store. The store launched last October. (You don’t remember everyone dancing in the streets, celebrating its launch?) The rules are such that, once you’ve sold more than $200 worth of applications, calculated after Microsoft takes its cut, then Redmond sends you an electronic transfer payment. Nothing too fancy for a gigantic corporation like Microsoft.

Unless… Well, a number of developers have claimed that, despite crossing the dollar amount threshold, they still haven’t received payment. And yes, these developers have already read Microsoft’s explanation as to what’s going on, and they’re still asking questions. Mainly, “where’s my money? Food doesn’t grow on trees.” Oh, wait: it does. Imagine that.

To its credit, Microsoft does appear to be trying to rectify the issue, and is posting on the relevant message board that it’s looking into the situation, but “try” probably isn’t a word you want to hear when there’s money at stake.

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Crying baby? There’s an App for that! (Boo!) It’s called Cry Translator, and it takes the various shouts and screams of your baby and “translates” them to proper language.

The App, which costs $17.99 $29.99 (sorry, got Pounds and Dollars mixed up), is the brainchild of a Spanish doctor.

Anyhow, this all works because researchers have pretty much figured out what a baby’s crying means. Turns out there’s five types of cries—and these cries are the same across all of humanity, from Texas to Japan, from Portugal to Indonesia—and they indicate whether or not the baby is hungry, tired, stressed, bored, or annoyed. I did not know that.

The App claims to be 96 percent accurate.

Anyone in the audience have a baby they can try this on?

via The Sun

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What’s the phrase? Oh, yeah: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. BlackBerry went down yesterday across North and South America. Users couldn’t send or receive e-mail, and some complained that they couldn’t connect to the Internet. It’s the second time in a week that BlackBerry has failed. Considering how important the service is to some people—I dare you to go to Wall Street and not see everyone using the device—you really do wonder: how long will people tolerate this shoddy service? It also raises the related question of, How wise is it to rely on “the cloud” to host all of your important data? Surely you wouldn’t leave “mission critical” information in the hands of someone else, someone who’s unsettling opaque when it comes to explaining outages?

Before we get into this, here’s RIM statement about this latest bit of downtime:

A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.

RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.

I’ve never had an important thing to do in my life (clearly), so I’ve never really needed the BlackBerry’s always-on e-mail capability. I’ve never had a job on the line, or a fancy business account at stake, at that beck and call of RIM’s servers. So I read these “BlackBerry down~!” stories like you read international news: interesting to a degree, but nothing that’s going to upset the carefully choreographed rhythm of my day.

That’s not to say I don’t rely on services that I have zero control over. I use Gmail for both personal and professional (if that’s the word to use!) e-mail. If a tornado rips through Google’s servers I’m pretty much doomed. I play World of Warcraft for many, many hours per week. If Blizzard’s servers mysteriously vanished my playtime would have all been in vain. I listen to music now on Spotify (in fact, I haven’t downloaded an album in several months because of Spotify). What happens if aliens invade, shooting a death ray at the Spotify servers? There’s goes my music “collection”!

The point is, it’s hard not to run into, and use on a daily basis, services that you have very little control over. How many people do you know who run their own e-mail server? Who has backups of all the photos they store on Flickr or Facebook?

I know it’s not the same, but this latest BlackBerry outage does highlight my concern with everything moving to “the cloud.” Like I said, I haven’t downloaded an album in months because of Spotify, but what if the record labels suddenly decide to revoke their support? How is that any more wise than buying a cheap hard drive then stuffing it with MP3s and FLACs? Then buy a backup hard drive.

I guess this makes a cloud skeptic. (Incidentally, while my fellow CrunchGear writers will be at CES clutching to their phone to see their Google Calendar schedule, at the mercy of the wireless networks in Las Vegas, I’ll be walking around with a pen and a piece of paper stuffed into my wallet with a list of all of my meetings. A piece of paper won’t crash, and if AT&T dies in Las Vegas that week, and I fully expect that it will given all the iPhones that will be crawling up and down The Strip, I’ll be skipping along with everything I need in my pocket. It’s sorta like Steampunk, just not stupid.)

So as RIM gets BlackBerry up and running (to be fair, everything looks to be running just fine as of this writing), you do wonder how long people will continue to passively allow this to happen to them. What are you going to do the next time an outage happens, tweet your displeasure to the world? Provided Twitter itself isn’t down, of course.

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Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox, is “days away” from release. It will initially be available for the Nokia N900; don’t expect an iPhone version anytime soon.

If all goes according to plan, the browser should be available before the end of the year. It’s been in development for a year and a half.

What will Fennec do to convince you to try it out, much less switch to it full-time (provided you have a Nokia N900, of course)? There’s a clever syncing feature that ensures whatever you view on your desktop version of Firefox will be available on the mobile version. That is, if I’m reading the Wikipedia entry on, say, WrestleMania 10 on my desktop, that same Web page will be displayed when I launch the mobile version of the browser. Handy, yes.

Fennec will have tabbed browsing. The AwesomeBar also makes an appearance.

And yes, there will be Add-Ons. Whether that means you’ll be able to load up Adblock Plus (don’t leave home without it!) and Scriptmonkey and so forth isn’t exactly clear. Maybe you’ll need mobile-specific Add-Ons?

As for that iPhone version jab: since when did Apple approve Apps that replicate “core functionality” of the iPhone? (Mobile Safari says hi.) Your best bet is to hope someone is able to get the code up and running on Apple’s little device, then releases a binary on one of those Jailbroken App repositories.

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Maine could well become the first state in the Union to require cellphone manufacturers to add a cigarette-like warning to cellphone packaging. The idea is to remind people that cellphones may be dangerous, and that you would do well to limit your exposure to them.

Of course, for every study that comes out that says cellphones may be dangerous, there’s another that says they’re not, or, at the very least, that more data is necessary to make any conclusions.

Whether or not the warning message should be added will be brought before the Maine Legislature next month in a session that’s “usually reserved for emergency and governors’ bills.”

The proposed warnings would advise people, especially children and pregnant women, to limit their exposure to cellphones.

For its part, the CTIA, which is the mobile industry’s public face, says that it always bases its policies on hard science. To date, there has been no definitive “eureka!” study. Of course, that ignores the numerous studies that say, “you know, there’s some evidence here that says we should limit exposure.”

Besides, why make sure a big deal about a warning sticker? What’s so bad about limiting your exposure to cellphones?

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