Windows Mobile 6.5 phones at Microsoft event

Microsoft smartphone partners are expected to deliver about 30 new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices by the end of 2009, including those shown for the first time at a Microsoft Open House in New York.

The 30 or so Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphones will be sold in approximately 20 different countries, said Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, speaking at a Microsoft open house.

Windows Mobile devices getting first time looks encompassed the HTC Tilt 2, the HTC Imagio, and an as yet unnamed device built by Toshiba and anticipated for sale in the Japanese market.

In his keynote, Bach suggested this kind of hardware diversity is a key selling point for Microsoft in its struggles with Android, iPhone, Palm, and others for greater consumer mindshare.

Apple's iPhone, after all, has been available in very limited form factors, and the same has held true so far for Android phones promulgated by Google.

Bach noted that while some users like large touchscreens, some practically can't live without keyboards, and others prefer slider architectures that give them a choice of using a keyboard.

True to Bach's words, the Windows 6.5 smartphones displayed later in the day, hung in and around artificial trees in a mock treehouse set up for the occasion, sported a variety of different form factors.

Although pre-loaded this time around with Windows 6.5, the Tilt 2 looks and feels quite similar to the original Tilt, a device known for its slider architecture, powerful speakers, and solid video performance.

While it's about the same size as the Tilt, and its screen size is a comparable 3.6-inches, the Imagio seems slightly thinner, and lacks a slideout keyboard.

The as yet unnamed smartphone from Toshiba, so far codenamed the TG0I, boasts a much larger screen, estimated by one Microsoft rep at 4.2 inches. But it also lacks a slider.

In a briefing during the event, Elizabeth Sloan, senior marketing manager for Windows Mobile pointed to another type of differentiator for Microsoft. Sloan contended that Apple targets its phones mainly at consumers, while RIM aims for corporate customers, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to provide both business- and consumer-oriented capabilities in a single mobile OS.

"We've figured out that the business user is often the same person as the one who uses the phone for personal things," Sloan noted.

Sloan also honed in on some of the new features in Windows Mobile 6.5, including MyPhone, Windows Marketplace, a mobile browser based on Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0, Theme Creator and new, user-friendly screens such as the Today Screen for accessing e-mail, calendar items, photos, favorites, and other frequently needed items from the same place.

Radio spectrum has reached its limit, says Qualcomm

The wireless industry has reached the limits of what it can do to use radio spectrum more efficiently and needs to move on to making networks more dense through tools such as femtocells, the cofounder and the current CEO of Qualcomm said Thursday.

Appearing together on the main stage of the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show in San Diego, cofounder Irwin Jacobs and son Paul Jacobs, the current chairman and CEO, reflected on the emergence of the wireless industry and shared their thoughts on some current issues.

Both said the quest for more efficient use of available spectrum, one in which Qualcomm has been intimately involved since it pioneered CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) technology in the late 1980s, is effectively over.

"We are getting to the point where, in the lab, we've sort of done what we know how to do to optimise any given radio link," Paul Jacobs said in answer to a question from CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent, who moderated the conversation. "We have to use different tricks now," Jacobs said.

Using more cells that each cover a smaller area, such as a home or campus, will be an important tool for getting more usable capacity out of the same amount of spectrum, he said. Carriers are beginning to introduce the smallest type of cell, the femtocell, for sale to subscribers.

"We think we can get maybe eight to 10 times improvement in user experience by building out dense networks and managing the interference between the macro network and the femto network," Jacobs said.

The shortage of spectrum has emerged as a hot topic, with the CTIA asking the FCC to find 800 MHz of additional mobile data spectrum and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski declaring a looming spectrum crisis at the CTIA show on Wednesday.

Apple updates iPhone OS

Rest in peace, iPhone 3.1. It was just last month that the most recent iPhone update hit the streets and already it's been superseded by the younger, faster, better looking iPhone 3.1.2. Whither iPhone 3.1.1? I'm afraid we may never know.

iPhone 3.1.2 appears to be focused mainly on providing bug fixes for a few problems introduced in iPhone 3.1. Apple specifically calls out a problem where iPhones may not wake from sleep, it remains to be seen if this is the issue that some users had dubbed "coma mode". In addition, the update fixes an intermittent issue that could interfere with mobile network services and require a restart, and a bug that could cause a crash while streaming video.

The update weighs in at a hefty 306.2MB on my iPhone 3GS, and is also available for the iPhone 3G, the original iPhone, and the iPod touch. As always, it's available only via iTunes.

Microsoft and Samsung show off phone voice commands

All right, Microsoft, confess How many takes did you need for your video of the Samsung Intrepid's TellMe feature, which sends text messages and searches the Web by voice, to go smoothly?

Because honestly, it's a pretty impressive feature. One that, given some of the things we've heard about Windows Mobile 6.5 in general, is particularly worthy of praise.

See, voice dialling has never really excited me. It's useful for those occasions when your hands are busy, but anyone comfortable with their phone can generally get to a number easily with buttons. Using voice to replace typing, however, can be more convenient in more scenarios.

Here's how it works: The Sprint Intrepid has a dedicated button for the TellMe feature. Press it, and you can start a text message by saying "text" and the contact's name. Then, you can just dictate your message, and the phone will transcribe it. You are, of course, able to check it before sending the message. The search function is even easier, as you can just say what you're looking for, and in one step the phone initiates a Bing search.

I'm aware that the Google Mobile app for Blackberry, Android, and the iPhone also lets you search the Web by voice (and it's fairly accurate, too), but the difference with the Intrepid is hardware. Even on the iPhone, you've still got to slide out of the phone's lock system or get out of whatever app you're using, find the Google Mobile app, and then lift the phone to your ear to start a voice search.

By fusing TellMe's voice features to a dedicated button on the hardware, Microsoft and Samsung make texting and searching much easier. Indeed, I'd like to see other phone makers (ahem, Apple) extend their phones' voice dialers to include these functions.

Wait, did I just say other tech companies should copy Microsoft? I must be in the Bizarro world.

How to hack WPA wireless security in one minute

Japanese computer scientists have developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute.

The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for September 25 in Hiroshima.

Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organiser of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. "They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they've made it much more practical," he said.

They Japanese researchers discuss their attack in a paper presented at the Joint Workshop on Information Security, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan earlier this month.

The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

The encryption systems used by wireless routers have a long history of security problems. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) system, introduced in 1997, was cracked just a few years later and is now considered to be completely insecure by security experts.

WPA with TKIP "was developed as kind of an interim encryption method as Wi-Fi security was evolving several years ago", said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director with the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that certifies Wi-Fi devices. People should now use WPA 2, she said.

Wi-Fi-certified products have had to support WPA 2 since March 2006. "There's certainly a decent amount of WPA with TKIP out in the installed base today, but a better alternative has been out for a long time," Davis-Felner said.

nterprise Wi-Fi networks typically include security software that would detect the type of man-in-the-middle attack described by the Japanese researchers, said Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security. But the development of the first really practical attack against WPA should give people a reason to dump WPA with TKIP, he said. "It's not as bad as WEP, but it's also certainly bad."

Users can change from TKIP to AES encryption using the administrative interface on many WPA routers.