BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 were designed years ago – the traditional strengths of these software platforms are rapidly becoming liabilities in the fast-paced smartphone market. Michael Vakulenko answers a critical question: are user interface face-lifts, application stores or even going open source enough for the legacy smartphone platforms to stand-up to the challenges posed by iPhone and Android?

A new beta version of the iPhone OS 3.0 and associated SDK has been released by Apple. You can upgrade your iPhone is you have been using the beta 3 to experience greater stability, some enhancement in MMS support, Apple Push API and probably some more.

April Fool's day drive developers Imaginative : it seems that opensource world is not so far from supporting iPhone technologies...

Hekkus Sound System is a small and fast sound engine for WinCE/iPhone/Symbian/Win32/MacOSX/Linux/PSP/GP2X and .NET applications, expecially designed for games. Latest release adds support for iPhone / iPod touch and Mac OS X through OpenAL and OGG Vorbis files support on all platforms.

So far only capacitive screen are supporting multitouch UI, but who knows ?

Apple has just announced the Apple Developer Forums—a new benefit for developers in the iPhone Developer Standard Program, Enterprise Program, and University Program. Currently in beta, the Apple Developer Forums provide a collaborative environment to post iPhone development topics and questions for an open discussion with other iPhone developers and Apple engineers.

Worldwide smartphone sales totalled 32.2 million units in the second quarter of 2008, a 15.7 per cent increase from the second quarter of 2007, according to Gartner, Inc. In addition, of all mobile device sales, smartphones' share remained stable at 11 percent. Symbian OS is still far ahead of competition but looses almost 9% market share.

I think it's a good idea to wait a bit with commenting the announement of big things. You might not be as fast as others, but at least will have a broader view to the whole picture. At least that's what I did with Steve jobs announcement about the iPhone SDK (official press release is here) and developer program.

Yes it is. After being a really beautiful phone, the IPhone now come to the world of the SmartPhone, phone for which we can write native application.