WiMax products get certified

The WiMax Forum officially gave its stamp of approval to 10 mobile WiMax products, marking the first time fully standardised products have been available outside South Korea, says Information Week.

WiMax is a next-generation last-mile wireless broadband technology that can deliver faster downlink speeds than existing networks. The Mobile WiMax profile operates at 2.5 GHz, which is spectrum that Clearwire and Sprint will use to deploy their WiMax network in the US.

Alvarion and Motorola each received certifications for a base station. Airspan Networks, Beceem Communications, Intel and ZyXEL received the forum's seal of approval for use on the customer-premises equipment side. Samsung and Sequans Communications received certification for both.

With the average resolution of camera phones fast approaching three megapixels, handset designers face the dilemma of devising new mobile phones that can efficiently handle large image files - increasing in size as resolution goes up - without having to add more memory and processing power, says eeTimes.

Scalado, a Lund, Sweden-based mobile image software company, claims to have the answer - a suite of software that delivers faster rendering, scaling and rotation and superior image editing features.

The Swedish company earlier this week got a shot in the arm by signing up Symbian, a leading mobile operating system company, as its licensee.

The new Instinct smart phone, which goes on sale Friday, has a number of speech-activation functions for calling, texting and finding information on traffic, movies, sports and weather, says Computerworld.

Sprint Nextel, which developed the Instinct with Samsung Electronics, has focused on the speech-command functionality as a clear differentiator for the Instinct, especially when compared with Apple's iPhone.

The iPhone 3G, another touch-screen smartphone, so far has no native speech commands. It ships on 11 July.