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Since it looks like GT5’s still another decade or two away from release, racing gamers need everything they can to survive the wait, and this is just about the most creative way we’ve seen to do that.

At a glance, Nokia’s Ovi Maps Racing looks like a pretty simple, standard 2D racer with an overhead view, but its secret sauce lies in the map: it can turn pretty much any street in the world into a racecourse.

The game lets you chart out your heated battle using nothing more than Ovi Maps data and your finger, meaning Manhattan, Prague, or your folks’ quiet, peaceful neighborhood are all potential targets for your high-speed bedlam.

Nokia has recently introduced the Nokia X6 16GB, a full touchscreen handset that has a 3.2-inch full touchscreen display in 16:9 ratio (360 x 640 pixels) and 16 million colors. Available in all black, all white, white with pink highlights and white with yellow highlights colors, the phone is powered by a 433.9MHz processor with a 5-megapixel camera with dual flash LED for low light photography, Bluetooth 2.0, a 3.5mm headphone jack, A-GPS and WLAN. The Nokia X6 16GB will be sold without the Come with Music service but will come with the latest Symbian S60 5th edition. Additionally, the phone comes equipped with a battery that provides up to 11.5 hours of talk time, up to 18 days of standby time, up to 35 hours of music playback time, or up to 4 hours of video playback time.

Orange UK will release mobile HD Voice in the UK this year. The network carrier is already working with unnamed top phone makers on developing HD Voice-ready handsets. FYI, mobile HD Voice is based on the WB-AMR (Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec, which uses a wide speech bandwidth (50–7000 Hz), which is capable of providing enhanced sound quality without using extra network resources.

Orange UK’s mobile HD Voice trials should be announced in the next few months, while a full nationwide roll-out is planned for later this year.

Brightkite, the Social Discovery Network, recently rolled out the first national augmented reality advertising solution. Users of Brightkite have gained the ability to access its augmented reality (AR) service since August earlier this year courtesy of the company’s partnership with Layar. Up till now, the service’s users can also check out their friends’ posts and photos at places around them. Now, with the rolling out of a new local advertising solution, those very same users are also able to check out tantalizing, special offers available in nearby stores to further tempt them to part with their money.

The Mozilla Firefox RC1 (Release Candidate 1) for Maemo (Nokia N900 and Nokia N810) is now available for download. Dubbed as the Mozilla Fennec, Firefox for Maemo promises to make you “forget about the clunky, stripped-down mobile Web you’re used to”.

The Mozilla Firefox RC1 mobile browser features Awesome Bar, Password Manager, tabbed browsing, location-aware browsing, one-touch bookmarking, desktop syncing and add-on for personalization. You can download this mobile browser via Mozilla’s official website. It is available in more than 30 languages, including Arabic, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Consumers get another boost with this new alliance from Yowza and home furnishings retailer Crate and Barrel. Starting today, the free downloadable Yowza app available at the iTunes app store can get free coupons on their iPhone or iPod Touch which are redeemable at all Crate & Barrel and CB2 stores in the US. Special price-offs and discounts will be available at select items which should take the pain out of having to locate and clip or print coupons to get some good deals coming your way. This should be timely as the Holiday season comes near and at a time where Christmas shopping is expected to take a feverish pitch!

The new Google Earth version 2.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available. This latest app provides several new features such as the ability to view custom maps (created by your or by others) via the My Maps interface. In addition, it also provides improved performance and enhanced icon selection. When you touch an icon, a small glow appears under your finger to let you know which icon you have picked. Other features include support for more than 31 different languages. You can download the Google Earth 2.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch free of charge via iTunes.

How cool is it that you can use Photoshop on your Android-powered smart phones while you’re on the run. Adobe has done it again, releasing the Photoshop mobile app for Android Smart phones, after releasing the iPhone version last week.
Of course, the mobile version of the Photoshop is different from the full-fledged version. You could only carry out some simple tasks on your Android phones. But it should be more than sufficient for those who’d love to twist some photos before uploading them to Facebook for sharing.
The Android Photoshop mobile app allows you to crop, rotate, and color correct your photos with a touch of a finger only. Read the rest of this entry »

To know why a baby is crying is perhaps a mother’s biggest problem, but it’s time now for all mums to rejoice, for an iPhone application is here to figure out the same in just 10 seconds. From Biloop Technologic in Barcelona, the Cry Translator is quick to identify a child’s cry, based on five emotional conditions reflected out of hunger, sleep, stress or if the baby is bored.
The $29.99 app has been clinically tested to be 96% accurate, and is easy to use, trigged to work with only a touch of the Start button. Besides analyzing and informing the parents about the cause of the baby’s cry, the app also advices on what to do, depending on the translation it manages. The application is currently on sale for $9.99 until November 11, 2009.

Agile Messenger – an instant messenger for mobile phones that allows you to connect to many instant messaging networks such as MSN, Yahoo, AOL, GoogleTalk etc, is now available for all Android devices including, but not limited to the Google-branded Android devices.

Agile Messenger is what you need to get connected to all your friends on all the mentioned IM networks while you’re on the run. It’s been available for a number of mobile platforms including Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone, Symbian platforms and now is also available for the Android devices.

If you’ve got hold of any one of the recently mentioned Android smart phones, you can now get the Agile IM to let you stay connected with all your friends over all the IM networks. The Agile IM for Android has a 30-trial version, which you can download from AgileMobile.com

Multichannel News is passing on word from “an industry executive familiar with Netflix’s plans” that the company is prepping an app for the iPhone and iPod touch (not to mention the Wii, which we’ve heard before) that would let users enjoy their Watch Instantly queues from the comfort of the small screen — likely restricted to WiFi, of course, because the mere thought of trying to stream a movie over a saturated 3G network is about as brutal as fingernails on a chalkboard. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook is undoubtedly the only Social network to show such dedication to the mobile platform. After being a top app on the iTunes App Store for the iPhone / iPod Touch, Facebook was also one of the first apps to be integrated inside the Palm Pre.

Not losing any time and momentum Facebook is now all set to go official on the Android Market. The official Facebook app for Android couldn’t come at a better timer with a plethora of Android devices expected to be released in the coming months.

Initially the Facebook app for the Android isn’t expected to offer as much as it does for the Apple iPhone, but it is expected to leverage the Android capabilities well!

For More Information Check here

Apple’s popular App Store has proven that selling mobile applications for smartphones is a hot business, but can all these copycat application stores expect to find the same success as the App Store?

Companies, such as Nokia, Google, LG Electronics, Research In Motion and Microsoft are hoping they can. Since the Apple App Store came on the scene a year ago, these companies have each announced plans for their own application stores. Read the rest of this entry »

As promised back in June, T-Mobile launched it’s new Android device right on time. The MyTouch 3G has been officially shown to the world, and the highly customisable smartphone has been getting fairly good reviews all round. But sad news for those who loved their HTC Dream (or G1, if you like) - T-Mobile has no intention of releasing it’s successor, the HTC Hero Read the rest of this entry »