a quick recap of some of the things I personally found interesting or worth noting about all of the various smartphone announced / releases over the last few weeks:

1) TomTom is not the first GPS maker to have a mobile app
When it was announced at WWDC that Tomtom was making an application for the iphone 3G it generated a good bit of buzz. The blogs wrote, the twitters tweeted, and so forth. Turn by turn directions on a mobile device has not only already been done for free by Microsoft but it has also been available commercially from Garmin for at least the last year.

2) Cupcake still doesn’t open up Bluetooth to developers
It is very clear that Apple is attempting to leverage the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities to get hardware makers to create iPhone apps to drive all sorts of curious hardware. The best example which comes to mind is medical equipment in hospitals but I would be that plenty of devices will come with a Bluetooth interface and a matching iPhone app over the next year. This is why I think it is so absurd that Android still hasn’t opened up this world to its own developers. Perhaps they are waiting to perfect the API but if they wait long enough it won’t matter anymore!

3) The Palm Pre’s Dev mode is engaged via the Konami Code
Seriously. See this video. This alone has amused many developers and shows that Palm is trying hard to make this device memorable. I find myself unable to talk about the recent releases without mentioning this.

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