We have carried out some generel bug fixes and optimizations to voice and performance.
Check it out and let us know what you think!

You may also notice a few changes to our website - We have changed the Sign Up process and done some changes to the “my barablu account” area. So if you Sign In to your account to check your call history, add credit or seomething else then don’t be surprised by the very different look.

For careless unfortunate users like myself there is hope, though. Golden Shellback coating is a new and unique coating that protects your phone from damage if it is exposed to water.  The coating can repel oils, synthetic fluids, dust, dirt, and water based solutions, and it is almost invisible, so your device will still look slick and stylish. 

The coating is developed by Northeast Maritime Institute in Fairhaven, MA USA. It was originally developed to solve a problem of water proofing a ‘man overboard’ system, which needed to be able to function when exposed to water. This has now evolved into the Golden Shellback, which can be used for smaller devices like mobile phones, cameras, Mp3-players, and laptops.

Unfortunately it does not mention on the website when this will be available, but rumors have it that the price will be around $50-75 depending on the size of your device. Bigger devices like laptops are likely to be more expensive.

Watch the video here:

 
Golden Shellback Waterproof Coating from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

According to a study carried out by the company 44 percent of users left their old devices unused at home. Only 3 percent of the respondents recycled their phones and 50% were unaware that their devices could be reused.

The Integrated Nokia Kiosk - Or just INK - has been designed to make the process as simple as possible for the customers, who only have to follow instructions from the screen. 

In an interview with ZDNet Asia Nellie Abdullah (Nokia Malaysia’s environmental coordinator) said:

 “The survey revealed that one of the main reasons why so few people recycle their mobile phones is because they simply don’t know that it is possible to do so.”

“In fact, up to 80 percent of any Nokia device is recyclable. Materials such as cobalt, nickel, copper, iron, aluminium, plastics, and even gold can be recovered. It can be reused to help make new products such as steel and other metal products, plastic cones, and in the case of precious metals like gold, into jewellery.”

As an extra incentive Nokia have announced that they will plant a tree for every phone recycled. Users who recycle their phones can monitor the growth of their trees, as Nokia will provide the coordinates of the tree planted and instructions on how to view the tree via Google Earth.

Most of us have probably done it before. Seen or heard of a new interesting phone. And to learn more we have entered our preferred search engine and typed in the name or model number of the phone, followed by key words like “review”, “test”, “rate”, “feedback” etc. and then browsed through our findings.

With online shopping on the rise, I’m sure that quite a few of you have also considered – or maybe already tried – to purchase your next mobile phone online.

But sometimes a review, however good and detailed it might be, is not always enough to take the leap of faith and purchase a mobile phone from an online shop. You want to explore the phone and its features by yourself. Get a feel for the UI, menu system and usability.

Now, how do you do that without having to actually go to your local phone retailer?

You go to tryphone.com, of course!

It is an exciting new website, which offers everyone the possibility to test drive mobile phones before buying. The phone you choose to test will appear in your browser and then you are able to interactively navigate through the menus, thus getting a feel for the setup and User Interface.

There are also demos available, displaying how to ‘add contacts’, ‘change wallpaper’ etc. You can find specifications for the available handsets and finally, there is a section dedicated to user reviews.

One thing I particularly liked was the “compare” feature which allows you see two phones side by side, and then lets you navigate them both at the same time – If, for example you have doubts whether the Nokia N95 or the Palm Centro is the right phone for you, this is an excellent way to find out.

Of course, this still doesn’t beat going to your mobile phone retailer where you can hold the phones in your own hands, but I would say it is as close as you can possibly get right now without getting out of your chair.

Tryphone is still in its beta stage, and there are only a handful of phones available at the moment, but I’m sure that they will be adding new devices to the list on a regular basis.

Certainly this will help a lot of people, who are considering to upgrade their phones, to make the right decision.

Well done Tryphone!

The new releases contain some generel bug fixes and some optimization to voice quality while also reducing the bandwidth slightly. 

We have also integrated AIM and ICQ and our new barablu skin on windows mobile and symbian, plus our new Multi File Transfer feature. The Multi File Transfer enables you to send more than one file at the same time to different users.

As always, your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!

As our phones have been blessed with more ‘high end’ features’, which drain the battery life faster and the fact that we like to use these features a lot, it is no wonder that we are in need of some improvements in this area. You might say that the battery technology has not been able to keep up with new and more demanding features, and of course the change of user pattern - After all, we are still using the same Lithium Ion technology that came out in the 1991 in Sony’s laptops. Obviously there have been a lot of improvements since then, but the technology remains the same and the question is, if this technology has now become as good as it possibly can be.

Recently, the company ZPower has introduced a new line of rechargeable silver-zinc batteries, which they claim can offer 40% more runtime in portable devices. Yesterday ZPower’s chief executive was interviewed on CNET (Click here to see the full interview)  where he told a little bit about the new battery technology that ZPower plans to bring out sometime next year. The technology has been around for years, but has primarilly been used in military applications, and now ZPower has brought it down to the size where it is possible to use it in portable devices like mobile phones. 

Environmentalists will be happy to know that ZPower batteries have no heavy metals or toxic chemicals and that as much as 95% of the primary elements in these batteries can be recycled and reused - And to encourage people to do so ZPower will be offering financial incentives. Apart from the obvious benefits for the environment this will also help ZPower to make up for the high prices in silver making this an economically viable project. 

If you are a barablu user (of course you are!) then let me just remind you that we have done a lot of work to minimize the amount of battery that barablu consumes - In fact the actual application hardly takes up any battery at all, but since many users connect via Wi-Fi, the battery can be affected - This is also why we have come up with the Auto-roaming feature - So you can seamlessly switch between 3G and Wi-Fi, and this way make sure that you won’t drain your battery more than absolutely necessary.

Did you know that you can enable Auto-roaming in barablu for Nokia?  

What it does?

Auto-roaming enables you to roam freely between 3G and Wi-Fi. For example, if you are connected to Wi-Fi and you leave the hotspot, then barablu can automatically connect again using GPRS, Edge or 3G.

This way you can make sure that you stay connected to barablu all the time - And you don’t have to manually sign into barablu if you loose your connection.

How to activate Auto-roaming and how it works?

Go to options à Account Settings à Auto-roam à And select your preferences.

Once you have opened the Auto-roaming menu you get 4 options:

• GPRS Only:

This means that barablu will only connect using GPRS. If you loose your GPRS signal you will also be signed out of barablu.

• Wi-Fi only:

This means that barablu will only connect using Wi-Fi. If you move from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another hotspot then barablu will automatically connect to the new Wi-Fi hotspot -  If you are not within reach of any hotspots then you will stay signed out of barablu.

• Wi-Fi and then GPRS:

This option prioritizes Wi-Fi connections. If you select this option then barablu will first connect using Wi-Fi. If you loose your Wi-Fi connection then barablu will automatically scan for other Wi-Fi access points to connect to – If barablu does not find any Wi-Fi connections, then it will connect via GPRS.

• GPRS and then Wi-Fi:

If you select this option you choose to prioritize GPRS connection – This means that barablu will always try to connect via GPRS/Edge/3G – Should you, for whatever reason, loose your signal, then barablu will first try to connect via GPRS, and if there is no signal at all, it will scan for Wi-Fi connections and connect you if there are any available.

Pretty neat, huh?

There is one thing you should remember, though.

barablu will only connect to connections it already knows(hotspots where it has already been connected once before). So, if you find yourself a new Wi-Fi hotspot you will have to manually log in the first time, but after that barablu will do it automatically.

Hopefully, this cleared up some of the confusion about this very useful feature - And if you are one of those who were thinking about trying it out before, but was not entirely sure what it did, then now there is no excuse - Start Auto-roaming so you can be logged into barablu at all times.

Happy Auto-roaming!

We have had some enquiries about our barablu personal numbers.

On the website we refer to this number as 8088… but lately we have changed the format, so when you sign up to barablu, the number you are given actually starts with 5600…

This has caused a little bit of confusion for new users who signed up to barablu.

Let me just point out that absolutely nothing has changed except for the format of the number.

The old and new format are 100% compatible with each other and you still get all the free calls and barablu features that you always did when signing up - Oh! and by the way!

Check out our new animation video which gives you an overview of some of the features you get when you do sign up to barablu.

I did a little research on Google and found out that there already are a bunch of ‘web archaeologists’ out there who enjoy to locate dead websites and preserve them. One of the most interesting sites belongs to Steve Baldwin who has gathered information on several derelict and abandoned websites for a while now; “The Museum of Interactive Failure” as he calls it.

For example, did you know that the massively popular myspace.com originally used to be an unsuccessful file-sharing service until 2000? A fact that, most likely, only a handful of MySpace users are aware of, and a piece of information that could easily be completely forgotten over time if it wasn’t for Baldwin’s and other web diggers’ websites.

Another exciting web page is the Internet Archive (or the ‘Wayback Engine’ as it is also called). The Internet Archive has been around since 1996 and it’s purpose is to build an Internet library, and offer historians, scholars, and researchers a permanent access to both forgotten and current websites.

The Wayback Engine lets you enter any web address, and then allows you to select different links from different years, displaying what the particular page looked like that year – This way you can see how certain websites have developed over time.

If you have been with us for a long time and would like to take a walk down memory lane, then I suggest you try to enter www.barablu.com and see how our page has evolved over the past 3 years.

Being a very satisfied Firefox user I would normally not pay too much attention to other players on the browser market, but an article from Computerworld about a Japanese browser maker, caught my interest.

I might as well be honest; Words like Fenrir(name of the company) and Sleipnir(name of the browser) taken from the Norse Mythology did probably have something to do with it. I am the barablu viking, after all… But reading on I found that, apart from the excellent name choosing, this browser also had a few interesting features.

• First of all, it offers a very high level of customization. Pretty much everything is customizable. Tabs, menu bars, explorer bars etc. You can even control what should happen when you right/middle/left click with your mouse buttons.  
• The ability to choose between the two layout engines: Gecko(used in Firefox) and Trident(used in Internet Explorer) is very useful to make sure certain pages are displayed to your satisfaction. 
• One of my favorite features is that you can lock a tab simply by double clicking on it – This way you avoid to accidentally close the tab. In fairness to Firefox I have later found out that the “Tab Mix Plus” add-on also offers this, but Sleipnir’s double clicking method is still more effortless.
• Also, I found it to be pretty fast, and I have yet to experience any crashes – believe me, I did try -  so it seems to be quite stable, too.

According to Fenrir inc.Global, the browser has a market share of 9% in Japan, and is especially popular with the “advanced” users, towards whom the product is also directed.

Having experienced a higher demand from international users, Fenrir have now decided to boost the promotion, and are hoping to conquer 5% of the English-speaking browser market, within the next couple of years.

It is a tough market to break into – Browser version market share statistics for June 2008 from Net Applications reports that Firefox is far behind Internet Explorer – Even though Firefox has been given a lot of attention, Microsoft’s seven year old IE6 still holds more market share than both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 put together.

Sleipnir will remain installed on my PC, and I will continue to use it for a while. Whether it will triumph over my Firefox browser remains to be seen, but to me it certainly looks a worthy contender and definitely deserves a chance.

But it is going to take a whole lot of Viking Power to achieve 5% of the browser market share.