Coming from Austria, yours truly has a healthy dislike of government agencies – wherever the government gets involved, idiocy and bloat usually follow suite.

Travelers and gadget heads in the USA will soon enjoy even more of the above-mentioned. PCWorld reports the following:

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Airline passengers would be affected too, as rules banning spare lithium-ion batteries in checked-in luggage would also be extended to alkaline and nickel metal-hydride batteries, argues George Kerchner, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Portable Rechargeable Battery Association.

…

For air travelers, this means that you are no longer allowed to put batteries or accumulators into checked luggage – which is just insane. More on that can be had at the URL above.

P.S. This is a non-political blog. However, I think that the Terrorists have already won their “war” with us – air travel is such a hassle nowadays that many evaluate taking the train more and more. One can always circumvent security measures if one really wants to.

WebKit is the browser engine used by almost every mobile device – except for Microsoft and RIM’s current devices. It thus is interesting to see which mobile company does all the work…

neugierig.org performed an analysis and ended up with the chart below:

Not much to add here…

Amazon has just sent out a few invites to developers who indicated “interest” in the Kindle – it offered a further form, offering you to “apply for a place” in the Kindle developer test program.

Amazon has now posted an FAQ for Kindle developers – the most relevant questions are below:

# What APIs are available to me in the KDK?
The KDK is comprised of two sets of APIs:

* Java version 1.4 Personal Basis Profile (PBP) APIs for mobile devices.
PBP JavaDocs can be found at http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr217/.
* Kindle custom APIs which complement the PBP APIs and provide UI components, JSON and XML parsers, HTTP and HTTPS networking, secure storage, and other features. Other APIs like audio and dictionary access will be available in a future release of the KDK.
KDK JavaDocs can be found at http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.

# I’ve already built a Java Micro Edition (J2ME) application. Can I port it to Kindle?
Yes. You should be able to modify existing Java applets and J2ME software to run on Kindle.

…

As of now, Tamoggemon has not been accepted – stay tuned!

This one is great news for Palm – their webOS has just begun to show up in the AdMob traffic reports. All the figures below are from the December edition, which can be had in PDF form here…

First of all, webOs is starting to show up in charts – it has amazing 2% of the world-wide OS share, and is distributed across countries as follows:

It has furthermore managed to surpass the Centro’s late popularity marks in the USA:

And even makes it onto the list in Western Europe:

The UK was one of the first countries in Europe to get the Pre – O2 interduced it a few months ago, and was not heard from since.

A recent Reuters report now revealed the following:

“It will take a long time before that goes away,” Dunne said. O2, which started selling the iPhone in November 2007, is the leading mobile operator in Britain ahead of Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile (DTEGn.DE) and 3 (0013.HK).

Dunne said sales of the iPhone and good sales for the Palm Pre had helped the operator to finish the year well in Britain, and said he expected the next set of trading results to show that O2 was the only operator to grow in the period.

Looks like things aren’t as bad as some of us expected. Tune in in a few hours for even more good news…

Traditionally, Palm devices were rather gender-neutral – there was a time when both yours truly and his wife used Palm devices for their daily chores.

However, things tend to move on – and Verizon feels that the Pre plus is a device aimed at females:

While this could of course be a tie-in for the upcoming Valentine’s day, it could also turn out to become a lasting negative asset for Pre brand – let’s see how this one evolves…

As usual, our friends at BrightHand’s have just released their mindshare stats.

The top-ten is below – as always, the position in brackets refers to last month’s place:

1. HTC HD2 (1)
2. Samsung Moment, Android (3)
3. Nokia N900 (2)
4. BlackBerry Curve 8530 (new)
5. Nokia E63 (9)
6. BlackBerry Bold 9700 (6)
7. Motorola Droid, Android (4)
8. BlackBerry Bold 9000 (returning)
9. Nokia E71 and E71x (returning)
10. Samsung Omnia II (10)

Apple’s announcement to use a micro SIM in its iPad caused quite a bit of waves in the mobile industry – no other box has used this smaller format so far.

The illustration on the left shows the site difference – and CNET reports the following:

…

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which sets the standards for SIM cards, tells us that except for the size of the plastic around the chip, micro SIM cards are identical to the SIM cards we normally find in phones.

…

This means that you can cut existing SIM cards to size – have fun, tinkerers!

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Justin Ormont

Update: Palm has just written in that there never was a press release in the first place. Sorry, my bad!
Don’t ask me why I didn’t get this before – but the folks at Palm’s will hold an event in Germany on the 10th of February.

The reason for this is short and sweet: German users have downloaded over one million content apps from the App Catalog.

Looking at the agenda, we see a smorgasbord of Palmary topics interesting for developers:

• Mojo
• PDK
• Ares
• Selling apps

Bluetooth 2.x is getting somewhat old in the tooth – it has been around for over two years. Its successor Bluetooth 3.0 has been certified for some time, but has not hit the road so far.

It looks like this will change in the very near future – the Bluetooth SIG has just certified a Samsung phone with a Bluetooth 3.0 radio:

Further information can be had at the URL below:
https://www.bluetooth.org/tpg/QLI_viewQDL.cfm?qid=16289