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Yesterday at a press event hosted in London, HTC unveiled its latest Windows Mobile device, the diamond.

The device is equipped with a generous 528 MHz processor, 4GB storage inbuilt, HSDPA, FM Radio, 3.2MP camera and GPS built in. The Diamond runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.1 which is the latest offering from Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t made many great improvements to the user interface of Windows Mobile recently and HTC have built applications and customizations for their devices.

The most important factor of this new device is HTC’s new Touch Flo 3D interface. The new interface aims to compete against Apple’s iPhone touch interface. From a video demonstration by MoDaCo it appears that the technology suffers from some common drawbacks to Windows Mobile’s own interface and system. Occasionally freezing and not always responding to screen taps correctly. Checkout the video below to see what I am referring to. HTC has integrated Opera’s mobile browser into the device and it appears to offer an improved interface for web browsing on Windows Mobile devices. A YouTube specific application features on the device almost like the iPhone equivalent.

In my own opinion, until Microsoft revamp Windows Mobile so that any area you navigate to on the device you can use gestures and the Touch-Flo like interface, these devices cannot compete with the interface of the iPhone. The iPhone is specifically built with touch in mind. Unfortunately there is no synergy with Windows Mobile yet and you feel frustrated when you navigate to an area of the OS that does not function the same as another. I am hoping for bigger things with Windows Mobile 7 and Microsoft has promised them.

Video: >> Click here <<
View: HTC Diamond

Some Pictures:

Do you like twitter a lot like me? It is great yeah… the next BIG thing on the Internet.. maybe?

Oh… In case that you did not add zakeh’s twitter account yet to your twitter friends, then do this here.

Why not sharing your website’s updates or your blog’s RSS with your friends on twitter? That would be awesome for your friends to get notifications on their twitter accounts and getting some sms notifications for your website

Here is a code that might makes this happen

I used the PHP curl features to do the same thing from PHP (obviously with a real username and password):

<?php
// Set username and password
$username = ‘username’;
$password = ‘password’;
// The message you want to send
$message = ‘is twittering from php using curl’;
// The twitter API address
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
// Alternative JSON version
// $url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json’;
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
// check for success or failure
if (empty($buffer)) {
    echo ‘message’;
} else {
    echo ’success’;
}
?>

Obviously you could do more with the return than print out a success or failure message. The $buffer variable has the returned XML or JSON for you’re parsing pleasure.

The code has been tried many times and it works great on WordPress. Feel free to edit, change, and share the code.

Bill Gates, who will formally resign from Microsoft  later this year, took the spotlight at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Friday as he pledged $306 million to improve agriculture in Africa.

In announcing the grants, Gates called on wealthy companies to engage in “creative capitalism.”

“If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women,” Gates said. “The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor.”

Innovating the System

Gates told the summit, “Thirty years, 20 years, 10 years ago, my focus was totally on how the magic of software could change the world.” But he said technology innovation is not enough to solve problems and change lives in the third world. “If we are going to have a serious chance of changing their lives, we will need another level of innovation. Not just technology innovation — we need system innovation.”

Noting that capitalism tends to benefit people in “inverse proportion to their need,” he offered a refinement of the capitalist model, one that reflects the human desire to help others as well as the drive to make money. In the current schema, wealthy nations donate money to poor countries, but there’s never enough money to meet the need.

“Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces. To make the system sustainable, we need to use profit incentives whenever we can,” he said.

Since profits are hard to come by when serving the very poor, Gates suggested another “market-based incentive” — recognition. Because recognition for good work attracts customers and employees, it “triggers a market-based reward for good behavior,” he said.

Gates described creative capitalism as “an approach where governments, businesses and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities.”

Renewed Focus on Farming

The new pledge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is targeted at delivering better seeds, healthier soil and access to new markets to the rural poor. The foundation will raise its giving for agriculture to $900 million by next year.

Agriculture, which has taken a backseat to health and education since the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, is getting renewed attention these days as global warming models predict devastating droughts and flooding in the parts of the world where the poorest people live, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

“People, ourselves included, recognize this is an urgent problem and is only going to get worse,” said Rajiv J. Shah, the foundation’s director of agricultural development. “We need to come together now.”

Earlier this week, Microsoft and Dell  announced support for the (RED) project, which raises money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. Dell will sell two (RED)-branded XPS laptops, the XPS One desktop and its 948 all-in-one-printer . The machines will feature various (RED)-related items from Microsoft such as wallpaper, screensavers and video.

Gates praised the (RED) campaign in an interview with CNN Friday. “People with great products associate themselves with the red campaign, and that campaign has saved over 2 million lives by buying the drugs [that people] need for their AIDS,” Gates said.

Japan’s Panasonic has created the world’s longest-lasting alkaline battery, according to Guinness World Records.

Panasonic promises its new Evolta battery cell — whose name is derived from "evolution" and "voltage" — will keep gadgets running 20 per cent longer than offerings from rivals Duracell and Energizer, as well as its own upscale Oxyride batteries.

Guinness certified Evolta in a Tokyo ceremony Tuesday as "the longest-lasting AA alkaline battery cell," based on testing under guidelines set by the industry’s International Electrotechnical Commission.

Read more »

It turns out that without even noticing it, those over 45 years of age (today) have witnessed the most significant demographic event in the history of human population. Global human numbers have more than doubled from 3 billion in 1960 to 6.5 billion in 2005. If 2005 fertility rates remain constant, global population will reach 11.7 billionby 2050.