Palm just announced on his blog that jQuery Mobile has been released.
Aside from Windows Mobile and Maemo (!?!?) All the modern platforms are supported as you can see in the chart below. We’ve seen how web apps can look gorgeous on the iPhone Safari browser, now all the mobile browsers get a leveled dynamic experience of the mobile web. It’s hard to anticipate just now if this is going to be a game-changer or simply a nice to have feature, and while many have envisioned that web-apps would prevail to native apps this certainly hasn’t been the case till now.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing news and for sure web developers will have to upgrade their mobile site to take full advantage of this new dynamics.

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery
to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the
major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI
framework.
Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing
work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular
platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview
detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart
showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

RIM’s consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones, dubbed Blackberry Protect, has just been officially announced. Rumored for months, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

The application is currently in limited beta trial and no date for General Availability has been communicated

Gotta love the idea idea – turn your todo list into quests and level up as you go through them. When GTD meets with RPG and Funware : “Epic Win” coming soon on the app store !

Grats to “comex” who is apparently getting somewhere in porting flash to iPad. He is basing his work on the libflashplayer.so made by Adbobe for Android, and indeed since both are ARM devices, with a lot of hacking around he got it right !

A couple of charts I found worthy to share excerpted from Vision Mobile’s “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond” study which you should definitely read (it’s free – sponsored by Telefonica).

Seems like the mobile security industry is shaking :

• In May, McAfee bought mobile security provider Trust Digital for an undisclosed price
• Last week, Lookout announced it has gotten more than a million registered users in the past six months for its smartphone security app which includes anti-virus, anti-spy/mal-ware, lock and wipe and backup and restore for android, windows mobile and blackberry

Lookout recently secured a second round of funding increasing total funding to a wooping $16.5 million and has only 20 employees – sounds lean enough and ready to last.

Shopping from a mobile phone has always been a very theoretical exerience. Sounds like a good idea but nobody ever really managed to make a clean 360 experience from window licking to actually paying for goods.  Mobile phone may be used to give more info on a product but at the end the purchase was always done in-store or on the PC. Apple’s app-store made it real and mainstream for apps and now today they just released a mobile app version of their app-store. You can download it right here.

Since your Apple account already integrates your billing infos, the whole process is as seamless as it is on the app store or on the web, probably the first really compelling e-shopping experience on mobile to date !

While the app stores have been marketed as a safe place by Apple since the very beginning, turns out they can become quite easily the haven of the new-age app piracy. The WSJ runs an article on the subject (thanks @gr for the link) where they give as an example a fake banking application sold 1,50USD on the Google app store.

Of course Apple has a very strict human-based approval process that should limit those malwares/spywares, but while the other app stores only react to notification, bottom line is the mobile app world is getting unsafe, and those articles definitely are raising awareness on this fact.

Even with all the human brain curation of the app store, it appears it’s far from perfect as explains the WSJ article “Consumers should be aware that iPhone security is far from perfect and that a piece of software downloaded from the App Store may still be harmful,” wrote software engineer Nicolas Seriot in a research paper detailing iPhone security holes that he presented at a computer security conference in February.

It’s probably time to secure that environment where apps and andvanced browser lead to the same threats that we’ve been taught to manage on the PC world, just as some visionaries such as F-Secure have foreseen for a couple of years already.

From Sharp’s press release :

Sharp Corporation has developed a 3D camera module for mobile devices capable of capturing high-definition (720p*2) 3D video images, an industry first. Sharp will start shipping samples in July. Mass production of these modules will begin within 2010.

3D images are composed of two views taken using two cameras that simultaneously capture separate images for the right and left eyes. Consequently, a 3D camera requires peripheral circuitry to apply image processing to the two images, for example, to adjust color or to correct positioning between the images from the two cameras. Manufacturers have thus been pursuing designs that reduce the size and weight of 3D cameras and seeking ways to shorten their development period.

Those modules are hitting pre-prod this summer and mass production by the end of the year, hopefully we’ll see the first camera early 2011 that will get full 3D HD capability! Can’t wait to get a 3D setup at home to enjoy the full experience.

I installed yesterday pCalc on my iPad and was quite amazed by the way the developer invented a really innovative business model of freemium … for a simple calculator.

As any freemium model, the basic calculator is free and high-quality and the developer identified a few typologies of users that need special functions such as HEX/Binary handling, RPN with multi-lines… and all those features can be purchased in-app in a super smooth way.

It’s jus brilliant to see that something as simple as a calculator can be a field of innovation like this.