Threadless has a small repository of designs that didn’t quite make it. These belong to the critique section and I’ve lifted them out for all to see — they didn’t get very high marks and some of them have been out since forever. Here are some of them:

Original design here.

Original design here.

And here’s one more, which among the three I find the best in the lot.

Apparently, my mobile phone (a Nokia E71) is infested with more germs compared to a friend’s toilet. Yep, and this comes as no surprise, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Gerba — the world famous microbiologist who scanned Tyra Banks’ underwear — came over to a friend’s house to do some germ swiping. The good doctor had a special machine called an ATP Luminometer that read swatches to determine how much germs resided in a specific area.

Lo and behold, my Nokia E71 had more germs than my friend’s bathroom sink and toilet! But wait ladies and gentlemen, before you think that I “talk dirty” it actually must be said that it isn’t surprising to find mobile phones to be more contagious than our bathrooms. We disinfect our toilets everyday but do we apply the same diligence to our mobile phones? Apparently not.

So what I learned from this fun get together — your portable gadgets are hives for germs because we take them everywhere we go, we talk into them, we rub them on our hands, our pockets and place them on our desks.

Disinfect your mobile phones with alcohol on cotton buds once in a while!

There’s excitement abounding the Symbian community as Symbian Foundation launches its beta testing program. I guess it’s one good way to support the current efforts of the Nokia Conversations blog as well as the Ambassador Program.

During the beta trial phase several thousand friends and members of the Symbian community are being invited to test and give feedback on the foundation’s developer website. The site contains a rich developer offering including platform release information, council charters, wikis, forums, as well as access to the Software Development Kit (SDK), Mercurial Source Configuration Management (SCM), Bugzilla defect reporting and issue tracking tool, various other tools, documents and FAQs.

The beta trial period consists of a resource-rich infrastructure for fans of Symbian that ultimately unites S60, UIQ, and Symbian S40 under one roof.

With ACER announcing its initial barrage of phones, Toshiba is not far behind. Both behemoths are making use of Windows Mobile with their own proprietary technologies built in. ACER uses the Spb Shell application while Toshiba has some sort of Window pane flip UI. The TG-01 brings a huge 4 inch screen to the table making that the main selling point apart from the usual bells and whistles — HSDPA, camera, WiFi and anything you’d opt to find in a Windows Mobile phone.

Kinetic or flick scrolling used to be a fantastic piece of technology that the iPhone could boast. Now, even Nokia is bringing it into their phones. Before this, the Samsung OMNIA implemented kinetic scrolling to an extent. And alongside the N97, the Palm Pre is also making use of this technology. So it took the phone companies two years to play catch up.

What could be under Apple’s sleeve next?

Because of the hard times, it probably cost Nokia so much less to put this viral campaign up than advertise on the big screen. This is an eye catching demonstration done before the movies begin.

That’s the way of the world — if you can’t adapt, you lose. UK telcos Orange and O2 are perturbed with the inclusion of Skype into the Nokia N97.

The move to include Skype into a phone to ship beckons that that there exists a thin line between regular calls and data.

dear O2 and Orange — you’re obviously showing signs of insecurity. It’s been many years predicted that VoIP and data will be the wave of the future and many other telcos have learned to adapt - like 3 Mobile for instance.

Boo you.

A few days ago I was sent a product code that unlocks the full version of Audials Mobile, a S60 based application that seems questionable when it comes to music copyright laws. What it does is rather amazing: it scours the Internet Radio sites for songs and adds them to its database of over 70,000 songs. When you request for a song by typing in an artists’ name or searching for a particular genre, you’re given a listing of the most popular results. Audials allows you to download them. The disturbing thing is that the application is seamless and powerful, it’s scary that something like this exists. So I asked them if its completely legal and let me quote their answer:

Audials Mobile records the files from social web radios – this is legal, but only for private use. This means, you can use the files on your cell phone and copy them to your PC, MP3-player etc., but you are not allowed to share the files.

Audials from jayvee Fernandez on Vimeo.

Songs are recorded into the S60 enabled mobile phone, and can be shared to your collection as MP3’s. There is NO DRM copy protection whatsoever.

Audials Mobile is the only software that allows you to download the best MP3 music the Internet has to offer from the newest generation of social radio stations. It’s like taking candy from a baby! With Audials Mobile, your cell phone will be bursting at the seams with the latest pop, rock, rap, hip hop, metal, electro, trance, techno and music from many other genres as well as the latest hits from the charts. Music recording of radios is legally and free! [AUDIALS SITE]

Scary. Stark. Potent.

I did a quick Google search for Audials but I get no queries from actual blogs or other sites that have reviewed this service. Not sure how new this application for mobile is. Has anyone used this before?

[photo from Audials.com site]

I had a dream about this once. What if someone developed a really neat user interface you could license easily to anyone. Well, TelMap does exactly that.

Telmap, the world leader in mobile location solutions, today announced the introduction of Telmap Active Interface - a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) engine that works across all mobile operating systems currently available on the market. The development, which is the first of its kind, sees Telmap using a Lightweight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT) from Sun Microsystems as the base technology for the GUI’s core elements. This in turn offers users the first unique cross platform GUI engine to provide the ultimate experience available on mobile devices. [source]

I guess what I’m really after isn’t how the phone works in the back, but what appears out in front for the user to enjoy. So correct me if I’m wrong — regardless if its running on Symbian or Windows Mobile, this UI is supposed to integrate seamlessly as per however the developer wants. Since it’s light, it shouldn’t lag.

Correct?

This service served as the inspiration for the Fake A Call app for the iPod touch / iPhone. Popularity Dialer allows you to premeditate a call to your phone at a given time to alleviate you from any awkward situation such as dinner with your mother in law. The calling service was promoted by David Pogue in December last year as one of the more interesting mobile phone services to date.

However, the site has been under watch by the FCC for rampant fake calling since you can always enter your friend’s number and have them get pranked. The damage isn’t really that - it’s more like cost. US carriers do charge for incoming calls so there are many ways for this service to rack up abuse. Since then, Popularity Dialer has issued a “Do Not Call Me” list that blocks your number from their servers.