Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

Here are the top 10 Android Developer Challenge (Round 2) winning projects:

* cab4me: call a cab to any location worldwide
* Compare Everywhere: scan a barcode to check price and reviews
* Ecorio: calculate travel carbon footprint
* GoCart: shopping cart on-the-go
* Life360: a multi-channel messaging system and neighborhood-centric social network
* Locale: advanced settings manager based on conditions, such as location
* PicSay: personalize and share your pictures
* Softrace: turn your workout into a thrilling race and challenge the world in real time
* TuneWiki: play audio and video while displaying synchronized lyrics or translated lyric
* Wertago: find the hottest parties in town and connect with friends and others all night long

All of them use location API (GPS and cell based) or at least Map API. So it is a good list of mobile LBS applications.

HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) is rumored to be launched on October 13th. But GPS is not mentioned in the (rumered) spec, which is quite a surprise to me.

Inovaworks is working on a “Java on iPhone” development kit that allows Java developers use Java to write iPhone applications. The goals of this devkit are very appealing:

* Using the familiar Java programming language
* Using a familiar IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans
* Generating 100% valid and compliant iPhone applications
* Explicitly avoiding software black boxes and developer lock-in
* Allowing for Xcode Instruments tuneups if needed

For one second I thought it is the company Innaworks, which announced a while ago providing an automated J2ME to iPhone porting solution. Those two company names are very close.

Image source: sevenclick.com

I used to use Google Send to Phone service and the FireFox plugin to send SMS. But today I found that free SMS service has been stopped by Google. I remember that Yahoo had a similar service before. It turns out Yahoo Web2SMS is not longer available either. I do not know when that happened.

Here are a list alternatives I know:

(1) Via Email

AT&T: number@txt.att.net
T-Mobile: number@tmomail.net
Sprint: number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: number@vtext.com
AllTel: number@message.alltel.com
Where number = your 10 digit phone number.

I did not use this method for quite a while, I hope those emails still work.

(2) Via carrier websites

They often provide simple web forms to send SMS. For example Sprint has messaging.sprintpcs.com, T-Mobile has t-mobile.com/MESSAGING.

(3) Gizmo SMS

GizmoSMS.com site allows you send SMS globally. You can pick the country name from a long list.