While rumours were all over the place this week and pictures (also fake ones) popped up of Microsoft's Zune or Apple's new iPod, some real annoucements were also made. One of them was that Motorola's low cost MOTOFONE that had been launched in Cape Town, South Africa. (see report from Phone Scoop)

Although the target seems developing countries and prepaid markets, I hope (for myself) that it will be available here too.

Mobileburn.com was able to test drive the device, here the promising report:

While its spec sheet might not seem all that impressive, the F3 demands your attention when you have it in your hands. It is amazingly thin (9mm/.35"), solid, and beautiful. The monochromatic EPD (Electrophoretic) "Clear Vision" display is retro-cool looking in that 1980's LCD watch kinda way. In fact, when in use, it looks for all the world like an Etch-a-Sketch children's toy, thanks to its black digits and powdery gray background. The display is made up of two lines for text and numbers with icons filling the top and bottom areas. The same EPD technology appears to be used for the volume and battery level indicators that sit above the display and on either side of the big Motorola "M" emblem. EPD technology is often known by other names like "e-ink" and "e-paper", among others.
The very basic menu system, accessed with the up arrow button to the left of the d-pad, makes use of simple icons and voice prompts to denote what section the user is in and what they can do there. There is no icon grid main menu, no animations, nothing to confuse even your grandmother. In fact, the large, high-contrast display and simple user interface make this the perfect phone for the very young and the very old alike. The F3 might have been designed with users in places like New Delhi in mind, but I'm quite certain that it will find a following in many other places as well.
Motorola expects the MOTOFONE F3 to sell for well under US$50 without any carrier subsidies at all. That, along with its good looks and high usability, is likely to make the MOTOFONE F3 a very popular handset, in my opinion.

• Adding to (or riding on) the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is one organization called Green Wifi that proposes a wireless access point with solar cells to overcome the power supply problems in developing areas. There might be much higher priority things though on the radar screen of the people who try to help the less fortunate as also our own post comments on.
• How people should be fired is what Guy Kawasaki comments on in his The Art of Firing. The title already shows that the extreme "at will" culture in the US approaches this topic entirely differently to the other extreme in Europe. As often, I think extremes are not the best solutions.
• Maybe the extension service of TechCrunch into job offering - CrunchBoard - is a first example for what could happen to many of the famous blog sites out there: Using their loyal niche communities to get paying services and information to them.
• While the large car manufactures are wasting lots of cash and time on figuring out what the less, or not at all, petrol driven cars will look like in the future, it probably will take the high-tech guys from Silicon Valley once again to show them how to do it. Ion America (located at Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA) has got another round of funding, totalling its support to 165 million USD. They develop a fuel cell technology for trucks and cars. Of course not all investments of the three VCs NEA, Kleiner Perkins & Kaufield and Mobius Ventures have been successful in the past, or the present, so there is still some hope for the above-mentioned "old world" guys to save their face by finally getting their act together...
• At the security conference Black Hat in Las Vegas two researchers demoed how they can hack a WLAN card in a MAC notebook in less than 60 seconds. We have also commented on this worrying news on our blog site.
• Similar successful hacking news came from the German Lucas Grunwald (works for dn Systems) who was able to clone the new "secure" RFID passport that will be launched soon in the US and other countries.
• It looks like the mobile phone manufacturers have overstretched the acceptance level of their clients accepting ever more stuff in their tiny devices. At least that's what the latest sales crashes suggest. I am watching for quite some time that this industry seems primarily driven by some consumer market experts who put emphasize on design only and not so much on the useability aspects. Otherwise some of the phones that I see in the stores would never have seen the light of the day. The latter of course would mean that less is more. Not sure when they will finally get it but I guess the market dynamics will once more take care of it.

This week's news from the Silicon Valley based organization Green Wifi got me thinking if such projects/gadgets really make sense. The definition of what a gadget is is totally subjective and largely depends on living standard. While for Steve Jobs a gadget thing would be (and for all of us) an outerspace flight on board a space shuttle, for the average high-tech person this might start with e.g. a Breitling watch or a sports car. Now for someone living in rural India e.g. a gadget starts much lower priced and could entail eating enough or simply having access to clean water. The proponents of organizations like Green Wifi or the more famous One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative that proposes a $100 laptop seem to me a bit off their - certainly well meant - goals. As the Indian education minister just recently commented on the $100 project:

"We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

This is a view held by a number of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) who hold that the focus on taking technology to India's poor overlooks other key requirements like water, food, and basic education of the country's deprived sections.

The above statement makes sense and lets projects like the mentioned two look a bit like theoretical patchworks from some high-tech industry people who have worked themself their entire lives in high-tech and now feel for whatever reason responsible for doing something for the much less fortunate in the poor areas of the world.

I would also like to add one other point. First of all setting the right priorities seems mandatory; someone having no education or access to sufficient food and drinking sources will not sit under a shady tree with a limited $100 PC (I assume that laptop does actually not even have wireless connectivity) and connect to a solar powered access point in reach. Secondly, I question if those initiatives are not even enlarging the digital divide if they provide such nations with "second class, very limited" Internet access and $100 PCs? I am sure people in Bangalore only have top-notch IT infrastructure to be able to offer services that are practically identical to what the guys in Silicon Valley or elsewhere do. Only if someone has a chance to move up to such a group do PC and Internet savviness make any sense to me. Solar-powered Wifi access points and $100 PCs seem a bit far away from this.

So to sum things up. I think what all those organizations should really do is work very closely with the folks in those countries who are working on helping the less fortunate poor day-to-day. When basic things are provided then Internet access with good performance PCs in PC /Internet equipped schools could be a next step - but not the first. Until then any money should be spent for what the Indian minister mentioned, I think, and often probably for even more basic things. If you don't know how to read/write, or struggle to feed yourself, Internet surfing is not that cool a gadget.