BMW has teamed with rental car company SIXT to develop a car sharing service that works in conjunction with a BMW-developed iPhone app. The scheme and app are both called DriveNow, and will come online in April. It will initially roll-out in Munich, then Berlin and will give drivers the opportunity to locate, book and hire BMW 1-series and MINI cars.
Canada-based Mobilicity is now offering its Mobiflip smartphone, though it's currently out of stock. The Sharp-built device is a spiritual successor to the long-discontinued Sidekick LX, and is in fact, a rebranded version of that very device. The form factor that reveals a hardware QWERTY keyboard also sports a 3.2-inch, 854x480 display, a trackball and a 3.2-megapixel camera.
The iPhone is among the most widely accepted portable internet devices, and some in the industry are torn on whether this is a sign of the prophesized death of desktops. PC Magazine writer Lance Ulanoff argues that the iPhone, coupled with the long-awaited SDK, is creating a brand new era of computing standards that will some day kill the desktop, and possibly the laptop. Ulanoff argues that the iPhone has found a market with many different groups.
Day one of CES 2008 draws to a close; earlier in the day, Intel formally announced its 45-nanometer Core 2 platform, based on the previously-announced Penryn architecture. The new chips offer a host of new features, such as SSE4, and up to 6MB of Level 2 Cache. Intel will release the new mobile-centric processors by the end of January, and will be available from a number of different PC vendors, such as Gateway and Sony. Intel's booth presence at CES 2008 is large, with several different areas dedicated to the manufacturing process, mobile applications, home theatre integration, and plenty of hands-on activity.
