The Olympic is just around the corner, so now could be a good time to get prepared to keep up with what is going on, and to help you cheer on your favourite athlete (not sure that the UK has many medal hopefuls going this time...)

Pocket PC users who are travelling to the event can take advatage of Tube 2 Beijing Geo which is an animated Tube map which should help you find your way around. Available for only £2.50 from Visual IT.

"This superb map package for Tube 2 is the ideal map for anyone who needs to get around Beijing using the public transport system.

The map is a comprehensive map of the Beijing subway system system accurately overlaid onto an informative street map.

Not only can Tube 2 show you where all the most popular Beijing locations are situated, it can plan the shortest journey there by subway. Detailed directions are provided on what service to take and in what direction with further information on running times, fare zones, ticketing information etc."

Why not try to emulate the real athletes with Summer Games which includes 5 summer events and includes the crazily over the top tag line of "This game will literally turn your Pocket PC into an Olympic stadium."

"Summer Games the multi million selling classic sports title from EPYX - now on your Pocket PC !

This game will literally turn your Pocket PC into an Olympic stadium.You'll be competing against the best athletes in the world, to conquer "THE GOLD". No less than five exciting summer events (200m Running, Skeet Shooting, Long Jump, Weight Lifting and Rowing) are waiting for you to take part in.

One last advice though... Before you take on the Olympic Championship and annihilate all existing world records, it would be a good idea to exercise your athletic skills in the intensive training program of practice mode. You know what they say, no reaching the stars without a little bit of good old fashion hard work and practice.

So stop wasting your time and start practising if you wanna break those world records!"

iPhone users can now download an Olympic inspired theme for their device. It is tastefully designed and coule be a keeper, even after the games have finished.

At the time of writing this there are actually very few Olympic related applications available for mobile devices, but as they come up we will post them on 247. PDAs will be heavily involved in the games though, as this article shows, and we can expect a couple of results tracking applications to be released before the games start.

There are many online mobile services tracking the games and you can see a list here, so there is no excuse not to keep up with what is going on. Provided the athetes don't choke on the poor air quality and if there are not too many human rights protests it should be a good event:)

I mentioned my experiences with SplashMoney for the iPhone yesterday, and how it proved to be extremely unstable and time consuming to use due to some menu management which is built in. This followed my article last week where I stated that the Apple Application Store is in fact a good business model for the consumer, even though there are no trial software versions available before purchase.

OK, I take all of that back. I paid £5.99 for SplashMoney and received some software that was a complete waste of money. I am convinced that SplashData will get it fixed very quickly, but this one example shows that there is an argument for trial versions on the App Store. I then purchased a title called Pocket Money which also looked very good, and lo and behold it also crashed a few times. Every other title I have tried works very well apart from one game, so there does seem to be specific software issues at play here rather than an issue with my phone.

What does Apple have to do to clear software for release in the Application Store? I suspect that certain standards have to be met and that full testing cannot be done, because that would be far too time consuming. With a backlog of applications supposedly building up, Apple must find itself having to work as quickly as humanely possible to get the titles through, but does this lead to shortcuts in the validation process?

I am not sure of the reasons at this time, but it has left me a little wary of spending my money on a whim in the store when even a developer with the reputation of SplashData can get it wrong…

On a related subject, it looks as though some people have already tried to take advantage of the iPhone craze by releasing fake apps! More at Gizmodo.

"If you Google "iPhone apps," the first thing that comes up is iPhoneApps.org, a site selling a bundle of "top 10" iPhone applications for $25 using "safe PayPal." Friends, there's nothing safe about this site. It's a scam. The iTunes App Store is the exclusive distributor of official iPhone apps, period."

Down Call is very unusual and potentially of no use whatsoever, for 99.9% of you. This is for the 0.1%!

With Down Call you can schedule a call to a phone number at a specific time.

It's very useful if you need to call and wake up someone in the morning !

To install, copy the content of the archive to your phone and run the executable to schedule a call.

Elecont Launcher for Smartphone and Pocket PC is currently on special offer and is a nice alternative to some of the others available...

Allows you to start programs, documents and sites directly from Home screen. You can start your favourite shortcuts with one click. Optimized for finger usage.

Smartphones like the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile and Windows Mobile–based devices represent the next major computing platform. But how will that platform cohere? Nokia bigwig Bob Ianucci recently compared the smartphone phenomenon with the way the mainframe, mini-computer, and PC markets developed—and what it took for them to succeed. He pointed out that when mainframes first came to market there were a lot of players—Control Data, GE, Honeywell, IBM, RCA, and so on—and all had their own approaches and operating systems with very little commonality between them. He called that era the golden age of mainframes, but it was more like the Wild West. Once standards were in place, people could write software for these various mainframes, which in turn led the market to expand. With that, the value shifted to software and eventually services. But at best, this market amounted to less than 100 computers sold during this time.
 
Ianucci also examined the mini-computer market. Its golden age was dominated by incompatible systems from Apollo, Data General, DEC, Prime, and Wang. But once they standardized on Digital Equipment's environments, there was a buildup of compatible hardware that the software community was able to support in the way of all types of new mini-computing applications. With this move the software was now where the value resided, followed by a value shift to services. Now the total available market ran in the thousands instead of just a hundred or so.

Not surprisingly, the same pattern can be used to show the development of the PC market. It started out with various incompatible systems from Apple, Atari, DEC, Commodore, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Osborne, Sinclair, Texas Instruments, and even Wang. But once the market standardized on IBM's PC and Microsoft's OS, compatible hardware came out from Compaq, Dell, HP, and others, allowing the software community to drive the next real value propositions. Today services are where the real money is made. Now the market for PCs is in the hundreds of millions annually. More at Yahoo. Thanks to Justine.