Garmin, in collaboration with Asus has come up with a phone that combines the power of Garmin’s GPS technology with phone. Garmin-Aus Nuviphone is available from AT&T for $199. The phone provides a complete range of GPS functionality from this article in cellcompare, alongwith other smartphone features such as camera. The phone comes preloaded with maps so the user need not download the entire map while on the road.

Would I replace my GPS with a GPS phone? Probably not.

Here’s an interesting article from Javaworld . It talks about how Flash is becoming a ubiquitous platform just like Java. When Flash 10 becomes available next year, it promises to run the same content on smartphones as well as Desktops essentially emulating the Java’s philosophy of ‘write once run everywhere’.

Not that folks at Java world are sitting siltent- Java has been working on JavaFX which promises a rich user experience and will compete with Flash. However, the mobile client for JavaFX is still in infancy and it is unknown when the SDK will be available.

With more than 1 million developers worldwide, and a good roadmap for penetrating into mobile devices, there’s a good case to be made that Flash may make Java obsolete at some point.

Nintendo Wii’s opera browser now supports Flash Lite 3.1.  Previously it supported Flash 7. This means they can play youtube and other internet sites supported by Flash 9 not requiring actionscript 3. Hulu requires higher version unfortunately. So two out of the top three game consoles (Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii and XBox) now have Flash player.

So I go to Walmart (of all stores) to buy a new game for Wii for my 10 year old nephew(Not that I am a serious gamer, but for some reason waiving my arms in front of TV to play Wii gives me great joy!). Of the 100s of games out there, we finally settle on couple. We come home and find that the games are total dud- not much can be changed in the background and there aren’t many options either. So he is upset that I got him a ‘bad’ deal(being a computer geek and everything he thinks I know everything about everything ;). Then it dawned on me that I should have spent some time researching on Gamestop or Testfreaks to find what people are saying about the game before purchasing. I can not return that game as the box is now open. So I am stuck with a game that he probably won’t play again and a bill of cool $39.99 (not to mention upset nephew)…. Lesson learned!

There’s a book available on Amazon written by Todd Perkins on developing Flash games on Nintendo Wii. Check it out here. Thanks to William for the tip.

The Nintendo Wii currently runs an Opera web browser and is capable of playing Flash 7 files within the browser as well. Developers have been writing applications for this and there are quite a few resource available. I came accross this site where quite a few resources are listed. Check it out.