Positive Vibes

I was just idly sitting contemplating writing a post on kittens or puppies, because there has been an overwhelmingly negative vibe to the blog as a whole and the mobile space rarely gives you an opportunity to shake that off unless you are the eternal optimist hoping mistakes won't be repeated when the newest latest and greatest ideas are implemented.

Kittens are great, but i think instead it would be more positive to round up some of the recent events in mobile which are good:

• 3's x-series. Finally they've realised that they're getting nowhere with their walled garden approach, and they've done the right thing. They're in the ideal position to do it because they have little to lose. Lets just hope they remember to configure the phones with the right wap settings else it'll all be for nothing...
  (yes I was going to post when this news was fresh, but everyone else under the sun did so it seemed a little redundant... as so often, MobHappy summed it up best)
• Sony-Ericsson still make great phone UIs, and the K800 is very nice.
• HSDPA rollout has started in Japan.
• I recently discovered that the original Symbian Monty JVM (observed on Nokia 6600) is able to hold the value -255 in a byte, which any Java programmers among you will have to admit is an impressive achievement, though ultimately not very useful.
  (If you're interested, a static byte that usually holds a negative number has a thread write 1 to it, that thread can read it back as 1 but other threads read it as -255 for some indefinite period afterwards. Consider the 32 bit nature of the Java heap, the int binary representation of 1 vs -255, thread variable caching and the known sync/thread instability of early Monty JVMS to get an idea of what's going on).
  

Hmm, now I am a little stuck and already veering towards the negative... ah well, good to at least try to get that positive vibe out every so often. One day maybe we'll be included on Carnival of the Mobilistas ;)