I-Tel, an unknown player in the mobile handset space, has launched India’s first multimedia customised mobile phone for Muslims. Known as i-Tel i786, it comes integrated with special software for Muslims like Azan Alarms, Prayer Timings, Wallpapers, Ring Tones, Higri and Greogeon Calender, and Zakat calculator.

Talking to The Mobile Indian, a spokesperson of the company said, “We have started the customised mobile phone for Muslims having customised Muslim calendar, prayer timing schedule and Qibla directions and Muslim wallpapers.’

He added: “We have taken permission from the biggest mosque and leading Islamic scholars to sell this customised Muslim handsets to Muslims all over the world after intensive research.”

The spokesperson further said that the company will give 2.5 per cent Zakat (a kind of donation given by Muslims for social welfare) on every sale of the handset to needy and poor Muslim children, and NGOs for educational purposes. Besides, i-Tel has also taken special permission to put the model i786 as this number is highly auspicious for Muslims as it means “we start in the name of Allah”

The i786 is a dual SIM phone which has integrated MP3, MP4 player and supports Bluetooth. It has a camera of 1.3 Megapixel Resolution as well. It supports English, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Bengali, Burmese, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai language.

This phone comes with one year warranty with three months replacement comes at a price tag of Rs 2,999.

Microsoft has asked users to be patient and wait for the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update for couple of weeks more.

Joe Belfoire, vice president for Windows Phone, Microsoft shared the news via his official Twitter account that the WP 7.5 Mango update rumours are false. Though Mango update based devices have been announced by Toshiba, HTC and Samsung, the official Mango update has not been made available as yet.

As reported earlier this week, Microsoft was expected to release the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update for the existing Windows Phone devices. However, there was no sight of the update. Instead, Belfiore sent out a Twitter update clarifying that the September 15 as Window Phone 7.5 Mango release date was merely a rumour.

“9/15 isn’t mango day, that was another rumor, folks. We’ve been saying “fall”… it’s not fall yet,” Belfiore wrote, indicating that there’s one more week to go for Microsoft’s official announcement of the Mango update as the Fall will being in USA from September 23 onwards.

Apparently, there is a Windows Phone 7.5 Mango final build leaked and circulated around through forums on the web. Handset makers like HTC have already announced the new Titan and Radar handsets while Samsung has announced new Focus S and Focus Flash handsets.

In coming weeks, we can expect other Windows Phone handset partners that include Dell, Acer, ASUS, LG and ZTE to announce new devices. Nokia’s Windows Phone 7.5 loaded device can be expected by the end of this year.

We all know the kind of reach Facebook has, and the way they have worked successfully with the App developers. While we don’t know whether they want to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft for the mobile operating system market or not, but analysts are suggesting such a move.

According to a Forbes report, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek writes Facebook is the best candidate to buy webOS software division of Hewlett Packard.

If this happens it will be good news for die hard Facebook fans because if Facebook is built into the operating system, it will make contact list better and other stand features more social. Right now, people access it via its mobile website, its apps or through a dedicated Facebook button on a phone.

Apart from that if this deal happens people can expect element of social networking being featured in payments, app store and campaigns instead of being just limited to games like Farm Villa.

Facebook in-spite of more than 750 million users on its social network and its good financial position has always stopped short of having its own operating system so far, even though it has partnered with mobile handset companies such as INQ Mobile and HTC in building Facebook phones. If the analyst’s views really become a reality, Microsoft and Research In Motion will have to face a really strong competitor.

Motorola is working on a new handset, named Edison, which may have Android 2.3 Gingerbread, according to a report of Android Central. The website found traces of the upcoming handsets dubbed as Edison in the Webtop code.

The Motorola handset codenamed Edison is presumed to be the much buzzed Droid HD MB865 update but there are no confirmed reports to join the strings together.

Motorola offers the Webtop application that allows users to connect the Webtop-enabled Motorola Android smartphones with a dock and use it on a larger screen using this application.
According to the report, the code in Webtop application has the codenames of the Webtop enabled Android smartphones – Olympus, Common, Sunfire, Targa and Edison.

Out of those names – Targa is the Droid Bionic, Olympus is the Atrix 4G, Sunfire is the Photon 4G and Common is assumed to be meant for common set of devices. Amongst those, Edison is the codename of an upcoming Android handset.

The codename Edison could be of the Droid HD MB865 handset which is expected to have 4.5-inch display with qHD (960×540) resolution, 8 Megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p HD and micro HDMI port. This handset will be as slim as 8.5mm, almost as much as the Samsung Galaxy S II handset. This device may come with Android 2.3 Gingerbread if it is revealed by the end of this year or might jump to Android Ice Cream Sandwich update directly.

We have taken the information about Edison in webtop App code as a grain of salt and just trying to pull the different strings together. Hopefully more details will be shared at the CTIA E&A Event on October 11 in San Diego, USA.

The new ARM tablets which run the Windows 8 operating system will not run the current Microsoft desktop apps for personal computers, according to Stephen Sinofsky, the president of Windows Unit of Microsoft.

“We’ve been very clear since the very first Consumer electronic Show (CES) demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” Information Week quoted Stephen Sinofsky as saying.

Earlier at the Build Conference, Microsoft had showed two devices, one with Windows 8 running on x86 processors and another prototype ARM tablet which was running pre-beta software.

“The challenge is very interesting. If we allow the world of x86 application support like that, or based on what we call desktop apps(like MS word and excel) in our start yesterday, then there are real challenges in some of the value proposition for [ARM] System on a Chip,” Sinofsky said. “Will battery life be as good, for example? Those applications aren’t written to be really great in the face of limited battery constraints, which is a value proposition of the Metro-style apps.”

In another related news, it was reported that the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 will not have the Flash Browser plug in. So the Windows 8 platform joins the other platforms which are favouring HTML5 over Flash.