fring

Thanks to all of our fringOlympics micro-blogger reporters for sharing your thoughts, insights and feelings in words and pictures straight from the competition arena and the Olympic village to the global fring community.  With your behind the scenes view of things and alternative look at each day’s news, you helped capture the spirit of the games and provide fringsters with a really cool, original way to feel part of the events in Beijing from their mobile.

And, just like Beijing, we wanted our own fringOlympics Closing Ceremony, so we’ve put together a selection of your pics, posts, and contributions, to capture the sites and memories of the last few weeks.  Hope you like it!

On behalf of the worldwide community of fringsters, thanks again for your hard work guys & well done.

BTW: for you developers out-there : we’ve been asked to publish the fringOlympic add-on source code, this should be uploaded here in the next few days.

Have fun and c u in London in 2012!

fringOlympics team

At fring we love all things mobile, we especially love gadgets that are designed to make mobile use even better. Every now and then we are lucky enough to unbox a great gadget that we thing rocks. I recently got to unbox just such a gadget over at the South African fring blog.

The gadget you may ask, A sexy Universal Travel Charger which was given to me by my parents who had returned from a trip to Thailand. Anyway I must say this was one of the most useful gadgets I have received in a long time and will go down in my hall of fame. There was something missing though from this gadget and I just couldn’t put my figure on what it was, that was until today.
While surfing the net this afternoon I came across something and it hit me, this is what has been missing and this is what will take the Universal Travel Charger to the next level. Gizmodo.com is reporting that the guys of Brando have added a cool new feature to the universal charger “This time though, the gizmo is designed to be portable and draw its power from a USB source”

Now although my Universal Travel Charger is already the best gadget ever, after seeing the new USB addition I can say this will be one of the hottest gadgets of 2008.
The good news for fringsters is that the USB Universal Travel Charger is easily and cheaply available online through a well known retailer which means that you don’t need to travel to China to get your own Universal Charger. All you need do is point your web browser here, order your USB Universal Charger and they will have it shipped directly to your door within a few days.

The future of mobile freedom gets brighter and brighter each day

It’s been a busy week here at the fring HQ. Last week we brought you 2 new fring ready devices and today we’re happy to add 5 more devices to the fring family. The devices are: Nokia N78, 6550, 6210, 6220 and 5320 - all of which are Symbian 9.3 devices.
To get this new version - simply go to the download page, enter your details and click ‘Join’.

As you can imagine, developing the fring client is not an easy task and I’d like to take a minute to thank all the fring team for working day and night to bring you this new fring client. So: Thank you!

To those of you who are waiting for the Sony Ericsson G900 version, we know you’ve been waiting for some time now, we haven’t forgotten about you. Stay tuned for more updates soon.

We reckon Nokia’s new E66 is very cool, and in response to popular demand, we’ve just released a version of fring for this great device (that’s another device added to around 1,000 already supported..and more on their way!)

Check it out and as always let us know what you think.

fring team

Google’s Gmail which servers as an email client for more than 100million people has suddenly stopped working.

According to Techcrunch, the service is down in “multiple countries”. I having checked with a few international friends I can confirm this report. A friend in USA reports it “working on/off for the past few hours, but the service is very flaky at the moment”. In South Africa I am experience the same thing, on/off for the past few hours.

fringsters subscribing to Gmail notifier via fring, might therefore not receive notifications until Google’s servers are up and running again smoothly. I bet the guys over at Google are working around the clock to get this problem sorted and hopefully they will soon have it up and running again. Good luck guys, we hope you crack it soon!

For more info see the official Gmail blog.

At the time this post went live there was still no official responce via the Gmail Blog.

UPDATE 1. Google’s comment on the outage:

Since about 2 p.m. Pacific Time today, many Gmail users have been unable to access their email. We are very sorry for this interruption in service. The issue is being caused by a temporary outage in the contacts system used by Gmail which is preventing Gmail from loading properly. We are starting to roll out a fix now and hope to have the problem resolved as quickly as possible. Even though you may not be able to get to your inbox right now, your mail is safe, including new incoming messages.

We will post an update in the Gmail Help Center (http://mail.google.com/support/ ) when more information is available.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the breaking news and updates.

UPDATE 2. Google  fixes the problem and issues an apology. Don’t worry Google we forgive you

So you had some time to see what your new and shiny E71 can do. To be honest with you, we think it’s a wonderful handset too. But, don’t you think it’s time to get it fringing and not just ringing?

Yup, we think so too, so we’re glad to announce that we’ve just released a brand spanking new version for the E71. To get it, simply go to our download page, choose your handset, get an sms, click on it and you’re ready to go.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Enjoy,
The fring team

The Olympics countdown is on, and our dedicated onsite fringsters are ready to bring you the highlights and low down from the Olympics field and village… Day and night, you can receive free, unique updates via fring from our very own fringentators (commentators, correspondents, play-by-players, unruly news distributors, etc) from the Olympics fringAdd-on.

You can choose to receive live, local language fringfeeds from:
• Alexander Rusakov – Gold medal contender these games! This Russian trampoline champion is going to be fringing away when not focusing on the gold medal he is tipped to win!
• Oleg Zaporozhchenko Jr. – The Russian Olympics team coach & international category judge!
• Fei Wen – Malaysian Olympic volunteer and coordinating the onsite fring effort – thanks!!!
• Tania Teoh – Malaysian Olympic volunteer and avid fan of lots of sports including swimming, volleyball, badminton and more!
• Udi Moshel – Israeli sports obsessive… I mean, enthusiast… will be keeping us all updated with sports and social updates across the board from the fields and other online circuits!
• Agus Jose – Our Spanish sports and travel devotee will micro-blog about both with the added insight only a professional psychologist can offer!

All you have to do is to choose the fringAdd-on from our in-client catalog by: restarting fring –> click Options –> settings– > manage add-ons select one or more. Russians will be micro-blogging in Russian (beginning Aug. 13), Malaysians & Israeli in English and Spanish in… Spanish (beginning Aug. 15)

You can get more info, review miniprofiles (with quite accurate caricatures) of our fringentators and keep tabs on their feeds from our Olympics page.

Let the fringing games begin!

My ever growing wish list of mobile techno gadgets got a much needed boost last week, after my parents returned from a trip to Thailand. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for taking the time to fring me from Thailand and for getting me some cool new gadgets.

Todays gadget on review is my all new mobile telephone charge or ‘Emergency Mobile Phone Charger‘. The device which is no bigger than a tube of lipstick acts as an emergency power source for a wide array of mobile devices and after testing I can say this device could come in very handy one day. The unit is powered by a single AA batter.

Now although it cannot give you hours of extra talk time, it guarantees to give you enough extra battery life to make a few emergency calls.
I’d say, this relatively low cost device is a must have for all fringsters and will make a great gift.

In response to all you Samsung fans out there, we’ve just added the first Symbian Samsung device to be supported by fring.

Owners of the cool Samsung SGH-i550W will now be able to join the fring family and enjoy their own fringing freedom, along with millions of fringsters worldwide.

Supercharge your Samsung, and start talking, chatting, and interacting with all of your online buddies this summer with fring.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

The fring team.

Last week while on Safari in The Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, I came to realize the fact that possibly one of the best ways of going green is to use solar energy.

Every day while sitting at the waterholes watching animals, I sat and thought about how these lovely creatures were being negatively effected by my carbon footprint. How could I possibly reduce my carbon footprint to give these guys a better future.

My cellphone, my camera, my laptop and multiple other gadgets were all drawing power and this was damaging the environment, and thats not to talk about the fuel I burned up in the park. What could I use to save even just a little power?

I figured that it be best to start with the little things that would be easy to change so on arrival back home, I Googled ’solar power charger’ and came across this nifty looking device. Now although I have not personally used this device it sure looks like a good way to start making some of my gadgets green.

Power from either the sun or USB, charge is stored in an inbuilt 2600 mah Lithium ion battery, which usually takes about 8-10 hours of sunlight to charge.

This solar charger is next on my gadget wish list and I thought it good to share the link in case other green fringsters wanted to give it a bash. For more info or to purchase this charger follow this link.