Planet Mobile Web - W3C

Uplink Downlink Ratios [Martin]

2008-07-23T15:33:10+00:00

I've observed my network usage over the past couple of days to see how much data I would transmit and receive over the course of a week while traveling. I've noted that there is a big difference between PC and mobile device use in terms of uplink/downlink ratio. With the PC, which I mostly use to access my eMail and for web based services, the ratio is about 10:1. The ratio on my N95, however, is close to 1:1 as I upload pictures, blog posts and eMails. Especially picture uploading with Shozu has a major impact on the ratio.

Other statistics say that 90% of the data traffic in mobile networks is from PC's and I think that also reflects my behavior. As a consequence, the uplink traffic generated by mobile devices is still an order of a magnitude smaller compared to overall downlink data traffic.

With faster uplink speeds becoming available the ratio could change once it becomes feasible to upload high quality video material from mobile devices in a reasonable time. That's about the only application I can imagine that could have a real impact on uplink use. Until then, however, the uplink will remain rather unused.

greatness and danger in police car computers [Little Springs Design]

2008-07-23T14:27:51+00:00

Last week Maj. Mark Sullivan, Deputy Chief of my local police department showed me the way their patrol cars are set up with communications and computer interactive systems. I gather the older versions, before they were based around ruggedized laptops, were called Mobile Data Terminals, so you'll see the "MDT" terminology still.

They are, in many ways, a dream of location services, context and data availability:

A computer allows the officer in the field to look up licenses, take reports and do other tasks without paper or slow voice communications back to the dispatcher.
The location is constantly broadcast over a data network, right to the dispatchers' screens. No more "anyone in the area" calls; the closest available vehicle can be sent to a call.
The dispatcher can send data to the cabin terminal; not everything is sent over voice, so there is less chance of garbled communications, less clutter on the voice channel, and some data will be much more speedily delivered.
When the car pulls into the police department parking lot, say at the end of the shift, it comes into range of a dedicated high-speed wireless network. The video filmed during the shift is automatically downloaded and indexed to location and other data known or recorded.

I run a plate on my MDT and I can have a photo of the registered owner of the car in about 5 seconds. I'm typing on one right this moment, these things are awesome.

–Cleveland area police officer

But could all this access to information, and communications be a hazard? While the risk of distracted driving while talking on mobiles is apparently very low, the danger from actually looking down at screens is much more immediate and obvious.

Entering license plate information – and reading the response – while still moving may improve safety by presenting the officer with critical information (it's wanted in connection with an armed robbery!), but it's also a risk since the officer cannot be paying as much attention to driving, what is happening in the vehicle being stopped, or the rest of their surroundings, like other traffic.

And what about writing reports in the car?

A thirty-year-old officer was sitting in his patrol car in the middle of a busy shopping center parking lot, under a bright light. He was catching up on a couple of reports, using the patrol car's computer. Unfortunately, he lost awareness of the peripheral area.

Another vehicle pulled along side the passenger side of his patrol car. The dirtbag driver leveled a shotgun at the unassuming officer and slaughtered him. The cop's report ended abruptly, mid-sentence. The cop never saw the danger coming.

This is from an article entitled Is your Patrol Car Computer Going to Kill You? by Jim Donahue. He's a police officer in Florida, who has started training programs for mobile computers.

He teaches a class on "technology and tactics." Much like firearms training teaches officers not just the skills of hitting a target but when to use appropriate force, these classes are about how to use your technology as a tactical item. How it influences your work and the implications of using computers, phones, radios and other technology for the job.

While I am leery of training to overcome design issues, this is training to avoid procedural errors. And fixing the procedures can certainly help. The trend, as in all industries, is to get more and more out of your workers, so it is typical for patrol officers to spend their downtime in the field writing reports. As Major Sullivan says, "To write a good, cohesive report you gotta be focused; you can't be looking up every thirty seconds to see what's around you, which you should do if you are out." So it's not even just an issue of safety, but of getting good output from all facets of the officer. To that end, some departments do specifically encourage only note-taking in the field; reports are written after the shift, in the office.

Jim Donahue teaches his students that when they do have to perform paperwork in their car, there are ways to alleviate the awareness issues: find a quiet spot, back the car against a wall or other obstruction, roll the windows down and turn down the radios. And park on gravel if at all possible. You cannot be surprised by anyone walking up, and ought to have time to react if anything interesting happens.

Of course, some of these issues, and solutions, did exist in paper-report days. But shouldn't interactive systems be able to assist better, and be able to improve the situation? They certainly should not hurt, but even maintaining a flawed status quo aggravates the designer in me.

Some of this does seem to be happening. The Mission, KS police will be moving to a new system when their next vehicles arrive, with a smaller touchscreen and keyboard, mounted just below eye level. They are on movable arms to provide access to the vehicle stereo and climate controls, as well as to make the typing position more comfortable, while staying well away from airbags and the driver's body in case of an accident. Officers in other departments with systems like this to tend to say it brings ergonomics, usefulness and visibility up past any pre-computer systems.

These sorts of improvements seem to be moving into the mainstream slowly. The software, and device interaction in general, is an entirely different field, also with wildly variable results. Most of the software started life as desktop data entry systems. Many are simply compressed to fit the smaller screens, and are therefore quite difficult to use. Important functions of the software, or the computer system itself (dimming, or night modes) are often difficult to access, or impossible to decipher without training, which may not be available or comprehensive enough.

All of these are failures of basic mobile principles. Despite being vehicle mounted systems (mostly), the core concepts are the same:

Glanceable
Contextually presents information
Contextually prepared for input
Personalized
Always on and always ready
Obvious and predictable interface

These systems do some of this wonderfully, but generally fail on at least one critical area.

Since I don't think most of our readers don't build life/health/safety devices, you might wonder how this applies to you? Well, this is an excellent case study of a possible future of mobility in many ways. First, the hardware gives capabilities not far from many consumer mobiles. Multiple radios, location services, video, text communications. To get to this level of contextual behavior only takes a dream and some software. Why shouldn't my phone be able to recognize when it is within range of my desktop computer, and automatically use the bluetooth connection to download video to the correct folder?

Risks of heads-down behavior are, as I mentioned already, obvious for consumers on mobiles, and promise to get worse with increasing use of data services (and to my surprise still no voice-xml accompanying the text and graphic output).

But even aside from safety, simply missing out on meetings or family christmases, angering your boss or grandma and generally not engaging with the world is whole new class of risk that is almost the opposite of how mobile devices should be helping users interact with their world

And if you do work on public safety, communications, telematics or military systems, please do try to make them the best interfaces you can.

Orange Internet Max – The Port 25 Trap [Martin]

2008-07-23T12:18:52+00:00

Here’s a blog entry about something that leaves me quite speechless: A couple of months ago, Orange France started to offer mobile Internet access via their prepaid Mobicarte SIMs. For 9 euros a month, Orange says they grant full access to the Internet (no, not the Web, the Internet!) from mobile phones with their Internet Max offer. The fine print says may limit the speed after 500 MB a month. Further they say that eMail via SMTP, IMAP and POP3 is limited to 10 MB per month. And finally they say that VoIP, Peer to Peer and Newsgroups are not allowed. Tethering to PCs is also not allowed and will be billed separately. No word about how much is charged separately or what happens after the 10 MB per month eMail limitation.

So I activated the option on my prepaid SIM and have used it for a couple of weeks now. As per the description, all the services I use on my mobile phone such as web browsing with OperaMini, the default web browser, eMail (POP3 and SMTP), A-GPS ephemeris lookup, etc. work well.

Then recently, I discovered that every now and then my prepaid account seems to leak a few cents. But why? After experimenting a bit I found out that every time I send an eMail via SMTP some cents vanish. To verify I repeatedly sent eMails over the course of several days, deactivated and activated TLS encryption, but each time the result was the same. Sending an eMail with a 200 kb file attachment resulted in a charge of 3.50 euros!!!? Did I pass that 10 MB boundary? Unlikely, since I only sent and received few eMails from activation time until I first noticed the behavior. And even if that is the reason, why did the system not send an SMS to warn me? It can bill me but it can’t send me a warning?

This sort of service behavior is one of the reasons that keep users from using the Internet on their phones. Imagine I had used a post paid SIM with the offer and would only have discovered this behavior a month later.

Hello dear readers at Orange France! If you read this and have any idea why this is happening I’d be very interested to hear from you. Or maybe this is an issue of the billing system? In that case I am sure there is someone who could fix it. Could I also get reimbursed please?

AskMoby - Custom Weather Forecasts [Wap Review]

2008-07-23T01:48:16+00:00

AskMoby (askmoby.com) is a new mobile weather service with a couple of clever features. When you request a forecast you also pick your planned activity from a list of Golf, Walking, Surfing, Sailing, Football and a few more. Supposedly the results are customized based on your proposed activity. I suspect that this feature isn't quite finished yet. The only difference I could see is that with sailing and surfing the results include wave and swell data. All activities get the temperature, wind and general conditions (Sunny, Rain, etc.) and links to a map showing nearby conditions, satellite images and a synoptic weather map.

The other feature that's unique to AskMoby is hour by hour forecasts for any hour, day or night, in the next 48 hours.

There's also a social aspect to AskMoby Users can create a blog and participate in the forums. There aren't many blogs yet and the mobile forums seem to be down at the moment, but give it time. This would be a good home for a meteorology blog, I'd think.

In addition to the mobile site, AskMoby has a slick Ajaxy PC version and an embeddable Widget for your Blog or MySpace page.

AskMoby currently covers European locations only. Via SMS Text News.

Mobile Link: askmoby.com

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Y Combinator - “30 Startup Ideas We Would Like To Fund” [Andrew Grill]

2008-07-22T10:09:45+00:00

I’m cross posting this from Jonathan Macdonald’s blog who in turn sourced this from Y Combinator.

I’m with Jonathan about number 12 (or soon will be working on this full time - fix advertising and specifically mobile advertising).

You can see the original post here and I have re-pasted the list below.

1. Two things are broken: record labels and movies.
2. Simplified browsing. The space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox.
3. New news. PerezHilton and TechCrunch, Reddit and Digg are just the beginning.
4. Outsourced IT.
5. Enterprise software 2.0 for smaller companies.
6. More variants of CRM: make interactions with customers much higher-res.
7. Something your company needs.
8. Dating.
9. Photo/video sharing services.
10. Auctions. EBay is doing a bad job.
11. Web Office apps.
12. Fix advertising.
13. How can you teach kids through the web?
14. Tell who the most productive people are in large organizations.
15. Off the shelf security. Stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.
16. A form of search that depends on design. Google has no sense of design.
17. New payment methods.
18. The WebOS.
19. Application and/or data hosting. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.
20. Shopping guides. How do you decide what you want?
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
24. A buffer against bad customer service: a wrapper around common bad customer service experiences.
25. A Craigslist competitor.
26. Better video chat.
27. Hardware/software hybrids: iPod/iTunes.
28. Fixing email overload.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets. What’s the best way to make a web site if you’re a lawyer?
30. Startups for startups. We’re one; TechCrunch is another.

The End of Software Patents? [Betavine]

2008-07-22T10:05:21+00:00

C. Enrique Ortiz reports on a Patent Law blog which may have major ramifications for the ability of software to be patented (in the US; as far as I know you cannot patent software in the EU). The basic thrust of the argument is that programs run on 'general purpose' computers; i.e. they are not specific, 'particular' machines that have been created solely to run the software in question. It then follows that software is unpatentable if they can be run on any general machine. Of course, for any such change to patent law to be made, there will be counter-arguments from the huge patent players (Microsoft, Qualcomm, etc) that (for example) cars are general purpose machines but it is still possible to patent features for them....an interesting topic, and worth keeping an eye on.

Tags

Carnival of the Mobilists #133 [Carnival of The Mobilists]

2008-07-22T09:44:53+00:00

Introducing this week’s Carnival of top mobile writing, host Andreas Constantinou at VisionMobile writes: “The iPhone 3G has kept most bloggers busy, but it’s refreshing to see the diversity of topics covered, from challenges in modelling mobile broadband subscriptions to axioms of user interface design. This is truly mobile biodiversity!”

Carnival of the Mobilists 133 at Vision Mobile [Martin]

2008-07-21T21:52:11+00:00

This week I am probably the fastest Carnival of the Mobilists reader, as I was traveling at 300+ km/h with the high speed train from Avignon to Paris while reading the posts on my Nokia N95 with OperaMini. The carnival this week is about as fast paced as was that train, so make sure to check it out at the Vision Mobile Blog. There's definitely no better place to find out what happend in the mobile space in the previous seven days. Enjoy!

usability testing of multiple-device software and sites [Little Springs Design]

2008-07-21T21:38:42+00:00

This is the second of a three-part series on mobile usability testing. Part one is for devices and software native to devices. Part two is for web sites and applications that might go on multiple devices. Part three will talk about adding testing with physical and social context.

In most of our work, we are designing applications or web sites that need to run on multiple devices. When we have control or even just the ability to predict what screen size, rendering engine, input mechanism, user interface paradigm, device interaction, and more is present, we consider that relatively easy. Complexity in the design process quickly arises from managing device diversity.

Developers deal with device diversity problems as well, with coding, porting, and testing. Best practice I’ve seen is to test in a simulator, check actual behavior on a small set of live devices, and then do thorough testing and debugging with a service like Device Anywhere. I’m hopeful that Mob4Hire will also do well.

None of this is relevant for usability testing.

If you are testing a prototype, perhaps focusing on information architecture, then you can do usability testing on simulators and get pretty good results. Most usability tests I’ve seen, however, are done on complete or near-complete products. You simply will not get reliable results from an emulator. User behavior changes, understanding of information changes, perception changes, delay times change, input mechanisms are mismatched, and rendering engines usually are slightly different.

Yes, we talk about this a lot. You can check out some slides, or of course my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience.

We have a few main recommendations for handling usability testing of cross-device applications:

Test on actual devices for final product testing. If you are just testing information architecture or some other iterative question, you can use the emulators.

Acquire ten or so different models, based on popularity in your market and rendering and UI differences

Recruit users using a device the same as or similar to your devices

Perform usability tests with these devices.

Match the device’s user interface to the participant’s personal device’s user interface.

Use the practices for all mobile usability testing, as explained in part one.

Avoid the tempting shortcuts.

Use actual devices, not emulators, for final product testing. You’ll find different results, results not relevant to your actual product. You won’t find that a target size is too small on a computer, you won’t find that the page is simply too heavy to be sufficiently responsive. Go ahead and use emulators for iterative testing, as long as you have similar input mechanisms and device+network responsiveness.

Use your devices, not the participants’. You have no idea what customizations, downloads, extra bugs, full memory, start state, or more might be on the device to affect your data. Besides, you don’t want to do anything to inadvertently cost them more money.

Use an array of devices, not just high end. Unless your entire target market uses the iPhone or N95 or Blackberry, you’ll not get good data. I’ve seen too many “best case” usability studies. If you want a marketing study, be honest about it.

Have participants show you their device. They may tell you they have an iPhone when they actually have an Instinct; they may say they have a Sprint device when they actually have a Sanyo device. It can be difficult to know what device you have.

Mobile Web Megatrends - still looking for some speakers .. [Open Gardens]

2008-07-21T20:14:43+00:00

We have made some great progress with Mobile Web Megatrends confeernce .. and the web site launches in a day .. however I am still interested in some speakers in the following areas. While some of these topics will be covered by other speakers, we are still keen to speak to someone who knows these in detail

Note we are looking ONLY for speakers in the following areas at this time
• The evolution of the browser(Opera, Nokia)
• Location based services 2.0 - (Cell id databases)
• APIs - network(GSMA, OpenAjax, Bondi)
• Widgets
• Android
• Nokia S40 6th edition – the impact on mass market phones
• Flashlite
• Browser plugins
• Cloud computing

Please contact me at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com

Full details of event as below.

The Mobile Web Megatrends is a unique one day event that addresses the
strategy and best practices relating to key current trends for the
Mobile Web.
The simple idea behind Mobile Web Megatrends is to create a small,
niche event focused on developments that are key to the Mobile Web
currently (2008/2009)
This means that the event will be much more focused and granular.. For
instance - we don't want to talk about 'Nokia' but rather about Nokia
S40 6th edition which has implications for the mass market. Similarly,
Opera Mobile 9.5 is significant due to features such as implementation
of Google Gears and widgets. Thus, the event will have a much more granular,
interactive focus than other events. Some of the topics we will cover
are (note that this is an indicative list only at this stage ..)

• The evolution of the browser(Opera, Nokia)
• Location based services 2.0 - (Cell id databases)
• APIs - network(GSMA, OpenAjax, Bondi)
• Widgets
• Advertising models including analytics
• Mobile social networks
• iPhone (including iStore)
• Android
• Nokia S40 6th edition – the impact on mass market phones
• Flashlite
• Mobile Web demographics – the numbers, uptake figures, impact of
flat rate etc
• Browser plugins
• Enterprise and Mobile Web
• Cloud computing
• Emerging markets
• QR codes and
• Offline browsing

The discussion will focus on the strategy, implementation, competitive
advantages and the pitfalls of these trends.

This is a unique opportunity to get an unbiased viewpoint with the
opportunity to discuss these developments. You can clarify your
thinking from the experience of others and keep the conversation going
through an ongoing attendees only discussion forum
Watch this space for more updates .. The date will be Sep 8, the
venue will be Pacific Film Archive Theater - University of California - Berkley
and the tickets will be at only
$195

Mobile Web Megatrends is brought to you by Ajit Jaokar of futuretext
and Larry Lockhart of NextVision Media

Carnival of the mobilists 133 is at visionmobile.com [Andrew Grill]

2008-07-21T19:01:38+00:00

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Visiion Mobile.

As usual, a great range of news and views on all thins mobile so I encourage you to head over to Vision Mobile and have a read.

This week there are quite a few thought pieces and observations worth reading. The iPhone 3G has kept most bloggers busy, but it’s refreshing to see the diversity of topics covered, from challenges in modelling mobile broadband subscriptions to axioms of user interface design. This is truly mobile biodiversity!

Andreas has also included my post on the impedence efect of the mobile industy - thankfully agreeing with me…

“Continuing with another thought piece Andrew Grill writes at his London Calling blog: we’re all an impedance to the brands and advertisers getting their message to the consumer. I couldn’t agree more; the mobile industry overemphasizes technology and mobile operators (the main route to market) are especially proficient at stifling innovation and blocking long-tail opportunities.”

Head over to Visiion Mobile to read this week’s carnival.

At MobileBeat on Thursday [Mike Rowehl]

2008-07-21T16:01:17+00:00

Gregory and Matt invited me to participate in a developer focused pre-event session on Thursday right before MobileBeat 2008 kicks off. The session is going to focus on the evolution of mobile operating systems and services platforms.

It should be interesting, cause in general I think the services platforms are a load of junk, and mobile operating systems are generally moving in the right direction. The services platforms are fundamentally mismanaged and misaligned efforts to try to replicate the success of user generated content from the web and apply it to application development for mobile platforms. Generally they seem to be shiny trinkets to dangle in front of business folks to make them salivate over addressable audiences, but I know of very few successes running on top of any of these platforms.

Compared to say something like GetJar, on which I’ve heard good feedback from both existing businesses and entrepreneurs looking to bootstrap distribution. The iTunes App Store could be the counter example, but I think it’s too early to know for sure. Too bad the iPhone as an overall platform isn’t one that I would pick out as a real boon for developers, generally closed off as it is. Still, everyone seems to fail their saving throw vs. shiny when an iPhone shows up, so they could have at least a sustainable success going there.

Should be a great discussion. If you want to attend make sure to contact Jacob as described in the post. Even if you have a ticket for MobileBeat, this is a different deal. The folks at MobileBeat need to know how many folks are going to drag themselves out of bed for a 9:30am session. This is a developer focused session after all, that’s like 6:30 in the morning in real-people time. Hope to see you there!

Taptu - getting mobile search right [Andrew Grill]

2008-07-21T14:11:14+00:00

Taptu is a search engine for your mobile phone. Starting with music and fact-finding, they offer a load of content to help you find what you need quickly on your mobile.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Ives, CEO of Taptu and Christophe Hocquet from Moblr, who are using Taptu to power their social media site. Taptu have now “officially” launched, even though they have been live for some months now.

Taptu is unique in that they are targeting almost exclusively the mobile user. Steve’s vision for Taptu is to have the best possible mobile search experience - tying in the social media aspects of all that content flying around today on social networking sites and making it simple to find and share.

Some of the things I particularly like about Taptu and their approach are:

Free and fast - browser based and it also indexes and crawls videos, images, songs as well as mobile and desktop web pages
It makes content sharing easy using social media networks and SMS with friends and contacts
They will make money from sponsored links and ads - so the business model is well known and works
The experience on the mobile is optimised for the handset - so it is a better experience while searching because you see made for mobile search results

Steve also showed me one of their architecture diagrams they would normally show someone under NDA. What I took away from the discussion is they have really thought about not just the user’s mobile experience, but also how to hunt down and source content relevant to their community - a key thing for mobile social search.

He mentioned also that the Google guys had said some nice things about Taptu (which is unusual in the fiercely competitive space) - to which I explained that this was the Google MO for poaching staff and ahead of an acquisition - so he should be happy and worried in the same breath - not sure how he took this!

London Calling view:

Taptu have a head start and a clear advantage because they are focused on mobile search
They have got the user experience right and care about constantly improving it
They aren’t just scraping any old content from the web - they actually have Humans helping to source and sift content!
Each Taptu user search makes the whole experience better and more relevant for the next searcher
Allowing users to share the search results will also have a viral effect

So, why not head over to www.taptu.comon your mobile phone - and if you are not sure what to search for - why not try their I’m bored link (great when mobile “snacking”) and you can see today’s top activity in the Taptu community. Alternatively, try and find something obscure - perhaps something about your favourite hobby. I’ll bet there is something about it on Taptu.

I also know Taptu’s Vero Pepperrell (she’s in my social network) and she is helping to ensure Taptu remains connected to their community.

Well done Taptu and I look forward to following your success. Can I buy shares before Google buys you?

Nokia needs to do a lot more if needs to get developer mindshare like Apple .. [Open Gardens]

2008-07-21T09:43:35+00:00

While I have always been a big fan of Nokia .. I think this excellent post by Steve Litchfield - Download! - absolutely no excuse is spot on ..

Nokia have all the elements but still the dots are not complete .. and Apple shows us how to do it right ..

Like Apple, Nokia need to create a whole ecosystem and a go to market strategy that benefits third party developers. Nokia is taking steps in the right direction - but there are many gaps still

However, looking at it from a bright side ., finally .. everyone has realised that there is money in Mobile data apps .. so we should see a lot more initiatives from everyone ..

Also see Pipes, software and platforms: To be (a platform) or not to be – that is the question ..

Mashable Goes Mobile - With a MashUp [Wap Review]

2008-07-21T03:01:51+00:00

Peter Cashmore's Mashable is a high-traffic news blog covering social networking, web 2.0 and mobile.

I suspect the site's name comes from "Mashup" - combing two (or more) web services to create a new site or service, think of TwitterVision which combines Ttwitter feeds with the Google Maps API to show Twitter updates as text bubbles on a world map. Mashable does cover mashups, especially ones involving popular social networks. But Mashable is a lot more than mashups, with 20 or more news items a day, a MarketPlace section for job postings and Web 2.0 related services for sale or wanted and an Invites page of invites codes for startups in closed beta. There's also a daily podcast, usually with the founder or CEO of a hot startup. A popular feature of Mashable is Mashcodes a repository of free MySpace themes, games and plugins. And Mashable itself is a social network, with personal profiles, photo pages, friends, status updates and messaging.

On July 10th, Mashable launched a mobile edition at m.mashable.com. Unsurprisingly it's a mashup, using MoFuse to generate a mobile version of from RSS feeds of the Mashable's News, MarketPlace and Invites sections. MoFuse is used by a number of sites including ReadBurner and MobileActive (review). It's also one of the services I reviewed in 4 Easy Ways to Make your Blog Mobile Friendly. Since I wrote that piece, MoFuse has added a nicely formatted iPhone version. Another recent enhancement is image resizing, images are reformatted to a maximum size equal to the phone's screen width. That should make MoFuse pages compatible with more phones, but I'd like to see MoFuse implement page splitting too. As it is, the page delivered to mobile can still be quite large, one of the news items on Mashable that I visited contained 17 KB of text plus 41 KB of images. That's no problem for any Smartphone and many feature phones, but too big to display completely on something like a RAZR V3. The W3C and dotMobi suggest a maximum of 20 KB text (10 KB markup plus another 10 KB of images) for pages intended to work on any phone.

Mobile Mashable is a subset of the full site but a fairly complete one, offering the full content of the news, marketplace and invites sections. If you want to get to the full site and your browser can handle it, Mashable doesn't force mobile browsers to the mobile version, although if you use a PC browser to visit m.mashable.com, MoFuse will display the content in a mobile widget.

Mobile Link: m.mashable.com

Ratings: Content: Usability:

iPhone Reconciliation [Russell Beattie]

2008-07-20T19:16:55+00:00

It's amusing to see a bunch of people in the tech community having trouble reconciling their love for the iPhone vs. how closed and proprietary it is. It's a real conundrum... The iPhone 3G is the best mobile phone there is, bar none, in both functionality and usability. It's also relatively inexpensive, widely marketed, and easy to get down at your local mall so tons of your friends and family have one as well. And there's nothing else like it on the market now, or in the forseeable future.

However, from a technology perspective, it's about as closed as they come. And this has caused some real consternation in the tech community. They're trying to work through the issue it seems, but haven't really quite gotten it straight in their minds yet.

First there's Gina Trapani writing about how you should avoid the iPhone, despite the fact that she doesn't actually follow this advice. She lays out the very real problems that the iPhone has from a Free Software and DRM perspective, but in the end simply covers up the Apple logo in a "minor rebellion" and keeps using it.

Then there's Tim Bray, writing about his Mobility Blues, because Java development on most phones sucks, Android is nonexistent, and developing for the iPhone despite how nice it is, is akin to being a sharecropper. He doesn't actually address development for Blackberry, Symbian or Windows mobile devices because really, the entire post is summed up as, "God, the iPhone rocks, I wish it were open, or at least had a decent JDK from Sun." :-)

Then there's Tim O'Reilly - who's been a huge iPhone booster despite the fact that his company was essentially built supporting open source - wondering about "devices and services that people love so much that they even love to hate them." I don't think anyone loves to hate the iPhone (except competitors obviously), it's that *they hate that they love it*. There's a difference.

One of the amusing things in O'Reilly's post was at the end where he wrote that Jeff Weiner asked him to "write something that explains why the iPhone is such a paradigm-shifting device," which he agreed he should do. It's sort of another attempt to reconcile the love/hate relationship with the device: "I have to love it! It's 10x better than anything else before it!" But is that true? I don't think so.

I really don't see any paradigm shift beyond the normal Apple integration and marketing magic. Anyone who's used smartphones for the past few years knows that the iPhone doesn't do anything that another comparable device like a Nokia N95 does - it just integrated them better. There are some innovations like the multi-touch screen, but in general the iPhone succeeds because the whole ends up being more than the sum of it's parts. It's not like it's 10x better than anything else, however. It all depends on your perspective and what you use your phone for. Ask a heavy Blackberry user if they prefer an iPhone's email client, for example, or a Nokia user chatting for free using integrated VoIP if they'd like to give it up, or ask a heavy Danger HipTop users if they want to give up their 24/7 IM connections and I doubt you'd get many takers. That said, ask any Motorola RAZR user what they prefer and there's no contest, so it really just depends on where you're coming from.

I've loved the iPhone since the moment I started using it (check the archives, baby), and have only gained more respect for it as time goes on. But as a developer and business person I've always been wary of it, and maybe a little annoyed that so much attention was lavished on it to the detriment of other more open platforms. I take the long view, however. The iPhone will never gain a monopoly like Windows - there's just too much competition in the market. Competitors from all sides - from the Intel backed MID devices to the Nokia backed mobile devices to the Linux backed open devices - will eventually catch up in terms of features and functionality. So therefore it's just a matter of time before there are more open alternatives that don't require any sort of sacrifice to use. Just like I use a Sony Vaio laptop with Ubuntu on it instead of a MacBook, with little to no loss of features and a much expanded universe of possibilities, eventually we'll see the same in the mobile market. Until then, I happily have an iPhone in my pocket and not worry about it.

That doesn't mean I'm content - every time I pull it out of my pocket I almost let out an audible sigh. My biggest regret so far as a professional in the mobile space is that I had nothing to do with that device, actually. I wish I had something to do with it because it's so nice, and has brought smartphones to the masses in a way that no one else could. It would have been nice to have been part of that effort.

I could actually see what Jobs was going to do years ago. Here's what I wrote back in 2004:

Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows *he could do it better.* He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world. And he wants that phone.

And he got it. But that's the thing: It's Steve Job's phone, and you shouldn't forget it. You can use it, you can love it, you can praise it, buy apps for it and let your kids play with it. You can do everything you want, but just remember, it's not yours and never will be.

If you're in technology, this is the thing to understand and once you accept this, it's pretty easy to enjoy how nice the iPhone is. Like leasing a BMW or something. It's not yours, but it doesn't make driving it any less enjoyable.

:-)

-Russ

Canada's AWS Spectrum Auction - Will It Encourage Competition? [Martin]

2008-07-20T18:55:00+00:00

I recently became aware of the current spectrum auctions in Canada to bring another wireless operator into the domain for what is hoped to create additional competition. I did some quick background research on the auction below there is one important piece of information missing in the article: Which frequency blocks are auctioned and which technology will be used? Looks like the bands auctioned are similar to those of the U.S. AWS auction, i.e. paired spectrum 1700 MHz / 2100 MHz.

O.k., so no WiMAX here since I don’t think there is a profile for such a paring yet. I guess the likeliest technology to use in this band is UMTS and LTE. This band is standardized as band IV in 3GPP. In my opinion it’s going to be difficult to create a lot of competition for incumbent operators with this frequency band mainly because there only seem to be two more operators using this band globally:

• T-Mobile U.S. for their 3G network
• A carrier in Japan

Compare that to the hundreds of UMTS networks globally using 2100 MHz band I. I am a bit afraid there won’t be a lot of devices supporting this band, as the market for mobile device vendors such as Nokia is very small.

After many years, Nokia is finally releasing 3G Nseries and Eseries phones for band II and V (AT&T in the U.S., Telus in Canada and Telstra in Australia). I wonder what the chances are that they produce a third version for the AWS band IV of future phones!? Or, what would even better, devices that support all these bands!? Well, at least carriers don’t have to lock devices since they can only be used in their network anyway…

A controversial topic. What do you think?

Orange I am campaign [Kai Hendry]

2008-07-20T15:24:01+00:00

Orange’s latest billboard marketing campaign in London is quite remarkable, as it asks you to search for “I am” to find out more.

So that means that at least through out the campaign they must have paid every major search engine every time a respondent wants to find out more about their product offering.

To me, this is surprisingly stupid. Is it that difficult for those coke snorting marketeers to find a reasonable (sub)domain and add some non-vacuous content? Crikey.

I guess Hutchison 3G have the same problem when people search for 3. I guess if you don’t understand the Web you’ll get punished by Google.

always read the small print [Andrew Grill]

2008-07-20T12:26:03+00:00

I picked up the latest Carphone Warehouse brochure yesterday - always a good read for market research.

I came across this full page O2 ad below. I’m a loyal Vodafone customer so no need to switch - but I love reading mobile company small print for a laugh.

Reading the small print, it says “When you connect to a new 18 or 24 month contract before xx.xx.xx“

Looks like someone forgot to proof read the ad!

On the other hand, I saw an Orange mobile ad in the London underground back in March where at the end of the legal small print it read “thanks for reading, it makes our legal people feel wanted“.

See more great outdoor ads on my Flickr advertising page.

BlackBerry Browser Can Accesses GPS Location [PavingWays]

2008-07-20T12:24:22+00:00

We’ve been monitoring the mobile browser market pretty closely during the last couple of years, especially in regard to Mobile Ajax and how it could help to create new and powerful web applications for mobile phones.

Mobile Ajax is a lot of things and it always depends on the individual’s definition what is really meant, but one thing that is a pretty common aspect of Mobile Ajax is the ability that it might at some point be used as a gateway or API to connect the web browser on the phone with the device hardware, such as the GPS system thereby giving access to the device’s position within a mobile web application.

These things are in development at every mobile browser vendor today, that much is for sure, but what’s more interesting, because it’s hardly known, is that this functionality already exists on some BlackBerry Devices, namely those of the 8800 series! Now maybe we’ve been too busy developing our stuff lately to notice, maybe this time nobody really made a big buzz out of this, but personally I feel bad that I missed this until now, because I feel this might have a tremendous impact on mobile web application development:

As TonyB writes in an article called “Blackberry Browser & GPS” on his blog, certain BlackBerries provide a JavaScript object within the web browser that allows the web application to access latitude and longitude from the GPS module on the phone. Security is taken care of by asking the user to allow (or not) the application access to the physical location of the device in a Yes/No alert() window. Simple and, if it works, tremendously powerful!

Too bad BlackBerry devices are known for not having the world’s best web browser on them (to put it politely) - developer documentation seems not to be of much help either. But as results from our ever-running Frost library test show, there might be a BlackBerry device, the BlackBerry 8200 Cingular US (VendorID = 102), that already features support for Ajax. This could be a faked user agent string though, so if you have a 8820 and want to test it, just go to http://pwmwa.com/frost - or we can test it ourselves as soon as you send us over a BlackBerry 8200 ;) As we develop Groupile, we will make sure to include this as soon as possible too.

Please read all details and the code listing in TonyB’s article - thanks for blogging about this!