Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Nokia And Motorola Ready To Rumble In Emerging Markets points out that they need to put more efforts into these markets to expand the sales volume (yet not necessarily market share). Both China and India are mentioned as key such markets, as well as East Africa, Eastern Europe and Middle East, yet I believe India and Africa will be most extreme when it comes to pricing. These countries will though also be interested in more costly phones as the salaries are increasing steadily in the cities, and most don't have PCs, so the mobile phone is a logical device for both telephony and information access. I would therefor guess that there will be a lot of service innovation in these countries, especially China and India.

Quote: Merrill Lynch says developing countries -- including in Southeast Asia, Africa, eastern Europe and the Middle East -- will consume 63% of global phone sales in 2007, up from 42% in 2003.
That's very interesting, as it indicates manufacturers will be more controlled by these markets' requirements than of the "Western world's".

Already almost all phones are made in Asia, even though there might be somebody else's brand slapped on the device. What's odd is that runner-ups Samsung and LG has trouble taking market share from Nokia and Motorola. Samsung for sure needs to make more low-cost devices. They recently left the Indian market as they couldn't generate profit. Why Nokia and not Samsung? Due to Samsung's way of developing phones where several labs compete with each other, using any technology components they find on the market. This sounds way more expensive than Nokia's and Motorolas' more streamlined approach with a few platforms and application suites, and surely also just a few providers of hardware,.

Mobility Weblog talks about Mobile data consumption is about access to relevant information, which I fully agree with. The random ("see what's out there") usage pattern is less prevalent on phones than on PCs.

There's also an interesting paragraph about the upcoming MIDP3, the next version of the dominating mobile application platform, that will among many other things enable MIDlets to present information to the idle screen of the phone. A typical use for that would be mashups and inevitably also ads.

Mobile Distillery's Celsius is a tool for simplifying porting Java ME applications between phones. Celsius contains a database of the differences between a lot of different phone models, so that developers can write one base application and then build different versions, as many as are now needed, to cover the lion share of the mobile phone market.

Visiware might be M.D.'s biggest win so far, as I haven't heard much of deals before.

The ever more popular free Java-based browser for mobile phones Opera Mini is now available in version 3.0.

I noticed several small enhancements, but the biggest is probably the photo-blogging support. This of course only works if your phone supports camera access from Java. I noticed that blogging is made to an Opera server and not to existing blogging services (like Google Blogger), which is a bummer.

Opera's server is extremely slow right now, likely because of massive downloads.

When I tried to blog a photo the server timed out, maybe for the same reason.

Work away from work gets easier with technology points out that wireless hot spots is a key enabler for employees on the move, but if the telecom industry was in any way "normal" there would be no need for wireless hot spots. The telecom networks would have handled this both performance- and cost-wise. As we all know that's not so today, but forward-looking operators will understand that's the way to go.

The note goes on describing a few useful tools for the roaming worker, including from DataViz and WebEx.

Smartphones move out of their niche informs that smartphones now are used by "everyday people".

The definition of a smartphone used here: smartphones have a PC-like operating system and download and run computer programs.
Therefor it's not necessarily a business-optimized phone, but rather a phone that runs Symbian OS, Palm OS, Windows Mobile or Linux. Java ME of course also supports downloading of applications, but it's not right to say that the phone as a whole then runs Java. Many smartphones also support Java ME for application compatibility.

Nokia is the clear leader in smartphones today, with its Series 60 platform (based on Symbian OS), used both in business and multimedia phones. In comparison RIM and Palm are very small.

Korea hopes to sell lots of CDMA mobile phones to India. India is mostly using GSM and Korea makes a lot of phones for GSM for export, so I see no reason Korea wouldn't be able to sell also GSM phones to India.

We are talking ultra low cost phones here, starting at $30 end user price. With the US Dollar nose-diving lately these companies must feel lots of pressure to reach that price level. The note even mentions $20 in the long term.

An indication of the size and growth of the Indian market (Yahoo! News Nov 10): ISuppli believes India will drive growth for ultra-low-cost handsets next year. The nation will be home to 405 million mobile phone subscribers by 2010, up from 140 million by the end of this year, the market researcher says.

To my understanding Nokia and Motorola have been most successful in India so far.

I'm co-founder and CEO for a newly started company called Mobile Labs that focuses on text layout solutions for mobile phones and that has a solution for India-enabling mobile phones with rendering of Hindi, Bengali and other Indic scripts. As all know that've tried, Indic scripts are quite complex and the Latin "left-to-right" rendering scheme doesn't apply here. The company is so new we don't even have a website yet. I don't mean to market this solution here, but if you have an interest in Indic scripts just let me know.

Here are figures showing how many are actually using each Indic script. Even the "tiniest" one has 20M users (which is especially remarkable for a Swede, as we only have 9M people in total).

* Devanagari (used for Hindi 300 million, Marathi 100 million and Nepali 17 million) – totally some 400 million and yet another 100 million people understand Hindi/Devanagari

* Bengali (used for Bengali (Bangladesh 122 million and Calcutta 66 million) and Assamese (17 million in Assam, eastern India)) – totally plus 200 million

* Telugu (south of India) – 69 million

* Tamil (south of India and Singapore) – 66 million

* Gujarati (used to write the language Gujarati in western India) – 46 million

* Kannada (spoken and written in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra) – 44 million

* Malayalam (used in Kerala in southern India) – 35 million

* Oriya (used for the language Orissa in eastern India) – 22 million

* Gurmukhi (used for the language Punjabi in northern India) – 20 million

3 now hosts a blog about the X-Series flatrate and service-filled subscription. I think it's right of 3 to have a blog. Typically operators are very closed, but 3 seems to have understood that this probably is a very good way to market X-Series to the masses.

(via picturephoning)

I've written a basic tutorial on how to set up a mobile application project with NetBeans. It's intended for beginners and new users of NetBeans, and is in no way detailed. At least it shows the initial steps to create a basic project, so you get to a point where you can start coding.

If you want more I can give you more, but not today.

Another "operators hinder market development" kind of piece. This time from ZDNet called Google: mobile operators want to block our apps.

My spin on this is (as before) that operators want to hinder others from offering information services that operators anyway don't and won't offer themselves.

Most service innovation is done outside of operators and those services are what users want to get access to, but again, what are operators afraid of? That they will get too much revenue from mobile data (we are talking Google Maps here: lots of nice data traffic), and that their billing systems and/or the network will crash?

Or is it a branding war? Operators being afraid their value will be diluted by much stronger service brands (which is a fact)? In the long term no one will care who provides the bit pipe, so obviously this is something for operators to fear.

Both US and European operators should take a hard look at DoCoMo's i-mode. It's been around for over 7 years, yet we don't seem to have learned from them. Maybe 3 has, but few others.

There was a discussion a week ago about operators feeling that 3G was not optimized for IM, and could even fold if too many chatted. That's reverse and nonconstructive thinking. What operators should think is "It's our task and responsibility to provide the best data access possible, so we need to optimize our networks, whatever technology acronyms we are currently using, so that any IP-based traffic works the best way possible. We shall also offer attractive and easy to deploy billing services to third-party. That way we'll get lots more revenue from mobile data.". Maybe I should make this into a plaque...

Do you disagree?

(via Mobility Weblog)

Mike Rowehl has another interesting piece on Email Clients - Java vs Native App, where it was found that the Java client easily beat the Nokia client. He tested Google's Gmail client and Flurrymail.

This might be a special case for Nokia, but if so Nokia needs to do some serious improvements to its e-mail client.

There are a few things that should be noted for after-market vs native applications (after-market applications being mainly made for Java ME, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile, in a very quickly falling curve):
- The time-to-market for after-market applications is way shorter than for native applications, as after-market applications can be released when they are available, not years later due to phone development lead time.
- After-market applications are much easier to test and quality-assure, as they can easily be deployed on the market as test versions rather than being tested only in the lab.

Regarding specifically Java vs native:
- Java is available in many more phones than Symbian OS. It's a ratio of 10:1. That doesn't explain quality/feature issues though, as the volume should be enough for that.
- Java applications are typically complemented by a service that in the case of e-mail and browsing (see e.g. Opera Mini) optimizes the information transfer, hence leading to better performance and less airtime, and typically also to a smaller and more efficient client.

Mike: Normally the Java stuff is kinda memory heavy compared to a normal app
That's not necessarily true: Java ME applications tend to be much smaller than e.g. Symbian and Windows Mobile applications, and data-wise could be too, as Java ME developers are probably more aware of memory limitations (due to experience) than such for Symbian and Windows Mobile, and due to the client/server setup mentioned above.

This is no news really, but Mike Rowehl's note about US Carriers Requiring Shortcodes - Developer Hostility Hits a New High indicates it's even worse than expected in the US. The key question is, what are they trying to protect? Their pride?

Maybe some things are different also on the user side, as given by my comments on Mike's notes below.

Mike: Sure, at least we have something, European carriers don’t even have SMTP available.
In Europe we access any mail servers on the Internet. In most countries in Europe operators don't put up walled gardens, so any service on the Internet can be accessed freely (but costly).

Mike: I decided to swallow my anger and pay an SMS aggregator to deliver me messages.
Why not use the browser or any of the many Java applications for e-mail instead? That's how it's done in Europe.

Clickatell: Clickatell’s short code has been blocked by T-Mobile due to more than one service(different content from multiple users) sent over one short code which is not allowed and we can not say when other providers could take the same action.
Again, what are the operators protecting?

Regarding that 3 now offers flatrate data in the UK:

It's like the Berlin wall: Once it was down it was pretty obvious it should have been down along. Life continues...

Pressure builds on other operators to deliver, and they simply have to move this way.

Flat rate was one of my base requirements for Mobile 2.0. Let's hope more in the list becomes real now.

Here's a new round of statistics from Gartner for the mobile phone market. Gartner estimates that 986M phones will be sold this year, which is 21% more than last year. It doesn't look good for BenQ.

Provider	Sold units Q3 2006	Share Q3 2006	Sold units Q3 2005	Share Q3 2005
Nokia	88.1	35.1	67.2	32.5
Motorola	51.9	20.6	38.6	18.7
Samsung	30.6	12.2	25.9	12.5
Sony Ericsson	19.4	7.7	13.8	6.7
LG	15.0	6.0	13.5	6.5
BenQ	6.1	2.4 !!!	9.8	4.7
Other	40.2	16.0	37.9	18.3
Total	251.3	100.0	206.7	100.0

Update 20061123: It seems I can't use the service from Sweden as of now.


Berggi is a new company specializing in providing e-mail and instant messaging to mobile phones. Taken individually it's nothing unique. See e.g. MovaMail and others. Possibly the combination of multi-service e-mail and IM in the same client application and service is unique though.

They tactically state Berggi as a "poor man's" BlackBerry, not that it can be compared 1-to-1, as Berggi doesn't provide integration with enterprise e-mail servers.

From the description the client application must be a Java ME application, but as it can't be downloaded until tomorrow there's a 0.01% chance it's not.

$9.99 a month (US only) is fair, but there are also completely free e-mail and IM clients available from GetJar and other places. The data transfers cost though.

I'll see tomorrow what the service can do.

Commentary:
Yahoo! News - E-mail for Basic Mobile Phones Unveiled

New York Time has an interesting article called Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts about Location Based Services.

LBS has been talked about for years, and there have even been a few "IT Bubble" companies that were involved in LBS, just to vanish a few years later when the VC boat sprung a huge leak.

The mantra for future LBS seems to be GPS (Global Positioning System) that enables precise location of the user. The drawback, so far, is that not many phones have GPS support yet, and based on the deployed mass of phones, hardly any at all.

I honestly think that many such services could be achieved without that level of precision, e.g. a listing of the closest cinemas and bars with addresses and possibly pointed out on graphical maps, where you could pinpoint those bars you've already visited during the evening/night (so you don't go there again). Also closest hospitals, shops, post offices etc could be handled the same way, and with the features phones already have.

The article talks about social mapping, which could be in the shape of friend-finders etc. It would be interesting if you for instance could allow some other MySpace user to track your position. It could also be dangerous due to the anonymity, so maybe it's best used for people you really know, and especially from parent to child. At least a younger child. I don't think teenagers would appreciate being followed by their parents.

Quote: "The technology has been ready for a while, but not the customers."
I'd say useful and easy to use services haven't existed. Technology in itself is no guarantee for customer adoption, if they can't do anything sensible with it.

The article points out privacy concerns: If your employer, parole officer etc would know exactly where you were all the time, that would most likely dampen your interest in using such services if you were the employee etc. That's of course provided they would get access to your location, because believe it or not, your operator already knows where you are all the time, yet not with any high accuracy. That information is not openly available, but I guess e.g. the police could locate people this way.

Check out Golden Swamp for this week's issue of the best in mobile. I'm not there this week due to a memory lapse.

Golden Swamp >> Blog Archive >> Carnival of the Mobilists #54

Supposedly it's now used in 100M shipped phones (probably counting to the beginning of time, but nevertheless). Of course Series 60 is completely dominating, as UIQ and possibly other variants of Symbian OS are used very little.

As I've indicated before, it's a bit tricky to say what is a smartphone, and as all phones with Symbian OS are considered smartphones, this means also many phones that are bought as generic phones are considered smartphones.

What's so good about Symbian OS though is that it's much better at handling after-market applications than the more proprietary OSs and platforms used in most phones on the market. It also means embedded functionality can be more powerful for the same reason.

Java ME / MIDP is said to be deployed in close to 1B phones, and now Symbian OS in 100M. That makes Symbian OS (mainly Series 60 of course) a very valid platform of choice for developers of mobile applications, complementing Java ME. Especially if the mobile applications are frontends to services, where the only thing that counts is the maximum deployment potential possible. Note though that most Symbian OS phones also support Java ME, so you are not completely off track if you go for only Java ME.

Engadget Mobile - 100 millionth Symbian smartphone ships

Labels: java, series 60, symbian

I've switched to the new version of Google Blogger, so there might be some hickups. E.g. blog feeds may show all the latest postings again. This should be a one-shot phenomenon.

This note from Terrence Barr at Sun clarifies the most important question developers have had about what this means for third-party applications running on top of Java ME:

We believe that any Java ME code which is independent of the Java ME platform implementation and is distributed separately from the Java ME platform implementation and merely uses the functionality of the platform but does not extend or modify the platform should not be considered a derivative or combined work of the platform and as such is not impacted by the platform license.

The whole message is at Mobility Weblog.

Labels: j2me, java, open source

At the same time I hear rumors that 3 is about to leave the UK, 3 will offer flatrate subscriptions. That sounds a bit irrational. Anyway...

This is of course good news for users, and is necessary if ever 3G is to become useful. Skype, Sling, Orb, Windows Live Messenger, Google, eBay and Yahoo! are mentioned as supported services, but open access to the Internet is not. Does that mean you can't access any other Web service?

The service is called X-Series and is initially only available on two phones, not because the service itself requires special phones (as far as I understand) but because the Skype client will initially only run on those phones. Why limit X-Series to only phones that can run Skype? Mobile data is certainly not just about free telephony. Again because of a walled garden approach?

Hutchison unveils fixed-line broadband on cell phones - Yahoo! News
Skype Launches Mobile Service - Yahoo! News
3, Oh How You Make Me Feel Conflicted at MobHappy
Hutchison 3G opens the mobile broadband faucet | InfoWorld | News | | By John Blau, IDG News Service
Skype launches first mobile service | InfoWorld | News | | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
Group 3 to launch flat-rate mobile Internet | InfoWorld | News | | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
3 Announces Flat Rate Skype and Media Over 3G (MobileBurn)

Mobile Complete offers testing on 200+ real phones over the Internet, and I just got a note from Cingular saying that it's free for members of devCentral to use this service for the phones Cingular provides for 10 hours.

Sounds too good to be true, but based on the customer list this is real enough.

(via Mobility Weblog)

Daniel Taylor has a great piece on mobile e-mail, indicating early adopters are the key drivers for mobile enterprise e-mail adoption.

In my worst "why don't they ever get it?" mindset I can though think that the early adopter stage should have been passed at least 5 years ago, as mobile access to Exchange etc has existed for at least 8 years now, so why does it take so long?

In my attempts to convince IT departments over the years (already during 1997, and then via in-house development) about establishing mobile phone access to Exchange I've come to realize IT doesn't necessarily see itself as controlled by user demand. I've heard all kinds of quotes from IT, and one of the most telling one was "We in IT don't need mobile e-mail (read: so you don't need this either)". Oh well...

Of course there's no point expecting operators to do anything about this, as mobile data overall is such a small revenue stream. Instead there has to be a point-to-point relationship between the provider of a solution (RIM, Visto, Microsoft, Good etc) and the customer (the enterprise). That's the way mobile data/information access has to evolve, not just for mobile e-mail.

Another point is that it's of course not early adopters that have the real need. I've spoken to many in sales and sales support about this, that are often traveling worldwide, and once they understand that mobile access is at all possible (that's the first "bump" to overcome) they immediately want this.

Hence enterprises need IT evangelists (formal or informal) so that management, IT and users get aware of the possibilities. Don't assume that IT in itself (not even the IT manager) will evangelize new technology, as that goes partly against their responsibility, to keep the IT equipment and services running 24/7, and in an economical way.

Mobile access has for long been considered a security risk, yet many allow users (at least silently) to redirect emails to Hotmail etc. That sure ain't safer!

So all in all, don't trust operators and IT departments to deliver mobile e-mail on their own accord. They don't have any real incentive. The users, and especially the managers of those users (that have the money), are the drivers. Throw in a technology-knowledgeable and promoting evangelist, and things will start happening.

Mobile Enterprise Weblog: Changing Times for Mobile e-mail

They boil down to this simple but hard to follow rule (unless you are very conscious about it, and experienced): Develop the games based on the feature and capability scope of mobile phones. Don't try to crow-bar in games based on a pre-conception that mobile phones are like game consoles and PCs.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, mobile phones are often thought of as limited or constrained devices (at least compared to PCs), but to speak fairly they are in a different but overlapping bracket with both limitations and enhancements compared to game consoles and PCs. E.g. how many game consoles have integrated cameras, positioning, wireless connectivity, high level of portability etc? Games should be designed to make use of those features, provided it makes sense.

Gamasutra - Mobile Editorial: The Mobile Developer’s Manifesto

This news seems to indicate iPhone is no longer someone's pipe dream or nightmare, but a real thing that will be released next year and be produced by Hon Hai in Taiwan, one of the biggest ODM countries (China being the other).

I believe the picture shown of the phone is fake, as it looked completely different at another site reporting about the same news.

Apple iPhone: Order for 12 Million Confirmed - Gizmodo

Ericsson has introduced a 3G/HSDPA base station for home use. The burning question then is: Why use this instead of Wi-Fi that has a much higher performance? All new laptop computers have Wi-Fi pre-installed - even the cheapest ones - and there are more mobile phones on the market with Wi-Fi than HSDPA (at least right now).

If it was subsidized by operators it might make sense, but only if there was a low-cost flatrate data subscription attached to it, as users will likely also have regular broadband.

Digital Media Europe: News - Ericsson introduces 3G/HSPA indoor access point for the home

Considering the UK is one of Europe's absolutely biggest markets, and Europe is the Mecca of 3G/WCDMA, I could guess that customers are simply not swayed by the benefits of 3G, nor of 3's 3G-benefiting services, which is a bit sad for 3G promoters.

I don't know anything about 3's coverage in the UK (an obvious deal breaker for users), but if UK falls, what could happen to much smaller markets?

Vodafone is rumored to be interested in 3 UK, which would be a small bite for them.

blogtwopointzero: 3 to Exit UK

Laymen and developers alike misinterpret what the terms are from now on. I won't pretend I'm an open source expert in any way, so I might miss the point too.

Note that we are talking both SE and ME here, but for obvious reasons my main interest is ME.

My understanding is this:
* This till allow third party to develop enhancements to Sun's Java base code
* Enhancements need to be handed back to the community under the GPL terms
* Sun still provides the licenses

What I had hoped was that somewhere in here there would be a side effect of decreased fragmentation, but I don't find any.

ME is very different from SE in that SE is always used as is. There's no provider of variants of SE. In the case of ME it's quite different, where KVM providers make optimizations and other changes, and in cases write their own KVM altogether.

What I haven't figured is what happens from now on if a KVM provider or a phone manufacturer chooses to use the ME base code and then optimize it for its own purposes. Under the GPL terms such optimizations should be given back to the community, but those optimizations and changes could be quite extensive and even non-generic, and such have been done for years already. What happens with adaptations that are already deployed?

Theoretically, as the HotSpot VM is part of the open source "package", providers might in theory not need to make any optimizations, but then the question is what they offer in terms of value, beyond what's already in HotSpot and the configuration, profile and JSR implementations. JSR implementations beyond Sun's offering?

Quote: The initial release features a buildable phone implementation targeting mass-market handsets and the Java ME Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) framework

I'll post more when I know more. As I said, I'm no expert on open source, so be gentle in your comments :).

More on this:
Free and Open Source Java Project Overview

Sun has just opened the doors to a community for Java ME developers. Logically most focus will be on MIDP, but it's likely also CDC/PP etc will be discussed here.

I think this is great for all developers out there that either have few in the proximity to discuss with or that needs to know about others' experiences of new features of and tools for Java ME etc.

As of now the actual facts provided via the site are the same as has been available before via java.net.

The biggest benefit is probably the focus this will have on what people are actually using Java ME for: mobile phones.

community.java.net - Mobile & Embedded Community

See also these new notes about the open source effort, as Java ME is as of now open sourced under GPL:
Welcome to phoneME
Free and Open Source Java - Get Involved
Free and Open Source Java - Overview
QuicklyBored » Blog Archive » Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL

I'm ambiguous as to the benefits of open sourcing Java ME, and wonder if it might actually increase fragmentation rather than the opposite. It's clear though that this can generate a much faster development of new features. Hopefully the code also gets optimized so that each KVM provider doesn't have to optimize the reference code extensively and that way introduce "dialects" (read: bugs) on the way.

It's World Usability Day tomorrow (November 14). Will all mobile phones suddenly be intuitive and trouble-free after that? I figure not, but here are a few things I'd like improved:

The industry should start talking about how easy (or not) it is to use specific features in phones, not just present long lists of features.

Industry awards should be given to inventors/providers of the most easy to use products, whether it's devices, client applications or services.

Phones should always be activated for all services at delivery: Less hazzle for the user, more revenue for the operator.

The phone's user interface should be better adapted to the feature set of phones for calling, messaging, media playing, photography, video recording, gaming etc.

Especially gaming is left completely in the dark. See Mobile phones need better controls for gaming for more on this. I don't think the changes need to be big, and the production cost is not likely to be higher. It just seems this use of a phone is completely ignored.

I think keypads are generally more designed for looks than usability, even for simple things like making phone calls. Again, we are not talking major changes here, just apply common sense (like that keys should be tactile and at all pressable).

Phones should use standard connectors, like mini USB for PC connectivity and 3.5" for audio.

It should be possible to charge the phone while it's connected to a PC (ideally via USB), as increasingly people are using phones as wireless modems.

Bluetooth headsets should be charged from the phone's battery, not from a separate power supply. We have enough power supplies already.

Accessing downloaded ringtones, applications etc is too hard. Why not always ask the user right after downloading what the user wants to do with the content?

The list goes on, and I might add more later, but you get my point: Things can be done...

Last year I worked with user interface and usability design and planning at Obigo (a Teleca company) and we defined a process for how to test Obigo's products for usability. We also wrote guidelines for how buttons, display etc should be used across all products. Of course we only dealt with software in this case, so we had no control over what actual buttons and other hardware features were on the phone. We consulted the Usability Lab at Ingvar Kamprad's Design Center (IKDC) across the street.

Here's another excellent round of blog postings about mobile, this time at C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog.

C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog

There's been written a lot about Yahoo!'s Gmail application recently, but compared to that MovaMail is much more powerful, supporting all the popular services: Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail, AOL, POP3 and IMAP.

The application is free and runs on most phones supporting Java ME / J2ME.

Version 2.0 has just been released, and sports the following new features:
* Phone Address Book Synchronization – complete synch and server backup
* Complete Email Synchronization – including email status
* Attachment Support – view images, forward attachments
* Camera Phone Integration – email pictures from your mobile phone
* Multi-lingual support – support for any language in the end users mobile phone

The service now also supports access via a WAP 2.0/XHTML browser, for users that can't or don't want to run a Java application.

MovaMail

This is a very good fit for Motorola, and another nail in RIM's coffin.

Good's most important offering is wireless corporate email software (client and server) compatible with Microsoft Exchange and IBM/Lotus Notes.

With Motorola's power it will also be easier to fight off IPR companies like NTP, but it's very likely NTP will try to sue Motorola now, unless Good and NTP are already fully settled.

Motorola buys mobile software maker - Yahoo! News

Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity discusses the effects of Sony Ericsson's acquisition of UIQ. My personal spin on this is that it won't have much effect outside of Sony Ericsson: SEMC has simply secured UIQ's existence and hence availability. Increasingly risky is though that Nokia very much controls Symbian, and hence can affect Sony Ericsson as well, despite the UIQ deal.

Of course UIQ is only used in a very small range of Sony Ericsson phones, namely the P and M series phones, and some W series phones. The M series shows promise to be the future form factor for SEMC UIQ-based business phones, and hence can reach a broader audience than the early-adopter feel of the P series.

I left a comment to the post stating that in the hunt for a common application platform we must not forget about Java ME / MIDP, that already is the most popular mobile application platform (both deployment-wise and application-wise), despite its problems.

Mobile Opportunity: Symbian unloads UIQ, and the mobile apps situation gets clearer -- and uglier

Here's a good piece on Flash Lite for mobile games, where Dave Williams at Atom Entertainment is interviewed by Gamasutra.

Compared to Java ME, Flash Lite has only one provider, hence it's less of a hazzle to move games between phones. Yet, as pointed out here, Flash Lite is much less deployed than Java ME, but it definitely shows promise for increased phone independence, hence cutting development and testing costs and time.

It probably also makes it easier to work with animated 2D graphics, even for non-programmers. Java ME with SVG might come close feature- and quality-wise, and might even be quicker deployed in phones than Flash Lite. I doubt though that Java ME / SVG will be nearly as much hyped as Flash Lite.

Gamasutra - Mobile Q&A: Atom Entertainment SVP on Shockwave Minis

As a way to aggregate the different blogs that cover the mobile Web, W3C has set up Planet Mobile Web. Great initiative, that would be even greater if they set up something like Carnival of the Mobilists, to increase awareness.

Planet Mobile Web

Yahoo! Messenger will support voice, e-mail and IM, simplifying the use of the different communication methods.

This has nothing directly to do with mobile, but shows something that could make mobile communication a lot easier in the future, as you could potentially stay in the same application the whole time, whatever communication method is used, potentially switching between modes during a conversation.

Google already offers this in Gmail, but the note indicates Yahoo! Mail has 10 times more users than Gmail, so the impact will be bigger.

The only real remaining headache is that the different solutions are not compatible with each other. Sure, you can e-mail between Google, Yahoo! etc, as they can all send and receive e-mails as per Internet protocols, but that's still not the case for IM and VoIP, even though attempts are made to "gateway" between the different services. There are settled Internet standards for IM and VoIP, but few services use them in an interoperable way as of now. Skype is the service that's farthest from achieving interop with other services, but attempts are made also there.

Yahoo to offer instant messaging inside e-mail - Yahoo! News

I read more and more often that phones get pre-installed Java games. This increases the quality of the games considerably from the traditional "hacks" you had to accept earlier, as the best Java games can be handpicked from the already very crowded Java game arena.

Smart phone manufacturers will put a link to their own game portal in the phone for easy purchase and download of more games, but some operators might not like that.

Quote: between 39% and 46% of females from 12 to 44 play games preloaded onto their mobiles. Among males% have played preloaded mobile games, and the numbers in other age groups fall off sharply. When it comes to actually purchasing mobile games, females 18-24 lead all with 23% having done so compared to 19% for their male counterparts.
It's interesting to see that there's seemingly also a healthy amount of games that are purchased. That shows there's some real business in mobile gaming, albeit spread out on a lot of actors.

Quote: (mobile games) will not be the overwhelming space that the free webgame space is.
OK, but what generates the most revenue? Sounds like mobile games to me.

Mobile gaming, from a development perspective, is though a touch place to be in, dominated by low-cost development companies that churn out one similar game after another. The winner here is clearly the distributor/aggregator. Just look at Playfon, that aggregates over 2000 games.

QuicklyBored » Blog Archive » Mobile Gaming Market Data

I wasn't there, so I can safely be "clever" without having to take the consequences.

Mike Rowehl that arranged the event makes some valid points about the chaos (my interpretation) in the mobile industry where actors don't seem to be at all in sync with each other. I wrote the following comment to his entry to highlight what makes sense in this situation (another one of those "quoting myself" moments):

I sense we in the industry need a user-to-service approach instead of the other way around. Remember that the Web as we know it didn't exist until there was a reasonable browser available that could show pictures and do some formatting. The same goes with phones: Look at what a phone can do and what a user wants to do and design the services based on that. Don't just think browser access or SMS access etc. Think broad and use the amazing amount of technology phones already have to build services users want. Don't wait for tomorrow's technology. Everything we need is already in the phones.

On top of that: An industry that always waits for the next new technology is not healthy, rather it's in hype gridlock, but by using the above approach part of the gridlock is gone.

Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility » Blog Archive » Mobile 2.0 - Didn’t Quite Do It

Word abbreviations have obviously been used for years in e.g. e-mail and chat communities, but are a no-no for any form of professional writing, like so far also exams.

We all know the user interface of mainstream mobile phones suck when it comes to writing text, hence txtspk was developed over time to speed up writing. Not until SMS was there any real need for it, even though abbreviations like u, 4, 2, lol etc were used long before SMS. Yet, why allow it in exams now? Shouldn't students learn "real" English?

I'm maybe a bit conservative here, but if I saw a work application in deliberate txtspk I would throw it in the "archive" immediately.

Txt speak approved for exams - New Zealand, world, sport, business & entertainment news on Stuff.co.nz

For more on txtspk, unless you are already fluent:
SMS language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Update: As the information I based the first revision on was wrong I rewrote the piece using Juniper Research's whitepaper as a base instead.

Juniper Research has just released a new report and a free whitepaper on machine-to-machine communication.

The whitepaper is worth a read, especially for the market info, but don't expect much about the technologies used. For that you might find Comtech M2M whitepapers or Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications interesting.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication has many facets, and can cover almost any device that needs to communicate something to any other device over a distance. There's also a high degree of integration with business systems involved, making M2M a quite complex affair project-wise.

A typical application is e.g. fleet management where the mobile terminal can report about the device's location, read status on the delivered goods etc, as well as control external devices in different ways.

SMS has dominated such communication for years, but nowadays many such applications instead use data connections over GPRS or similar, as the amount of data transferred and network speeds increase. SIM cards have typically been used for running the M2M client application, but my own guess is that also Java ME will be used for this, for more advanced tasks.

Quote: M2M contracts are longer term compared with subscribers, and machines would not churn or require expensive support as voice customers would.

Juniper estimates that by 2001 M2M will generate a $74B yearly revenue (from $20M 2006), which is a sizable market that surely will continue to increase as uses, awareness, reliability, performance, device size etc improve. This could be compared with the ringtone market that's expected to reach $6.6B by 2009.

Quote: Juniper likewise estimates that the global population of wireless M2M devices will grow from 35 million in 2006 to 250 million in 2011

Not explicitly mentioned in the whitepaper, but it's expected that also the price pressure is considerably lower than in the consumer mobile phone market, so volume doesn't need to be en par with the consumer market.

Is M2M the least known mobile opportunity, considering how much media attention e.g. ringtones, mobile advertizing and mobile search get, while M2M gets pretty much none?

Obviously M2M is not for consumers (at least not directly), but that shouldn't stop industry media to talk about it. Anything that generates revenue should be talked about, and M2M generates direct "we sell stuff for money" revenue without any need for second-hand revenue from advertizing, that's got nothing to do with the core offerings.

What other "hidden" opportunities might there be in the mobile industry?

As I pointed out in More on third-party services and consumer loyalties it's the mobile-enabled Internet services that win the user loyalties, not the operators that provide the network access (and not much useful services; cause or effect?).

This new note indicates young people are gadget-loyal, but not operator-loyal. This is a backlash for those operators that have tried to build own value around its brands trying to over-shadow individual phone brands, but seemingly they've not succeeded for younger folks.

That also means it's getting less meaningful to design phones for individual operators' requirements, as it doesn't provide any visible value to consumers, nor does it lock them in, it just adds time and headache for the manufacturers and software component providers.

As I indicated in the previous post, the only lock-in operators have is a long contract in return for getting the latest phone model for a lower cost. If it works it works.

Mobile Report: Young People Love Mobile Phones, But Aren't Loyal To Network Providers - Yahoo! News

Update: Now with information for English-speaking:
Sony Ericsson to acquire UIQ Technology AB, 07 November 2006 - Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications: About Us - Press Room - Press release - Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson pwns UIQ (literally) - Engadget Mobile
Sony Ericsson To Buy UIQ from Symbian - Yahoo! News
UIQ Technology: UIQ News 2006


The Swedish magazine DI has news about this acquisition. It's all in Swedish, so I'll explain.

Sony Ericsson acquires UIQ, securing that Sony Ericsson will have full control over the UIQ platform's fate.

UIQ provides a UI and applications on top of Symbian OS. It's used by Sony Ericsson in the P and M series phones. Nokia's similar solution called Series 60 is much more popular than UIQ, yet the jury is out on whether UIQ or Series 60 is better. UIQ supports touch screens and handwriting recognition, which Series 60 doesn't.

This deal makes a lot of sense for Sony Ericsson: It was probably not an expensive acquisition, and they anyway need to move to a more powerful platform also for mainstream phones, with or without touch screen. I therefor expect the next version of UIQ will fully support phones without touch screen.

Nokia has made at least one phone with UIQ for the China market, where handwriting is very important, but I don't think Nokia will go anywhere close to UIQ from now on.

di.se

Update 20061107: Palm fights back and claims the patents are invalid:
Palm sez NTP patents are invalid, refuses to settle - Engadget Mobile


Companies like NTP are entirely focused on wringing money out of the hands of technology providers, hence are in my opinion destructive to the development of the industry. They are not competitors to those providers, as they don't make any products themselves. They only own patents.

For some reason mobile e-mail, despite being a very simple concept (e-mail over a wireless connection, right; that's information technology 101), has been plagued by law suits, where not only NTP is to blame. RIM, Visto and others have done their share of damage by cross-suing its competitors.

Hard words, but those of you who have followed the RIM/NTP patent suit and understood that there's no inventor behind NTP anymore, just lawyers and shareholders, hopefully agrees a bit with me on this.

Even worse, the stock value fall (8.1% !) of Palm shows the financial market sees NTP (and similar IPR companies) as a real threat to Palm. As things are not going too well for Palm at the moment, a license fee similar to the one RIM paid would be quite painful. It most likely will not be that high though, but if it's in the same magnitude it still hurts.

Time to read what the patents are actually about.

Palm hit by patent suit - Yahoo! News

Still going strong, here's the latest issue of CotM with the best blog notes about mobile.

Carnival of the Mobilists 52

This mobile application enables you to read ebooks quickly, by showing one word at a time (at your desired speed). Supposedly this makes the brain see and understand the words as pictures and hence decreasing the time for interpreting the word.

The application is not ready yet, and there's no release date.

A clear benefit I can see is that as only one word is shown at a time you can use a huge font, enabling you to hold the phone at a distance, and hence decrease eye strain.

BookMuncher software enables speed-reading on your mobile - Engadget Mobile

Update: A misunderstanding on my part: Vodafone adds Windows Mobile to its list of preferred phone OSs/platforms for future phones, previously consisting of Symbian OS and Linux. Most current phones run neither of these OSs. Rather they use OSE, Nucleus and similar simpler OSs. Clearly there's a shift towards OSs that can run separately installed applications, not just embedded such, and that can also multi-task properly, but it will take many years. Especially for Microsoft this won't mean very much in the short term.

Quote: Vodafone announced earlier this year that it would whittle down the number of operating systems it supports from more than 15 to two or three.

Vodafone chooses Microsoft as third phone platform | InfoWorld | News | | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service



If this is unconditionally true this would be a huge win for Microsoft and its mobile phone software division. What I suspect though is that there are several conditions for this decision by Vodafone, so I'd like to hear Vodafone's version too.

I'm surprised Vodafone would choose Microsoft, considering Windows Mobile is hardly known for being intuitive, is hardly used at all (in 6M phones), Microsoft has so far not bothered much about OMA and other industry fora, and Microsoft is not much liked by operators in general.

I didn't find any press release about this in the news archive, which adds to my doubts.

Vodafone first to standardize software - Microsoft - Yahoo! News

ABI Research has issued a report about mobile blogging, that's kind of pessimistic about the outlook.

I'll stick my chin out and blatantly disagree.

The note mentions a number of reasons users are supposedly reluctant to mobile blogging:

* The generally poor quality of the pictures made by most camera phones: OK, so what level of quality is needed on a blog, when pictures are anyway scaled down? Pictures from a 2 Mpixel camera are roughly 1600*1200. You don't use that resolution in a blog. Rather 640*480 or less. Of course quality is not just about resolution, but even when considering other factors, what's the problem?

* Clumsy upload processes: So fix that then. Uploading pictures via email or MMS is very easy these days (see e.g. mojungle), and a downloaded application can potentially make it even simpler and also more powerful (see e.g. ShoZu), provided users can at all cope with installing and starting such applications.

* For most people there's simply not enough going on in their lives that they're going to be uploading pictures on a regular basis: So why is Flickr, YouTube and the gazillion other picture and video sharing services popular then?

Blogging as such might have lost its luster. I have to admit I've considered closing down my blog many times, especially when I don't get any feedback on entries, and those bloggers that just report on what boring things they've done during the day ("same ol', same ol'") are likely to give up pretty quick.

Let's stop thinking specific terms for a moment (like blogging for instance) and instead look at the phenomenon of uploading photos and videos to public sites as a way to brag, joke, report etc about things. That's pretty popular right, so in a sense media sharing is the new way of blogging.

Also, consider that professional news media increasingly ask for photos and videos from people that's been close to events.

Once usability is fixed, the main obstacle is the cost of transferring the media. Especially sending videos via the mobile network is pricey, and is a virtual showstopper as of now, but will change when/if flatrate subscriptions are economical.

Mobile Blogs To Remain a Niche

Sun has similar plans, and has even promised to do so.

Motorola, that's a big promoter of Java ME (as well as Linux), intends to provide this under the Apache license. Hopefully with Sun as a participant. Otherwise I don't see how this could succeed.

The Apache license says that you can make commercial products based on Apache-licensed software provided you don’t market them with Apache brand. That would hence also be true for Java ME.

Motorola Plans to Develop Java Handsets Under Apache License

Pannon is yet another operator that chooses to pre-install Opera Mini on their phones instead of requiring phones that have an integrated full Web browser.

Interestingly the data traffic decreases when using Opera Mini compared to embedded browsers like Opera Mobile, Obigo Browser or Access NetFront, but users will rejoice. Also, Opera Mini means browsing via a GPRS phone is acceptably fast.

Digital Media Europe: News - Pannon to pre-install Opera Mini browser on handsets

Not much real information in the note, but at least it sounds like a firm commitment. In any case, why wouldn't they make YouTube mobile? I hope though that flatrate data subscriptions are available at that time.

YouTube hopes to be on mobile devices in 2007 - Yahoo! News

Update: Added some more links, including to the press release from Google. Will Yahoo! and MSN etc feel pressure to improve their mobile email support? It sure will.

Update: This works well from outside of US as well, even though you get a warning message. I tried it on my M600i and the application scales correctly to the phone display despite the phone's unorthodox 240 by 320 resolution (which is easy to do in Java ME). I wonder why they chose to make a 2-level menu, that cripples usability a bit, but I applaud the general ease of use. Worth a spin. Download it via your phone from "gmail.com/app". I'm a bit surprised it gets so much press though. Was the browser access to Gmail that bad?


Most interesting is the mentioned arguments for why a Java ME solution is better than a browser ditto:
* Five times faster access and use.
* Fewer keystrokes for reading, composing, and searching mail.
* Attachments that are automatically resized to fit your device.

Surely attachments could be resized on the server based on information about the actual phone etc, but a browser-based solution can't be as user-friendly as a Java ME application optimally can be, due to how a browser works.

Drawbacks:
* Doesn't check emails autonomously
* Application is free but of course the data transfer is not
Due to the latter the former is good.

Quote: is currently compatible with all J2ME enabled phones in the United States
That must have required a lot of testing. It must work also outside USA, but it's much harder to guarantee function in those more "chaotic" markets.

The press release:
Email On-the-Go Now Even Easier -- Google Launches New Mobile Application for Speedier Access to Gmail

Commentary:
The Experts' View of Mobile Gmail - Yahoo! News
Google Aims For Speedy Mobile Email - Yahoo! News
Google takes aim at fast e-mail for cell phones - Yahoo! News
Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » local applications with web content: Gmail App
C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog
Gmail Goes Mobile | Portal IT news :: Hardware, Software, Games, Internet, Security alerts
SmartPhoneToday: News: Google Ups Ante with Gmail For Mobile Devices
dBusinessNews :: Daily Business News Delivered to Your Desktop
Google Launches Gmail Java Application (MobileBurn)
Google Takes Aim At Fast E-Mail For Mobile Phones - Yahoo! News
iTWire - Google Gmail now on cellphones
Google launches Gmail for mobile devices - Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal:
Google introduces Java Gmail app - MobileTracker
The Cleveland Leader
Google Drops Gmail Mobile App at MobHappy
Google Gmail Goes Mobile - Mobiledia
Google email goes more mobile - Yahoo! News
Google preps mobile app for Gmail | InfoWorld | News | | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
GMail Mobile Rushes E-mail to Your Phone - Gizmodo

MobileIndustry.biz highlights in "Out of Control" that one of the issues with playing games on mobile phones is that the user interface, and specifically the keypad, is not adapted for gaming at all.

Let's face it, phone keypads are designed primarily for aesthetics, not for usability, so this shouldn't be too surprising.

There are few phones today that have really good keypads. E.g. the Sony Ericsson W810 has perfect numeric keys (the best I've seen in a very long time; tactile and precise), but then the navigation buttons completely destroys the picture.

I'm talking the generic case of at all using the phone for telephony above. When looking at playing games there are very few, if any, phones that have buttons optimized for good game control (not counting the non-selling N-Gage and Gizmondo).

The only way to get around this is for manufacturers to more emphasize the usability and use case aspects of the phone keypad. This also applies to media control: You also want it to be very easy to start and stop music and video playing.

Fitting all this into the traditional numbers + some navigation buttons scheme probably won't work, so some lateral thinking is required.

Interestingly, if the joystick would be optimized for gaming it would probably also be more optimized for navigation. Think an analog joystick (or better a thumb disc) with a select function that would be designed to be easily and quickly pressed.

Manufacturers should take a look at portable game consoles for inspiration.

As of now I don't think manufacturers and operators even consider gaming to be important, as they don't get much revenue from this, but sometimes you have to do one thing to enable something else.

Out of Control - Editorial /// MobileIndustry.biz