Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The European satellite-based navigation system Galileo has been hampered by slow deployment, and the politicians are not amused. Main reason being increasing costs (even the start budget of 10 billion Euros is a lot), but I think also a major factor is that this is very strategic in EU's efforts to become independent of USA, so they want to generally speed things up. I get the impression that the involved are still negotiating. Actual deployment hasn't been started yet.

From Wikipedia: 'the European Union has agreed to switch to a range of frequencies known as "Binary Offset Carrier 1.1," which will allow both EU and US forces to block each other's signals in the battlefield without disabling the entire system'
That's nice.

Update 20070430: I found a way to get rid of the permission warnings when accessing GPS, so I updated the text about that.


As everyone's been so positive about this phone, saying it's the perfect smartphone (except for the short battery up-time), and I needed to test its GPS capabilities, I took it for a spin in the 'hood.

First off, the phone itself is slick, and being able to slide the front in two ways - up to to reveal a numeric keypad and down to reveal a multimedia keypad - is smart, yet I have a few gripes about the UI:

The navigation buttons right under the display are very poorly designed from a usability perspective, and are clearly designed only for aesthetics. Not that they look very aesthetic to me.

The multimedia buttons at the top are not real buttons, as they are put under a flat plastic film. That means there is no button feel before you press. Not good.

That said, to call a smartphone perfect it has to fulfil the following criteria in my way of thinking:

• alphanumeric keypad (yes, it's mandatory on a phone optimized for information access!)
• landscape display (for information access, video viewing etc)

Either fold up of the display or slide out of the keypad (to keep the "pocket form factor" small). See e.g. Helio Ocean for a good smartphone design.

Connectivity/communication-wise the phone is really nice:

• standard USB connector for the PC connection; that's the way it should be on all phones; it didn't seem to charge from USB though, but I might be wrong
• standard stereo headset connector
• integrated Wi-Fi that worked quite well, but wasn't very sensitive: more than 5 meters away from the access point and it lost the connection
• HSDPA makes mobile network access snappy; 3 supports this now in my area

I hope standard USB and headset connectors will be on all phones in the future.

About GPS then:

Nothing reveals that the phone has integrated GPS, except of course all the included location-related applications. The form factor of the phone doesn't seem to be affected, but to be frank I haven't compared with other N series phones.

As I primarily wanted to test my own location-enabled application, that was what I focused on.

I noted that the GPS sensitivity is pretty low. Oddly my Nokia LD-3W GPS module is way more sensitive, as I could use it while walking around, while the N95 had a hard time finding enough satellites to get a decent heading. I verified that it wasn't a problem with my application, as the embedded ones often didn't get any coordinates either.

Interestingly the N95 can access Bluetooth GPS modules via the Location APIs in Symbian OS and Java ME, so in the future applications need only go via the Location APIs. Not so now though, as there are way more phones that have e.g. Java ME and Bluetooth than the Location APIs. Almost all vs almost none. The requirement to support a reasonably precise location in USA and Japan will drive integration of GPS into phones.

When it finally was able to retrieve location information from the internal GPS I got one message asking for permission to use location information. After that I didn't get more questions. Still, this was not until I had changed my software to use a location listener instead of synchronous access, so that's a pointer to others out there working on location applications in Java ME.

My verdict is that it could have been more sensitive on the GPS reception, and as everybody else has said, had a much better battery life, possibly simply solved by better power management (of GPS etc).

Comparing N95 and LD-3W:

As previously mentioned, a separate GPS module works with pretty much all new phones, as the only requirement is Bluetooth and Java ME. Also, prices are going down fast. Hence this is a good alternative to anyone that's already got a good phone, but only wants to add GPS. Keep in mind though that no applications are included with the module, so that's an extra cost that's not negligable. Mobile navigation software is still rather expensive.

Regarding battery life: If I don't connect to the LD-3W via Bluetooth it shuts down the GPS receiver, and in that mode the battery lasts for several days (empirically verified, at least 4). There might be a lot of other things that make the N95 a battery under-achiever, but maybe they made the (wrong) decision to always keep GPS active. Other GPS modules switch off entirely when there's no Bluetooth connection, but the LD-3W is always accessible while turned on (that didn't come out right...).

The LD-3W also seems to have a quick start mode where it hasn't yet shut down GPS, and where hooking up via Bluetooth and getting correct coordinates take mere seconds.

An interesting feature of the LD-3W is that it has a rubber lining, so that it stays better on top of the dashboard etc. Not 100% reliable though. It's fallen on the floor several times while I've been driving.

Overall I think the LD-3W is very well designed, and certainly one of the better GPS modules available.

This is a really good thing, especially as we are talking a worldwide standard here. This means manufacturers don't have to make different phone models just because of the payment technology used, cutting costs for them and the component providers (that get larger volumes for the same components). This makes it also much more likely that phones will at all support payments in the future.

The concept is called Pay-Buy and uses NFC technology.

GSM Association gets everyone together for phone e-wallets

GSMA Adds Nokia to Pay-Buy Mobile Initiative

Nokia Joins 'Mobile Wallet' Initiative

Standard for Secure Mobile Payments Coming

Standard for secure mobile phone payments is on the way

Here are links to some of the platform statistics (market share relative to all mobile phones) provided by Mobref, with the most interesting figures noted.

It seems the figures are based on mobile site accesses, which could explain the high figure for Symbian OS below.

Java ME

CLDC 1.0: 36.6%
CLDC 1.1: 49.9%

MIDP 1.0: 13.6%
MIDP 2.0: 72.9%

Conclusion: Stay with CLDC 1.0 if at all possible (no floating point), but MIDP 2.0 seems pretty safe. There's another reason for staying with MIDP 1.0 functionality though, based on my own experience: MIDP 1.0 functionality is typically less flawed.

Also note that MIDP 2.0 is backwards compatible, so MIDP 1.0 applications should run on those phones as well.

I don't know what the remainder shares represent. Phones without Java at all? i-mode phones?

Symbian OS

Overall: 28.7%

Note that Symbian OS phones tend to support Java ME as well.

The figure is way too high. Nokia claims to have delivered 100 M phones with Series 60, and Series 60 is the dominating UI/application platform based on Symbian OS. Sun claims there are 1.5 B phones with Java ME (in practice CLDC and MIDP).

Probably not at a formal dinner, but according to QuicklyBored pretty much anywhere and anytime else. Slightly tongue in cheek.

Mowser is a new service that does transcoding of Web sites so they can be viewed effectively on mobile phones. It does this intelligently so that already mobile-optimized sites are not tampered with. Google and others already have free transcoding gateways, but possibly not as smart (I need to test it more to see if there are user-noticeable differences). I guess Mowser uses WURFL/WALL for figuring out device features, but I have no proof.

Commentary:

Russell Beattie’s Back With A New Project — Mowser

Mobility Weblog - Mowser

Side track: Have you noticed that new services no longer add 'www.'? See also Twitter. Abiro is trend-aware, so you can enter just 'abiro.com' if you like. Actually you've always been able to do that...

'Enterprise mobility is nascent reality' indicates mobile technology still struggles in the enterprise. Not for voice calls of course - some companies even throw out their fixed-line and DECT phones and replace with only mobile phones - but when it comes to accessing internal and external information services from mobile phones it does. It seems so close at hand, but still it's like being stuck in super glue for the providers of services and the evangelists in the companies.

Quote: 'Carriers will continue to expand their 3G networks to further eliminate dead zones'
Who said 3G performance is required for e.g. simple work order management, time reporting etc? Does SMS-based IT services require 3G? Obviously no.

Quote: 'device makers will craft new handhelds for specific industrial markets'
OK, but the vast majority of users do well with the phones they already have.

Quote: 'software makers will "reinvigorate" their wireless management applications development efforts'
A long phrase meaning what? Isn't it better to make good real-life products and see if they stick?

"Companies are finally beginning to consider new wireless technologies when there isn't a hard business case to be made for it, but the landscape is so fragmented that enterprise-wide deployment is a ways off."
Yes, this is a major issue. For instance Microsoft has no solution to this due to its focus on Windows Mobile that pretty much no phones use. However good a 'Windows Mobile + Microsoft Exchange (etc)' solution might be, it's a tiny part of the market. Time for Microsoft developers to do WML and Java ME development. Also, employees already have mobile phones. Were the purchases of those phones (and PDAs) really motivated by hard business cases? I don't think so. Why not do sound service investments as well? Also, enterprise-wide deployment is of course not the first thing to do. Note how PCs came in to enterprises many years ago: in smaller departments where there were special needs that the mainframe or mini computer couldn't satisfy.

And again, why not focus on the technology that's already in users' hands, and stop this constant talking about technology overhauls when only parts of the IT system needs upgrading? The only things lacking are services and mobile applications.

See Abiro Mobilizer for more of my own thoughts on the matter.

In 'Mobile Development with Flash Lite' Fejes Balazs goes through what it's like to start developing mobile applications in Flash Lite if you already know MIDlet development. He makes a comparison of sorts:
'What I did found interesting is how the IDE and the philosophy behind it made me develop something that’s more visual and dynamic than what I implemented on the J2ME platform. Because animation comes free with the platform, it’s trivial to use it, and the form designer is all about graphical components, I believe the application I developed became more enjoyable and visually more appealing.'

The article is also a step-by-step description for how to get started with a smaller project.

I also noted the following, that at least applies to Flash Lite 1.1. 2.0 is supposedly object oriented.

• The base development tool is commercial (not an issue for companies, but definitely for hobbyists)
• Flash Lite is not object oriented (harder to re-use modules etc)
• Flash Lite is UI/multimedia-centric (which in some cases can be very good, like in games)

And he didn't mention the following:

• Flash Lite is way less functional when it comes to Internet and local device communication
• It's less available in phones, but still a good number (supposedly 200 M)

Update: Barbara Ballard at Little Springs Design adds a few complementing tidbits on how to make it easier for consumers in 'on selling applications'.


'The NPD Group: Watch out Teens! Adults Rule Mobile Gaming (for Now, Anyway)' indicates that as many as 29 M (10% of the population!) play games on mobile phones in USA. That also includes embedded games. 7 M download games and are dominated by people between 25 and 34.

Others might then say that "98% don't download games. Disaster!" (similar to how articles have said things like "MMS has failed, only xx% are using it" bla, bla), which sounds really bad, but the fact that so many at all play games on their phones (and finding time for it) indicates there's a good potential in the market for also downloaded games. I think though that they need to be even more accessible than they are today: simpler to find, simpler to choose, simpler to purchase (if they even have any direct cost), download and run.

Mobile content services could have user-voted top lists, including of course for games, that were displayed smack on the home page, and most consumers would buy those games if highlighted enough. It's kind of like digg where people vote the most on those news that already have the most votes (over-emphasizing certain news). That's of course a very flawed way of voting, so I'm not considering digg a good approach for news prioritization, but for mobile content that doesn't matter, as the only thing that counts is to maximize sales, of whatever the service might sell.

This guy must have blown a fuse when he asked YouTube visitors to call him on his phone. Remember that USA has the callee pay ("tele-spammers, please call me").

Supposedly so many called that he is to pay $20,000 for this little prank. He should just have asked them to call him on Skype, MSN or similar instead.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is no longer an area of technology experimentation and lame attempts at finding uses. Rather it's getting increasingly used for real applications like tracking, payments, tickets etc. I still don't see many mobile phones with integrated support for RFID, so it doesn't look like consumer use will be widespread during 2007, except in Asia, but after that it looks really promising.

I was asked to inform about a related event at UCLA in May. See more below:

RFID Hands on Workshop at UCLA – WINMEC on May 16, 2007

UCLA - WINMEC (Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium) is pleased to present its fifth one-day hands-on RFID application development workshop on May 16, 2007. This hands-on workshop will provide attendees an opportunity to learn the basics and the potential of RFID in various application scenarios. Attendees get to experience a variety of RFID technologies and use the WinRFID middleware in conjunction with the existing RFID hardware in UCLA to get a first hand experience with several potential industrial RFID applications. The workshop and demonstrations will be held in UCLA. For program details click here. For more information please contact infor@winmec.ucla.edu

Two new interesting articles about the status of the mobile phone market in India:

India tops 200 million telephone subscribers
'The total number of wireless subscribers at the end of March was 166 million, up by 68 percent from the previous year'

Web 2.0 is not for India
'Though dismissive of Web 2.0 in India, Bajaj thinks that Mobile 2.0 will happen, but it will take time. "Of the 150 million mobile phone users, only two million are GPRS-enabled. The urban penetration is 52 per cent, while in rural areas it is 7-8 per cent. In reality there will be mobile Internet applications but the market size will not be 500 million but 25-30 million.'

Top Wireless Companies, FierceWireless - Fierce15, 2007 lists the companies that Fierce believes will shine this year. Admittedly I knew of only a few of these companies beforehand, not the least Neonode that makes mobile phones and is based in Sweden. They haven't had much luck so far, but maybe they can flourish in the wake (or place) of the iPhone, as the concept is somewhat similar.

Regarding services: 'Location-based services, mobile banking and mobile payments are just a few of the compelling services that appear to be making progress with operators.'

I now and then receive requests for informing about new things, and here's a mashup of recent ones I found interesting:

Mobile Location Enabled Services 2007 takes place in Novi, Michigan on May 23 2007
'Do you want to profit from the boom of mobile LBS? Learn from the key players at Mobile Location Enabled Services 2007 conference - a high quality event for industry executives to meet, discuss and plot the path to mass profits'

Tire Wireless will launch a new version of its Tira Jump platform for mobile content deployment April 24.

The Mosio Project Launches 'Technology for Good' Mobile Q&A and Text Message Alerts Service
'Mosio allows mobile users on the go to execute mobile searches to find places to eat, drink and shop, create and send text newsletters or alerts to other mobile subscribers through its My TextCast function and utilize its "QnA" tool, a service that lets them ask questions to other Mosio users serving as "lifelines" at their computers.'

At least some: Twitterati - Abiro Jitter: another mobile Twitter client

I've released 1.06 with support for "international" characters and symbols. Actually all symbols in Unicode should be supported now, but that's only provided your phone include them in the fonts.

As always, it takes time before the new version shows up at GetJar (sometimes a day). I'll provide Jitter at abiro.com tomorrow, so you can download the very latest version as soon as it's available.

Doesn't sound like the most distinctive or unique feature, considering anyone could put 8 GB of Flash in a phone, but according to 'Apple's Got The iPhone Buzz' that's what people appreciate the most in the yet to be released Apple iPhone.

This is no doubt an indication of focus on multimedia, and not just audio. A DivX/XviD-encoded DVD at high quality takes approx. 700 MB, and a ditto TV show maybe 150 MB, so you could easily squeeze several episodes of Desperate Housewives or Scrubs into the phone, whatever might be your fancy.

I only hope they haven't forgotten to put a USB 2.0 interface on it.

mobref provides statistics on e.g. manufacturer market shares, application platform version market shares, popular display resolutions etc etc. A good reference when making decisions on what phones and application platforms to support, provided it's trustworthy.

There's no information about how the information has been collected. E.g. the Nokia 6600 is supposed to have a 5.39% market share, which doesn't sound right.

Actually something like 7 hours later, as it took longer to chase down a parser for the timeline information than to develop the base application. Eventually I decided to make my own, so that was redundant work. I also had issues with the length of the timeline response, so I rewrote the HTTP class as well.

The application is called Abiro Jitter (Java Twitter), and I've made a dedicated page about it. With this level of functionality it will be freeware. Feel free to comment on the functionality. I'm probably not a typical Twitter user, so there might be other features that are important.

It can be downloaded from GetJar. Wait for the page to update to version 1.04 (can take hours), as 1.02 doesn't include the timeline support. 1.04 automatically performs Setup if credentials haven't been set, making it more obvious to new users what needs to be done first. I also made everything show up on the main screen, which is more convenient. Maybe I will move the timeline to a separate screen, but it's quite practical this way too. I also fixed a few remaining bugs, so 1.04 should be a pretty stable version.

Right now also my own updates are shown in the timeline. I'll add a setup option to control the display of those, as they are pretty irrelevant.

I noticed that Twitter has issues with characters outside of 7-bit ASCII. It's not documented whether UTF-8 can be used. I will add a better character coding when I know what works. Also the timeline response is poorly documented.

More later...

Just finished developing Abiro Jitter, a basic Twitter client for mobile phones (a MIDlet) on the level of functionality found in TinyTwitter and Twitlet. I won't stay there though, so this is just to test out the Twitter API. It's up at GetJar for free download.

It was very simple to do, so kudos to the Twitter team for that. The transfer is not even encrypted, which is OK for this kind of casual communication.

As a side note: Of course almost all e-mail (including corporate e-mail) sent across the Internet is unencrypted as well, so it's not worse than that. Actually I wonder why we all still transfer e-mail unencrypted and without opt-in. What if you before you send an e-mail to a new recipient first asked for permission to do so, via your everyday e-mail client (similar to how you ask for permission in chat applications). After acceptance you would then have a peer-to-peer connection (logically speaking) with that person, and of course all messages sent over that "channel" would be encrypted by default. That would get rid of all spam and eavesdropping (including from internal management and the government via the mail relay servers). Why isn't it this way already? OK, back to the topic...

I used Mobile Blogger as a base, and all in all it took approx 2 hours to make in its current basic and stable form. It's designed to work on all mobile phones that can at all run MIDlets.

It doesn't look good though, as I use high-level widget calls, but that's what you get for your money. If I'd added e.g. the J2ME Polish UI it would be 30 KB larger. Now it's 13 KB, and half of that is the Jitter logo.

The transfer problems I noticed before mainly occured when running the MIDlet in the MIDP emulator, which is odd. Still, transfer can take a very long time, and sometimes also fail completely.

More later...

(Updated 20070420)

I've revamped my WinkSite and added all the feeds I review daily, as well as more WinkSite features overall.

As I also have wap.abiro.com I'm not sure I will gain much from this extra site, but maybe there are WinkSite visitors that now have easier to spot wap.abiro.com and www.abiro.com.

Also, a few days after setting it up, my twitter blog still works flawlessly, and it was very quick to get working, despite everything involved.

I also tried Tiny Twitter, but it didn't accept my credentials. I've heard of others with the same problem. The site has an interesting flaw: It says 140 pixels wide at the bottom, forgetting that the flowers at the top are much wider, making the page hard to read on a phone browser.

Update 20070421: BlackBerry: The Cover-Up Is Worse Than The Outage indicates a certain level of arrogance on RIM's part, very similar to the attitude IBM had when it was in an IT monopoly many years ago, and that maybe Microsoft has today (but not quite the same). We all know what happened then: Novell and Microsoft took over networking software, Dell, Compaq and Asia took over PCs, Sun and others took over heavy-duty servers. Of course RIM is a very small player compared to IBM, but by locking in wireless e-mail users to RIM's solution its impact is still significant in that segment.


Update 20070419: BlackBerry outage exposes RIM's 'soft underbelly' points out that all e-mails go via RIM's central system, which is not a very clever design, load- and security-wise. Even the US government reacted to the outage, indicating how much BlackBerries are relied upon among the few that have them. As I said in the note: RIM needs competition.


There's been a massive outage since Tuesday, supposedly inhibiting most BlackBerry users to access the service. A few questions immediately pop up:

• How can the effect be so broad?
• Isn't the user lookup service distributed?
• Is there only one lookup server in the whole world?

The actual transfer of messages is handled by the corporate-internal BlackBerry Connect, so what is so critical in the central service that this can happen?

There's serious need for a competitor to RIM, for these reasons:

• RIM's service architecture is clearly outdated. Such a critical system must be distributed.
• RIM gets way too much media attention (and completely for free, even though an outage is obviously not good news), despite an unnoticeable sales volume relative to the mobile phone market as a whole.
• There's definite potential in this market, yet due to patents etc few others dare to approach it.

Keeping Track of Laundry on Wireless Web is just one of several new services that SK Telecom has launched for corporate customers, as a way to compensate for decreasing voice revenue. Similar services could be set up in other parts of the world.

As the mobile phone is always with you and always online, it's a way better tool for 'information access wherever you are' than e.g. a laptop or PDA. See Mobilizer for more on this paradigm.

How vs. what: Why so many new tech products fail outlines that we should focus more on what new products should be used for than how new technologies can enable new uses of those products. It's the old top-down vs bottom-up design struggle. When designing a product it's very easy to fall in the trap of thinking that more technology is inherently better, but that has some more or less serious implications:

• Products can be harder to understand and promote, unless the new features are defended by new valuable uses; it's those new uses that need to be described
• Products become more expensive for the manufacturer, and hence more pricey for the operators and consumers

Without going out on a limb, mobile phone design is plagued with 'how' thinking. In part because of the market's structure: Manufacturers rely on people in more mature markets to constantly upgrade their phones. If they didn't, the market would collapse. Hence (and similar to Microsoft Office): Features that are unmotivated from a usage perspective are added to sway consumers to upgrade. Also, operators rely on this to lock in subscribers on long term contracts.

That's why e.g. iPod (mentioned in the note) and mobile phones can't be compared one-to-one, as iPods are not sold in the same way as phones are. You might think that people would keep iPods longer, as they do exactly what people need, but it seems things like size and storage space plays a role in making people upgrade anyway.

Another "wrong" in mobile phone design is, at the other end of the spectrum, aesthetic design without motivation from a usability perspective. Examples are keypads that can't be used effectively, LCD displays that can't be viewed in sunlight, menu systems that are not logically structured, close to impossible to initiate the browser or launch downloaded applications. That's why I still wonder why the RAZR became so popular, considering its UI sucks. It's clear people were motivated by other things, like slick design, and that they anyway mainly make voice calls, so it might not matter if the other features are not useable.

Is this an incentive for making simple and inexpensive phones for people that don't need more? In theory that's definitely so, but would operators care much about phones that are so cheap they can't slap a 1-2 year subscription on top of it? Would manufacturers stop the feature war, understanding that people don't need more? A definite no.

Hence, another form of struggle occurs for mobile phones: Common sense (from a usage perspective) vs how to sustain long term profit.

This seems to be a no holds barred implementation of Web widgets for mobile phones, and if so it's an industry first: Nokia introduces widget support for S60.

Phones with Series 60 are powerful enough to handle that, as well as PC-like Web browsers.

Instead of investing in expensive gadgets that only collect dust you can now get gadgets that are truly useful (read: can be eaten), as described at Chocolate Cell Phones, PDA's, Blackberry and More....

This set of gadgets also includes a TV set, a PC mouse etc. 'Celebrate Changing Technology' is not really true, unless that means 'get old gadgets as chocolate candy'.

So, is it chocolate mouse or chocolate mousse? Sorry for the bad joke.

(via Textually)

The author of Why cell phones are still grounded means the reasons are altogether different from those officially stated. It supposedly all boils down to money, effort and politics. Here are a few tidbits:

Quote: 'The airlines fear "crowd control" problems if cell phones are allowed in flights. They believe cell phone calls might promote rude behavior and conflict between passengers, which flight attendants would have to deal with. The airlines also benefit in general from passengers remaining ignorant about what's happening on the ground during flights, including personal problems, terrorist attacks, plane crashes and other information that might upset passengers.'

Quote: 'they want to profit from it. Simply allowing passengers to use their own cell phones in flight would leave the airlines out of the profit-taking.'

Quote: '[the phone] might have roughly equal access to two or more towers that use the same channels, which confuses the carriers' computer systems.'

Quote: 'Keeping the ban is the safe decision for the politically ambitious.'

What I found from my frequent travelling a few years ago was that many people didn't turn off their phones. I've even seen people turning the phone to 'silent' mode on the plane. Whether they actually thought that would make the radio shut down I don't know. This means, on any given flight there are several phones still turned on.

A few flights have detectors, and in those cases the staff has been quite strict on finding those still activated phones. Not so on almost all flights.

Here's a summary of interesting news and new services related to location:

Satnav, GPS, LBS: Where are we going? - a long article on not the least the evolution and impact of location in mobile phones

Trimble launches GPS 'adventure' layers for Google Earth

All Nokia phones to get GPS

Tao's Chris Hinsley - "Clearly, privacy and safety are major concerns." - on location in mobile games, contemplating the fact that hardly anyone has GPS yet; why the editor or author chose the above title I don't know; rather market reach, adoption rate and revenue are the major concerns, as always

uLocate - provides a mobile widget platform, that among other things has made a location-enabled Twitter client

idevio - platform for mapping, routing and geocoding

mopill.com (and its mobile counterpart) has been shut down for good. If you want ringtones etc there are plenty of other sites that offer that, so you won't exactly miss it.

An observation related to this: People talk about Internet advertizing taking over TV ditto. Spending-wise I'm sure, but effectiveness-wise I wonder. Think about this for a second: Already when Jamba started its mobile content business there were tons of sites selling ringtones, so how stand out? In their case by advertizing the latest ringtones etc on TV, many times a day, and in the 'noisiest' way possible, so most people that might have an interest in mobile content would see Jamba, and only Jamba, even if they were also frequent Internet users. So please don't rule out the power of TV advertizing just yet. Especially not for already overcrowded markets where brand is absolutely everything, and where Internet advertizing drowns in the overall information noise. I also see e-commerce services still make heavy use of TV advertizing. Not meaning to be backwards, but in the overwhelming advertizing noise that we all face, an advertizer needs to be even more creative to cut through, even if it means to use older methods.

I've also shut down Forums (probably also for good), as it was only used by spammers.

This is to enable me to focus on more productive things.

I present a scenario here to highlight that the most basic and needed functionality doesn't work on mobile phones.

The scenario is that I hate telemarketers, and I wish them all to hell, or at least out of my hell (sorry, hair). There you have it. I think you can guess I've had a bad telemarketer week.

So what to do:

1. I want all calls that don't present the number of the caller to be automatically filtered out, so I don't hear a beep from the phone in such occasions. It shouldn't even show up in the "who's called" list, as I can't do anything with it anyway. If a bona fide person has such a setting they will sooner or later contact me some other way.
2. If there's a valid phone number showing up, and it's not in my phonebook, the phone should immediately look it up in a trustworthy Internet-based number service. If it says something like "Sloppy Joe's telemarketing scam" I would with one key press put that number on the ignore list, and it should be treated as 1. above. The same if I take the call and then disconnect.
3. If it's a call I'd like to take, the information from the Internet service would be put in the phonebook.

Can this be done by default on mobile phones today? No.

Do fixed-line VoIP services and phones provide this? Yes.

Is it possible to write an application that does this? I guess in Symbian OS and Windows Mobile it would, but definitely not in Java.

Anyone seen such an application?

'Sun buys mobile phone software maker SavaJe' is interesting, as SavaJe based its mobile phone system on CDC (Connected Device Configuration) and was one of the few providers of such an implementation. After hyping the platform for a while SavaJe seemed not to find much customers for it, and has since fallen on hard times. There were even rumours they had gone bankrupt, but that was never officially confirmed. Is this good or bad for the CDC platform? CDC isn't used much in mobile phones in general. See 'Java ME (CDC) Devices'.

Generally though it seems operators think that way, both when it comes to mobile data and in the case of 'EU setback for mobile phone industry', roaming fees.

If it's too darn expensive without obvious added value or with good alternatives people won't use it. In the case of international calls the need is obviously there, but increasingly people use Skype and similar for that. With a reasonable cost for international mobile calls people will also use it more.

If some middlemen disappear in the process, so be it. There's no industry that is exempt from the risk of extinction.

I've set up so that it's possible to get update notifications of Abiro Mobile News via twitter. I used twitterfeed for this.

It's already simple to read my blog and many other feeds via wap.abiro.com, and then you get the complete text in the entries so this is not very important, but I did it to test the possibilities.

The delivery chain for providing my blog to twitter is this (at least currently):
Me → Blogger → FeedBurner → twitterfeed → twitter → Web/e-mail/SMS etc

What you get in the end is a short note with a link to the blog entry. TinyURL is used to shrink the URL to the blog entry, so that as much as possible of the entry text can be included in the twitter message.

The twitter account is called abiromobilenews, if you want to try it out.

Similar to Enough Software and Mobile Distillery, Neomades provides a framework for abstracting device and Java implementation differences, so that applications can be easily ported between phones.

The site provides an "in a nut shell" list of issues involved:

• different mobiles hardware (screen size, keypad codes, memory size …)
• incompatible Java architectures (J2ME MIDP 1.0 & 2.0, DoJa …)
• manufacturers specific implementations (NokiaUI, Vodafone VSCL , SPRINT…)
• incomplete or incorrect implementations
• distribution or local constraints (naming conventions, languages, logos…)

'A Mobile MSN Project' provides a practical example of what's involved in making a mobile solution for MSN chat, involving a client part (in Java ME) and a server part (in Java EE). It's rather pragmatic, so if you are into developing similar solutions, or even specifically an MSN solution, this can give you good pointers. Most things apply also if you use Eclipse or similar.

gubb.net is a service that enables you to make centralized lists containing whatever you like. The lists can then be accessed via PCs and mobile phones, and via a number of different methods (browser, e-mail, SMS etc).

Is this the era of simple widget-like Web services (considering my comment about Twitter before)? Another interesting pattern is that new services are made for both PC and mobile access simultaneously. In this case mobile access might be the most important.

In Going to Market: The Mobile Youth Market Enrique Ortiz asks "Should the youth market be considered at all?".

Confrontationally I'll ask the oppsite question: "Should the adult (as in grown-up, not XXX) market be considered at all?", and Enrique seems to go in that direction as well.

Adults tend to be rather traditional in their uses of mobile phones, so why bother about that demographic when designing new information/entertainment services, except possibly if you are into corporate ditto?

Young people use the things that work through experimentation and word-of-mouth, and as Enrique says, it doesn't have to be pretty, but it has to do something useful (in the minds of the actual users, not necessarily in your own mind). New services, if deemed useful, can get popular very fast this way.

I made a critical statement about Twitter yesterday, but I'm starting to warm up to the idea as a casual way of informing multiple people simultaneously about 'whatever'. I though still consider an IM client to do the same thing, and better, but Twitter is even simpler to use than IM, as you can send a simple SMS, that absolutely all young people know how to do, and most adults as well.

Here's an example of a good (and probably more long term sustainable) use of Twitter: Woot! - A-Twittering We Shall Go: Get Woot Updates Through Twitter . Sure, this is what mailing lists and newsletters normally do, so again the benefits are arguable, except that using Twitter might be cooler, and that sent messages are optimized for reading on mobile phones.

Here are some of my findings from developing a MIDlet for accessing location info from the Nokia LD-3W and sending it to a service. I can't go into detail about what the service does, as that's still work in progress and under wraps. Other GPS modules should be compatible, and I will do testing with more modules later.

The basic functionality of the MIDlet is:

• Discover suitable Bluetooth devices and let the user select one of them. The selection is saved for later sessions, so normally further use requires no user intervention.
• Provide configuration of intervals, coordinate thresholds, service login, etc. This is also saved persistently for the same reason as above.
• Hook up to the GPS module via Bluetooth Serial Port profile.
• Parse and convert the incoming NMEA-formatted GPS info.
• Convert coordinates to decimal values (no minutes and seconds anymore) for easy use later.
• Convert all else to metric units for consistency.
• At given intervals and given conditions (enough satellites, enough movement from previous place, etc) send GPS information to a user's account at the backend service.
• Inform the phone user of what's been sent etc. This might be removed later.

I noted that discovering Bluetooth devices can take a long time on some phones (sometimes 15 seconds). Yet, this is only needed once if the same module is used all the time.

On the three phones I had access to I noted different Bluetooth behavior on all of them, and in one case I couldn't find a workaround at all, as the Bluetooth implementation simply couldn't handle the streamed traffic from the GPS module. It was an older phone, but many still have that model. On another phone the transfer simply stopped after a while, and I spent a long time figuring this out. This is a clear sign the testing of Java implementations is not adequate.

Right now the application requires CLDC 1.1, as I use floating point. It also requires MIDP 2.0. Most phones with Bluetooth have support for CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 as well, but not all. There's really nothing stopping me from stepping down to CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 1.0, by using a floating or fixed point class. I could even send the raw GPS info and do no numeric processing at all in the MIDlet, but then I wouldn't be able to handle e.g. position thresholding. The generic GPS class I developed would then also be less useful for other applications.

I almost choked when I started reading this note, until I realized 'WAP – The Underestimated Mobile Gaming Platform of the Future' is a badly disguised advertisement for HandyGames, and now I also realize I help them further. Oh heck...

It has a few sensible things to say though:

• not many WAP game providers exist (but maybe for a reason; see below)
• high level of cross-device compatibility (read: the same game works on most phones, as there's simply nothing running on the phone; the browser takes care of the interaction)
• HandyGames has an infrastructure for speeding up WAP game development

The note doesn't mention though that interaction in a browser-based game is way worse then in e.g. a Java or Flash Lite game, and action games simply can't be done in WAP (feel free to prove me wrong). When I come to think of it, there are not that many games that fit for pure browser access.

It should be noted that Java and Flash Lite games can communicate effectively with a server, so if you want centralized high score lists etc, that can be easily done. What remains are issues with cross-device compatibility (Java) and availability (Flash Lite).

'GPS alternatives take flight' describes that Russia will launch 8 navigation satellites in the short term (24 in total later), Russia hopes they won't have to rely on GPS in the future, and they intend to provide their service to enterprises and consumers.

China is doing the same, yet the European Galileo system is currently on hold. In any case the U.S. military/defense (you choose) controlled GPS will not be the only choice for navigation in the future, which the article indicates will have political implications, as USA then can't use GPS as a diplomatical weapon.

There's no indication of better function in cities and in-doors in this new system. My own experiments show that the GPS precision is much lower (up to 30-40 meters) when only 3 satellites can be 'seen'. In most cases there's no reception at all in-doors, which is as per spec, but still annoying as in-doors navigation has many applications.

Quote: "Everything that moves will use a navigation signal - airplanes, trains, yachts, people, rockets, valuable animals and favorite pets."

Quote: "A receiver must be in line of sight of no fewer than three satellites at any time to triangulate an accurate position. A fourth satellite is needed to calculate altitude."
This is the same as for GPS, still supposedly 24 satellites are required to cover the whole world.

The short answer is no. The long(er) answer is below:

Interestingly some Web 2.0 and Mobile Web 2.0 advocates are starting to feel a bit shaky about what it's all about (at least the ones in the listed articles). It's not strange, as the Web 2.0 term has no clear boundaries, Mobile Web 2.0 even less: It doesn't describe specific services, except that it has to do with abstracting the Web to content publishing (and user-generated such) and Web applications, rather than more or less static pages. Neither does it describe specific technologies, even though AJAX is often mentioned for Web 2.0 (but is of course not needed for creating Web 2.0-type services).

It gets even more foggy when talking Mobile Web 2.0, as mobile phones don't support AJAX and other similar "Web 2.0 supposed-need-to-haves" today. It's also arguable whether you can reap much of the benefits of AJAX on a small mobile phone display. Also, and most importantly, the phone's browser is not used much today for interaction. Rather most such interactive services are handled by native phone applications (e.g. for SMS, e-mail and chat) or MIDlets.

The World Wide Web is based on numerous different technologies and its different uses are vast. We are at a point where you could compare with an abstraction like a 'house' (that can be configured in many different ways, but all of them are 'houses'). No one would think of a concept called "House 2.0", but on the Web there seems to be such a need. Reasons being to provide concept abstraction, create hype, interest investers, do self-promotion, increase company value etc.

Before Web 2.0 was coined for the first time there were chat rooms and forums (actually many years before that). There were also "build your own site" services (including mobile such), and blog engines etc. In terms of Web applications there were Java applets (for games, stock charts etc).

On one hand such terms can firm up service concept definition and technology definition (providing a direction), but they can also hinder other more "crazy" technologies to evolve, as people don't 'understand' them, because they are not covered by the given term. In the case of mobile the latter part is especially destructive, as you need to use what's in phones now to create future mobile services. You can't just rely on things that take years to become deployed, and certainly not e.g. AJAX, unless your aim is only to create hype. If you control the solution end-to-end you can use whatever technologies you like. See e.g. Skype.

If anyone wonders: There's no written specification for Web 2.0 and much less so Mobile Web 2.0. There are books and there are opinions, but no agreed-to specification. Period.

Wireless Wanders:
Is Mobile Web 2.0 more Hype?
a kind of follow-up:
Does Mobile Web 1.0 really exist?
and the real one (answering to Ajit Jaokar):
Sticking to the definition of Mobile Web 2.0…

Knowledge Forward:
What I Don’t Like About the “Web 2.0” Label

Update 20070410: I have to admit, providing an API (or rather protocol) like Twitter, Skype etc have done, is always a good thing to create added value for users and delegate the workload: If the service becomes popular there's always a lot of developers that want to make free add-on tools for such a service.

Update: After reading through others posts it's obvious that the principles can be utilized for other than transient presence info. Rather you can multicast any kind of short messages, and without the cost of SMS. That's nothing new: There are lots of services providing 'SMS' over HTTP, that normally also provide a chat log etc. I'll sign up and see if I can make sense of it :).


I'm new to Twitter, so the following probably sounds a bit lame, but when I read the following at the Twitter home page "...answering one simple question: What are you doing?" I just wonder why anyone would use this service. Why would you tell anybody else what you are doing, when you are doing it, unless you have absolutely nothing else to do (which in itself is a contradiction). It's to me a useless distortion of the presence concept used for IM. It's actually not even presence, as it's not a live representation of whether you are available, busy etc.

To me it's therefor even more peculiar that there are so many tools available for accessing Twitter information 'All Twitter tools and mashups in one place', which includes a few mobile applications. You can send messages from a mobile phone via SMS, but also from a PC. Messages are therefor limited to 140 characters.

In a sense it's like a micro-blog service: It's easier than ever to post information noise. Sorry guys, but I don't understand the purpose of this service, even for leisure use.

I'm sure Twitter will be acquired for a gazillion dollars anyway, due to all registered users, and I'm also sure there will be books published based on Twitter "diaries".

Oddly though there's no advertizing or any other revenue stream involved, so is this another one of those Web 2.0 "complete lack of business model" services? E.g. the revenue from the SMSs is absorbed by the operators, not Twitter.

It's one of the simplest community services you can set up, so expect a lot of copy cats. There's e.g. Jaiku.

See also:

RIP Twitter (2007-2007)

Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time

RIP Twitter?

RIP twitter? Tarot cards 2.0

RIP Twitter - A Rebuttal

Is this the new Tamagotchi or does it have a life after the hype 'honey moon'?

The Visual Studio Express series tools don't have all the features of the Standard and Professional editions, but for smaller projects they should be quite sufficient. I'm using the Expess versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++, and I don't complain.

Visual C++ Express might be sufficient for e.g. Symbian OS and Windows Mobile application development, but I haven't checked.

Is this a response to Eclipse and NetBeans and/or the fact that the alternative for many economically challenged students and hobbyists would be to download the tools from Piratebay or similar?