Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Update 20071002: Stephen Wellman at InformationWeek counters by saying 'The Top Five Reasons The Mobile Web Rocks', using the same topics. The fight is on...


Here's a rant from DigitalMediaWire on the issues with the Mobile Web, with some arguments of my own:

1. Wireless carrier networks are SLOW

True, but I find that using Opera Mini is sensibly fast even on GPRS. Browsing PC web pages on a mobile in a browser that downloads the full content can be a pain even on 3G, and it's expensive.

2. Public WiFi access is a SCAM

Yes it is. No more comment needed. Wireless WAN (like WiMAX) is needed for this to work.

3. Sites aren’t formated for small screens

True:
* There's yet little business incentive to make mobile-optimized sites. At least perceived such.
* Web designers don't understand mobile.

What companies haven't yet grasped is that mobile is everywhere and everytime, while PC is way more locational and occasional. That in itself changes the conditions for services, marketing etc.

4. Mobile device screens are too small

True and comes with the territory. Higher resolution doesn't help, beyond a certain point, as you can't read and see what's on the screen. Bigger screens make the general mobile experience suffer. Hence, there's no ideal way to solve this, but phones that are "all screen", like the iPhone is a good step in the right direction.

5. Advertising gets in the way

Text-only advertising is fine in my opinion, but picture ads can be annoying due to the small screen, but what most people don't know is that the consumer pays for downloading the ads. When talking picture ads, they can easily be larger than the other page content, which will show up on the phone bill.

A few key points:

'attracted a further 8.31 million wireless subscribers in August to touch 201.29 million users'
Note that a few months ago it increased by 6M per month!

'the number of people owning a telephone out of every 100 people -- rose slightly to 21.20 percent by August'
Hence still a lot of market potential, and also the replacement business has just started.

'The government is aiming for more than half a billion mobile phone subscribers by 2010.'

As some might know I'm involved in a start-up called Mobile Labs Sweden AB that implements mobile text output solutions for India, so this is really good news for us.

GISuser.coim provides a listing of free applications for the Nokia N95, some of them using the integrated GPS, e.g. locr, Sports Tracker, Yahoo! Zonetag, twibble and Nokia Maps.

For the few that has a N95, that is.

It's been surprisingly quiet about the 6110 Navigator since its release, that's considerably less expensive than the N95, even though I believe these applications work on the 6110 as well.

According to Rudy de Waele the upcoming Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco is close to sold out.

I guess I need to bury my hatchet about nonsense non-descriptive buzzwords and accept that for some reason the market needs a new catchphrase to describe something that's existed for several years, at least in the minds of industry folks, but less so among the public.

It's not a big conference per se (one day and no parallel tracks), but it looks like the right people are there. The Emerging Technologies slot seems the most interesting.

Mobile 2.0 Conference

Like mobile phones caused a rapid enhancement and miniaturization of e.g. camera and battery technology, toy robots provide a similar effect on gyros, motors and sensors. Unfortunately yet much less so in terms of AI, as most of today's toy robots are either remote controlled or play through pre-set scripts.

I'm still waiting for the small humanoid thinking robots in Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, but meanwhile it makes much more sense to copy much simpler animal, like the fly mentioned below.

One example of a robot that has some learning capability is the Ugobe Pleo.

Technology Review - Robotic Insect Takes Off - Researchers have created a robotic fly for covert surveillance

i-Sobot - supposedly the world's smallest humanoid robot

Ugobe Pleo - (somewhat) self-learning dinosaur-like robot

Interestingly, when looking for the i-Sobot at Amazon, the "also bought" list covers a lot more robots: Amazon - i-Sobot
For instance the Roboreptile can be found in most toy shops nowadays.

Here's a site about toy/home robots: RobotAdvice

I want an i-Sobot for Christmas.

Nowadays everyone talks about mobile TV, Ajax, mobile 2.0 etc, but when looking at what people are actually using and understand, SMS stands out like a pink elephant in an ant farm (you have to be a Swede to fully understand the double pun buried in that phrase).

When talking mobile marketing and value-added services SMS has some very interesting features:

• It's a no-brainer to use
• Service requests are saved in the Sent box, so it's easy to make another request
• Service responses are saved in the Inbox, for easy reference later
• Links to mobile sites can easily be added to SMS's for additional information
• The user doesn't really have to know how to use the browser to make use of such links, provided at all a data connection can be set up
• There's nothing to install
• Absolutely all mobile phones support it, so the reach is all mobile phones
• It's very easy to describe how to use a service this way: Send 'bla bla' to nnnnn

Sounds neat doesn't it.

More about why I bother soon.

Not known to the broader public, but Enpocket is one of the bigger suppliers of SMS-based mobile marketing offerings, and Nokia acquiring them seems like a very good fit as Nokia expands beyond mobile phones and further into mobile services, complementing its previous mobile marketing efforts as well as its location based service efforts.

As previously reported about the Preview, there are a lot of improvements in 6.0. The preview wasn't too reliable, but hopefully the Beta can be used for production programming.

Completely new is the support for Ruby on Rails, but the editor also has significant enhancements. In terms of Mobility the VMD improvements look interesting.

I've just installed it, so more later.

NetBeans ISE 6.0 Beta 1