Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Android phones on the horizon
You know about the HTC G1 and the new and slimmer Magic of course, and they are soon out with more.
Other phones spotted:
Samsung i7500 Google Android Phone Offers T-Mobile 3G Support
LG plans Android phone by June, two more by end of year
BlackBerry will be completely OTA upgradeable
(OTA as in Over-The-Air)
At a seminar held by RIM and Telenor I was told that the upcoming 5.0 system software will support upgrading of both downloaded applications as well the complete phone system software over-the-air. This will be a great help for the IT departments struggling with keeping phones in line with what runs of the server, and as an easy way to add features and bug fixes without manual intervention.
Telenor also mentioned there’s need for more localized software for BlackBerry, as most software available now is in English, and might not be adapted to local regulations etc either, so the speaker from Telenor made an open invitation to developers to contact them for partnering possibilities.
RIM hasn’t had much success in the Nordic countries, which is a bit strange, but overall PDA-like phones haven’t had that much success here. Telenor meant it’s changing now, albeit not very fast.
Nuance owns the predictive text input market, literally
Nuance recently acquired Zi Corporation, and before that Tegic, the key players in predictive text input technology.
Interestingly, even though the mobile phone market is huge, and Nuance already completely dominates the predictive text input market with close to a billion units of (X)T9 per year (my guess), Nuance’s key market is supposedly speech recognition for vertical markets, which volume-wise is a minuscule market in comparison, and revenue-wise seemingly not a significant market.. What does that say about the profitability of embedded mobile phone software?
Nuance has started a Developer Program, which Mobile Labs (I’m co-founder) has joined, as the offerings are complementing each other.
April 9, 2009 - Nuance Closes Acquisition of Zi Corporation
August 24, 2007 - Nuance Closes Acquisition of Tegic Communications
April 2, 2009 - Nuance Mobile Developer Program Adds 12 Members, Accelerates Development of Mobile Ecosystem
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Might mobile applications for the enterprise be the right answer?
Rich Miner (previously at Google, now with Google Ventures) thinks so, for there to be profit. FierceDeveloper has written some commentary on this, favoring smartphones.
Rich:
- “A business can empower a workforce by giving them a mobile data management cloud. The whole handset could become the workflow for an entire company. The real opportunity is the enterprise.”
- “The good news for mobile developers is that iPhone, Android and Nokia 60 all have the same HTML-based browsers to build dynamic apps.”
Considering he’s working for Google, it’s not surprising he thinks the browser is the “window” to the information and the services instead of downloaded applications, despite the fact that it’s still impossible to access many phone features from the browser. Many applications work though fine via a browser, like time and status reporting, and they are likely to be quicker to adopt (nothing to install etc) and compatible with a lot more phones that way.
As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t need a smartphone for corporate access, even though it clearly and obviously improves the user experience. The question is though how many want to take the expense of giving all workers new phones, especially when the workers have their own phones.
There’s also the question of “point of attack”: It’s a rule of thumb not to address the IT department, but rather management and generally those that need mobile access to corporate information. Provide the services in the cloud, so there’s no need for buying new servers and other things that will make the IT manager lose his lunch and sleep.
FierceDeveloper - An enterprising future for mobile app development?
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Mobile Monday comes to Malmö
Me and a buddy discussed a couple of years ago whether we should set up a MoMo charter for the Malmö/Lund/Copenhagen area, and concluded then we didn’t have the time nor gusto.
Now it’s a fact though, without my help (most likely for the better).
It will start in May and be at Minc’s office each time.
I’ll be there.
Tidbit #1: For those not familiar with Swedish, “ö” is pronounced like “e” in “nerd”. Copenhagen is spelled “København” in Danish, where “ø” sounds the same as “ö”, and is sometimes spelled out as “œ” or “oe”. Malmö is internationally sometimes spelled Malmoe due to this. I agree, the logic is not 100%, so read on.
Tidbit #2: The most southern part of Sweden where Malmö is, is called “Skåne” (“å” pronounced as “o” in boring) was a few centuries ago part of Denmark, so we speak in a strange dialect that people in Stockholm have hard to understand and/or tend to laugh at.
Android 1.5, new and improved
A few highlights:
- Version 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.
- Another site mentioned better camera and GPS performance, support for video recording and Bluetooth stereo.
- Possibility to build for different versions of Android.
According to the Android blog the UI look-n-feel will change, from the very “raw” design in current version, to a more up-to-date look. It will be backwards compatible, to a point, so some applications might need some re-writing. Examples are given.
UI framework changes in Android 1.5
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Easter fun: The mobile phone is a digital Swiss army knife
But this must be a ridiculous comparison, right?
Or isn’t it? How much of your mobile phone’s functionality have you used lately?
More about this monster of a Swiss army knife: Wenger – Giant Knife 2007
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Windows Live Writer and blogging
I recommend all that use Blogger (or any other cloud blog service) to check out Windows Live Writer, that’s an excellent tool for writing blog entries. It’s way better than the browser-based editor, and you also have many more options and even plug-ins that you can make use of while editing, so give it a spin.
Interestingly it adopts the look-n-feel of your blog, so while I’m editing this I get the exact layout, fonts etc of the Mobile News blog.
Windows Live Writer – Writer Zone
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and mobile communication
I recently read the Hitchhiker’s books for probably the 5th or 6th time, and I also read about how the h2g2.com service came about, that Douglas Adams set up right before the IT bubble burst, and that was then acquired by BBC and still exists under that ownership.
In several ways h2g2.com was a very creative idea at the time, consisting of several nowadays household concepts like cloud computing, peer reviews, user-generated content, mobile access, etc.
Interestingly early on DNA and his team had the idea of using mobile phones to access the h2g2.com content. The mobile phone then served as a real life H2G2 terminal, using communication via the mobile network instead of the sub-etha ditto (same, same, but different).
I figure you already see that Wikipedia in many ways made real what h2g2.com set about to do, so actually I would advice BBC to collaborate with Wikipedia (through funding and other means), creating an even better Wikipedia.
I also advice you to check out h2g2.com. It’s certainly not Wikipedia in terms of scope and aim. It’s more like a number of tutorials on different things.
And if you haven’t read the H2G2 books, please do so. Otherwise you are not a geek.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Backdoor features in Sony Ericsson’s featurephones
I’m surprised nothing has been written about these features of some of Sony Ericsson’s newer phones.
Supposedly this should work on all their OSE-based phones (not Symbian or Windows Mobile) that were released during 2008 or later, according to a friend at Sony Ericsson. After this I might not have any friends there. Anyway…
If you enter ‘#speedy’ (as in the keys #773339) and press arrow down 4 times, you will activate HSDPA (as in high-speed downstream 3G), even if the phone is claimed to support only GPRS, EDGE or “normal” 3G. As all mobile radios today are software-programmable I guess this is to simplify production by using the same chips in all phones.
There’s also a code for getting no-cost data transfers (probably used by Sony Ericsson internally while testing in the field): Just enter ‘#outofcash’ (#688632274) and press arrow down 4 times.
I don’t know exactly what models this relates to, but it worked fine on my 760. The question is what operators think of this.
