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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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Widgets getting standardized
A couple of years ago widgets for mobile phones were the craze, but after that nothing really happened. Considering RIM, Samsung and LG are in this collaboration it looks rather promising (read: can survive).
LEADING HANDSET MANUFACTURERS TO SUPPORT THE JOINT INNOVATION LAB (JIL) INITIATIVE
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Creating sweet music, or at least attempting to
Just got my Korg M50 Music Workstation (the 61 key model), replacing my by now pretty dated Korg M1. It’s like a combination of a synthesizer, an arranger and an electronic piano etc. The piano sound is “smack in the face” realistic, and with the plethora of effects and possibilities to tweak the sounds I can get quite aggressive or mellow synth sounds as well.
I’m not a musician by any means, so I got the M50 partly to learn to play better, and specifically the M50 for its vast customizability, yet being an easy to use “ready to go” keyboard at the same time. The Korg M3 would have been even better, but is roughly twice the price. The M3 and M50 share the same sounds, effects and general setup, yet the M3 can also sample, has built in Karma software (available separately as PC software for the M50), has a better keybed etc.
I posted a few entries at Twitizer about it:
Straight from thomann.de in Germany (15-20% cheaper than if bought locally in Sweden, even when including the shipment fee).
What would life be without gadgets?
The setup at the moment: The Korg M50 with a pair of active studio monitors (2x20W) with several inputs, including digital, so I have both the M50 and my guitar and effect box hooked up to the same speakers.
Korg M50 – unpacked and ready to go
My first attempt at mastering the drum tracks, arpeggiators and my fingers. The first two were the easiest.
Korg M50 – my first groove, sort of
Sunday, October 18, 2009
I’m a VB
My Visual Basic programming profile was posted at The Visual Basic Team for all to enjoy/ridicule:
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Android, LiMo 1 – 0
Motorola ditches LiMo for Android
LiMo will be used by Japanese manufacturers for the Japanese market, but that’s about it.
Linux will be more used in mobiles than PCs?
I’m just speculating, but it doesn’t sound far-fetched considering the following information from Net Applications concerning OS’s on PCs:
- Windows total: 90%
- Windows XP: 71.5%
- Windows Vista: 18.8%
- Mac OS X 10.5: 3%
- Linux: < 1%
Clearly Windows (as in WIndows Mobile) has little chance to grow its market share, yet Linux is used in Android, LiMo, WebOS etc etc.
Netbooks were supposed to turn the tide for Linux on the desktop/laptop, and the share for Linux there is probably higher than in other types of PCs (except possibly servers) but as far as I know most customers opt for XP in netbooks.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Time for a teaser
An official teaser for now, translated the best I could:
Motimate is a completely new service that will coach you daily via videos and SMS to your mobile phone and via the Web. When you are ready to do something with your life and live in a more healthy way, we offer you 500 different exercises, 200 training sessions and 50 or so prepared training schedules based on your targets and level of training. Each week you’ll also get meal recommendations and motivation tips from our experienced life coaches, personal trainers, nourishment experts and not the least Paolo Roberto.
The service will initially be available in Sweden, but there are plans to establish in other countries as well.
A Facebook group has been set up for Motimate, where more will be published as we come closer to launch.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Android to dominate by 2012?
Android to grab No. 2 spot by 2012, says Gartner
Interestingly Symbian is expected to hold on until that time. Probably because of the clear dominance it has today in “smartphones”, compensating (for a time) for its age. Nokia will down the road focus on Maemo for advanced phones instead of Symbian.
It should be noted that Android doesn’t have a similar ecosystem as is surrounding Apple iPhone. Apple gets revenue from phone sales and after market music, applications etc. Apple also controls the operators, not the other way around. A privilege traditional phone manufacturers (the audience for Android) don’t have. Google will not get that much revenue from phones or platform sales (read: none), nor after market, unless they completely revamp their after market content strategy, introducing music, audio books, etc (read: anything that can be downloaded to a phone and charged for). It seems to me very unlikely that Google will get similar amounts of revenue as Apple gets from iPhones and related business. Google continues to be in the advertising business, almost completely, so I’m sure they will push that as part of the Android strategy.
For developers, broad success for Android is beneficial, as it will (hopefully) decrease the chances for other Linux based (yet UI/framework incompatible) platforms, including WebOS and LiMo, hence creating a less fragmented application landscape. Apple and Nokia will not use Android, that’s for sure, but most other manufacturers will.
If you haven’t noticed already, there are more mobile platforms than ever, which is both good and bad. Good because there’s continuous competition about the best user experience and developer support, causing an evolutionary jump. Bad because of the many platforms developers need to support (or have to ignore…).
Friday, October 02, 2009
Apple in the movies
In almost every movie from Hollywood there are only Apple computers being used, even though, looking at the market as a whole, this is not at all representative.
Apple supposedly doesn’t pay product placement fees, but instead loans out computers. I guess you can figure out what is the cheapest, and we are talking a huge difference here. They can even move the same computers between movies if they like, as they are not literally used anyway.
Why does the studios agree to this? Why not let for instance Dell get a year of promotion, then go on to Asus etc. Why specifically Apple?
It’s obviously a conscious strategy from Apple, but again, why does the movie industry agree to do this?
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Google Wave is upon us
What Google Wave does is nothing new in its individual parts. It’s the whole that makes it a revolution, and might even make companies turn to e-mail in the cloud, instead of using in-house mail servers, due to the conferencing functionality etc.
It combines at least the following: e-mail, chat, document sharing, wiki, mobile messaging etc.
It’s also supposedly very plug-in friendly.
Google Wave is from today on user trial on invitation.
The video mentions at 25:30 that there will be support for iPhone and Android, and they even show prototypes.
