Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Here's an updated tutorial that shows how to use the new Game Designer tool, as well as basic MIDlet development.

NetBeans 6.0 CLDC/MIDP Development Quick Start Guide

This article in the renowned Swedish business magazine "Dagens Industri" indicates a few trends worth noting:
Telia släpper trimmat turbo-3g: Nu öppnar vi alla kranar

All relevant operators in Sweden are now offering flat-rate turbo-3G (or less) for PCs for approx 200 kr / $30 a month. It's become very popular, and is increasingly used as a complete replacement for broadband communication.

Flatrate subs have been expected for a long while, so no big surprise there really, except that the development has been quite quick since the first operator offered this solution.

More surprising, and also a warning sign for Ericsson, is that most of these 3G "modems" are from Huawei. I expect Huawei to compete overall very effectively with both Ericsson and Nokia, and Ericsson will be the first company to lose out, big time. This is not the time to own Ericsson stock. Sadly I do.

Long overdue, here's a brief note about one of the companies I'm involved in now: mm3 Mobile Channel AB, or simply mm3.

mm3 focuses on response-based marketing via mobile phones. We also do marketing via other channels as a complement, including e-mail and mobile sites. See the Services page for more information about what we offer.

mm3 Mobile Channel AB - making marketing mobile

Either contact me directly, or use the response form to get in touch with us.

I'm breaking the silence for this heads-up:

NetBeans 6.0 is completed and released, and can be downloaded from the NetBeans site.

There are big changes to the Mobility package, so beware if you are in the middle of a project and you try to migrate to 6.0. I advice you to try it on a non-critical or completely new project first, especially if you use Visual Designer, as it's both visually and functionally quite different from before, and after porting my current project I got lots of compilation errors. I didn't analyze it further though. I just concluded I can't risk this project now.

The Analyzer function is welcome, as you didn't even get a warning if there were unused resources before.

There's also Game Builder and SVG Composer, so it's a big step forward.

Here's about the new features in the Mobility package.

Top Mobile Applications 2007 lists what Fierce considers are the best mobile applications, only that these are primarily Internet-based services, not local applications, even though they all have a service frontend of some sort.

Their value rather stems from the fact that they create links between people, in one way or another. That's a good indicator of what types of applications/services people value in a mobile, not saying that these services are all hugely popular.

There was a lot of talk about The New Economy before the IT crash a couple of years ago, but I sense there's something close to it still floating around.

Primarily Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and News Corp are fighting about getting the most advertizing money from web services. This is strictly controlled by the amount of users clicking on ads (voluntarily or in many cases by mistake). The services themselves are typically free of charge except for premium upgrades of the accounts.

That's the foundation.

Around these companies and around the world are 1000s of companies that provide Web 2.0 / UGC services hoping that one day, like fish in a pond, they will be caught by the acquisition hook.

So what reason do the big guys have for acquiring these often in practice not-for-profit services?

To stay on top of the user volume and advertizing revenue pile of course.

So what do they get:

• users (no profit doesn't mean no users; often the most popular services have millions of users)
• service types (even Google is starting to become a dinosaur in terms of innovation, and don't get me started on Microsoft, AOL and News Corp)

Of course if you are the thousandth company that's made a Youtube clone, your chance of being acquired is absolutely zero, but there are other fish to fry in service areas yet unexploited, and it might spell "mobile".

Simply put Mobile Ajax is a version of Ajax that has features for handling the differing and small display sizes and other limitations specific to mobile devices. The FAQ doesn't say anything about access to the camera, Bluetooth etc, so such integration is probably left out. Apart from that, it seems to support the full set of Ajax features: XML/XHTML, DOM editing, CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest. There are still few mobile browsers being deployed that even support JavaScript, so we are not quite there yet.

There's also a relatively objective comparison of Mobile Ajax and the major mobile application platforms Java ME and Flash Lite.

One reason that Mobile Ajax is more compatible across devices than Java ME is that it's much simpler and doesn't access nearly as much phone functionality than Java ME. It's not the only reason though, that I've mentioned a couple of times before, like Java ME being provided by several different suppliers (read: not good for achieving compatibility). A big advantage of Java ME and Flash Lite is that they both work well for off-line applications. Ajax doesn't.

For Ajax based widgets to work really well from an end user perspective the browser should be fully integrated in the phone's UI and even the main (so called "idle") screen, and ideally the whole UI would be browser based, provided it doesn't cripple the user experience.

Mobile AJAX - Frequently Asked Questions

Note that Vivek Jishtu the author doesn't necessarily select the commercially most relevant platform (which Windows Mobile is far from). He still admits that Java ME is the choice for volume deployment.

That doesn't mean Java ME is always the best choice even commercially. If you develop games it certainly is, but if you make premium business etc applications it likely isn't, in part because the applicable phones also run Symbian OS or Windows Mobile that are much more powerful platforms than Java ME. An exception is the Blackberry that supports Java ME.

The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer

The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer - II

BuzzCity (a partner of Abiro while mopill.com was up) made a survey at MoCollywood with participants at the conference about how they used mobile services, and not surprisingly (as they are not in the key target group for such services) the responses were not so positive.

This reminds me of a similar occasion at a MAPOS conference a few years ago where one of the speakers blatantly said something like "A Blackberry is all anyone needs", forgetting that almost all users out in the real reality (the one outside the conference hotel) don't have nor want a Blackberry, or a business phone of any other type.

Over half of mobile content execs don't practice what they preach

Some highlights:

72% of respondents believe that mobile social networking services are only in their infancy as an emerging niche

mobile TV and music downloads were among the highest scores in the never used personally category

38.8% of respondents believed that mobile advertising was the most likely source of revenue generation
Fair, but that requires a reason for users to at all see those ads too.

And a word from a BuzzCity representative:
We know from our experience with MyGamma, our mobile social network, that there are emerging markets, such as Africa and Eastern Europe, who do not have easy access to the internet via a PC and want to be involved in a social network by their mobile phone.
Add China and India to that.

Acquiring both NAVTEQ and Enpocket is a sure sign Nokia takes location and advertizing seriously and intends to become a leader in such for mobile phones. Maybe they've already figured out that in-car navigators is a tiny market compared to mobile navigators and mobile location based services. As phones are always on-line (at least in theory) up-to-date info could be pushed down e.g. to accomodate location-based advertizing. I'm not sure users would applaud that, but in combination with useful information, it might be acceptable as a way to cut the cost of the service.

Nokia, the internet company, is advertising going to be a major part of the new strategy? hints that advertizing will be the main driver for Nokia, but the connection to location is murky at best. In terms of Enpocket it's all clear as mobile marketing is their turf.

It mentions also Java ME as a means for mobile advertizing, forgetting that MMS is in most phones today, and requires nothing new in the phone to be used for advertizing. It can even be used for user generated content in the other direction, again without having to install anything extra. I guess I should defend Java ME here, but tools should be used for the tasks they are designed for, or at least needed for.