techype

Spinvox

2009-07-17T16:32:00.003+01:00

Some interesting news on Spinvox, a company who's MWC stand design I have always rated as top notch - after $100m funding, with 250 employees, they appear to be struggling to pay salaries. Instead, they seem to be offering employees share options instead of salaries - I am in all in favour of offering share options on top of wages, but instead? Can you eat options somehow?

More worrying is the suggestion that the more big deals they get (having already got some huge ones with Telefonica), the more funding they need - which makes their voice recognition technlogy sound a little unscalable... read the comments and find out why: almost all of the recognition is done by humans, hence the need for such a headcount and lack of scalability / chance of profitability.

Big confidence trick on the VCs? That seems a little harsh, but you have to question why they rate themselves so highly :)

More On Skyfire

2009-01-06T21:43:00.002Z

I wrote previously about what I thought about smartphone-only browser Skyfire's chances to make any money for its investors, but at that point I hadn't properly used it. I just did, on a Nokia E61 (3G S60 smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, not very nice to use itself but modern and relatively high spec), and I can't say I was overly impressed.
In theory it has the best AJAX support of any browser - in practice it proved why AJAX is not fit for mobile UIs yet. I ran a quick test on Flickr, the kind of site that ought to be in the standard test suite for web 2.0 browsers I'd have thought, and tried to tag a photo (which uses some funky AJAX, for those that don't have Flickr accounts).
It took me about 2 minutes to navigate through to a photo - various clicks did not do what I expected (ie. what they do on a desktop) - during which time I decided that the zooming system is quite clever, but ultimately quite annoying and not as good as a nicely reformatted page which takes account of the screen size (like Webkit / Opera) or indeed anywhere near as nice as a pinch and zoom iPhone affair.
Despite the browser emulating a mouse pointer (I always dislike this as a UI system with handsets that don't have proper pointing hardware), CSS rollovers weren't shown at all which is a shame as the new Flickr home page makes very good use of them when showing you recent events.
On reaching the photo I wanted to tag, I clicked on the 'Add a tag' link and waited. And waited. (A simultaneous test on my laptop on another photo suggested it was not Flickr slowing things down). After 4-5 seconds a textbox appeared, I entered the tag, clicked 'Add' and waited several more seconds. Then the tag appeared.
So on the one hand, Skyfire handled the AJAX as well as it could within the constraints of the handset. But on the other, whilst faster than reloading whole pages, the AJAX experience wasn't exactly super quick and responsive - something I find essential for me to bother using AJAXy features on a real PC.
The AJAX speed isn't Skyfire's fault of course, it just shows the limitations of the medium - many years after 3G was launched it still isn't widespread and still isn't fast. Maybe HSDPA will work better, but the whole experience didn't convince me that I want to do anything serious in a mobile browser any year soon...

Trutap - Riot-E for the IM Generation

2008-12-08T17:17:00.003Z

I was just commenting on Tom Hume of Future Platform's riposte to everyone's favourite pundit, Ajit, over the rapid and expensive demise of Trutap, when it struck me - Trutap has to be this bubble's version of Riot-E.

For those who don't know, Riot-E were the original mobile badboys/money wasters - these guys were so visionary, they signed up the rights to the Bridget Jones mobile game for a six figure sum back when mobile games were SMS-based (and tiny). They had giant dollops of Nokia cash and they spunked it left, right and centre with little to show for it at the end except some great stories - such as the time the CEO started naked wrestling in covered in olive oil in one of Helsinki's top restaurants, realised he couldn't buy his way out of it, and so led the whole company on a naked charge through the centre of town back to the office. But hey, they do that sort of thing in Scandinavia. The documentary is excellent and well worth a watch for anyone interested in either tips on how to invest VC cash for maximum fun, or an insight into the Finnish psyche (things get messy at the end).

The point being - you have to hope there are some amazing stories of champagne jacuzzis in private jets to explain how that $14.5m got spent, because there is no rational way a boring conventional company should spend that much to create what in the end is a <$1m fancy JavaME IM and social network aggregation client. Sadly I haven't heard any stories of this nature - so Trutap people, if they exist please share!

Stop Press: Not Everything At 3 Is Illogical

2008-11-14T13:28:00.002Z

Frank Meehan, CEO of 3 UK's custom handset manufacturer INQ, is sounding dangerously like he (and hopefully, by extension, 3) have some sort of clue. This would be dangerous new territory for an operator, hitherto not known for getting much except the value of fat voice revenues.

I clicked on the link explaining the new 3 Facebook phone with some trepidation, expecting it to be the standard load of 2.0 rubbish, but was met with the following quote:

"Communications is what the mobile industry should be about. The industry has forgotten its core roots; to make communication easy. Operators are trying to take over music, take over the camera business. They've totally missed out on what has been the key driver – the Internet. Most packages are voice and text. Yet on the PC, you have email, social networking, VoIP."

I'm not especially inclined to think nice things about people who harp on about social networking and anything with a version number, but this does signal that INQ are exploring an interesting direction which ought to be a natural extension of a personal communications device for the mainstream. If they really can get 3 to buy in with "affordable, transparent pricing" then they may be onto something.

Whilst I'd love to leave this post as a purely positive one, there is the minor problem of what will happen when people actually start using mobile data - something that has been concerning Dean Bubbley recently, quite rightly.

I think the real fun will start when operators find it impossible not to offer affordable flat rate data, and people actually use it - they will be stuck between commercial pressure to cut data tarifs and buckling infrastructure requiring major upgrades (to the backbone as well as a general expensive move to 4G). Throw in increased pressure on the bread and butter voice, SMS and roaming prices just in time for a long deep recession, and you have a rather potent problem brewing. Maybe the time to get out of operator shares...

3 Ways To Buy a SkypePhone S2 On 3

2008-11-13T12:01:00.003Z

A friend just tried to upgrade his SkypePhone to the new Skypephone S2 on the 3UK network - he is 14 months in to an 18 month contract. The prices he could pay:

£105 to upgrade 4 months early (with all the lock-ins of a new contract);
£76 to purchase a reconditioned used handset;
£60 to buy a brand new Pay As You Go handset (which he could use with his contract SIM).

Would anyone at 3 like to explain how that possibly makes sense?

I guess at least if you buy the reconditioned one it ought to work, wheras maybe the new PAYG one will have to take a trip to the repair shop before it's usable?

Carnival

2008-11-11T14:49:00.003Z

Ubiquitous Thoughts decided to include our last post on this week's Carnival of the Mobilists despite the cynicism, nice :)
This week's Carnival also has some other good posts, and something from Ajit.

iSkoot Pull Fast One on VCs

2008-11-07T15:15:00.002Z

Congratulations today must go to iSkoot, "the company that brought Skype to mobile phones" (well technically, only one of the companies to do that as Skype themselves have done it too, as have a whole raft of other companies with even shallower business models than Skype itself).

They have now raised a $19m third round of funding from some people in suits, bringing their total ~~fleecing~~ investment up to $33m.

The purpose for this cash injection was to build an applications platform for AT&T. Presumably AT&T want this platform so much, they won't pay for it - but presumably the suits think it is worth at least $19m, and probably a lot more. AT&T have 71.4m customers right now, and operators usually give say a 30-40% revenue share to the people who do the work, so $19m would need $47.5m in sales, which is 66 cents per customer. If you wanted to also beat the interest rate a bank would give you on the same cash, you'd probably need to up that sale price; if you wanted a profit (shock, horror, etc) you'd want to clear over a dollar from every single AT&T customer.

Decide for yourself how ambitious that sales target is, given the usual proportion of customers who download premium applications for their phones on any given network (excluding the early iPhone App Store goldrush, that is, which AT&T can't access).

So - what is this app platform that will generate so much revenue? It's a service to bring "social networking, email, RSS feeds and eventually services like Twitter" onto low-end phones. Right. Forgive me but isn't Twitter (aside from being pointless and loss making) already available, through the wonder of SMS (that extremely high margin data service that operators love above all others)? Are AT&T crying out for services that cannibalise those SMS revenues by generating greater use of GPRS/3G bandwidth (given away for near-free these days, but costing the operator a lot to maintain and scale infastructure)?

OK, but what about the other (more useful) services? RSS and email have been available on all feature phones for a while, and things like the GMail Java app can be used even on the pretty low-end devices.

But wait! There's a USP! iSkoot have a very special magic at their disposal which allows them to integrate deeply into every phone - "Skype, for example, is so deeply embedded in the software stack that Skype contacts are integrated directly into the phone's address book". Would you pay $1 to have your Facebook contacts added to your phone? Personally no (all the ones I know well enough to talk to on the phone are already in there), but maybe some people would. But how is this deep deep deep integration achieved?

Well, the conventional way on the GSM range of handsets supplied by AT&T would be to use the JSR75 PIM API from inside JavaME, available (to any developer) on most of the mid- to high- end devices (and probably a few of the low-end ones too). Not really a $19m USP then...

Could it be something more? Well, iSkoot do appear to have done some of the customisation of the Skype-branded Amoi launched on 3 in some territories a while back. V1 was pretty flaky but a good effort if you have a high tolerance for bugs in your phone's UI - I haven't tried V2 yet... this does indeed feature a lot of customisation, achieved through a lot of customisation effort. This much customisation could be ordered by an operator with AT&T's clout, though doing it to their range are off-the-shelf Nokias, SEs, Motos, Samsungs etc would slow down handset launches, increase the risk of bugs and recalls (this has happened to Orange a few times with their simple front page rewrites) and cost a hell of a lot. iSkoot may well be able to do the work, but would AT&T want them to? It would appear AT&T at the very least don't want to pay for it...

Of course, I'm sure I'm not seeing the big picture here, every operator in the world will need this so there's got to be a hockey stick graph in the PPT somewhere - but, as most of the companies like Facebook are bringing themselves to mobile quite happily, Twitter is custom designed for SMS, etc etc, I remain uncertain why the whole world will need this $19m platform.

Please, someone, show me the light! Or if that is impractical, send me $19m to the usual address and I'll see if I can come up with something similarly world beating...

Pepsi Roll Out Massive Proof That QR Codes Don't Work Outside Japan

2008-11-05T17:49:00.003Z

Pepsi UK have been persuaded to roll out a massive QR code promotion on cans of toothrot, which should hopefully prove once and for all that slick marketing agency types should not be trusted, and QR codes are a waste of time outside of Japan. This is not news but I reckon this may be the biggest amount of money wasted proving it in the UK...

I ran into someone at an event a few weeks back who had a QR code attached to her name badge, and one on her business card - guessing the answer, I asked her why. She said I could quickly snap it with my phone to get her contact details... then did admit that actually, in her experience, they often came across with the wrong number and some other info missing. She was hot and I was borrowing the new N96 for the night which in theory has native barcode integration (Nokia have offered this in S60 for some time) so I decided to give it a go anyway. Three minutes later we concluded that the photo app didn't seem to be recognising the barcode at all (bad light? user error? who knows) and that just handing over a piece of card is not without its advantages.

The point being - only one major UK phone platform has native QR codes, and it isn't yet sufficiently mature to "just work" like the ubiquitous readers in Japan. Users won't type in a URL to download and install a dedicated app simply to avoid typing in a URL or number, so... those who in theory can do this actually can't, and the rest won't bother to try. Plus ça change...

Same Old, Same Old

2008-10-30T09:05:00.003Z

So it would appear that the iPhone App Store success had more to do with scarcity of apps at the start than a sustainable exciting new model, which shouldn't really be a surprise. It's the same thing that has cursed all other mobile app portals, though having a PC-based iTunes interface has helped a bit.

Moto on Touch - plus ca change...

2008-10-16T21:57:00.007+01:00

Having just been rude about Samsung's touch attempts, I should add that Moto have thrown their own new effort into the mix - the Krave ZN4 (singalling some new sort of naming convention from Moto, keeping the weird spelling but relaxing the four letter word rule).

What's so special?

It has a dual touch screen. Get this - not just a main touch screen, like normal phones, but a second transparent flip down cover which is also a touch screen! Because... like... you can flip it down to lock the phone, but it doesn't lock! So... WTF, I give up.

Feels like my much hated old RAZR2 V8, which had two QVGA screens (both of which lit up when the handset was open, contributing to terrible battery life) and a set of controls which allowed your pocket to turn the ringer off without you knowing, reply to texts without opening the phone, etc

How American - expensive inefficient redundancy to do things you didn't really need to do, very slightly quicker than you could otherwise have done, whilst missing the basics and burning extra power to get there.

Still, at least it isn't another RAZR...

Samsung Touchscreens

2008-10-16T21:43:00.003+01:00

You know a technology has hit the mainstream when Nokia gets round to adopting it - touchscreens have now clearly hit that point.

Samsung got in a bit earlier, so what are they up to?

Well, if you use the Tube you won't have been able to escape ads for the Omnia, and just before that they were pushing the Tocco hard. The spec sheets look different - the Omnia runs WinMob, the Tocco runs the the proprietary Samsung OS with touch stuff kind of shoehorned in; the Omnia has that bendy touchscreen technology you can be quite accurate with if you have long fingernails, the Tocco has that hard one which is fat finger only.

With all these differences, it is great to know that Samsung have managed to create a consistent experience from both - they're both shockingly bad. Oh, witht he same ugly icons. But it is the user experience that will enrage you til you swap your SIM out.

The Tocco has some stupid widgets on the front page, which allow you to drag around an icon that when clicked lets you change the background image (which you can't see any more, because the icon covers half of it) - but can't be extended to put custom things you actually want on it. Like a poor gimmick that you tire of in under a minute, rather than a good feature. The rest - well, it's the normal Samsung UI, but with touch. That pretty much describes the thought put in, and it works as well as it sounds.

The Omnia forgoes the usual WinMob stylus, but, stupidly, doesn't really customise the UI very much at all keeping the fiddly icons and widgets you just can't click with a finger - you need a stylus. The customisation does extend into the UI a bit though - they have the useless widget thing on the front page, and three different styles of scroll control depending on what screeen you're on - WinMob standard, some sort of tiny up/down arrows in the centre of the footer (impossible to independently hit without a stylus, and poor scrolling so you really don't know where you're going) plus a sort of thin scrollbar with a side button which pops up. It doesn't work well so don't worry trying to work out what I mean. There are many times when you're presented with a WinMob dialogue with six links packed together in a tiny fraction of the 240x400 screen, which is otherwise empty, and you just can't choose which one ends up being selected when you press the screen. If there is a usability / user experience team, now would be a good time to quit in shame.

Shockingly, LG (of all people) managed to create a better UI with the Prada a year back, and Samsung still haven't beaten their countrymates. LG even released a dev site last week - times really are changing...

Apple won't be worried.

Designer Confusion

2008-09-24T15:45:00.005+01:00

Apparently, "Since its March 2007 debut the Prada Phone by LG has been recognized as one of the world's most sophisticated handset combining innovative design with technological breakthroughs including the first complete touch screen."

Yes, that's right, the first complete touch screen ever. On anything? Well I assume they, like everyone else, know all about the touchscreen microwave in 2001 so they probably just mean the first on a mobile handset. Because of course all touchscreens on handsets prior to 2007, from 2000's Ericsson R380 through the Sony-Ericsson P800 and right the way on up to 2006's HTC TyTN were not, in fact, complete touch screens. No, they were all bereft of something, despite offering touch recognition over their entire screens. Possibly a designer logo or something.

It certainly has nothing to do with a lack of buttons, because the Prada has three on the front and a whole load round the edge. It may be to do with finger control instead of the more conventional stylus favoured by the UIQ and Windows Mobile devices that came before it - but that would assume some sort of definition of 'complete' hitherto unknown to me...

Alternatively, the press release may purely talking about phones that might be owned by people who would actually buy something because it had 'Prada' written on it. That is understandable, of course - the plebs really aren't worthy of consideration, and the P800 was certainly not marketed at the world's fashionistas.

How Many App Stores Does The World Need?

2008-09-17T12:37:00.002+01:00

Can anyone replicate the success of the Apple iTunes App Store? Plenty are trying in the standard 'me too' world of the press release and the 'visionary' VC, but have they a hope in hell?

Arguably, Apple have only managed to be successful with wireless applications because they have tethered them to the PC, requiring cable-based syncing from a desktop app in much the same way that the geekier mobile customers have been doing with GetJar and Handango for years. Heaven forbid a user might want to bypass the desktop tether – that's not what the wireless experience is about, after all.

They can only do this for two reasons – the device treats apps as first class citizens in the very simple UI structure, encouraging use, and because iTunes already existed as an essential part of the handset's infrastructure. iTunes existed long before the iPhone and its App Store, and for a very compelling reason – a music player is no good without music, and digital music is the sort of content that must be synced between a player and a bigger storage system, which means a desktop computer. Apple executed both the hardware and the software well at a critical turning point in the market, and now owns that market (though arguably iTunes is only a so-so music management tool, and took ages to sell very much).

Wither the recent app stores, then, without this strong heritage and compelling existing service to piggyback on?

Blackberry may have a chance. Much like the iPhone, Blackberry users are a very loyal niche in the marketplace with very specific needs, cash rich and tied to their devices. As a glorified email machine, it is tied to the desktop and there are existing mechanisms for corporate rollout of apps etc, along with a well known and easy to use development system (OK, it's god awful for developers, but it is possible to write apps with minimal fuss).

Microsoft have dropped the ball for so long it has probably rolled off somewhere and can't be picked up again. The platform is buried under custom UIs these days, and has no coherent customer base, pushed on the one hand to US business users and on the other to PAYG users as own-brand operator handsets like the SPV, the XDA etc. Seems a remote forlorn hope an app store would in any way revive it, even though the desktop sync experience can be better than average for contacts and the like.

Android has no users. One day that will change, but by how many? Hard to say right now.

The rest probably won't be seeing iTunes App Store numbers, ever.

The operators hurriedly announcing app stores are making non-announcements, they have had app stores for ever in the form of their stifling content portals. They can send out BREW or Java apps just as well as they can send out games, and in many cases have been doing so. They have long been poor at content discovery and they serve a wide range of devices which most developers can't effectively address (though it is quite possible to do so if you know what you are doing).

The handset manufacturers probably will try and compete, probably by rehashing their current game portals, which do very little business as far as I am aware. Buys them a press release but not much more.

Nokia are the obvious exception here, as they have been aggressively pursuing a service strategy in the form of Ovi, and they have enormous market share (a lower percentage than Apple's iPods, but vastly more shipped units). Could Nokia emulate iTunes in this respect?

It is possible. They could. But they won't.

Apple has sold primarily music devices – the iPhone is an extension of this, and probably some users don't use it much for music (or video and other media consumption), but even if they don't those same users must still use iTunes to update firmware, and just to charge the battery over the USB cable. Apple have managed to make firmware updates so simple users actually don't mind doing them, something Nokia has never managed despite some serious effort, releasing firmware so buggy it's amazing any user could stand to use it without an upgrade – 6600 anyone? So we can probably concede that most users of the iPhone will have synced at least a little music with it, and will probably have been familiar with iTunes from their iPods even if not – very few non-technical grannies bought iPhones, but plenty have bought Nokias (mine, for example). The App Store then becomes a natural extension of this default behaviour.

Nokia has sold plenty of music players, just like it has sold plenty of cameras and GPS units. I have some. I've personally barely used the camera on my phone and never used the other features, however, and I suspect I am not alone in this (though many consider me to be somewhat akin to the Amish in this respect). You buy a Nokia because they used to be easy to use, and you naively hope they still are. Or because you tried a Motorola once and suddenly realised even the new Nokias aren't that bad. Why would you sync with your PC? It's just a communications device, often supplied without a data cable, and one which is very unrewarding to sync with (though it has got better). You can (and should) back up your contacts, but the number of Facebook “I've lost my phone, please send me your contact details” groups I have seen suggests many people don't. There's no driver like there was with iTunes, and retro fitting one to leverage even new handset sales will be an immense challenge that requires considerable more focus than Nokia have thus brought to bear.

A closed iTunes clone will not work. As discussed, there is not enough compelling reason to use it. It will be forever niche, and a small unprofitable niche probably.

What Nokia could try and embrace is a fully open system – turning Ovi into an iTunes equivalent which is better, easier to use and works with any device from low-end Nokia through Samsungs, Lgs, Motorolas (do they still exist) and even including iPhones. Seamless out of the box syncing, via cable or OTA. No stupid constraints. Fully integrating and working alongside popular web services, instead of replacing them. Open to all developers with a clear revenue stream and good support.

Exactly the approach they are not taking, in fact, preferring awkward me-too software replicating every function that already exists, in a closed and inferior way. I won't change my calendar system because I bought a new Nokia, but I might actually bother to sync my calendar to my phone for the first time ever if I plug in a USB cable and it just happens. Nokia don't appear to know this, and until they do they will fail.

In turbulent times such as these, I think investing in a million App Stores is completely foolhardy – so if you are considering it, don't, you're better off following the Motley Fool's advice to “buy shares in companies that sell cheap alcoholic beverages, and pubs. They always storm in with good returns when the economy goes t*ts-up!”. Really.

Oysters, Chickens, Eggs, NFC

2008-09-02T12:47:00.004+01:00

O2's trial of using NFC handsets to interface into London Tube's Oyster card payment network was apparently a resounding success, which is great news for two groups of people - those who make NFC chips (currently in almost no non-Japanese handsets), and those who hang out next to Tube stations waiting to steal phones (a large special interest group, if the Metropolitan Police's poster campaigns are to be believed).

Any sharp-eyed thief will now know exactly what handset Tube users have and which pocket they keep it in, which will certainly help them restrict pickpocketing to the higher-end , higher-value devices.

The silver cloud in this potential orgy of phone theft being, of course, that almost no handsets available in the UK have NFC, and there are almost none on the current release schedules either - a situation which has been the status quo for some time. Nokia have now released three special NFC-edition handsets over the years (each replacing the last), but these aren't generally supplied to users by UK networks - they can be bought unbranded at full retail price for anyone who wants one.

Without any NFC services, not even early adopters will pay a premium for a mid-range handset just to get an NFC chip, and without any users no services are rolled out, etc etc. Oyster could conceivably be a big enough kick-start to the market that manufacturers will start to build the chips into every handset - as analysts have predicted will happen for some time (just like mobile TV and so many other mobile services which have failed to gain users). However, given the relative market sizes of the entire GSM market and the Tube core regular users, I'm not holding my breath...

If Your Soft Keys Are Labelled 'Menu' and 'Options', What Should You Expect?

2008-07-28T12:16:00.003+01:00

Just spotted Punchcut via some blog post or other, a 'mobile UI specialist' allegedly. Clicking on their mCommerce showcase link you are presented with a series of screenshots which show they are approaching from a graphic design point of view, with no real clue about mobile UIs:

So what's wrong here?

Why is 'Buy' written on every track name next to a button like icon? That's real estate that could be used to show, maybe, longer track names (conspicuously absent from these examples but very common in real life)? Because this doesn't look like a touch screen app, so they perform no other logical function - just clutter which would make sense on a desktop but useless and confusing here.
The soft keys are labelled Menu and Options, respectively. What's the difference? Does Options display something that isn't a menu, and if so what exactly? Which would you press if you actually wanted to buy a track?
How do you switch between the sections along the orange strip along the top - and why is the current one highlighted in such a low contrast way, which would be invisible on many screens? How do you move up and down the track listing on the second shot? Is the blue highlighted bar the track being played, or the selected track? It's all thrown together to look good in a screenshot, but it isn't clear how it would actually work in an interactive context - which is supposed to be what these guys are experts at.

Mobile is becoming a fashionable area to work in, but it takes a lot more than Photoshop skills to design a good mobile UI - in fact I'd say Photoshop is probably the last thing a mobile app designer should be allowed near, as it encourages rigid pixel-by-pixel thinking which doesn't port well.

Nokia UI Best Practices - riiight

2008-06-27T09:44:00.002+01:00

Nokia became #1 in handsets for a few reasons, but one was the fact that the early breakthrough phones were very easy to use. I remember my old 3210 was a revelation compared to the NEC brick which preceded it. People still say today they purchase Nokias off the back of that reputation for ease of use - I'd love to know whether they continue to do so after an upgrade to S60, but the latest S40 edition justifies that faith still (though it went a bit wobbly for a while, I'd say).

However, I would still say that most people in Nokia do not get the importance of a good UI - including (presumably) all of the S60 design committee. I came across another stunning example of UI design with the new S40 edition 5 emulator, which attempts to show a scale picture of a real phone around the QVGA emualtor screen - but it does it in a window which is fixed at a height that can only show half the emulator:

Even if your monitor is taller than the 767px the window is fixed at (and these days, almost all are), you still have to jump to the scroll bar and scroll down to be able to press any button (even the up/down roller on my mouse mapped to up/down key presses in the emulator, causing lots of unplanned key events and frustration). Furthermore if you press a key, like say '1' on your PC's keyboard, it doesn't pass in the same key code as clicking the '1' on the emulator keypad (which is the ASCII for the digit 1, like a real phone) - instead you get some ridiculous key code which crashes the MIDP getGameAction method.

The whole mess is utterly ridiculous and infuriating. There's no need for the whole phone image, or the lovely whitespace around it - just show a QVGA screen and some semblance of a keypad, all visible at the same time - and map the keypad properly. Showing the phone gives a false sense of confidence that the emulator may behave like the phone itself, which it doesn't (fully).

Which brings us to the Nokia 'Mobile Design Showcases' doc they just released. As you may have expected from the intro here, I don't agree with all of it - though some of the showcase 'best practice' apps are excellent.

I saw the PDF shortly after trying out Fring, one of the showcase apps, on a Nokia E61 - possibly the perfect phone for this type of app. Under the hood, they have done an excellent job integrating with Skype etc - great job. The UI, however... not so good. Huge wasted opportunity in fact. It functions, but really it could be loads better - it's all LCDUI forms and custom items.

So another UI win for Nokia. Will the S60 UI get better now they fold in the UIQ (initially easy to use, but rapidly worsening by v3) and MOAP (shocking, just shocking) design teams? Given that more than half of the team at UIQ have now been "open sourced", probably not...

Stats Abuse: Mobile TV

2008-06-18T12:19:00.003+01:00

Just read an interesting excerpt Helen Keegan pulled from a report on Mobile TV. I don't 100% disagree with her conclusion, that mobile TV will end up being one of those functions that is 'just there' on your phone (though I doubt actual usage will match on-phone cameras, her other example).

I do, however, strongly disagree with some of the summary text of the report itself which states "The demand for consumers to watch mobile TV is there, with 65 per cent of respondents stating that they are willing to spend time watching an advert if it meant that the mobile TV or video content they consume is free or discounted".

Er, sorry? Without seeing the exact script for the interview it is impossible to say for sure which way that is wrong, but it most certainly is misleading the way it is presented here. The only interview question that can come close to a definitive answer about whether there is demand for mobile TV is "Would you watch TV on your mobile phone if it was available, easy to use and low enough cost that you didn't need to think about it?" - and even then, there would be the usual discrepancy between what people say ("Hmm, yeah I'd give it a go") and what they actually do (eg. watch once then never bother again).

Asking a question like "Would you watch a mobile TV advert if it made the mobile TV service free or cheaper?" is an entirely different kettle of fish. The interviewee will automatically assume they are in a hypothetical situation where they are already watching mobile TV, and will try to find an answer for the nice lady accordingly - given that situation, more than half would be willing to watch an advert. That is the only conclusion the question can lead to - not whether there is demand for the service, just that if someone was using it they probably wouldn't mind an advert if they saw a net cost reduction.

You have to hope the people conducting the survey knew this, else they shouldn't be conducting surveys - in which case, the only question you can ask when reading this rubbish is were they paid to 'prove' the case for mobile TV, or did some PR droid mangle the findings for a nice soundbite in the summary?

Though, re: last post, to be fair on Apple fans there is some good news

2008-06-10T10:41:00.002+01:00

Apple fans are an optimistic bunch who can see manna in the dullest of things so hopefully they feel ok, but if they need a cheer they can rest assured that their Mac's are vastly more secure than the enemy's Windows PCs. News has just come out of an enormous flaw which can trash incautious users of Windows installations, from that browser that is a scourge of security experts and leaks like a sieve etc - er, Apple Safari. That same browser which Apple fairly aggressively started to push out to users who never asked for it alongside updates of iTunes, Quicktime etc. Yay.

Sorry, in a bad mood today. To redress the negative vibe: they do sometimes still make nice easy to use software and their stuff normally looks nice.

Finally, the phone the world has been waiting for

2008-06-10T10:26:00.002+01:00

The Nokia 7510 fashion phone, of course! And by 'fashion', they mean like those shops selling cheap and nasty stuff with the word "Fashion" in the shop name somewhere, or a big flourescent orange star in the window with 'fashion' written on it in black marker. It's not as ugly as the Levis phone, but really it just looks like a cheap bit of badly designed plastic - maybe it's just a preproduction mockup but it'd need to change a lot to get exciting...

Allegedly someone else also launched a new phone, but as it is basically the same as the old one but meeting the barest minimum of rumours, I'll leave any commentary on it to better analysts. For me the only entertaining thing reading the coverage was how many things Apple have back tracked on. Local apps bad, webapps the only way forward? That must be why eBay have a new local app then. 3G a waste of time? Yup, got that now and suddenly it's the fastest thing ever and a revolution blah blah. Blackberries bad because of all the layers of servers? Well, er, new Apple enterprise sync stuff is basically same thing, but hey, now they are Apple's layers. etc. Oh, ok, I lie. The other entertaining thing came from the coverage of sites claiming this was now a Blackberry killer because it had better Exchange support. Really, please. People use Blackberries because they can type fast on the keyboard and the UI is optimised for the sorts of things they want to do - push email alone isn't enough. Amazing how obvious that one is but maybe people get paid by the word or something, and have to gush out whatever rubbish comes into their heads.

One thing I have noted using my iPod Touch though - which has all the good bits of the iPhone without the bad, IMHO - if the iPhone (damn, I said it) accelerometer is anywhere near as bad as the Touch's, I think it'll prove to be a trully terrible gaming platform - apart from puzzles like MahJongg maybe, and possibly Sim City or something. You can't do most games with a fairly accurate touchscreen and some flaky motion detection.

Moto JPG Vulnerability: No Need To Panic

2008-05-28T17:37:00.003+01:00

A vulnerability affecting Moto RAZR handset's JPEG decoding was kept quiet until this week, whenone of the remaining Motorola staff confirmed that there were no known active users of Motorola handsets any more and so it was safe to tell the public as it could not be used as an exploit against real people.

VC Watch: Better ROI Available on Bank Account

2008-05-28T15:50:00.003+01:00

The good thing about bank accounts is that, whilst they don't offer much interest, you're unlikely to lose anything either (even these days). Not so the latest $13m investment in Skyfire, a company which makes a Windows Mobile browser.

With Opera doing pretty well with their Mini Java browser, and the open source WebKit gaining traction with Nokia and Apple, where is the potential money in another brand new browser? The Windows Mobile market, whilst allegedly growing nicely particularly in the US (otherwise known as: not selling much outside the US), is pretty tiny and already relatively difficult to gain traction in, with the (poor) IE Mobile bundled and many devices also shipping with the mature Opera Mobile. It would be interesting to know how many downloads that first round of $4.8m bought.

The company now plans to expand into other platforms with its browser, that supports "Java, Flash and Ajax". That means the browser is top-end only, so they can only be planning to port to top-end smartphones - maybe S60 (which already comes bundled with a confusing pair of browsers), and possibly Android (current shipments: 0). It has become increasingly less fashionable to predict that smartphones will become the mainstream, in fact many commentators are saying the opposite these days, so again it's interesting to see where the users will come from.

Having got on a handset, where's the revenue? Web sites already deliver ads and frown on people upstream wrapping their own advertising around the content (Opera have got away with it, but other more intrusive players haven't). The whole point in the web becoming the platform is that the browser, if it works nicely, becomes invisible - and free. Mobiles don't have enough screen real estate to show many sidebar ads, and Google referral fees will only pay so much.

So I'd have to say, without knowing any detail about the company's business plan, that this is yet another utter waste of cash by a VC who doesn't know anything. Though I'd love them to tell me why my assessment is wrong.

Beattie Offloads Mowser

2008-05-09T13:53:00.003+01:00

Russel Batty*, the man the mobile web doesn't believe in, has just cleared his debts selling his Mowser project on to .mobi, surely the spiritual home of badly thought out mobile web ideas (try typing .mobi on a phone's numeric keypad, and compare it even to .com. 'Nuff said).

Congratulations are certainly in order - we would never wish a struggling entrepreneur into debt, it's a nasty place to be - but it doesn't make the Mowser idea very good. The future of mobile services will be things you actually need on the move, delivered in the most pain free way possible, and that doesn't necessarily mean big web content mangled through a transcoder, whatever Sprint et al might wish.

Now Russell is back on his feet we'd suggest he concentrates more on doing some useful work and less on blogging during work hours, his voluminous outpourings whilst at Yahoo! being the thing which first drew him to our attention and even helped inspire this blog. For that, we owe thanks - cheers Russ ;)

* juvenile I know, but I still can't help but be amused by the rather strenuous complaints Russ had against (in particular) British people mispronouncing his name, insisting it be pronounced pretty much like (as any British person would know) the favourite insult of that American-ganster-wannabe from Staines, Ali G. I think the more you travel, the less you get worried about the mangling different countries do to each other's languages and names...

Sarin Parties Like It's 1984

2008-04-21T15:55:00.002+01:00

"My view is that if we can bake a bigger cake together, and that cake has smaller pieces of it, but net-net we still have more cake, that's O.K. with me."

A lovely piece of doublethink there from Vodafone's top man, directly contradicting the actual reality on the ground for any Vodafone "partner" trying to scrape out a living.

Steve Was Right All Along!

2008-04-09T19:22:00.002+01:00

He said no-one needed 3G, it was just a waste of battery and EDGE was fast enough for everyone. We laughed. But figures from Apple's favourite UK network, O2, show he was right all along - EDGE is actually faster than 3.5G HSDPA, let alone 3G!

Steve, we're sorry. You were right. People should stop being nerdy, and just suck in whatever the slick PR machine of O2 and Apple gives us.

How The Mighty Have Fallen

2008-04-02T09:09:00.002+01:00

This could in theory be about the ongoing Moto fiasco, but I think I've said enough about that.

However I just spotted the latest Sharp GSM effort - the GX18. It's a lot like 2004's GX15 except bigger and uglier - in fact very close in specs to 2002's GX10 apart from the camera res (QCIF vs VGA is not a fight worth watching - they're both useless). Looking at it you'd never know that the handset market has become increasingly fashion concious and specs have moved on from 128x160 screens and VGA cameras.

Why does this matter? Well it doesn't any more, really, because Japanese manufacturers have all spectacularly failed to do anything outside Japan and are all finishing their retreats from their GSM beachheads right now (except Sony of course, who had to merge with a leading European vendor to hang in the top 5).

This wasn't always the case. Sharp started to make serious inroads into Europe when they struck up a deal to make Vodafone branded handsets - the GX10 was reasonably good at the time but the GX20 brought us our first mainstream QVGA screens - I remember being blown away seeing them the first time - and they were constantly pushing the envelope on camera quality to bury the waste-of-space VGA variety.

So it's a shame to see that their European swansong appears to be a return to the spec of their first success here. However, survival of the fittest is helping curb the fragmentation of mobile platforms somewhat so it's not all bad - lets hope LG goes next.

Possibly one of the funniest things I've seen in ages

2008-04-01T12:27:00.002+01:00

...though maybe less funny for Engadget.

When you've locked down every API you can find and come up with a satisfactory reason not to roll out 3G this month, what better thing could you do with your time then try to sue someone for using roughly the same colour than you in their logo?

Engadget promise this is not an April Fool's joke, maybe T-Mobile's legal attack bots were doing it for fun though?

Either Allow User Needs To Drive Product Development, or...

2008-03-28T10:07:00.002Z

...create one of these.

Presumably MIU got so fed up with the millions of customer requests for an ugly brick which can boot into XP, CE or Linux that they went ahead and built one.

Or, just possibly, they let the engineers in the R&D department loose and said "build us something with the spec sheet of your dreams" without considering how few people dream like geeky hardware engineers...

Wait... Are They talking About The Same Thing?

2008-03-19T18:08:00.002Z

Sprint are very proud od their open new open web open transcoder open initiative, which would appear to be thoroughly open and possibly more open even than their open competitors.

This open system from OpenWave will open the web for everyone with a Sprint phone, and is undoubtedly a good thing according to the press release.

I was a couple of sentences in before I realised this was the same transcoder that was thoroughly mangling every page it saw, from the tightest hand coded valid mobile XHTML-MP through to standard web pages, reducing them to a nasty common denominator of black and white ugliness, with markup errors added in for free. A thoroughly open initiative all round, coincidentally utterly killing anyone apart from Sprint's ability to host ringtones, wallpapers, Java games or anything else that requires device recognition - because of course now that all mobile web pages will look like uniform sludge why would you bother to pass through a meaningful UA header?

Not even Vodafone, in all their idiotic "we know best" incompetency, went this far - at least they shunted the UA onto a secondary proprietary header, so once you knew to look for it non-web content was ok.

Did customers ask for this? Did they get a choice whether to have it? Does this really make their lives easier? Bollocks it does. This shows exactly how open the new open intiatives from the US operators are - opening the door just enough to kick everyone but themselves and their paying content providers out into the cold.

And no, offering to create a whitelisting system some time in the future after imposing this screw up on all their customers is not going to make up for the incompetence. The only consolation is that their subscriber numbers seem to be in freefall - long may that continue.

Levi's Win Award For Ugliest Fashion Phone Yet

2008-03-10T12:23:00.004Z

Really, would you pay money for this thing?

On the other hand I might pay money to buy a replacement phone, if this is the only handset my mobile operator provided me with.

Yours for a bargain $520.

Then again, it will probably have one important attribute for the fashion concious - scarcity value...

What's The ROI on Hype?

2008-03-07T11:49:00.004Z

Michael Mace is very excited about the prospects of Apple's iPhone SDK, which apparently is not stillborn despite the blogging zeitgeist declaring all mobile apps dead last week - a whole separate area I shall get round to posting on sometime soon, hopefully, though right now I'm far too busy animating mobile zombies for paying customers, or whatever the technical term is for creating mobile apps now that they are dead.

As far as we can tell right now the Apple SDK is exactly what was expected of it, which is an SDK for the phone that lets you do most things, is completely controlled by Apple and has some intelligent thoughts about app discovery revolving around iTunes - competent, slightly cloying in its restrictiveness, basically nice but dull. Michael isn't necessarily wrong to be excited - it's better than nothing - but I find it hard to get that worked up.

More interesting I thought was the news that Kleiner Perkins are raising a $100m fund for iPhone development. This is surely monumentous news for every Kleiner Perkins fund manager involved in the fund, who will now get to have their photos taken with Steve Jobs, probably get to touch his hand, and maybe even get a free iPhone for their troubles. Kleiner Perkins will pick up an inordinate amount of press for their association too.

But what about the ROI for the investors in this fund? This is a more vexing subject. Apple want to have iPhones in 10m real people's hands within a year of launch - lets be kind and assume they can do that. Lets further assume they ship even more units next year to entirely new users, giving a 25m user installed base. The fund's beneficiary developers then need to extract $4 from every one of those users just to cover costs, more to provide ROI and value for the people actually doing the work.

Many of the recent predictions of mobile apps being dead were aimed at the sort of mobile app development the Apple SDK seems to be aimed at - old school developers creating niche software
that people actually pay for. This is exactly the kind of app I can agree is dead - niche apps can thrive if they are basically free and monetized in some non-invasive way, but I just don't think people go out and purchase applications for their phones in the same way you might buy Photoshop or MS Office on a PC (hell, I don't think many individuals even buy Office these days, they either get it bundled or 'borrow' a copy). Even mobile games are becoming free and ad funded. A bedroom developer could probably still make tidy sums on the right app, but not one who has to show substantial ROI on a 7-8 figure investment.

To make this sort of money on a phone/browsing device, with it's Web 2.0 expectations of everything being free, the investors might alternatively plan to invest in companies creating transactional apps which take a cut of money going through the handset (something Apple may or may not want 30% from). At this point they will really need to widen the scope of the fund to all mobile apps, because iPhone-only services will again only be a niche (spread across multiple countries/currencies/etc), though eventually a largish one and comprised of a fair number of people with more money than sense.

So - a case of a company attaching itself to the Apple hype machine, only to quietly broaden its options when things start to reach reality?

S60 + Touch = ...?

2008-02-13T13:18:00.002Z

Sadly, when the answer to that equation was shown, there were no surprises - if you hack a touchscreen onto a badly designed mess of a UI, you get a badly designed mess of a UI which can be controlled with touch. The iPhone experience was not a game changer in Finland after all.

Touchscreens were in vogue at GSMA, but mostly they were reruns of what we had seen before - some more Prada/Viewty variants from LG (not bad, not great) and some more testing of the waters from Samsung who are doing interesting things but have yet to really hit their stride, having been a very successful maker of attractive but relatively basic flips and sliders until now.

I can forgive SE for throwing out a few more UIQ3 phones without a radical overhaul, as they obviously need to make good with what they have and recoup some of their investment - whilst (hopefully) forcing the UIQ designers back to the drawing board at gun point with specific instructions to unravel the many usability downgrades they inserted in the jump to UIQ3, whilst adding in some consumer pizazz. The old UIQ 1 and 2 handsets won many friends because UIQ used to be an excellent PDA platform; the move to UIQ3 tried to go consumer by improving the graphics (great) whilst sacrificing some of the nice features and confusing the workflow a bit (not so great). This nicely hilights the problems inherent in making a platform designed to do one thing try and do another.

Which brings us back to that other Symbian platform, S60.

"The disappointment when people see the hardware design of a new Nokia – then notice that it's running S60 inside - is quite palpable"

Nokia's recent strategy has been to trojan horse S60 into consumer's pockets, making nice sexy phones which consumers buy because "I always buy Nokias, I just know how to use them". To date they have shifted a lot more smartphones this way than they ever did when they sold them as smartphones, a difficult label describing the sort of phone very few non-phone geeks every wanted. Time will tell if this strategy eventually backfires as aghast consumers assume Nokia has lost the plot completely and shift to someone else in the next upgrade cycle - some strange individuals do like the platform and its ever-changing warren of menus, after all.

I am reminded of the handset policy at my girlfriend's employer, a multinational, which some years back decided to provide all customer facing employees who asked with the very nice Nokia 6170, an S40 mass market phone. They felt compelled to standardise on Nokias because "everyone knows how to use a Nokia". As the 6170 started to get on a bit, they decided to migrate employees to one of those nice new enterprise phones Nokia had started selling, the E50 - an S60 smartphone, no less. Two months later, after mass complaints, they took back the E50s and moved on to the 6300, a nice and businesslike S40 mass-market phone. Staff are once again very happy.

S60 has always struck me as something Nokia has put money into, so it feels compelled to keep selling it, and enough people seem to buy it that we end up in a self perpetuating cycle. Sure, some people like it, but most people that I know who've had the misfortune to buy one don't buy another... the exception seems to be in marketing, where about 50% of the S60 users I know work. They probably need to feel 'cutting edge' or something.

Seeing the iPhone, sometimes labelled a smartphone, they must have thought "OK, best response is to pull in every touchscreen resource we have in the company (from the Maemo teams, R&D projects etc) and drop all of them into S60". Exactly the wrong approach.

S60 really doesn't really feel like it was actually designed by anyone, but in as much as it must have been it was designed to be a UI for a handset with a standard numeric keypad, a few seemingly random special buttons and a decidely unresponsive screen. This does not sit nicely with the idea of a touch screen.

We have already seen how Nokia's platform streamlining has jettisoned a very good Organiser platform (S80) by folding/crowbarring it into S60, alienating past fans, so there was ample likelihood they would mess things up further. This they appear to have done.

The iPhone is slick, responsive, fun to play with and contains just enough software to do most of what most people want to do reasonably well - but even if it doesn't do everything that they might need, users will enjoy the process of discovering it doesn't do what they need.

Nokia's S60 platform is confusing, obscure, constantly changing and always hugely underpowered and unresponsive, with software to do everything you might ever want to do, but after moving round the menus quite a lot you'll probably give up trying to find out how and just use it as a rather slow poor phone. Nokia's S60 Touch seems to extend this experience by allowing you to move round the same menus with your finger smearing the screen, whilst preserving those little experience-defining moments like the pause screens and waiting animations that you know and hate.

It will take a massive sales hit to understand that this approach will not, in the long term, work out. They must innovate and diversify into handsets that are once again fun and/or efficient to use; even S40 is creaking under the weight of the features loaded into it now. Sadly Nokia have such huge sales volumes that they can coast for a long time without realising this, and their customers will be all the poorer because of it.

Samsung PR Drone Distracted While Writing Soul Release

2008-02-11T13:05:00.000Z

The Soul is apparently the "completion" of the Ultimate Edition line, which means we shall no doubt be regaled by some new line of editions even more ultimate than Ultimate. There's clearly a lot to be excited about with this phone as it (perhaps greedily) has a whole three graphical UIs in it! The release writer lists all of them:

The Thematic UI, which can be completely customised by the user;
There's a User Created Skin system, which does sound a lot like one of the parts of the Thematic UI but we can pretend it's a whole second UI if they'd like;
Er, what's that over there in the corner? Must have been the cat walking past. Where was I? Oh yeah, it's 12.9mm thin!

Some have claimed a single consistent and simple UI is enough for one phone, but maybe three will work out well for Samsung. The little direction pad thingy might be good too. Only time will tell...

I tried to confirm that this wasn't just lazy SlashPhone release rewriting, but three days after the release date Samsung's UK web site has no Soul, at least in the press section, and the Group section (tagline: "you will meet SAMSUNG the digital are (sic) leader") didn't have any Soul either.

Apologies for the recent series of short sniping posts, but beyond Sony-Ericsson endorsing the Beast (under a layer of new UI) there's not so much interesting going on at GSMA, just more of the same... there's a post to be had in SE's current OS position but not one I'm up to writing now...

Mobile Magazine smoking something strong

2008-02-11T12:20:00.000Z

Just amused myself reading an "interesting" "news post" on Mobile Magazine, which suggests Nokia might start using Windows Mobile when v7 or v8 comes out. Possible, of course, maybe some time after a swarm of flying pigs decides to carry so much snow down into hell that it freezes over.

Couldn't help but be reminded that, in the UK at least, Cannabis is now three times stronger than it used to be (according to experts at the BBC). Related?

When Is A Pie Chart Not A Pie Chart?

2008-02-08T12:31:00.001Z

Girls usually aren't impressed by socks stuffed down trousers, because when it comes to the crunch the fake package won't be as satisfying as what was promised. The guys in California seem to enjoy swallowing whatever they are fed by Mr Jobs, however, even when he is feeling so unconfident that he has to stuff in half a sock drawer.

Wikipedia: "A pie chart is a circular chart divided into sectors, illustrating relative magnitudes or frequencies or percents. In a pie chart, the arc length of each sector (and consequently its central angle and area), is proportional to the quantity it represents. Together, the sectors create a full disk. It is named for its resemblance to a pie which has been sliced."

Steve isn't using a pie chart there - he's just using a pretty picture that looks like one. The amount of effort put into exagerating Steve's manhood here is impressive - Goebbels would doubtless have loved it. As I'm anal about the abuse of statistics, I thought I'd list the key ways that this slide sets out to manipulate the viewer:

It isn't a pie chart -if it was, the centre point would lie directly in line with the widest point of the ellipse (even with the 3D tilting). It doesn't, it's way above - destroying any proportionality between the sections and therefore any value in the chart as a genuine representation of the numbers displayed on it. Instead, it's a lie - socks stuffed down Steve's trousers.
The circle looks slightly tilted in 3D, with the bottom of Apple's section most visible - making their section look slightly bigger. If it were a real pie chart, that wouldn't evoke comment, but as it's a fake this has clearly been factored in as well.
Apple's section of the fake pie is in green. The eye has higher sensitivity to green because it has more green detectors than red or blue, so this gives a small visual boost to Apple's section. There's nothing wrong with that, but it shows the level of viewer manipulation that the designers were considering.

Sure, everyone lies in advertising, but it begs the question - if you're confident that your numbers are good, why would you go to so much trouble to make them look bigger? Could it be because the "4m in 4 months" line is not really what it says (way more than 1m were sold in the first monnth, so actually sales are declining from a high start). Could it be that a lot of those 4m haven't actually left the shop shelves yet? Who knows.

It's a lovely product, and it is selling well. Mr Jobs, making yourself look like a confidence trickster does no-one any favours.

Whither MotoMAGX?

2008-01-28T10:13:00.000Z

Motorola's chaotic platform non-plan just took a step backwards as Nokia bought Trolltech, who's Qtopia platform sits under Moto's new MAGX feature phone platform (as seen on the new RAZR2 V8, U9 etc).

I'm sure that's not why Nokia just bought them (others have some better speculation than me there), but it will be interesting to see how sanguine Moto will be about it given how much they've invested into Linux and their precarious position...

670,000 iPhones Sitting Waiting To Be Bought

2008-01-26T10:04:00.000Z

Interestingly, some people have done the maths on iPhone sales and suggest there's a rather large gap between the 4m Jobs claims Apple have sold and the number of devices that have actually left the shelves

I think my money is still looking safe...

Yahoo! Soon Come 3.0

2008-01-11T08:28:00.000Z

As anyone who has ever used a Java app from Yahoo! can tell you, response times are unusable even on the fastest phones, and if they had a QA team they should be shot, but they probably don't. Amid much fanfare at CES, Yahoo! launched Go 3.0 - have they got it right this time? Er, no. Maybe the Yahoo! JavaME development team is based in the Caribbean, working to a different pace of life where 2 seconds to respond to a key is cool, mon. Mi soon come.

How about the exciting widget support? I'm not a massive fan of widgets at the best of times, but it seems excessive to claim that a small piece of wap content magically becomes a widget when it is displayed in sssssslllllllllooooooowwwwwmmmmooooooo through Yahoo!'s UI.

So Yahoo! have actually just launched a very large (and expensive, for most users) download with much the same functionality as they had before. Hmmm.

The other Yahoo! release at CES was a new home page so revolutionary, the PR flak felt compelled to use every superlative in the English language at least once in the release. Some might say that this type of oversell usually appears when trying to sex-up a spectacularly uninteresting piece of non-news. Could this be the case here?

Well, when I first went to the site after reading the release (sneakily using Firefox to spoof a popular phone), I saw a message saying they weren't ready yet, with a nice screenshot of a graphics- and content-heavy homepage. The next morning it was still there, but after about 36 hours they'd got the real site up and suddenly all the graphics and style had been stripped out. I'll assume that if you are one of the lucky few in the US with one of the "iPhone, several Nokia Series 60 devices (or) select Windows Mobile devices" you'll be seeing something akin to that screenshot; this does directly contradict a lot of the amusing superlative in the release about addressing the wider global market with cutting-edge content etc, but I guess they were struggling even to hit the smaller target on time (soon come...).

As they're only targetting US users, who often are lucky enough to enjoy flat rate data, the very pretty graphics only slow the page download down without costing an arm and a leg every time the user visits, as they would in most of the rest of the world. Mobile designers tend to forget that the phone browser's cache tends to have a very limited lifespan (hours not months), but on a hypothetical fast cheap connection that wouldn't be fatal.

Seeing the design, however, the thing thats truck me most was the original Yahoo! portal clutter, which lost out heavily on the desktop web to the stripped down elegance of Google's home page. I'd be interested to see the user research that indicated mobile users want more clutter on their smaller screens - though I will happily admit that done right, a fully customisable portal could be nice (if a user bothered to use the service enough to customise it).

So all in all, lots of noise and not much content from Yahoo!. The only thing they appear to be getting right is the strategy of not creating a mobile OS, instead focussing on getting their core product out to every device possible - as soon as they can make that product worth using they'll be sorted, assuming that content is still relevant of course.

SE Release First Flip Phone (That Isn't The Same As The Last One)

2008-01-08T09:04:00.000Z

Quite a few sites seem to be reporting on Sony-Ericsson's brave first foray into the world of flip phones. Even if you don't cound the P800 and successors as flip phones, this would still be curious news for 2003's Z600, and the 20 other flip phones (not counting regional variants) that they have released since then...

So what did SE actually say to confuse some of the less thorough members of the press?

W350 release: "Featuring for the first time from Sony Ericsson a flip phone that allows you to control your music at your fingertips" - presumably 2006's W300 Walkman flip phone required you to press the controls with the pads of your fingers, or possibly your knuckles, instead of fingertips?

OK, I'm being pedantic, but surely someone engaged brain before retyping the press release?

Plus ça change

2008-01-07T08:08:00.000Z

Not long ago I remember reading that Windows Mobile 6 was going to be a huge radical departure from Windows Mobile 5, that Microsoft really "got mobile" now, and in general the future was looking brighter for WM. Then it was launched, and it became clear it was just the same OS with new graphics and a few rearranged menus.

What was missing, to produce such a lacklustre release? Well, possibly that traditional fount of Microsoft innovation: Apple. Since then we've had the iPhone, and suddenly WM7 is all about touch, gesture recognition... you can guess the rest.

It's really good to see that Microsoft are now fully committed to losing the "Apple rip-off" moniker, able to innovate purely through their in-house R&D. Then again, if they didn't rip off people with ideas, we'd complain that WM7 was just WM6 in different colours and they still didn't get mobile...

How Wireless Innovation Can Pass Whole Industries By

2008-01-05T11:44:00.000Z

Scanning through the MobHappy 2008 predictions, I remembered that it has been a long time since I actually managed to post to the blog, something I shall endeavour to fix as my new year's resolution. More specifically, Carlo's point 8 reminded me of the launch of the otherwise rather fine Canon EOS 40D late last year.

Many argue the finer points of whether Nikon or Canon make better lenses, bodies or sensors, but in general as a layman I think they're both pretty damn good and there's nothing I can really suggest to make their optics any better; this is a field where they are the leaders.

However Canon has recently been innovating in the wireless space, something I was very intruiged by when I saw the initial release. Simply plug in the WFT-E3 Wireless File Transmitter, and you can remote control the camera through a browser, auto-upload to remote storage over WiFi as you take a picture and even automatically geotag your photos using a 3rd party GPS device. All pretty cool stuff, and finally accessible to serious amateur photographers (pros with thousands to burn on kit have been able to do the WiFi stuff on the 1D for a while I think).

The WiFi features do seem like they would only be useful to high-end users - I can't see why I'd pay any money to have them personally. Auto-geotagging, however, is potentially a killer feature that would definitely make me go out and buy one - and I suspect many amateur photographers who do some travelling would agree, because geotagging hundreds of photos by hand some weeks after you took them is a serious pain in the arse. So how does it work?

It transpires that to get this feature to work do this:

Buy the WFT-E3 Wireless Grip add-on for about $800 (for context, the camera body only costs $1200)
Plug all 680g of it (that's a lot to carry in one hand all day) into the bottom of the camera as an extra grip (useful for some people, but not something I've ever felt the need for)
Plug your GPS unit's USB CABLE into the unit. That's right, USB. You have to carry the GPS and a wire connecting it to the camera the whole time you're shooting.

An instant cold bucket of water over pretty much everyone who might want this feature, leaving far fewer potential customers for what is basically a very very expensive wireless webcam. Canon think this is breakthrough stuff though.

As someone with some involvement in the wireless industry, my immediate thought was that they should just drop a $1 Bluetooth chip into the camera body itself which supported the GPS profile. This could be a huge commercial advantage against the competition, who are currently selling higher spec cameras at these amateur / serious amateur pricepoints.

It's difficult to say why they didn't do this. Possibly it's on the drawing board, possibly they would rather sell expensive add-ons to a few users, or possibly they just never realised it was an option. I am hoping that Carlo is right, and in 2008 we will start to see this kind of technology become so mainstream it's impossible not to offer it; roll on the 50D.

Can The Pizza Industry Subsidise A Mobile Linux OS?

2007-11-06T08:09:00.000Z

Without wishing to stoke the hype flames, I figured I ought to do a follow-up to my post yesterday now that Google have actually done their Annoucement (sic, though sadly they corrected the typo in the release title last night).

The world clearly doesn't need another Linux consortium, having plenty already, but apparently it has one, and more importantly one that will give its mobile-optimised implementation of the OS away for free. So that actually makes the playing field smaller, as any company selling an implementation will be dead within a few years. Ho hum.

The real question is, where's the money in it for Google? Clearly making Linux work as a mobile OS is harder than anyone thought, which is why we have no single core Linux phones yet. For the curious there are some more very interesting details on that and other topics over at Vision Mobile's analysis of Motorola's OS strategy - though I think "OS tactics" is a more appropriate term for Moto right now. They've taken 3 years to reach the point where they can make a content-lite annoucement, so clearly this is a considerable ongoing investment.

Amongst a lot of hot air, I've read two pieces which try to address this question: Michael Mace's theory is that they are purely interested in demolishing walled gardens and any other barrier to the standard Google business model, so really the monetisation happens when users are free to go to Google on their phone just like their PC. There's a lot of merit to the piece but the big shortcoming is that it is not the handset manufacturers and OS vendors who put the walled gardens in place, it's the Operators and they may bend a little for Google (and a fat revenue share) but they can still ultimately kill any Google OS device whilst they remain in control of the networks. Despite the calls of many in the tech world, they won't give up the status quo without a fight - and in general, they have proved that they would rather kill a market than give it to someone else.

Christian Lindholm took the more cynical side, which kind of mirrored my inital feelings when I realised they weren't yet bothering to address the UI layer. The data mining potential for controlling a mobile phone at the OS layer is huge... though you'd have to hope they never got a chance to fully make use of it.

If they were also working on the UI layer you could imagine some interesting innovations around search-based interfaces - maybe like the way you're contact list auto-filters as you start typing someone's name, but extended to every app on the device (meetings from the calendar, text message threads, etc) and services beyond. The archetypal service sell here would be searching for 'pizza' and having the location-enabled phone add in local pizza sellers from Google Maps - cool and undeniably useful, but now try and think of many other applications which would really work this way more than once a year. Is a cut of every pizza sale enough to subsidise a mobile Linux?

The problem with an open OS (which this isn't really, but let's pretend) with an open browser is that it leaves the users free to use any service they want. Are Google just gambling that they will continue to keep the lion's share of all traffic, as Michael suggests? How will that survive when it meets the operator customisation manual, or the commercial imperatives of Motorola or Samsung who might like to monetise through some other partner? Imagine if the OS gains the mass market within 5 years, but in the same period a new competitor steals the search market from Google and thus all the profits? It happened to Altavista so it could happen to Google.

I like the announcement purely because it shakes everything up, and having almost no real content makes it all the more interesting because the power of uncertain possibilities is more appealing than what they may actually knock out. Whether it has a long term impact will come down to whether they launch something that works well for all the players and really follow through to continue development over the years. Should that happen, I couldn't begin to answer how or when Google will begin to make money from it... but it'll be an interesting ride.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words - Fox News Get To The Nub

2007-11-05T15:45:00.000Z

The rumours surrounding the alleged Google phone, currently actually saying it will be a Google mobile OS, have been summed up rather nicely by Fox News in one single diagram which distills everything we know for sure about the advertising juggernaut's mobile plans:

Caption: "What the HTC Touch smartphone might look like with a Google operating system."

Technically that is incorrect, they forgot to add "if it were on Sprint", but we'll let them off as Fox News viewers have never been sticklers for accuracy. The diagram is still genius in that it really does encapsulate all of the facts, removing all the unsubstantiated dross around the edges.

The article goes on to talk about what "innumerable, but still anonymous, tech-industry sources" have been saying for ages. Here we descend back onto more familiar Fox News territory, regurgitating what people want to hear without worrying too much about reality; we know it's what people want to hear because so many bloggers have been writing about for so long. There's no echo chamber effect here, oh no.

Amid the myriad of rumours, there have been a few interesting posts such as Skydeck's 5 predictions (via this week's Carnival), rare in its application of actual real numbers and some insight into the industry and lack of religious certainty in the greatness of Google. It's also correct in pointing out that whilst Google has managed to turn out a few very nice Java apps, when it comes to mobilising their bread and butter service (Adwords) they've done a piss poor job - anyone who remembers their pre-YouTube video forays may have to pause and wonder for a second what a Google phone OS might look like. All experience suggests that whatever comes out of Google, it won't have an iPhone-level experience.

So hands up who thinks their current phone has too much screen space and desperately needs a serious percentage of real estate dedicated to advertising, with the UI hobbled to make the ads easily clickable? Think about how many keypresses it takes you to navigate round your menus before you answer that one, and mobile operators - you can put your hands back down right now, you don't count and your enthusiasm speaks volumes about who will benefit.

No, just like the iPhone, the Google phone / OS / whatever will mainly be interesting for what it does to shake up the industry. It is unlikely to have the polish of the fruit company's wares and it probably won't have such a positive effect on competition either, but at least it'll ruffle some complacent feathers.

Gosling: Kill The Multi-Billion Lame Ducks! My Turkey Rules!

2007-10-24T08:41:00.000+01:00

James Gosling looks exactly as you'd expect a godfather of a programming language to look. But despite being an obvious candidate for "Serial killer or Programmer", he clearly has the geek skills - before joining Sun and working on Java he wrote a version of emacs and a multi-processor version of Unix. Just the kind of guy you want involved in your new cross-platform virtual machine-based language, but maybe not the kind of guy who should be dealing with real world nitty gritty decisions.

My experience of ultrageeks is they tend to be enamoured by cool technology and less interested in what actually works for the majority of users, and other boring constraints of reality. That's great for driving technology forward and produces all sorts of exciting innovations for the world to enjoy when they become mass-market viable, but equally it can lead to a lot of beautiful concepts which cannot win in the market.

Mr Gosling has decreed that JavaME is out and the new JavaFX platform is in. I've been meaning to post on JavaFX for some time and I guess this is as good a time as any, though I haven't enough free schedule to do it justice. Here's a quick summary of the platform:

SavaJE was founded in 1999 to create a JavaSE OS
In 2001 they managed to release v1 of the OS
In 2002 they announced a Smartphone version
In 2006 their concept phone won awards at... a Java Conference
In 2007 Sun bought the platform after they ran out of cash, and renamed it JavaFX

In that 8 year existence, as far as I can see SavaJE impressed a lot of geeks and won precisely zero phone contracts. Some would say that after 8 years, zero sales implies that either your sales guys & gals or your product are dead. Or you forgot to hire sales types, of course, but surely an investor would have pointed that out.

Interestingly, as a comparison, the first Blackberry shipped in 1999 and now they have a (loosely) Java-based platform used by 10m active subscribers in 2007 (having sold many more in the process). They started with an old Ericsson platform, but then SavaJE started with the existing Java platform.
Symbian spun out of Psion's EPOC platform in 1999 as well, hit 100m shipped devices in 2006, and is an OS that has run various flavours of Java since then. Only JavaME stuck though - it filled a useful niche which the earlier SE-based Personal Java failed to find (admittedly being deprecated didn't help).

JavaME has shipped on some number of billion devices (everyone seems to be coy with the exact figures), and I propose that it has done so because Sun have been very much a background player - the licence was flexible and cheap, the hardware constraints minimal and the potential advantage of having an open platform doing the sort of stuff JavaME does - basically games - was big enough to be worth the hassle. The other APIs added to JavaME have added a lot of capabilities almost by being implemented inside the games Trojan Horse, though the actual implementations and associated digital signature idiocy have been slightly farcical at times.

It's easy to see why Gosling, as a geek, looks at this and goes "Eeew, it's horrible, I want an uber-Java platform where I can mess with everything! Let's buy SavaJE and make JavaFX and the world will be saved!". It's the same kind of urge that is leading initiatives like OpenMoko, which will not change anyone's life - the people implementing it would have coded some other open source project if they weren't doing this one so the net cost to their earning and social life is nil, and no manufacturer will ever make a serious go at commercialising it so it will eventually die. Hopefully people screwing around with the alpha releases won't bring down too many networks for too long in the process.

Gosling wants to do away with the sandbox, do away with the constraints. Sadly they are there for a reason - because an app on a phone should not be able to have free rein to do what it wants. A big part of the future of mobile devices will lie in flexible scriptable UI layers, so in a way JavaFX does usefully recognize the future - but sadly the future will not feature JavaFX as the scripting engine of choice. It's too little too late.

If JavaME is a useful component on several billion phones, JavaFX is an OS (or a large part of one) looking for some hardware. By trying to sell it Sun moves from being an innocuous background player, friend of everyone (manufacturer and operator alike), to a competitor in one of the fastest moving and most competitive markets in the world. This is a pretty long way from Kansas for them, and they risk burning goodwill just as platforms like Flash Lite start to come close to enough market share to be relevant in what was JavaME's backyard.

The phone OS market is already awash with about a million players trying to rework Linux, plus Windows Mobile, Symbian, and proprietary OSs (Samsung seem to have dozens and Motorola now have MAGX, AJAR, ...). They all have their own UI layers. Operators are getting more aggressive, trying to simplify the situation with initiatives like Vodafone's plan to standardise on S60, Windows Mobile and Linux for future devices. Operators are the ultimate customers for device Manufacturers and they want fewer platforms, not more, and they won't start adding more platforms just because Sun wants them to.

Where does JavaFX fit into a market like this? I would say it will fill the same niche as it did when SaveJE owned it - winning plaudits at Java conferences run by Sun, and shipping in no devices. What happens to JavaME if Sun follow Gosling's advice through to the end and misinterpret the market so badly? Hopefully it'll keep shipping and keep being useful long enough to bridge us into a world where it works very well, or a world where we don't need it as there are better systems out there. The huge number of non-Sun JSR backers suggests this will indeed be the case.

If JavaME is a few billion lame ducks, then JavaFX is a single stillborn goose. I'll have the duck, thanks.

Telefonica Definitely Not Playing By Rules, Complain Operators

2007-10-11T13:43:00.001+01:00

Not long after an O2 man was caught in public saying taboo things about revenue shares, O2's owner Telefonica have broken the implicit Operator pact to shun Nokia by endorsing the controversial Ovi services platform - a move which it forward thinking, ackonowledges other players in the value chain may have somethign to add, and may also actually improve consumer's lives. Shocking stuff, which will potentially see Telefonica removed from the Christmas card lists of their more conventional "we own everything everywhere" peers.

It's clear that an open content discovery system where many vendors can integrate smoothly is in the interests of consumers. It's certainly in the interests of Nokia, who appear to have bet the company on it. The question is why would an Operator allow it to go ahead? Maybe some sort of revenue share deal? Maybe they're just all shook up about the ridiculous concessions Apple are reported to have got, and would rather set precedents with the devil they know rather than wait and see how the O2 iPhone rollercoaster ends.

All very interesting game theory - competing Operators have a vested interest in all playing the same game, but anyone who breaks ranks can get a short-term advantage and potentially change the playing field. In a market where traditional revenue streams have a clear sell-by date, things will be getting ever more interesting...

Legal Contortionism

2007-09-28T11:04:00.000+01:00

"This unlimited Bolt On is for customers who only want to browse the internet and send emails and is subject to a fair usage policy which operates above 200Mb usage per month, or approx 1,400 internet pages per month."

I challenge anyone to tell me why that is a fair way to describe what is essentially a 200Mb data tariff bundle... I cannot contest that O2 are being very generous here for £7.50/month, far more generous than their peers with 30Mb caps and the like, I just despise the way all the operators can claim "Unlimited" bundles which have explicit contractual limitations in them.

Vodafone and McClaren Core Values Aligned?

2007-09-14T11:34:00.000+01:00

At the end of 2005, Vodafone switched allegiances from Ferrari to McLaren, taking with it sponsorship thought to be worth £160m. "The new agreement delivers a fantastic marketing platform" said Peter Bramford of Vodafone at the time. Does this still hold now McLaren are sitting on a $100m fine for spying on the previous benefactors of Voda's largesse?

The fine is of course only one dollar for every Voda customer - well within the sort of sum that could be raised using the old "double Premium SMS charge" trick in theory, though overcharging has a nasty habit of coming back and haunting you.

However I think it unlikely that Voda will appreciate the parallels with the recent Vodafone Greece phone tapping scandals and they appear to have no qualms in dropping sports teams who no longer meet their marketing goals, so there could be more bad news in Woking before things start getting better...

O2 Man Lynched By Rabid Operators For Breaking Ranks

2007-09-13T14:17:00.000+01:00

Peter Erskine of O2 was recently quoted in the Times: "If sharing revenue brings a bigger pie to the table, then we’ll be happy to share that pie".

Some have claimed he is laying the groundwork for O2 to announce the Apple iPhone. Maybe. But that's small fry when you consider what a radical change of direction this would be for a mobile operator. Think of it - voluntarily taking less than a 100% cut in anything, in order to allow a market to grow? Where's the sense in that? What operator would ever want to share a large market when they could dominate and suffocate a tiny one?

This sort of radical talk is unheard of outside of Japan, where mobile content ecosystems flourish and the rest of the value chain gets to keep 90%, compared to the anaemic 30-50% that is stifling every other mobile content market in the world - a sort of reverse of Bonsai gardening where the Japanese encourage growth and everyone else restricts it. It flies in the face of every 60-70% premium SMS margin the operators have gouged for so many years.

Could it be one lone man's dream, Peter Erskine the rebel declaring he won't stand for the stupidity of the herd? Or just a craven attempt to curry favour with the hype machine?

Google Joins "Patenting Patently Obvious" Bandwagon

2007-09-06T09:33:00.000+01:00

As a follow-up to the piece on Diebold, it is only fair to hilight Google's own pioneering works of innovation in the mobile sphere - namely their patent on "paying for things with a phone". Yeah, because no-one ever thought of that one before...

iSuppliHotAir

2007-09-06T08:44:00.000+01:00

I'd been meaning to rip into iSuppli's ridiculously triumphal ode to Apple from earlier in the week, but I figured it was worth waiting a few more days to make sure all the Apple-related rumours were in fact rubbish, allowing me to squeeze all fruit-related comment into a single post. Sort of like an Apple smoothie.

iSuppli's puff piece contains some real research, buried deep in the lightweight packaging. Almost every article quotes the "1.8% of all handsets in US" figure - only a few print the rest, that 1.8% means 220,000 units. Add on the 240,000 signed up before July and we have a much lower figure than the "700,000 in first weekend" Goldman-Sachs were talking about right after the launch, low enough to be considered a disappointment I would venture - not a triumph at all, and it makes that target of 10m by the end of 2008 look a little less likely without a serious shot in the arm.

The quote that really annoyed me was this one:
"While iSuppli has not collected historical information on this topic, it's likely that the speed of the iPhone's rise to competitive dominance in its segment is unprecedented in the history of the mobile-handset market".
I believe this translates to something like "This sounds pretty good, so if we write a quote laced with hyperbole containing no verifiable truth people will print and believe it, and we get to bask in the reflected glory". Let's ignore the fact that the guy actually admits he has no clue; it is a claim based on the idea that the iPhone is a smartphone. That's a mighty difficult category to define, but I can't see the iPhone fitting in it - for what it is worth, it's a feature phone. Sure it has email - so does almost every feature phone I've seen (quality is variable, but the iPhone isn't actually very good at email either). It has a browser, but so do low-end phones - OK that browser is scriptable, but that doesn't replace the ability to install apps (a common part of the definition of a smartphone). Hacking apps on does not count.

So if we really position the handset in its genuine market category, we see it is not really dominating in an unprecedented way at all - it equalled its largest current rival (the ageing Chocolate), which places it way behind the record of the RAZR which really destroyed the competition and had no peers for some time. Even if we do compare to smartphones, the wording is careful and obfuscating - for example both iPhones together apparently outsold any individual Nokia smartphone. Slightly unfair comparison - Nokia makes hundreds of the buggers which will naturally mean sales are spread across all of them, even in the US where Nokia's smartphone presence is tiny.

iSuppli clearly want to ride the iPhone for all the publicity it is worth. Much as I hate adding to the general cloud of iPhone opinions polluting the web, I think it is worth pointing out what rubbish they are speaking without just reprinting it verbatim.

Over then to Apple themselves - well they rather nicely admitted they had been ripping off the faithful and would continue to do so. Ringtones will now be available for the iPhone, for an additional $0.99 after buying an iTunes track. That's right - you can't just use any MP3, like on a normal phone (that hasn't been operator crippled), you have to buy a shorter version of the same MP3 for the same price as the full track in order to use it as a ringtone. Takes up more of your local storage, already stretched thin between music, video, photos and contacts, and you get ripped off in the process. I anticipate the faithful will be ecstatic with joy at the sheer innovativeness of it all.

The price drop of $200 is a nice admission that anyone who makes purchase decisions purely on hype and expectations of attaining nirvana through acquisition of Apple-branded plastic has already done so, and disappointing sales will only be pepped up with aggressive price cuts. Fair enough.

The introduction of the iTouch is more vexing. On the one hand it's an easy new product - just rebadge something you've got, taking out a few components and cutting the price. Bonus points because that appears to be what most of the customers wanted anyway - you can see a consensus forming that mass interest in the iPhone was about a new iPod form factor (WiFi and browsing are bonus points), and not about the underwhelming phone features at all. On the other hand, by selling these things in bulk across the world before most consumers have even had a chance to buy the expensive phone version, they have pretty much shredded the chances of the iPhone itself when it launches outside the US. What operator will now make huge concessions to Apple for exclusive rights to something customers actually don't seem to want? Which customer will pay a premium on top of their contract to get an iPhone, when they could have a nicer phone for free and pick up the music/video iTouch on the side? The answer to that last rhetorical question will give very good insight into device convergence trends over the short- and medium-term. I personally still carry an MP3 player and a phone and I don't
plan to change until I seem something paradigm-shifting...

Diebold Patent the Patently Obvious

2007-08-30T10:24:00.000+01:00

Diebold are best known as the ethical, unpartisan maker of vote tracking machines who's CEO pledged to deliver the 2004 US presidential election to Bush. Some people may also have heard that their voting machines were found to be deeply flawed and insecure by a Princeton Computer Science department (PDF of research) - apparently, security by obscurity really doesn't work, though you can always use your lawyers to try to gag any site which reveals this. Others may know them as a company that makes ATMs (cash machines, for those in the UK). But few knew until today that they are a hotbed of mobile innovation. Using their extensive knowledge of the ATM industry, and presumably some advanced research one of their employees did in his lunch hour when messing round with this new-fangled phone thing he had bought, they have patented the following utterly non-obvious ideas:

Using a phone to find the nearest ATM (according to MocoNews)
Using a phone to interact with an ATM to prevent card skimming, PIN surfing etc
Using a phone to pay for things at banks / checkouts
Connecting an ATM to a mobile network as it's principal means of communication
Remote control of an ATM with the phone's keypad
Using phone to make voice calls

Actually, they only patented five of those - I sneaked one in as a joke. They reckon these innovations could be in customer's hands in 3-5 years.

You have to assume that they decided to do some research into mobile banking, and before they started their patent lawyers specifically instructed them no to look at what anyone else was doing in the industry so that they could claim it was all internal innovation. Which is why they came up with a bunch of things people have been doing for years (1,3), extremely obvious applications of a mobile network as a means of reaching the net (4), ideas with limited utility which simply won't work in any usable way on handsets in the real world (5) and an idea which is the subject of a large number of startups and activity from other players like Visa (2).

It would be nice to sigh "Only in America could this patent be granted", but sadly given the type of company they are they'll probably try to bully smaller players into licensing something to establish precedent using their lawyers and political connections, and then generally strangle innovation in search of a quick buck. Ah well.

Operator Euphamisms: "ensuring customer experience is paramount"

2007-08-28T07:38:00.000+01:00

Apparently Orange wants Nokia to work with them to "ensure customer experience is paramount" - the reason? Nokia want to put their own music distribution channel on their handsets which allows MP3 sideloading. Sideloading is exactly what every user does with their conventional MP3 players, so it is stretching credibility to suggest that consumers wouldn't want it available on any phone which replaces a dedicated MP3 player. Certainly it would be nice to have a single MP3 player which gave the option of sideloading, Nokia's channel and Orange's channel all through one interface but methinks this is not what they really mean.

If Orange's music channel really only sells 100,000 tracks a month to the many millions of Orange customers with their millions of MP3-enabled devices, I think Orange should just do the decent thing and take the channel round the back of the barn with a shotgun. This seems proof enough that people won't pay over the odds for music locked to a handset.

Presumably "ensuring customer experience is paramount" is also what AT&T are trying to achieve by crippling the Blackberry 8820 to make the iPhone look better. iPhone might need all the help it can get with its current pricing model though, a picture becoming clearer now the launch dust is settling a little.

The depressing thing is, this isn't news, it's business as usual. I remember being enraged when I discovered a friend's Vodafone-branded K700 could not sideload anything over IR or Bluetooth, or use MP3 ringtones, unlike the Orange-branded version I had. Presumably Vodafone was keen to ensure that the customer experience involved paying £3-5 for a portion of a song transcoded into polyphonic MIDI or a small JPEG. This was in mid-2004, and it wasn't really breaking news then...

Torn Two Ways

2007-08-23T07:43:00.001+01:00

USAToday have an interesting piece on the handset/carrier mess in the US which is keeping them back in the dark ages of mobile (iPhone not withstanding). It's inteeresting to me mainly because it nails all the major problems with the way carriers sell devices there (handset locking, feature crippling holding back content use, contracts prohibiting 3rd party app use, etc). These echo the problems faced everywhere else in the world but taken to the next level, enforced more strongly so as to put an even greater stranglehold on the content markets and lead to the bland handset lineup US users 'enjoy'.

The most defensible of these annoyances are early-exit fees from a contract - the handset was subsidised by the monthly fee, so it is quite reasonable to expect the consumer to have to pay off that subsidy before the contract can terminate, whether it be a one-off fee or a monthly charge; the others are just the result of operator stupidity and paranoid lawyers, as I have yet to see an actual real justification for preventing a user from using the software their handset was designed to run (which is legal and frequently done in many parts of the world).

However true all this carrier-bashing is though, it doesn't remove the naivety of consumer advocate Josh Silver's statement that "public policies in this country allow (Apple) to chain that technology to one massive company, AT&T, rather than allow consumers to make the choices they want". Public policy no doubt plays its part but one of the key barriers to portability - even if the operators were under European-style regulations to allow it - would be the mishmash of technologies used across the US.

I would love to see how Josh intends to take his GSM iPhone on AT&T and make it run on Verizon or Sprint's CDMA networks, let alone the legacy iDEN networks that Sprint acquired with Nextel. This portability we enjoy in Europe can only be achieved when a single wireless technology is mandated across a country at the start - it is the policies of the government 10 years ago that were at fault and the US government today could only hope to partially solve the problem, allowing portability across equivalent technologies.

Can You Make Money From Mobile Banking?

2007-08-22T10:36:00.000+01:00

We were getting upset that our questioning of Monitise's pre-floatation quotes had dropped to #6 on the Google results page for 'Monitise', when suddenly as if by magic their financials came in. Following their AIM floatation their share price dropped about 20% in the first week of trading whilst the stock markets were still bouyant, before settling into a slow slide to their current position at about 60% of the flotation price in somewhat harsher climes - so what does this mean for the profitability of mobile banking, and financial servies beyond that?

Looking at the financials breakdown PDF, those "12m" customers they had (which should be "33m" now apparently - they never did clarify their real number, to my knowledge) have contributed to £500k in revenue in the last year, alongside consultancy revenues and "the intial flow of business from overseas". That'd make 4p/customer if we ignored the consultancy and assumed the 12m customers. I'd be inclined to suggest they have fewer customers but most revenue came from consulting - it would be very interesting to know more but the detail just isn't there, at least for a non-accoutnant such as myself.

This does raise a valid point on mobile banking - who should pay? I can't see Monitise's charge of 20p/balance to customers, on top of their operator data costs, being very appealing which leaves only the banks funding it as they fund their web sites, to cut customer interaction costs in the long run. That means either up-front consultancy fees to customise the service, or some sort of per-usage payment from the banks based maybe on cost savings (a very vague concept... I wouldn't like to be a software vendor drafting a contract based on that). These revenues suggest that Monitise cannot be making any real money on the customisation for the banks (with over 5 banks live now, that's be under £100k per bank - peanuts that couldn't scale to justify their valuation), but are they getting any per-user fees? We may never know, but banks are not known for their generosity (outside of the bonus pools of course).

Looking at Monitise's longer term position, I'm slightly stuck:
"As a result of the demerger and capital reorganisation of the Group, a merger reserve of £33.0 million and a reverse acquisition reserve of £(25.3) million have been created."
By my understanding that means they spent £25.3m to get a fairly poor MIDlet, a back-end integrating into Link and some sales work (having used the system, I am guessing/hoping they spent £25.29m or more of that on the backend and the sales). This leaves them with about £8m, which would mean revenues had better head north soon else they're going to be doing some strong cost restructuring soon (parent Morse pumped £8.8m into Monitise in 2007 alone). But I know very little of financial reports so this could misrepresent their position and everything may be peachy... I'd love some clarification from someone at the company?

It's very interesting to see these results, albeit an early set based on only a year or so with the earliest banks to launch. If I was a cynic, I would say that Monitise are busy proving that there is little to be made from charging bank customers 20p/balance with no backup revenues - but it does leave as an open question where money is to be made by mobile application developers. Can you make money when you have to pay off the multi-million early investments being thrown at these start-ups? I really hope Monitise proves that you can (writing a good mobile client might help - their proclaimed "consumer-centric product roadmap" must be a new thing introduced after the client I saw).

Nokia To Become Big In Mobile - Open Gardens Exclusive

2007-08-03T13:44:00.000+01:00

Never one to let a week slip by without giving the world something to chuckle about, Ajit at Open Gardens has stuck his neck out and said he reckons that a company other than Apple - his bet is on Nokia - will be the company to own most of the mobile data market. This despite Apple's clear innovation lead being first to market with a mobile data device (I think it helps the argument to ignore the few billion that had been sold before the iPhone launch).

This is the sort of out-there, just-maybe-possible prediction that only a visionary genius could spot - expect Nokia's share price to rocket today in vindication.

(In unrelated news, Nokia just announced a profit increase of two and a half times this quarter which may mean they'll grow beyond the 36% market share they had in Q1, but this news is surely small beans compared to the endorsement of a mobile visionary such as Ajit)

OK, he's talking about mobile data not just mobile, but as the purveyor of far more mobile data access devices than anyone else in the world (including of course Apple) and an aggressive strategy for pushing data-capable devices into the hands of consumers whether they like it or not (eg. trojan horse marketing of S60 phones as consumer-oriented) which predates the iPhone announcement, it would be hard for Nokia not to end up owning a significant chunk of the mobile data market.

Japan Not Buzzword Compliant Shocker

2007-08-03T12:42:00.000+01:00

I just wrote a comment on Pukupi's recent blogpost suggesting that japan was falling behind in mobile for its lack of mobile AJAX support - but it was rejected instantly, reason not stated. I am pretty certain that 6+1 is 7 so either they are automatically barring my comments (I've never baited them before so sounds unlikely) or they dislike Yahoo email addresses, so I figured I'd publish it here instead. Might be worth reading the original first...

I'd argue that the in-browser Flash Lite experience I've seen on Japanese phones is incapable of doing very much well, let alone an interactive webapp, though I'd imagine in some cases it could get by.

Ironically Japan is probably one of the only places in the world where the 3G networks are fast and reliable enough to actually make AJAX halfway feasible on mobile, and DoCoMo have the muscle to push a single standard implementation to remove the large cross-browser fragmentation issues, but with standardised well-integrated DoJa support offering a richer experience maybe DoCoMo don't feel the need?

I'd completely disagree with the idea that AJAX is a tool of choice for any developer who wants to develop something for a normal user on a phone though (can you name any successful deployments where this is the case?), even though you're right in suggesting a task-oriented focus for users. For the forseeable future mobile AJAX will be stuck targetting the minority niche of users who actually own a new S60/iPhone handset and live next to a 3G aerial/WiFi hotspot with flat rate/free data tariffs.

The Japanese are just going to have to accept that they are stuck in mobile purgatory with the most used mobile services in the world and superior mobile functionality to the rest of the world, but without the manifest benefits of full buzzword compliance.

Statistics For Morons

2007-07-26T19:06:00.000+01:00

"According to figures announced today by the Mobile Data Association (MDA), an overall total of 45.6 million unique users were recorded as having used their phones for downloads and browsing the mobile internet in the UK throughout October, November and December last year, an average of 15 million each month."

So by that logic, after 4 months at this rate we'd have had 60m unique users (every person in the UK), and by the end of the year 180m unique users in the UK - or the UK population plus all the Polish plumbers, and the whole of the rest of their compatriates back home plus the population of Germany for good measure, all deciding to come to the UK to use the mobile web. If we take into account increasing demand - by extrapolating a straight line of course - the UK will have more than the entire world's population of unique users within a few years...

Bet Not Over Yet

2007-07-26T11:29:00.000+01:00

A quick thankyou to Mr Mace for pointing out that my hundred quid bet is still not decided yet, nicely touching on a number of the reasons why it's actually very difficult to work out what has shipped between particular dates.

Currently I feel optimistic - this product was always going to sell to the faithful in large volumes over the opening week. It certainly won't sustain that rate so the bet all hinges on how quick the drop-off is, and whn they release v2 which should hopefully deal with a lot of the flaws (though I suspect there won't be a keyboard turning up any time soon so a lot of people will stay out in the cold).

i-RIP

2007-07-18T12:16:00.000+01:00

O2 have just bowed to the inevitable and ditched their i-mode service - excellent news.

There's nothing particularly special about DoCoMo's Japanese i-mode service apart from the fact that loads of people use it and it makes money for everyone involved - an interesting counterpoint to the situation in the rest of the world where operators feel only they should be paid for anything and few people use their equivalent services.

Japan is years ahead of the West in many ways, but it is also very different. When i-mode was launched Japanese PC/Internet penetration was extremely low, partly for historic reasons and partly because when you live in a shoebox you can't easily squeeze a PC tower in the corner. DoCoMo presented a very culture open to new technology with a fast, simple way to access services online whilst seeding an ecosystem with inclusive open technologies - customers loved it and usage skyrocketed. With complete control over handsets - it's often hard to tell which manufacturer actually made a Japanese handset - DoCoMo ensured that all customers could find the services they wanted, and they all worked in a consistent way removing a vast swathe of development hassle. This is why i-mode is popular in Japan, despite the fact that most i-mode pages are as ugly and awkward as their wap brethren.

Almost none of these factors apply to the overseas licencees. Customers had easy access to PCs and the 'real' Internet which pushed user expectations way beyond what any phone could do, let alone phones offering what actually is a very primitive-looking service. The European markets i-mode was trying to compete in were awash with very attractive high-spec handsets, benefitting from the economies of scale that have contributed to GSM's success. DoCoMo managed to line up a handful of largely uninteresting handsets to compete, offering none of the standardisation benefits they enjoyed in their home market whilst being seriously outgunned in aesthetics and specs. The Overseas Edition i-mode wasn't even as good as the Japanese version - it was several years behind the Japanese version but also, criminally, technically behind its European contemporaries (particularly with the DoJa 1.5 flavour of Java which contains pointless restrictions). With such a selection O2 could never hope to offer only i-mode devices, therefore they had to manage i-mode (and DoJa games/content) on one side and wap (with MIDP) in parallel. Finally, users didn't really know what i-mode was or why they wanted it, so handsets were not selling because they were "i-mode" - they needed to sell on their other merits as a Trojan Horse.

Thus the i-mode experiment outside Japan was inevitably going to be a failure, but it has taken 2 years to put it down. It goes to prove that you'd be very foolish to draw too many conclusions from the Japanese market, especially if you don't actually understand all the factors involved.

Correlations

2007-07-12T15:02:00.000+01:00

Sony-Ericsson make the best mobile UIs, Motorla some of the worst (though things may be changing, and buying Sendo was a great move).

Sony-Ericsson have been pushing in new directions with the use of the Walkman and Cybershot brands (with Wega coming soon?) for vertically targetted devices, Motorola have spammed the world's mobile shops with identikit RAZR clones (oh, and they did the ROKR).

Amid strong growth in the mobile market, Sony-Ericsson profits are up 55% this quarter, Moto is down compared to last year and may make a loss in mobile phones this year.

Coincidence?

(OK I think it's safe to stop bashing Moto now, one day soon they'll become the plucky underdog and people will start rooting for them again - the new platform could do it if they find a nicer box to put it in)

Open Paedo APIs? (No, We Don't Know What He's Talking About)

2007-07-05T14:35:00.000+01:00

Ajit of Open Gardens fame has recently received some top quality smokeable materials, it would seem, as in his latest blog post he has underlined the imminent threat to the world's morals posed by - can you guess? No? Uncontrolled APIs. To quote in full: "uncontrolled access to APIs is an invitation to scammers and paedophiles." Oh yes.

Scammers I can see. If you allow an AJAX script to initiate a phone call or send a text without user intervention, you could easily have any wap page - or advert - start racking up premium charges. You definitely want to make sure the user can prevent that. I would recommend a simple system where you ask the user what they want to do, but if you don't understand how code signing works it might seem that a laborious code signing exercise like the flawed Symbian Signed could maybe succeed.

Paedophilia though? Really? It's not my expert subject, but I do know a little about APIs and I don't really see the connection. If anyone can enlighten me please do so in the comments... Maybe this requires more thought. Perhaps there is also a terrorism angle that the pragmatic mind of Mr Jaokar has missed? Perhaps he could mention it to the European Parliament next time he drops by to brief them on what is happening in the real world?

Sorry to keep bringing the pragmatic thing up, but he started it ("but I have always been pragmatic") - and it's funny to see someone who really genuinely feels strongly about being pragmatic in his approach to people (quite rightly) without being able to see the utter lack of pragmatism in his view of the technology he is associated with.

The signature comment hilights his lack of understanding - you can code sign a single binary app because it's a single binary file and after every rebuild you can pay to submit it to code signing for a few weeks and maybe get it back approved. How do you sign a dynamically generated wap/web page which references a standard script library and maybe some other embedded custom scripts, a few external scripts, and some other server generated script and data? You can't. It simply doesn't work. Suggesting it does just shows how little Ajit understands that whichi he professes to be an expert in.

Apologies to Ajit and readers for getting worked up about this, I am certain he is a really nice bloke and he does a lot to raise the profile of mobile applications etc, but I strongly believe that if someone wants to create a massive soapbox and shout from it to everyone who will listen, that person really understand what they're talking about first and has a duty to communicate clearly and correctly. Suggesting this kind of thing is trivial and essential for the market to proceed implies some due diligence has been observed, but it clearly hasn't. Rant over.

TMobile Devicating On JavaME, says Nokia?

2007-07-02T09:47:00.000+01:00

An amusing typo on the new Forum Nokia wiki gives the standard permissions for API access on Nokia MIDP phones, and then lists T-Mobile US as among the operators who are "devicating from the standard". Which sounds awfully appropriate given T-Mobile's refusal to allow apps signed by a 3rd-party to be installed on their phones (only unsigned or operator signed - kind of kills the point in signing...) and their propensity to lock phones down and prevent users from doing nasty things like using the network from Java (operators being natural opponents of network usage...)

Had To Give In Some Day

2007-06-29T11:53:00.000+01:00

We've been trying to resist mentioning anything about that phone that some company is releaseing in I think it was the US around about now, but this bit of interesting rumour popped up on the rather well-connected Mr Kewney's site recently: 3G iPhone in Europe on Voda/TMob/Carphone Warehouse by end of year.

It all sounds reasonable enough, though he makes the odd slightly skewed comments - suggesting Orange wouldn't take the phone because they have strong branding and like to turn off handset features, which is a trend that Vodafone has led.

The 3G networking obviously would be rather useful over here, though it does rather make a mockery of Mr Job's recent 3G put-down... which appears to be a pretty standard Jobsian diversion from the truth, attempting to sound completely plausible and reasonable whilst not addressing the real issues and covering up for weaknesses in his product.

The dual Voda/TMob thing - at the expense of Orange, O2 and 3 - seems weird though. Working with multiple carriers is far more of an issue in the US, where every carrier has good and bad coverage areas (more bad then good for AT&T, admittedly), number portability is relatively new and the technologies are so different. In Europe these things don't matter so much - coverage is pretty uniformly acceptable and portability is the norm. Without exclusivity you get much less operator money, so why artificially halve your target market?

Anyway, details. Will be interesting, and I'd feel upset if I'd bought the EDGE version right about now...

Monitise To Demand Urgent Correction to Reuters Misquote?

2007-06-26T16:52:00.000+01:00

"Currently, 12 million consumers access Monitise's service platform and Lukies expects this to rise to 33 million by the end of the summer" says a Reuters article covering the fact that owner Morse would like to offload its mobile banking subsidiary Monitise onto AIM.

Mobile banking would appear to be way more popular than anyone suspected then, with 12m customers in the UK on Monitise's product alone... except that number doesn't quite ring true.

Monitise don't list clients on their site, but if you backtrack through press releases it looks like they currently have RBS, HSBC, First Direct and Alliance & Leicester offering the client as a trial or full product. First Direct have around 1.2m customers, but I've struggled to pin down good figures for the others - however the UK as a whole reached a record 18.1m online (Internet) banking users in 2006 (according to APACS), split between all the personal account offering banks: major high street banks (Lloyds, Halifax/BoS and Barclays do not use Monitise) and a few minors (again, only A&L use Monitise). Monitise said after RBS signed on they could potantially access 35% of Link-compatible cardholders, which is 95% of the UK's population of 58.8m (at the last census in 2001)... or about 19.5m.

So Monitise appear to either be doing exceptionally well at getting signups - with more mobile users in half a year willing to pay 20p+data charges to get a balance, than all the partner banks have persuaded to use web clients for free after 10 years of UK online banking - or they actually meant "potential users" and their real download figures are too low to mention in such a triumphant press release. Use the client and tell me which you think is the case (or of course read some of the reviews if you can't).

The problem is, mobile banking could be great and I'd definitely sign up immediately - if I didn't need to go through an 11 step signup process to get a terrible UI, to be charged 20p to know my balance just went down 20p (and not much else, though more features are promised). What's wrong with a nice simple phone thick client which uses online logins to let me do everything i can do in my browser - check my balance, move money around, find out if payments have gone through, etc? Shouting so loudly about the wonders of mobile banking and then failing so badly to deliver what customers might want just poisons the marketplace for other mobile applications, and denies users useful functions. The mobile experience is painful enough right now without the additional burden of poor app development.

Bootnote: I meant to post this some time ago but had trouble researching useful banking stats. It appears that in the meantime Morse/Monitise's PR firm have done an exceptional job at spraying the release all over the web and yet been less efficient at correcting the key highly misleading stat. How strange... still, if I understand right, there will need to be full disclosure of finances, users etc before the listing on AIM so no doubt we will all be the wiser soon.

OK Today I Feel Like A Cynic

2007-06-19T16:22:00.000+01:00

AT&T describe their new Video Share service as 'groundbreaking'. It's a video call. We've had them for years, and no-one uses them, so what was the point? And why did it take so long?

Synergy, Value for Money, and eBay/Skype

2007-06-19T13:34:00.000+01:00

I just had a quick look at an eBay auction I'm in and noticed a picture of a phone. Obviously that piqued my interest so I took a look, and it turns out eBay will now send you either an SMS or an IM when you are outbid, the IM containing a link to rebid. Nothing too excited, but I thought I'd sign up with my Skype account... except I can't. They only support MSN, AOL and Yahoo. Given that many people I know now only use Skype as an IM client, because the call quality is so poor and the IM UI quality so much higher than the likes of MSN, this seems like a major oversight.

$2.6bn well spent?

Smell the Desperation - sorry, Innovation

2007-06-19T10:53:00.000+01:00

"ScreenTonic innovates once again and creates the first mobile Internet portal skin sporting Coca-Cola's colors" - title of ScreenTonic's latest press release. They should seriously consider looking for patentable IP in that, after all it's not everyone who has the creative genius to make a red wap site with some links on it.

It is possible that there is more to it than that but the rest of the relase descends into pseudo-English so I couldn't be bothered to read it...

Wager

2007-06-13T14:36:00.001+01:00

I've been avoiding writing anything about iPhones since the announce, because it's just fuelling the hype that leads ultimately to this kind of meaningless infoporn thrown around by bloggers and companies mud-wrestling for reflected glory - and anyway, now it's even becoming trendy to knock the iPhone as more and more people start to come off the kool aid and spot the probable design flaws.

Instead I'm happy to wait until I'm vindicated, but the one iPhone thing I would like to do is make a relatively substantial wager, say £100, that they will sell fewer than half the number of iPhones Jobs is predicting to actual consumers during the first year of its release. I think putting your money where your mouth is is just so much better than mouthing off in blogs - and I wish I'd done the same with Moto stock a year ago :)

I'll wait to thrash out the exact contractual terms there until someone takes me up on my bet - obviously we're talking devices shipped to users not just dumped into retail channels, and we're also not including any which are returned within the 30 day cool-off period (I suspect there may be many there). I'll accept that if they decide to cut their own throats and massively reduce the price to gain market share, I lose my hundred quid though.

Anyone who'd like to take me up on this get in touch,

Après Nous La Deluge

2007-06-12T07:31:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I wasn't actually the first to write about the problems of Mobile AJAX, but suddenly I've started noticing others joining the "it doesn't remotely work yet" crowd, which is a refreshing change from the Kool Aid drinkers of old. I liked Mike Rowehl's post so much I didn't even bother rewriting the Mobile AJAX FAQ as if it was part of the real world - it's a nice idea, but it should really try to present an objective viewpoint and make it clear how "ahead of the curve" it is (that's the polite way to say no-one can use it yet).

Off-Topic

2007-06-07T07:38:00.000+01:00

OK totally off-topic but too amusing to pass up. Sliding out the door of No. 10, ex-president Blair has claimed that "We want good relations with Russia. But that can only be done on the basis that there are certain shared principles and shared values."

This throws an interesting new light on the last few years of his premiership: those shared values would appear to be the embracement of corruption by his government, undermining of human rights, strong early moves to pave the way for a police state (with some healthy spin on the reasons), political control and gagging of the media and news management to justify meddling in sovereign states... so perhaps we should look East to see what the future holds.

(Obviously this post is taking the piss a bit, and Blair comes a very poor second to Putin in the race to become a dictator - the latter probably blessed with an unassailable head start - but I think Blair's legacy does go to remind us why three terms is just too long for any party to remain in power).

No more politics now, back to mobile!

There Are Two Ways To Overtake

2007-06-06T10:09:00.000+01:00

I was cynical when Orange released figures saying games had overtaken ringtones (no really, I actually was cynical, believe it or not). There are two obvious ways market A might overtake market B - a healthy way (A grows faster than B) or an unhealthy way (B shrinks to become smaller than A). Orange did not make it at all clear which it was.

Now we have Gfk M2 (catchy name) claiming the UK spent £83m on games over the twelve months ending March 2007, overtaking ringtones for the first time which made £76m in the same period. All well and good, but... the UK ringtones market in 2005 made £177m. So I think it's pretty clear what the causes for this "impressive" overtaking scenario are.

Maybe people should stop getting so excited about news management without engaging their brains first. The big question is - will Orange be making such a big song and dance about it's mobile content figures next year? It never bothered to publish them in such detail before...

Bitch-slapped by the Invisible Hand

2007-05-29T08:35:00.001+01:00

This article did make me laugh - I think the fact it needs to be written shows that a completely commercial-led free market can often screw itself up just as badly as a government-regulated one. In general I favour lighter regulation and free markets (I normally agree with the Economist), but the fact that someone needs to dream of a fantasy phone which would allow them to make calls anywhere in the US just hilights how lucky we are to be able to carry one phone round the whole of Europe, and in fact a large fraction of the world, and all we have to wory about are roaming fees... yay GSM.

BWIN Marketing Team Asleep At Wheel

2007-05-28T08:18:00.000+01:00

There has been recent praise for the mobile expertise of Cellectivity, enabling BWin to "provide mobile users with access to real online poker tables for the very first time" - says Cellectivity CEO Marcel Puyk.

I have to say this did make me laugh. I remember being bowled over by a demo of PokerRoom's multiplayer mobile client running on the (then brand new) SE K700i, which must have been over 2 years ago. Sure, the network really wasn't fast enough for a multiplayer game, but it looked good and showed what was technically feasible.

Fast-forward to today and we still only have 10% 3G handset penetration in most of the West, so the quality of the multiplayer networking experience still won't be so great for a lot of users - so what has Cellectivity's mobile expertise done to enable such a sea-change?

Burke Hanson, attorney at large over at the Reg, reckons "In theory, Bwin's PokerRoom can be accessed today from certain mobile devices now. But the quality of the experience is so poor that for all practical purposes the potentially enormous market for handheld poker remains untapped. That is where Cellectivity comes in - the mobile gaming specialist has customized Bwin's service for handsets, enabling access to poker games anytime, anywhere." Eh? Says who? The supported handset list looks much like it did last month (from what I remember, always an unreliable way to view the past of course)...

When you look into it, Cellectivity appear to have contributed two things:

They have placed the client onto T-Mob and 3's portals, and presumably moved PokerRoom inside 3's walled garden for those 3 customers who still live inside it. Greta news for PokerRoom, though more a contractual achievement than a technical one.
They have written a press release bigging themselves up at the expense of the guys at PokerRoom who actually did the technical work.

If I'm missing something, Bwin or Cellectivity please let me know :)

I have no problem with the deal which hopefully will make both companies and their players very happy, but I do think that the BWin marketing team should shoot themselves for handing over all credit for a very impressive piece of software to another company that basically happened to own the rights to place gambling content on a couple of operator portals...

And Now For Something Completely Different

2007-05-27T21:25:00.000+01:00

Credit where credit's due, the Jbed-FastBCC JVM on the LG KE970 Shine is actually very nice. The extra compilation step seems pretty reliable (so far) and is quick; the JVM itself moves pretty nicely (though it flickers a bit when you're plotting a lot of things without a GameCanvas); it has full 8bit alpha transparency (even though it is reported as 2bit) and it supports silky smooth fully anti-aliassed fonts in three sizes, with bold and italic variants. It's so nice that I'd actually upgrade immediately to the Shine, if it weren't for the roller: it should offer high-speed scrolling with accurate positioning, but instead LG chose to make it painfully slow but innaccurate with really awkward left and right buttons.

So JBed appear to have turned a corner, and now offer products worth using. Which is nice.

ZNDR: "Ignore the Numbers, Look At The Recycled Phone Announcement!"

2007-05-16T07:25:00.000+01:00

So it turns out that the "media monster" capable of 30fps "superb video" hinted at by Mr ZNDR as he tried to cover Motorola's ailing financials was pure smokescreen.

This new killer phone, who's major selling point is having the same video performance as various other phones already on the market (I think they call feature-matching "innovative" in marketing circles), is actually just the Sendo - sorry, Motorola - RIZR Z8 officially announced at 3GSM back in February.

Today's press release also rather ingenously includes some airbrushing to exagerate the phone's specs a little - first there's a quote from Gartner on the size of the mobile TV market in 2010, even though the Z8 does not in fact feature any of the technologies usually referred to as Mobile TV. In common with most high-end phones, it just plays videos stored on SD cards or streamed over the network, not really the same thing - but you wouldn't know that if you skimread the release.

Secondly, the release talks about how it can expand to 32Gb of memory - before slyly admitting later in the sentence that "On today's 4GB microSD...": yes that's right, 32Gb is just the theoretical maximum size of a microSD card, but you can only buy 4Gb versions today. However in a few years time, if you haven't already upgraded the phone and forgotten about it, you'll be able to use 32Gb cards - assuming microSD hasn't been replaced by another format by then. Lovely.

So this leaves us with two conclusions we can draw: ZNDR doesn't know what is going on in his own company (a theory which might find favour with some investors), or he was just trying to distract from the dismal sales figures generated under his leadership - he managed to preside over a 15% drop in mobile revenues last year, which account for 57% of Motorola turnover.

To leave on a positive note though, it might actually become my first Motorola phone. Despite the rather poor efforts of the Moto CEO and PR warren (bunnies live in warrens if I remember right) the Sendo team appear to have done an excellent job, and I kind of like it. Unlike the RAZR2.

Proof Mobile AJAX Only Works In A Parallel Reality

2007-05-15T18:26:00.000+01:00

Ajit at Open Gardens seems like a nice enough guy - an outrageous name dropper, but generally fairly harmless. However his most recent post - that US Customs people are very nice and they don't always get the kudos they deserve - finally provides proof that he's living in a parallel reality. I'd love to know how many other people (particularly those without US passports) would agree with this summary - from personal experience and anecdotal evidence from others, I'd have to estimate in the long term - we'll get to the criteria for when later - though exactly how mobile and web worlds will collide and what they'll leave behind is open to question.

Anyone can read the future technology roadmap of the GSM Association, see the clear trend for more processing power in phones, and draw the obvious conclusion that some form of mobile web will eventually be available and possibly useful and desirable on a mobile device, some time. This does not take visionary skills, just a bit of common sense extrapolation and a willingness to ignore today's reality and live in the indefinite future.

Ajit's angle, excellent self-publicist that he is, is to spot the inevitable convergence, tack on today's buzzwords, and repackage the whole thing as a visionary dream around which he can sell a lot of 'strategic consulting', books, speaking spots and whatever else - and everytime any web thing happens on mobile, his vision is vindicated. Fair play to him in some ways - I have nothing against Ajit as a person, and he has spotted a niche which the right person can make lots of money shouting from - it's just that I have to disagree with almost everything he says about the near- and medium-term future of mobile. Long-term is too far away to try and call.

I see most mobile commentators split into two camps: technically knowledgable and pragmatic (Guy Kewney, Michael Mace, et al) and tech-lite but buzzword-compliant (Ajit, monkey boy and fellow cult members). The former tend to write insightful articles which understand the limitations of the medium, the latter tend to get very enthusiastic about future technologies which will solve all the problems we have today and assume everyone wants whatever their new idea is. The latter tend to call themselves names like 'visionary', 'pioneer', 'innovator' or 'imagineer' (ugh) as well, terms which tend to rub me up the wrong way when bestowed on oneself. You can argue that the world needs both sets of people, but I'd rather sit closer to the former camp - I have found that exciting future technologies tend to grow organically and unexpectedly, following user demand (the web, SMS) rather than as preplanned visions which appear fully-formed (think WebVan); this makes understanding the present and near future rather important.

So what's wrong with mobile AJAX? I think you need to look at the technical hurdles and the words of those pushing it.

There's a great little scene in one of the Asimov Foundation books (which I read far too long ago to quote in any detail), when a diplomat arrives and signs a giant treaty with the 1st Foundation, a frontier world, guaranteeing safety and blah blah. Everyone thinks it's a great sign of their importance and safety until one of the professors at the university applies some logic to it, cancels out the contradictions, removes the meaningless fluff, and ends up with nothing - a treaty designed to look impressive but saying nothing useful. I often think of this when reading Open Gardens, where you can see a huge enthusiasm for mobile widgets or whatever else is flavour of the day, without any real analysis of why people might want them, what value they provide the user, whether they can even work for the majority of users. There are attempts at analysis and explanations, but they always rely on an implicit assumption that everyone wants new technology and it must be good - this always bothers me. Maybe I need to go to California and take whatever the techno-evangelists and asymptote guys take for a while...

Blue Favour's recent post "10 Things I learnt about Mobile 2.0" covers a lot of what the web 2.0 beta crowd want from the mobile market, and infuses the points with some realism when commenting on the key trends that speakers discussed at the Mobile 2.0 Conference recently.

The key point which springs out of this to me are: there are a lot of people who want to push the Web 2.0 bubble onto mobile, AJAX and all. They don't appear to fully understand the differences in the medium - I really don't think people want to casually browse on a mobile in the same way that they do on a PC, I think they want to accomplish certain tasks quickly and efficiently, and those certain tasks revolve around things you need on the move. In a perfect world, the widget concept does seem to fit in with this requirement and I think this is why it has had a lot of traction recently - though I have always been heavily underimpressed when actually using the things.

The web 2.0 crowd seem completely PDA and smartphone centric, because that's what they carry, and this just hilights the fact that what they eprsonally want is totally independent from what the average person wants (as different as their smartphones are from the average person in the street's handset). The more they see their handsets capable of, the more they assume the market is inexorably moving towards web-browsing fully-programmable smartphones - but it isn't. Smartphones are selling better than last year, but almost all because of Nokia's S60 platform being targetted increasingly at the middle of the market and operators trying to leverage the potential for own-brand products by pushing Windows clones. Most people are picking up phones as fashion statements, not as computers - so don't expect any change in the platforms you can use to develop real world apps on any time soon.

A crucial point - shared by all mobile app platforms - is the impact apps have on battery life. Javascript allegedly drains the battery at 4-5 times its normal rate. Javascript is a high-level programming language and AJAX generates a lot of network traffic, both downloading every single little iteration of the code (and the massive libraries required to make it work cross-device) and when doing all that funky asynchronous stuff. I don't have figures for Java but it doubtless uses quite a bit too, but with a fat client you can minimise network traffic to a single download, intelligently minimise bandwidth and connections and generally offer a streamlined user experience which gets the job done as fast as possible.

When it comes down to it, AJAX is designed for powerful CPUs and low-latency broadband connections charged for by the month. It is not designed for the high-latency slow and flaky wireless connections, particularly not those charged for by the Kb or (if you're lucky) by the Mb. You couldn't design a less appropriate technology. Let's look at each point:

Data Quantity

XML is a very heavy way to describe data. For passing small amounts of data around you can instantly treble the payload size using it.
Fast iterations and rapidly changing code are great in theory, but when you download entire libraries each time you visit a site you are really piling on the pounds. Especially when those libraries have to allow for every runtime environment.
"Unlimited" tariffs are coming to mobile, but they tend to be limited in bandwidth and carrying a number of limitations. This may change, but only if the network's backhauls start playing catch-up.

Data Speed

Current 3G offers pretty slow connections with very high latency, a lot like 56Kbps modems in fact - OK for small WML pages, but pretty awful for big heavy things (see Data Quantity).
3G has just reached 10% penetration in Europe and the US. Do you even want to know how slow a GPRS connection will be with this stuff?
HSDPA may fix all this, where it is rolled out, if the backhaul can take it, once users have HSDPA phones. Don't hold your breath.
Remember boo.com? Remember why it failed?

Programming Model

Javascript is a high-level language. It's deceptive - at first you think it's really simple to code, and many non-coders do give it a try. This leads to incredibly inefficient design, code bloat and generally the kind of things that trained developers who have worked in mobile have heart palpitations about.
Anyone suggesting that fragmentation will not occur is living in a fantasy world.

Java is a very carefully designed language which requires central certification of environments, and it still fragmented for two reasons:

Phones are consumer electronic devices developed to tight deadlines, and often they ship before they are ready, with bugs.
Even carefully written specs with heavy centralised test suites have gaps.

Javascript has no carefully written spec, no centralised test suiute to ensure compatibility - it's an organically grown mess on the desktop, where upgrades are easy and browsers relatively sparse. There are a wide number of mobile browser makers and every one of them has wide differences in markup rendering - their efforts at scripting engines will be less standardised, not more.

How many hours of talktime are users willing to give up to fuel that funky sliding effect? How many pence will they pay for it and how many seconds will they wait while it loads? I can suggest an answer, but you can probably guess for yourself.

I have heard from a number of sources that mobile operator's backhauls cannot take many users using heavy data services. They survive off voice revenues, and a bit of SMS - they'd like to see loads of other data revenues but they won't do it if voice call availability or quality would suffer, because that is the cash cow. This is really a post on its own so I'll leave it here, but I do think that all of the Web/Mobile 2.0 crowd who want the operators to get out the way and just become a bit pipe are living on false hope. Just like their faith in mobile AJAX.

Fat clients and simple Wap pages will be here for a long time because they work, and they work in the mobile medium - you can't just do a quick mash up and make something work on a small screen with limited I/O potential. What replaces them, in a truly popular mass market sense, will be many years in the future and I don't think we're in a position to accurately judge that in today's bubble 2.0 market.

Motorola Make Computers Now Too

2007-05-02T08:21:00.000+01:00

The latest MotoDev newsletter proudly declares "Motorola has recently released a handful of new mobile computers running Windows Mobile...", jumping on the Nokia bandwagon.

Which begs the question, at what point will consumers tell the industry they don't want all those lovely features they associate with PCs - crashes, virus threats, BSODs, bloatware, never having quite enough processor power or memory to run anythign quickly, etc? Nokia have clearly embraced the processing power/memory issue in S60 which grinds along as much as it ever did, but I remain unconvinced that this is what customers really want...

Operators Don't Want To Get Caught Doing A Barclays Bank

2007-04-26T16:37:00.000+01:00

There seems to be a trend among lazy sub-eds to tag anything about mobile payments, wallets etc as "Mobile Banking" - even when the item they're copying doesn't, and they have nothing to do with banking.

The intiative itself appears interesting and has enough momentum to work now that Nokia, Mastercard, Vodafone et al are on board - it's basically just rolling out an internationalized version of the system DoCoMo have been using for some time in Japan - but more interesting is what the operators will do when they hear a lot of people are calling them banks. I bet they'd love to do all sorts of banking related things, but I also bet they really really don't want the banking regulations that come with them. Sticking to payments sounds much more sensible.

There was a lot of discussion about this back when Vodafone launched mPay and other similar initiatives came out, and I seem to remember the consensus opinion was they'd do anything to avoid becoming banks in the regulatory sense of the word, but typically I can't find any of those articles now. Such is life.

(look here if you're confused about the title)

Sony Ericsson in JBed with Esmertec Shocker? We Must be Told

2007-04-11T12:31:00.000+01:00

So the Jbed saga continues. 'Guilhem' alleges Sony-Ericsson use the Jbed JVM, something that even Esmertec don't know about - could it be true? Could the most reliable and arguably most advanced MIDP JVM in the market actually be Jbed in disguise? Could the many bugs on the LG Chocolate and the Siemens SF65 purely be down to incompetence at the manufacturers, and nothing to do with the underlying JVM product? They are both fashion phones sold purely for their looks, with questionable insides, after all.

The Case For
The case for is slim. It primarily rests on the word of Guilhem, who doesn't actually give any personal details identifying him further (don't you just hate it when bloggers do that? etc). He'd have to work at SE or Esmertec to have that kind of info, as if SE really do licence Jbed they're much too embarassed to let Esmertec tell anyone about it. Esmertec instead seem to concentrate on no-name Asian OEMs, with a handful of questionable handsets from Siemens and LG as the big names.

You have to look hard for other evidence to support his assertion. The blistering speed of the MIDP2 Sony-Ericssons is down to their use of Jazelle (since 2004), and the performance of the FastBCC variant is much better than the conventional version on eg. the Chocolate - JBenchmark claims FastBCC runs on Jazelle processors too, so there is some connection. However the FastBCC version still has a number of bugs which the SEs don't, in things like the inflate algorithm used in PNG IDATs, so this isn't looking too likely.
(Note: I call this Jazelle version 'fastBCC' purely because the system Profile property reports it as Jbed-FastBCC, and other buggier slower devices don't... I have no idea which devices really use fastBCC vs fastDAC).

When Lenovo signed up to use Jbed the press release claimed "Esmertec's software has been commercially launched within 4 of the 5 leading handset brands worldwide" - on 1/1/'07 that would be Nokia, Moto, Samsung, SE and LG. LG we know about, the others...? Well, we'll consider this again shortly, but the release only says "Esmertec's software" and not explicitly Jbed so it doesn't mean as much as they want you to think it does.

And finally, Sony-Ericsson emulators are just WTK reskins - other Jbed licensees don't ship any emulators, which implies Esmertec can't be bothered to make them, which in turn does suggest a link, but a tenuous one. The SE emulator's 'THIRDPARTYLICENSES.txt', incidentally, does not mention Esmertec/Jbed at all and nor does LicenseAgreement2.pdf.

The Case Against
Firstly, it could just be mistaken identity - the Jazelle is a processor which runs a lot of the JVM bytecode natively on the chip, but it requires support software from ARM called JTEK. Sounds kind of similar, could be confused?

Also it is worth comparing the little things about the JVMs. All Jbed devices declare their Platform system properties as 'Jbed' or some variant - Sony-Ericsson give detailed handset information. SE support every JSR under the sun, with a huge number of filetypes supported under MMAPI etc - traditionally Jbed devices do not, instead focussing on a handful of JSRs and limited media support. Gilhelm suggests this is the sort of customisation a manufacturer must do to the Jbed JVM to make it useful, which SE does and LG can't be bothered with. Possible, but it's a lot of customisation work and surely other licensees would pick up on the JSRs that don't need much native support?
The one massive improvement SE would have had to have made to the standard Jbed as used on all LGs (fastBCC and the rest) is the complete elimination of the multiple compile / jar optimizing steps which take up many seconds on the LGs but are completely missing on Sony-Ericsson devices. Some might call this the only piece of evidence required, but I'll go on.

But the real killer is in the numbers. Esmertec were claiming in that Jan 1st 2007 press release that Jbed has been shipped on 76m devices ever. As a comparison, according to analyst iSuppli Nokia (#1) shipped 348m devices and LG (#5 and Esmertec's biggest acknowledged licensee) shipped 64.4m in 2006. For Nokia, the vast majority of those devices have to have Java; for SE, the percentage is even higher as they sell so few low-end devices. So even if as Esmertec imply 4 of the top 5 manufacturers have shipped at least one device with Jbed in, it was a minority device and could not be their main Java platform.

SE's Java platform has remained incredibly consistent in every way you can examine since their first MIDP2 devices on Jazelle back in 2004, and has been in almost every device except the barely-selling J200 series etc at the low-end and the niche top-end Symbian devices (which run on the rather shaky Monty JVM). So SE's share of those 76m devices would have to be well over half of the Jbed devices shipped if it's core platform (the one I always praise) ran on Jbed - note that iSuppli claim SE shipped more than 42m devices in the second half of 2006, at which point their platform was already over a year old.

Where would that put LG, with those 64.4m devices shipped in 2006? We know that many of their sales come from their home market and from BREW devices shipped in the US, but you could conservatively assume that maybe 1/4 of those devices - 16m - were Java devices running on Jbed (with maybe 1m of those Chocolates - LG don't reveal the split between the Korean, GSM/MIDP and CDMA/BREW versions but we can assume the 1.7m sold before July '06 covers them all). Their pre-2006 devices also shipped Jbed, and have since at least Q2 2003, the launch date of the really really bad G7100 I have in my desk (MIDP1 Jbed, don't go there); LG sold 44m devices in 2004 so overall you could conservatively expect a good 30m of those 76m Jbed devices to be LGs, and my gut says it'd be a higher number. That doesn't leave much room for all those Sony-Ericssons.

So I'm going to have to say that unless Gilhem can pull some pretty amazing evidence out of the bag, I have to assume he's wrong and SE run on their own Java platform based on ARM's Jazelle and JTEK products. Esmertec may have licensed some software component used somewhere in the system by SE and the others in the big 5, but I fail to see what it is and it must be so small as to have little destabilising impact on the rest of the platform. Gilhem, care to prove me wrong?

Clarification
There was the subtle implication in the phrasing of the original comment that I may be biassed against Esmertec/Jbed unduly. This is definitely not the case. I dislike the known confirmed implementations of Jbed purely because they are really really bad, as I outlined in my post. For all I know the company may in every respect except for the Jbed product be the greatest company in the world.

What's Wrong With JBed

2007-04-08T09:51:00.000+01:00

In my last post I was fairly blunt in my dislike for JBed, Esmertec's pseudo-JVM for low-end devices such as most of LG's range (including the Chocolate).

Why Is It Different?
When you install content onto a JBed device, after the content has arrived it must go through a compilation stage where it is compiled into a native machine code - it is run native, rather than as interpreted bytecode in a sandboxed JVM. The native code still retains the garbage collection, threading and permissions models of a MIDP/CLDC JVM so code can in theory run just as it would traditionally; I have absolutely no idea if there are any security holes introduced by this process, this could be a fruitful area for a security researcher but I currently have no experience that suggests this is a risk. Array bounds checking and the like appear to still be implemented correctly.

Esmertec claim a performance increase of "up to 20x" from this process. That suggests the underlying hardware this JVM usually runs on must be really poor, because performance is pretty typical for low-end devices with equivalent speed in the non-Java UI. I'm sure there is some advantage gained to the manufacturer in slightly reducing the electronics cost of the device

Why Is It Bad?
The addition of a compilation stage is not, per se, bad - in fact if it really does transparently improve performance without affecting the way the code runs, it's great. Note the qualifiers there though: the reason I dislike it is that sometimes, arbitrarily, it fails to compile the code - code which a few small source changes ago compiled fine - just like the early Symbian MontyThread bugs where a small change would kill your code for the 6600 v3.4 firmware. This sort of unpredictability has been greatly reduced from the early days, when the MIDP1 LGs would just arbitrarily fail things all over the place, but it still exists.

Unpredictable builds are a nightmare, greatly increasing QA time for every tiny change. Do you single out these devices for early and repeated testing so you can trap failures immediately and pin down exactly what change triggered the problem, or is it better to just leave them to the end and accept days of pain if the build happens to fail, tweaking every line until it works? Whenever possible I now opt for the latter as failures can come and go as they please, and I make it clear that these problem devices are troublesome and will only be supported if possible, but this doesn't help when you have to patch code already out in the wild and the problems suddenly surface from nowhere.

I'll repeat, failures at compile time have become much less frequent on more recent MIDP1 devices like the Chocolate, so this is becoming less of an issue - but the unpredictability remains in other areas. Don't try talking to Esmertec about the flaws though, you will be greeted with complete silence and a total lack of useful advice.

ZLib
The ZLib deflate/inflate compression system underpins two major parts of JavaME: the Jar file format used to package applications (which is really just a special case of zip), and the mandatory PNG file format in which almost every image you will use is encoded.

The JBed JVM as implemented on, for example, the Chocolate has problems with both of these file types (it presumably uses the same flawed inflate algorithm for both). With conventional tools, you rarely hit problems but if you use Ken Silverman's extremely useful tools you will hit more problems because they use clever heuristics out on the edges of the deflate spec to improve compression, resulting in Zlib blocks that the normal Zlib will never produce and therefore presumably never appear in the test suites for Esmertec's inflate algorithms (I am assuming that they have test suites).

If you use KZip to create smaller Jars, sometimes they will fail - some files just won't be able to decompress so either the install will fail or some resources will not load correctly at runtime. This seems to go away if you use the conventional Jar tool, so no big problem - your users will pay a little extra for those spare Kilobytes, but it won't be more than 1-2% more.

If you use PNGOut you have larger problems. On many devices, including S40 MIDP2 handsets like the 6230, maybe 0.5% of files run through PNGOut will fail and you just have to resave them in a more conventional tool and they'll work again. These failures can actually be predicted at build time so it's not the end of the world - you aren't going to kill the QA team by making them check every PNG in every game.
On the Chocolate, however, you see more like 10% of the PNGOut-compressed images failing to load, for a wide range of unpredictable reasons (unpredictable in that, without the source code for their inflate algorithm, I really can't be bothered to find the reasons which seem completely aribitrary and random). So, basically, you can't use PNGOut for images intended for the Chocolate - which means the whole device (and others on this platform) have to be treated as special cases with different resources. Because you can't predict when an image will fail, you still have to thoroughly test that every image has loaded every time the resources change, because it may be possible that a PNG created through a normal tool will also occasionally break the loader. I've enough experience with other devices to say this won't happen, but with JBed devices you just can't take the chance.

Not Just ZLib
I've had certain resource files refuse to load completely, even when I deliberately make sure they are not compressed at all inside the jar. They just throw an exception and you end up with nothing. It's impossible to say what causes this, but if you adjust the first few bytes they will suddenly magically load (whatever the compression level of the file). So maybe the file is accidentally colliding with the magic bytes at the front of a JBed-compiled class - because you get a similar error if you try to open a class file. Or maybe it's something completely different, because you just don't know what is happening to the contents of your jar inside this opaque compilation step.

These are my key problems with the device. There are other bugs, but you accept that they exist and work around them just like with any other device on any other JVM. But it's very hard to live with completely unpredictable failure of some builds, sometimes. It annoys the hell out of your testers and your developers, and it makes managing big complicated builds a nightmare. The absence of support from Esmertec just rubs salt in to the wounds, and it's not a huge consolation to know that it's the same salt Nokia et al use when refusing to acknowledge any bug in their forums, because the JBed wounds are that much bigger and more common.

Why Do South Koreans Hate Developers?

2007-04-03T13:13:00.000+01:00

I say South Koreans, but of course North Koreans might be equally guilty if the strange (alleged) Bond-loving opera-writing golfing prodigy great leader would stop ravaging their country and allow them to move into the 20th or 21st centuries. But I digress.

South Korea is home to the world's first or second most advanced mobile infrastructure, depending on how you want to measure it, sitting comfortably ahead of everyone but Japan. After a trade dispute with the US, the South Korean people were saved from BREW and instead given their own government-mandated hybrid C/Java "standard" called Wipi - a "standard" which is only published in South Korean and requires you to be a South Korean citizen to download, as far as I can tell, which is I guess in keeping with the government protection traditionally ladled out by South Korea for other industries.

Whilst advanced, the South Korean market is also pretty small (under 50m people) so we should really look to the global handset shipment figures, where the Top 5 handset manufacturers include two South Korean companies, in stark contrast to that other advanced market Japan where a protected domestic market for Japanese manufacturers led to a complete lack of competitiveness abroad.

Top 5 Developer Resources
A comparison of the developer sites for the Top 5 manufacturers:

Nokia - Forum Nokia, containing absolutely everything you might possibly want to know

Detailed spec database with everything you need to know about every handset, hilighting their very public and clear platform strategy;
Docs on every subject, with fully customisable RSS feeds;
The best emulators in the top 5 (and some of the only true emulators, most being simulators);
Active detailed forums - OK no-one from Nokia will ever admit to a bug on one of their devices, but you can normally find someone who can answer your questions;
I could go on. The gold standard by which everyone else fails.

Motorola - they have MotoCoder dev site, with some things you might want to know

Spec PDF docs on some of the handsets, updated slowly, and ignoring quite a few but you can usually work out a handset's platform and infer a lot from that;
Some docs, though not that many and notably absent for some of the JSRs they have led;
Passable emulators, pretty accurate with a few annoying bugs like images take 4 bytes per pixel not 2 (but the heap size is the same);
No forums, but you can ask a question and someone from Moto will (probably) answer it.

Samsung - yes, well. They do have a site and at least now it works beyond IE.

New spec database, hilighting the complete lack of standard platforms, with specs always in flux and many handsets never appearing;
All the old docs seem to have been deleted;
I've never managed to get the emulators to work for me, but I might just be unlucky;
They deleted the contents of the old forums, which contained many valuable bug fixes, and replaced them with new empty forums that suck.

Sony-Ericsson - nearly as good as Nokia

Full specs for all handsets making clear their standard platform strategy, in a not-quite-so-convenient browsing format;
Almost as many docs, with a slightly less flexible RSS feed format;
Emulators are a bit of a joke, being simple WTK reskins, but you can do on-device debugging etc which is in many ways more valuable;
Active detailed forums.

The striking thing you'll notice here is that Nokia, Moto and SE all have active developer programmes and platform strategies which are either clear, or easy to guage from publically available information. With the South Korean manufacturers you have two choices - bad or nothing.

LG
You may think I forgot to add anything for LG in the list above, but in fact the omission is theirs. They have no developer support. I did once track down the (Korean) Javadoc for a very old proprietary sound API, which Babelfish kindly translated into pseudo-English for me, but I never got it to work; that's about all I've ever seen.

Despite lots of efforts with the Chocolate series and more recently the Shine, LG still fundamentally make lots of cheap rubbish low-end flip phones, many of which are for the CDMA market - anything in their non-Korean catalogue that is not low-end appears to be for show, selling in very low volumes. Chocolate is the big exception, but it is a deeply flawed device - anyone who has used one will know quite how infuriating it is to watch those sexy soft keys and direction buttons start pressing themselves, sometimes for several minutes as they traverse randomly round menus or totally screw up whichever fuction you were trying to use. I counted a few hundred button presses in 5 minutes just this morning, before I turned the phone off. I sense a YouTube video - watch this space.

This reliance on the low-end seems to have led to their developer strategy - low-end phones struggle with Java, so they fell for the JBed sales pitch and included that trully terrible JVM-replacement on everything but the high(ish)-end U8xxx series. This does some strange precompilation steps to "speed up" your code, which in practice just fail on some classes for no reason. The MIDP2 version is better than the MIDP1, but I have had code which works fine suddenly refuse to precompile and install because I have changed a few lines, and magically start working again later. It also has the flakiest PNG loading on the planet. So no wonder they don't have developer support - they clearly would rather developers didn't develop for the devices and they certainly couldn't afford to handle the huge volumes of support requests and complaints they would get if they tried.

Samsung
Samsung aspire to compete at the high-end. Not long ago they were getting very excited about how they would overtake Motorola and the future was theirs - shortly before the world stopped liking their zillion D500 rip offs and their market share dropped sharply back off, so now they are defending themselves against the solid advance of Sony-Ericsson.

Many of their handsets are on the cutting edge, shipping HSDPA before anyone else and beating Motorola on both the thinness and ease of use fronts (OK, the latter was hardly a challenge). Their Java efforts have always been decidedly middling though - many many bugs, documented on the old forums before they were deleted, and very few APIs beyond the basic MIDP and CLDC. Their LCDUI implementations are usually straight out of the WTK, offering no native UI functions and feeling completely alien to the phones.

The true failing of Samsung, however, has been their lack of platform standardisation. By all accounts they have a large number of research groups basically designing handsets independently - this affects their lineup in a number of ways:

The (almost) random model numbering system is highly confusing, and tells you nothing at all except the target region with the last digit;
There are a huge number of outwardly identical phones with similar specs but based on different platforms, confusing consumers and probably leading to their recent sales slump;
You just can't make any assumptions about them from a developer's perspective - just because your game runs on one MIDP2 176x220 Samsung handset does not mean it will run on any other.

Point 3 is slightly unfair - the developer site used to provide Excel spreadsheets grouping the handsets into devices based on a common platform, suggesting that if your game worked on one in the group it would work on them all. For example, the D500 was in Group 12A and the E800 in Group 4. They categorised maybe two thirds of their European range this way, leaving you to guess the rest.
Then, after at least 6 months of waiting, they launched their new web site. This had a number of amazing innovations:

It worked outside IE. The old one could have worked outside IE too, but they chose to implement logins in such a stupid way it didn't;
It had a new forum, which was harder to use and now had nothing on it;
It had a lot fewer documents;
It had a funky new device database.

If the device database had been good, everything else would have been forgiven. It almost is, but is plagues by two things: poor usability and flaky data.

On a usability front, there are a huge number of tiny things that add together to make a really frustrating experience:

There is no indication of what has been added recently, so you have to manually check a list of 130 handsets in case one has been edited or added - an RSS feed would be ideal, a 'What's New' list would also be good;
Each device's page shows a massive table of information, but the most important piece - which platform the device belongs to - can only be seen from the index screen;
You can only see 5 devices at once on the index screen - no way to change to show 10/20/100/all - and you have stupid scrolling buttons to page between them. This would be fine if you could use the drop-down of model numbers, but you have to see the entry on the index page to find out the group so you can't;
Breadcrumbs are shown on the screen, but aren't clickable.
etc.

Thye flakiness is harder to pin down, but:

All the old group numbers have been thrown out and the compatibility lists have changed:

A handset now belongs to a Group which is defined as the first handset they released with the same spec such that all handsets in that group should be able to run the same content;
ie. handsets in a group should share screen size, supported APIs, JVM, memory constraints, underlying hardware etc.

The new platforms appear to change over time, with platforms splitting and devices jumping between them;
Some data is plain wrong

eg. the E200 is stated to have a 220x220 screen, but it has a 176x220 screen;
eg. the site currently claims that the E830 and E200
are part of the E250 group, when they are clearly mid-range devices with a good Java spec and the E250 is a low-end device.

You get the impression with some groups that the people who define them are being lazy, and creating a new group for every handset

You get lots of one or two handset groups with basically the same spec from the same teams...

What we should have is a manufacturer clearly stating the widest possible groups of handsets that are internally, from a Java perspective, the same and can reliably run the same builds consistently. What we have instead is a load of changing spec data suggesting handsets should be compatible, but it's so unsure of itself that they move around and anyway as some of the basic specs are wrong, how much do you trust it anyway?

Unless you have a lot of money, you sadly have no choice but to trust it and react when your customers complain.

My constant impression is that the entire dev site is outsourced to basically one guy, SunHo, who valiantly tries to answer everything, help out with bug requests and make sense of platform compatibility with minimal support from Samsungs various departments. If that truly is the case then he does very well considering - but shame on Samsung as a Top 3 vendor for not doing things properly.

Why? Why? WHY?
I wish I could provide some insightful analysis as to why it is only the South Korean members of the Top 5 who behave this way, but presented above are my best guesses. All we can do as developers is plead for more support, and I suspect all they will continue to do as corporate monoliths is to ignore us until the market shows them that 3rd party games and applications are a competitive advantage. I suspect that most people in the mobile space don't dare ask whether the market will ever reach that point, but we certainly aren't there yet.

Crazee Enough for Taptu?

2007-04-02T16:47:00.000+01:00

Just saw this amusing job add for mobile search startup Taptu who appear to be after a software engineer with aspirations to be a Web2.0 David Brent. ka ching!! indeed....

From The Creators Of The 6600 v3.41 Firmware Comes...

2007-03-31T10:12:00.000+01:00

... a new book, "S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance - A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers". Reading that title for the first time did make me laugh out loud - and apparently it's going to be a serious book with more than 5 pages saying "don't do it like this". It is certainly unfair to complain about the occasional glitch in very complicated electronics released to tight deadlines in a fast paced market, but I think the S60 team can safely lay claim to more than the odd glitch - the 6600 is the worst example, but there are plenty more. You have to wonder which niche they are targetting with this effort :)

World's 1st Dual Slider. By World We Mean USA. By USA We Mean Officially Announced By A US Network. Oh Just Stop Being Pedantic.

2007-03-26T14:28:00.000+01:00

Helio today introduced the Helio Ocean, the world's first dual-slider combining a traditional numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard in a single device.

Note the qualifier - whilst the Nokia N95 has a dual slide mechanism it's along the same plane, and doesn't cover QWERTY.

However, this announcement does rather ignore the Samsung F520, announced back at 3GSM this year offering... a dual-slide mechanism with traditional numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard. Guess Ocean's PR droids missed that one when they were writing up the release, or felt that "world's second" or "a phone a bit like the one Samsung announced a while ago" just didn't carry the same punch.

OK OK, Music Will Never Make Us Money... But We Like Hanging Around Popstars

2007-03-23T07:49:00.000Z

I do like Guy Kewney's ability to actually see what a statistic is saying, rather than to go cross eyed and start spouting rubbish (like an audience of Applistas listening to Steve Jobs lie).

So it's nice to see (somewhat belatedly) he has injected some reality into the mobile music debate: SMS Revenues are projected to be $70bn by 2012, and entire music industry is worth $35bn - so any revenue kick operators expect to get from their misguided belief that they have a big role in the music value chain can only be tiny compared to their core business. Yet another hole in the fallacy that they can significantly offer shareholders growth potential through data, rather than fade into the background as a bitpipe.

And, it has to be said, he also has a lovely accent.

5 Things You Didn't Know About Me

2007-03-23T06:36:00.001Z

Hmmm, you know you've been too busy recently when you completely stop reading your RSS feeds for over a month... I appear to have been tagged to tell you 5 things you don't know about me by over at Everything And The Mobile Universe. Many apologies for not picking up on this, among many other things the Crossbow team have been keeping me up at night :)

This leaves me with two problems. One is that the point of this blog is you never know anythign about us except what we think about the mobile marketplace, and the other is that I haven't followed any other people that might read this blog enough to know who has already been tagged and who hasn't...

Well - the first problem I can deal with, so here we go:

I think the random text generators used in spam have reached the level of poetry for me - prose that breaks all the rules, is awkward to read and ultimately doesn't make much sense and yet sometimes can be quite captivating.
According to World66, I have dated girls from 6% of the world's countries (damn, there are just too many countries ;) - I've only lived in 3% and visited 12% though. Best get depleting the ozone layer whilst it's still somewhat socially acceptable.
I have a theory that Italians can only fight effectively in an army if they're wearing skirts - witness Rome controlling most of the known world vs the amazing range of retreats they pioneered in WW2. I'm still working on the reasons behind this, but it's almost certainly something to do with chatting up girls, which can be pretty effective in the army's current regulation camos (check out the army recruits 'guarding' Ciampino airport by selflessly flirting with every girl that comes past). Given my pacifist leanings I'm inclined to see this as a good trait in Italians, not a bad one (Andrea please don't get upset - you're the only Italian I know who has read this blog ;).
My favourite music video - you just can't beat breakdancing fluffy sharks.
I've been to the most expensive karaoke bar in Tokyo. Didn't sing though.

The second problem is somewhat harder, except for #1 - I apologise if I'm tagging people who've already taken part, I did my best to search blogs and find people I read, who have at some point posted on the blog, who've never taken part:

Thelf. I know he reads the blog and in theory he ought to post to the damn thing as well...
Pondering Primate, who I've robustly discussed things with enough in the past that he might possibly read the blog. Hopefully you're not too busy Chief Innovating mate :)
Andrea Trasatti, mastermind behind the WURFL.
Gustaf Erikson, occasional scrivener.
Michael Mace, in honour of the fact that he wrote a particularly amusing sarky post today which is a break from his usual insight. My vote's on #4.

That's my best shot, now to find out if anyone still does read this thing... and again, apologies if I've tagged people who've already done it etc :)

I'm An Artist Because I Say I Am

2007-03-21T12:30:00.000Z

Orange are now touting the special edition Julien MacDonald designed Sony-Ericsson K510i. I have three competing theories as to who exactly Julien MacDonald is:

A primary school child of an Orange or Sony-Ericsson employee who went a bit mad with some luminous coloured paints;
A made up name invented by the Orange or SE marketing department to try to make it sound cool (I know the names of a lot of good designers, but somehow very few of the names of designers asked to design custom editions of phones like this);
A real designer who just isn't very good, or sold his name and got the work experience student to do the design.

OK, OK, I can look him up, apparently he is real and he's Welsh and tacky. This is eminently believable, even though the source is Wikipedia, so 3 it is. But this seems to be a growing trend which is more miss than hit to me. It shows the marketing departments are trying to cash in on the premium that a 'designer' tag can get, yet like so many of these attempts there is no quality control to ensure that the designing is actually adding value and improving the product. Too often it's a muppet who has questionable taste, getting to play with all the wrong toys to mess up a product in a space (s)he simply does not understand - and 'design' is really not the right verb to describe this process.

How To Screw People For No Reason, Whilst Trying To Be Helpful

2007-03-19T15:37:00.000Z

Windows Mobile IE has long been a pain in the arse when it comes to device targetting through UserAgent detection - almost as bad as the various mobile Operas, with the sole saving grace that for all the millions of Windows handset variations HTC kick out hardly anyone buys them.

Handset manufacturers set a very low standard with their utter lack of consistency - take a brief skim through the WURFL if you need examples. In the end though even Samsung sticks to a core set of patterns you can latch on to, once you understand your SPH from your SGH.

Windows Mobile however sees things differently. From an application programmer's perspective, you probably need to find out a couple of key things about the device:

Screen size - currently that can be 176x220, 240x240, 240x320, 320x240, 640x480, 480x640, 800x600 and probably a few other rehashes of those figures, which makes quite a difference to the graphics you send.
Input device(s) - devices on the PocketPC side (now, inexplicably, Windows Mobile 6 'Professional') use touchscreens with a handful of keys, devices on the Smartphone ('Classic') use phone keypads.

It would also be really nice to know if you're expected to rotate a rectangular screen whenever the optional keypad is pulled out - for some games that makes a major difference and when delivering content OTA you want to minimise download size... the actual presence of that keypad would also also nice to know, but not essential at deployment time.

Traditionally a Windows Mobile UA would look a little like this:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)
or
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220)

Both those useful bits of info I mentioned are immediately available from this UA, so the standard code that all mobile developers running deployment servers are cursed to rewrite can easily select the right content and send it out. It's not perfect - we are rarely told if a JVM is present (and it's rarely integrated well enough to do an in-browser OTA installation smoothly either), and we rarely get enough info to know whether to expect the screen rotation and the QWERTY keyboard, but enough basics are there to get us where we need to be.

Apparently, however, this is not good enough. For the sake of tidiness or somesuch, some idiot over at Microsoft decided to remove both the screensize and the core platform name from the UA as of Windows Mobile 6.0 because "Since the capabilities of the Pocket PC and Smartphone versions of the browser are identical, and they're built from the identical code base, there's no reason to differentiate them any more".

For web sites being browsed, arguably might be true (though optimising AJAX just got a bit harder if you don't know what will be clicking on your bits) - but for OTA deployments you just made things way harder. This is what happens when people decide it's safe to break backwards compatibility for the sake of "tidiness" without having any clue what the consequences are, and it really annoys me.

We do now have some extra headers giving the screen size etc, and yes it is possible to adapt deployment servers everywhere to handle this - costing many months of work across the world, because the many independent solutions to the mobile deployment problem that exist were all designed to sniff just the UA.

Apparently M$ "really appear to have got mobile with Crossbow" (sorry, can't remember which hack lifted that from a Microsoft PR bot) - I beg to differ. If they really got mobile they'd know people depended on these things and just leave them the hell alone, and while they were at it put a standard well-integrated JVM on the OS and ditch .Net Compact; I fail to see how (from a 'getting the mobile marketplace' point of view) some totally random non-standard environment can be totally core and yet a JVM could be seen as an optional extra for 3rd parties to worry about, but then that's politics.

Anyway, rant over. I shall resist the urge to go and explain that I would rather see the IEMobile Team's heads removed from their bodies because, hell, it won't affect my life and go back to preparing the two big posts I've been meaning to write for ages which will be loads more relevant and interesting than this one. Grrrr.

When Technology Goes Bad

2007-03-07T14:49:00.000Z

Just found this highly amusing Guardian article (via Small Surfaces) which hilights everything that was wrong with the LG Chocolate weird button system, which Samsung then slavishly copied for the E900 adding some extra insult with their weird font selections and the like.

Those buttons are absolutely terrible, and on both phones the patht he user has to take through the UI is suspect at times. No arguments there.

The comments on the Orange portal did make me wonder though - I've definitely noticed, and complained, that all operators want you to go to their portal and make it an essential destination just when starting the browser, even when you tried to follow a bookmark. This must massively inflate their front page hit count allowing them to easily lie about numbers to the content companies who pay for that front page space - but that's an aside.

Given that the operator has my age, and in theory the ability to profile all sorts of other things about me, why do I always get presented with such unappealing rubbish on the front page? The article clearly shows that I'm not the only person who feels this way. Are operators throwing out the possibility of tailoring a service to what users actually might want because they'd rather take even more of a content producer's money to push the same content at everyone? Probably.

Anyone who starts spouting 'long tail' stuff tends to get on my nerves, but in general tailored content (given sufficient protection of the data that led to the tailoring) is a good thing especially on phones with limited real estate. It's a shame to see an opportunity ignored, or possibly just wasted because the tailoring tech is too rubbish to actually work.

On a vaguely related note, I guess I'm also pleased to see that Google's new Blogger system didn't just upset me: the often amusing battery fetishists over at Idiot Toys took a break from covering breaking Thing Holding news to bitch about it as well. You never know, maybe complaining will do some good and prove the blogosphere isn't largely a hot air generator - if bloggers can't influence blogging software providers, who can they influence...

Handset Anticipation, At Last

2007-02-14T08:44:00.000Z

Finally, after nearly a year of being decidedly unexcited about handsets, 3GSM 2007 appears to have thrown up some interesting models - and one of the most interesting from Motorola, of all people. Who would have thunk it.

I won't go into vast detail, but for anyone desperate for a sarky roundup of what has been announced:

NOKIA
My immediate reaction to the Nokia E90 was that it looked kinda interesting, but why S60? I remembered something about rolling S80/90 into S60, but presumed they'd have kept the good bits - but apparently not. Phenomenal waste of time, phenomenal shame. Same device with an overhauled S80 UI that looked nice and exceeded the old Psion 5 software, plus a good keyboard and a QVGA S40 UI on the front, well that might be something to get excited about...
However, I am now actually torn between two S60 devices - and a few months ago I never would have believed that. N95 or 6110 - difficult choice, but fortunately they're basically the same apart from the camera. I'll also inevitably regret this decision whilst I sit out my 9 month upgrade period swearing at the UI during those fleeting minutes the handsets can run without mains power, but for now, I think these two are very exciting.

MOTOROLA
The Moto RIZR Z8 - UIQ! Without a touchscreen! Not a brick! And without the serious usability flaws (allegedly)! From Motorola! I have to say I was taken by surprise - originally I saw this flagged as a Linux device and figured it was a cloned JIRA device like the Z6 with the new Moto UI, which is interesting as well but more in the sense that you're interested to try some new form of Japanese stewed fish gizzard, having nearly vomited on the last one. Then I saw it was Symbian and was confused, then I saw it was UIQ3 with a much needed overhaul and I was even more confused - until I saw it was created by the Sendo design team recently acquired by Moto, and then it all became obvious. They'll probably be sacked as soon as ZNDR finds out they shipped a usable interesting phone, but hopefully I can get one to play with first.

SAMSUNG
The F700 looks sweet. Not usually my form factor, but with a 5Mp camera etc I want one. Slight trepidation over what Samsung might do with a touchscreen UI though, but at least it will have a sensible battery policy, a good camera, a modern data connection and a tactile typing mechanism. I do wish people would stop saying it's an iPhone-killer before either phone is out though, that really is a little bit sad - compare specs if you want, but anything more strident and definitive ends up sounding like the rather heated online argument I remember stumbling upon about whether the Mines of Moria scene in the yet-to-be-released Fellowship of the Ring film would be better than the something else scene in the yet-to-be-released Harry Potter film.

SONY-ERICSSON
Oh dear.
They still have the best UI (please ignore UIQ3, they knew not what they were doing). They still have the best marketing policy (clear use of Walkman and Cybershot brands to appeal to specific types of customer). But they are now falling into the Moto trap of just churning out stacks of identikit models, and that could easily do nasty things to the appeal of their brand. It's a very difficult tightrope to walk, breaking into the mainstream without putting users off with needless differentiation; they might pull it off, but my immediate reaction was 'yawn' and I'm not the only one.
Also, to my mind, a 2Mp camera should not hold the Cybershot name - it would be better kept to distinguish particularly good camera phones which really could be used instead of a cheap standalone camera, and for that you need 3Mp minimum. But that's just my personal opinion.

BLACKBERRY
The Pearl surprised me, because the trackball isn't a trackball in the mouse-replacement sense but a trackball in a 2D scrollwheel kind of sense, and it works very well. Which should have been obvious, but the terminology got me wary and, well, after the mess they made of their Java support etc I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on implementation details... the 8800, with a real keypad, is almost enough to make me want one for personal use. Almost.

HTC
Every minor player and operator seems ot be introducing the same rebranded HTC devices. They're trying to crawl up the value chain with the Athena reference platform, and it'll be interesting how we start to see XP/Vista and Mobile devices merge because there's a huge difference in functionality and complexity, but now at the meeting point not such a huge difference in size, form factor and price. Don't think they've nailed it yet but full credit for trying.

So, I think I counted four or five devices there interesting enough to make me pause for thought come upgrade time - which is three or four more than last time. Good news, but hopefully there'll be even more to come this year as the incumbents fight to counter the wave of hot air surrounding the iPrettyFaceButNotMuchOfAPhone.

Garble

2007-02-14T08:26:00.000Z

Finally, I can post.

For my benefit as a blogger with Blogger, Google have now started demanding I use a google login and not my old blogger login; obviously this is for my benefit, to improve the service blah blah. Compulsory, but it'll be well worth it!

So I switch, which comprises a tedious form and a new sign-up and a password strength indicator which is entirely based on the number of characters you type in - a single English word all in lower case was rated stronger than a random selection of mixed case letters and digits which was one character shorter. But it was written in DHTML (or maybe even AJAX for all I know) so must be Correct and Good.

Then I try to post. But I can't, because the blog is owned by someone else with an old login. Something incontrovertable in the database has changed in the last week or two, and suddenly it is simply impossible for me to post. Thelf (owner of the blog - back then he planned to actually write some posts) is on holiday, so I have to sit and twiddle my thumbs until he turns up, creates a new GMail account, and converts the blog. Now I'm in.

Was it worth it? Well I think there appears to be some sort of 'label' system to add keywords to posts... and a slightly better designed Edit Posts page to manage the posts (but really not very different)... and... fuck it. It's the same, and this was a monumental waste of my time. Thanks Google, I was going to write a non-critical post about you but now I won't. Feel the wrath of the blogosphere! (cue evil cackles, fade out)

UPDATE: hmmm. For some reason I appear to be Thelf now. Feels strange - somewhat roomier around the waist department... my fault for forcing him to use my PC to convert the blog I guess.

You Have To leave The Market To Be Able To Say What Everyone Thinks

2007-01-23T10:25:00.000Z

Kuju just dropped out of the mobile content market, and made it very clear why. Whilst I feel sorry for them, they are dead right in everything they say and it needed saying. I doubt you couldfind a developer/publisher in the western world who would disagree with them, off the record.
With 3 turning from the closed garden loss making idiots into a last ditch, change-the-rules-or-die trying saviour of mobile data (flat rate data? no roaming? excellent!), we can hope that the market will not look like this come 2008, but the stupidity of the big operators never ceases to amaze so I wouldn't be putting money on it.
I feel particularly anti-operator having spent 2 hours trying to set up an operator-free K700, K750 and 6680 to network inside Java using Orange and O2 PAYG SIMs last night (and in fact an Orange contract SIM) - it should be as easy as requesting settings but it definitely is not. It summed up some of the huge problems with the operators - such trivial things should not only be very simple to achieve, they should be transparent. But we had to deal with settings not arriving, out of data web provisioning sites, "automatic" settings pushes not actually working, call centre staff not knowing about HTTP internet settings and insisting they didn't exist (when their colleagues on the next call knew about them), etc etc ad infinitum. All of which prevents mobile data taking off in a big way and needlessly kills an industry that could flourish.

iPod iPhone iGetSuedForTrademarkInfringement

2007-01-09T20:36:00.000Z

They'd better make it splashproof and wipe-clean else there will be some disappointed fanboys in July after their initial surge of excitement when their preorder pops through the door. The case looks fairly sexy (before the fingerprints arrive). The UI looks very sexy.

Apple have created a niche product here with amazing appeal - to the niche. At the risk of upsetting the Silicon Valley types racing round on their Segways between hip coffee houses to brainstorm about how this will change everything (using free metropolitan WiFi and their suddenly not-so-cool Palm Treos to take notes), what the iPhone won't do is change the world. It should easily carve out respectable sales that make Apple a decent profit without touching most people's lives, like the Mac with higher volumes and a much smaller percentage market share. It won't reach iPod sales volumes, and it might not even meet the iPod's profit margin when you look at the R&D cost of two years trying to gatecrash a new and much more complex market, but it will make money and it will make some people very happy.

Bloggers around the world will unite saying "I told you so", ignoring the fact they have been saying that for years, got half the details wrong etc etc. Cynics like me will console ourselves with the fact they we were right a lot more times than we were wrong, and move on to inspect the slick sales pitch we have been allowed to glimpse.

Starting with the hardware - it's sexy but it's not perfect. The processor is probably underpowered for that many pixels (enGadget says 320x480 which tallies with the early revealed dimensions of a 3.5" diagonal and 160ppi) and that level of alpha blending - when a fanboy in the first flushes of love says it looks "not the fastest scrolling" in the middle of a well rehearsed demo, you know we're getting a sneak preview of see where they had to compromise. Just hope it's not Nokia 770 underpowered. The screen isn't 800px wide so can't quite nicely render most contemporary web pages, but because of this compromise the device can fit into a respectable phone sized package (half a CD jewel case, give or take) which won't feel completely ridiculous against your face. "It's really thin, thinner than any smartphone. 11.6mm, thinner than the Q and the BlackJack, all of them" says Jobs - well the Moto Q is 11.5mm thick, and whilst my maths is a little shaky these days that to me looks like an outright lie which, if challenged, he will probably brazen off as "so similar it makes no difference" or something. But it does hint at the kind of word tricks he is pulling throughout this demo, and I doubt many of the faithful will challenge their messiah.

Jobs uses more great psychological tricks when it comes to battery life. He has a congregation of the faithful in the palm of his hand so he throws in a comment like "A lot of these phones have low battery life. We've managed to get 5 hours of battery of talk time" and everyone goes "Wow that's awesome, everyone else sucks, you rule!" (remember, this is California). It probably doesn't give 5hrs talktime / 16hrs music playback, but that's standard in this industry - assuming Apple's lies use similar metrics to the other manufacturer's lies we can still compare, and 5h talktime is comparable to one of the better S60 smartphones (N73 manages 6h talktime, N76 only 2.75h) and pretty close to a lot of popular mid-range phones too. Acceptable, but not stellar - I find in actual use those same S60s tend to die pretty quickly whilst doing less ambitious things, so lets reserve judgement until someone really road tests one.

The final trick, but the one which is hardest to accurately gauge at this point, is that punchline "BOY have we patented it!". I'll discuss what we could see of the UI in a second, but this seems to me to be a bit of a pre-emptive strike at anyone who says "yawn, a touchscreen with a touch keypad, we've seen them before (until they got so smeared with fingerprints we couldn't see anything any more)". I bet they have patented a load of lovely little UI touches with that touchscreen but there is so much prior art and there are so many ways to skin a cat that I can't believe their patents will make much difference in the long run. Just look at Windows before telling me UI patents will prevent competitors using similar or better tricks in future (and any clever hardware tricks can doubtless be done in alternative unpatented ways).

(For another legal sidetrack, the Cisco fight in the US will be fun. If any other company had the brazen cheek to steal another's 10-year-old trademark like that they would be crucified...)

The patent sidetrack should not overshadow what to me is the big triumph of the Apple phone, and again for me the only reason to be excited that Apple were entering the market - they have done a ground-up UI redesign for a phone, and by all accounts it is very good. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung et al simply have no excuse for not having done this already, instead of knocking out new revisions of S60 with rearranged icons (Nokia) or just looking the other way and shifting as many units as they could before the backlash (Moto). I have serious doubts of the day-to-day practicality of a touchscreen phone (try using one over coffee and donuts and get back to me), and I've always hated touchscreen keyboards, but you can't deny that the touchscreen has enabled some very good UI tricks that should give the incumbents a massive kick up the arse to start innovating in an area which has seen woefully little progress. Something like Visual Voicemail sounds so utterly sensible, that if Apple can leverage operators to implement it users will see immense tangible benefits - Nokia leave the room and hang your head in shame, this could have been yours years ago because you have the operator influence, the R&D budget and the sales volumes. Apple have also applied some common sense and integrated a whole host of technologies which have existed for some time (push IMAP, web backup of contacts etc) - on their own nothing spectacular, as a complete well integrated package very nice. So in conclusion, nice UI, nice integration, very Apple and lets hope it adjusts the playing field for everyone.

Incidentally, this is a lot of what the Nokia 770 should have been - it was a very interesting departure for Nokia, but the thinking was still just too in-the-box. But back to Apple.

Using a lightweight OS X as the basis for the phone UI makes a lot of sense. There are Linux kernels available with tried and tested mobile radio stacks, giving Apple a nice head start with an OS they already understand and slick UI code they just have to slim down and optimise. My take on the way it was described though - "a real browser on the phone, we can zoom in, Google maps, Widgets" says to me that this is not binary compatible with a desktop, and you can put that Photoshop CS2 CD back down. They ported a subset of things useful for the mobile and understandably ejected a lot of stuff that isn't required, without hinting at how open the OS is for non-browser/widget development (apologies if that I missed somethign there). But I bet a lot of people will get overexcited about the possibilities of opening up the phone experience to all developers, just like they were wildly speculating before the launch; those same pundits should perhaps leave the US sometimes and see that between the MIDP world and the smartphone platforms, that can be done already and with far higher volumes.

The photo browsing and other interface work on display in the iPhone left me with mixed feelings. They look gorgeous and I'd love to have them, on the right device. 8Gb flash sounds great - I myself am considering "going gay" and getting an 8Gb Nano as I have finally lost patience with my Sony which pays testament to their inability to catch up - but it is not enough for the all-singing all-dancing multimedia device this OS wants to be running on. For me, that is a minimal working set of music plus a few photos I take with the on-board camera and no movies.

We weren't regaled with details about how the camera has amazing optics or a real Xenon flash, so let's assume it's a passable cheap 2Mp CCD with no better performance than the average phone - OK, but very middle of the road, which is a serious letdown for a phone with such polished photo management software. Unless you use it to show photos to friends over your local WiFi (and even that will be pretty painful if your photos were taken with many megapixels) I see this as beautiful software waiting for the hardware to catch-up; on hardware rev 3 or 4, when 32Gb NAND flash is commonplace and 64/128Mb is starting to make inroads, we might actually reap the benefits but probably not before.

One final gripe about the hardware, and this is probably a lot more serious than most pundits have thus stated - it's just GSM/EDGE/WiFi. Why serious? Well, let's see...

EDGE is quite quick where you have it (some of the US, Italy, er...) and definitely preferable to GPRS but it won't cut it for a full blown web browser doing some serious browsing. Those big flash ads and animated GIFs will take forever to download, let alone big heavy AJAX sites. Wap looks basic but there are some serious advantages to accessing streamlined content on a slow connection.
For most of the world, WiFi just isn't a viable alternative unless you're running on a corporate expense account (£5/$10 to use it last time I was in Gatwick airport if I remember) or you're lucky enough to have a big free metropolitan WiFi zone - great for the Valley kids, not so great for everyone else. I will add a note of caution from my 770 experiences about WiFi browsing on a small device - I really hope it's fast enough and maybe it is, but a slick demo will not give you enough insight to verify that and given the suggestions that the iPhone is underpowered (see above), I have my doubts. Impossible to call without seeing one in action.
The multi-year Cingular deal is very telling. This says that Apple will not be producing a CDMA version of this phone - sensible from a worldwide perspective, but it does restrict the US market heavily. Cingular are the biggest of the US's 180 networks with 56m subscribers and what passes for good coverage there; they'll no doubt see a surge in subscribers among the gay/graphic designer demographic groups, but many will not leave their current provider - they will be locked in to existing contracts, worried about signal strength in their neighbourhood, not happy with priceplans etc. So the potential US market is actually quite restricted. The picture in Europe is better, but Asia is mixed - Japan and South Korea will never get this phone. In the future they have to try to catch up and implement UMTS and HSDPA, particularly if they are serious about data outside the US, but that will be over a year away and is a major omission for the kind of users they are trying to court. Make no mistake, they have now comitted to the arms race which is killing off some seasoned veterans and thereis no guarantee they can win or retain the advantages this iPhone gives them in the long run.
I scanned the enGadget coverage and could find no word on whether it has UMA-style roaming from WiFi to GSM, but I bet every fan that thinks about it is currently assuming it has. The big boys have only just got this working though, and it's rough round the edges, so I seriously doubt a mobile newcomer has beaten them to it. One to watch, currently uncertain, but yet another bit of catchup mobile newbies Apple will have to play to remain serious.

So for impecable technical reasons, Apple has released a phone which would be a natural upgrade path from an iPod, except that it won't be available to probably half the iPod users in the world. The iPhone will be behind the technical curve at launch and will fall further behind before it gets a chance to catch up, which will heavily impact the kind of data users Apple is targetting (outside of the Valley WiFi bubble). But it looks sexy as hell and it will sell quite a few million units to punters who may or may not end up liking what it does, after the first few firmware updates fix the traditional launch flaws. If Apple can do that whilst shaking up the big mobile players to bring innovation to UIs across the mopbile industry, I will be very happy - but anyone who tells you the iPhone is so revolutionary it will change the world means their own personal world, not the big round wet thing we all live on.

Is a Moto Ming owner a Minge or just a Minger?

2007-01-09T09:06:00.000Z

The MOTO MING has grabbed 1% of new phone sales in China and now it's apparently coming to the west. Great news, as it actually looks like quite a sexy high-end Linux phone and there's a strong suggestion that it doesn't have the standard Moto UI which can only be a good thing.

There is strong anecdotal evidence that "mingers" are a vast demographic in the UK (you'll be wanting the Newcastle & Tyne section halfway down the page there - they didn't provide an anchor sadly), so in theory Moto could have hit marketing gold - but should the Moto marketing drones (MRKT DRNS, to call them by their internal moniker) really play up this association? Do mingers appreciate this categorisation, however much they have earned it? Should Moto instead perhaps push the Ming as the "Minge" in the UK, building an implicit association with a commodity the highly lucrative 18-25yo male demographic actively seeks out?

Difficult questions, but the rewards could be huge - and Moto could definitely do with some good news right now.

Nokia N76 - Let's Rip Off The Bad Bits

2007-01-08T17:48:00.000Z

Introducing the Nokia N76 - kind of like the RAZR, but ugly. So more like the LG P7200.

At lkeast they retained the spirit of the original by supplying a poor UI (though the latest S60 is getting fast enough to actually use...). The big question on everyone lips - how will Nokia have randomly grouped the icons this time? The S60 team have heard of consistency in UIs, but they thoughtit meant keeping them slow and keeping them confusing...

ZNDR SHKR

2007-01-05T13:03:00.000Z

Gloating and saying "I told you so" is definitely an unpleasant human trait, so we won't partake despite Moto provoking us so blatantly.
Instead we'll point out the always amusing Andrew Orlanski has not taken his contractions far enough for the Yanks. Bye Moto.

What? No 2007 Predictions?

2006-12-29T14:47:00.001Z

We've been lazy in blog terms this month (otherwise known as busy in meatspace) so it's probably an idea to copy every single other blog out there and do some 2007 predictions. But because we'd far rather be rude about other people than create something ourselves, we'll start by summarising other people's predictions, in no particular order:

Dean Bubley - I agree manufacturers will sell "diverged" devices to users, for two reasons - because I think it's what consumers want (which is ultimately more important than what CFOs want), and because they're already doing that (eg. SE Walkman, Cybershot; all sorts of Nokias, etc). UMA won't change the world, nor will VoIP over 3G. His predictions on IMS hedge so much that they don't amount to much. I disagree with the idea that browsing will become the killer app - flat rate data would definitely help if it came along, but it's too much of a shift for the average user to start doing it within 12 months. The catch-all in 10 is probably fairly accurate too, IM will not make an impact (wrong kind of interaction for phone keypads), etc etc so we'll give him OK marks all in all.

Mobile Gazette - an interesting round-up, they concentrate on operators and handset trends broken down by manufacturer, and they do it pretty well. Oeprators: well I'd downplay the significance of MVNOs a bit thoguh they note markets are getting saturated, but the rest sounds reasonable particularly the 3 assessment. Long-time readers know my feelings on Moto which they seem to agree with; ditto SE. Spot-on with LG as well (Chocolate sold well, but no follow-up), BenQ has already come to pass (three cheers), Sagem/Sharp/Tosh all also seem accurate. I have to agree with them on Apple too - I've been cynical repeatedly about the iPhone rumours and I'll happily stick to my guns now and say it won't come out, hedging by saying if it does it'll be a 'Phantom Menace' (incapable of living up to the hype). So I'm pretty much exactly with these guys.

Industry execs at Mobile Games Blog (via QB) - 2007 will have fewer games, and fewer games companies making them. No disagreement there - too much rubbish is being produced at the moment, and a shakeout is inevitable. I disagree that Apple will make some huge difference by opening up iTunes as a channel for lots of games - there just aren't enough iPods out there, whatever people think (compare iPod sales to phones, blah blah). Steve Wilcox is probably right that the ringtone market will decline as people realise how stupid they have been to pay £3 for a portion of a song. Generally, some good opinions and some bad, but interesting if you are inclined towards games.

MocoNews - 2007 will be a breakout year for social media services on mobiles? Sorry, no it won't.

Open Gardens - no explicit predictions post that I spotted, but you just know what Ajit's going to say - 2007 will be the year Mobile Web 2.0 breaks through, blah blah AJAX blah blah. Again, sorry, but no it won't. AJAX is exactly not the technology that mobile phones and mobile networks need (regardless of what cool and funky betas you can create with it) and Mobile Web 2.0 is still a badly defined fantasy for California Web 2.0ers.

Pondering Primate - where to begin. To paraphrase: 1. Shortcodes will be big in advertising. Spot on there, well done, he's a visionary I tell you. 2. Google or Yahoo will introduce a 2D bar code and monetise it. Surprise surprise, here he goes again despite all the evidence. These companies are web companies, they are not the right end of the industry to popularise barcodes. I'm not going to say it again. 3. Apple phone, leading to Apple mobile marketing powerhouse. Sense the shift of his fantasies from Google ownign the world to Apple owning the world. At least he's putting a personal twist on the Apple rumours though. 5. He adds someone to his list. Well he can make that come true whenever he wants, but the world will continue to not change. 8. VCs target stupid idea. Well, there is a huge track record of VCs putting money into stupid ideas, so this one is very likely. (2D barcodes are not a silly idea - but trying to do them without manufacturer-level integration is). Basically, he's still in his fantasy (sorry, visionary) world - 2D barcodes may take off and he'll declare himself vindicated, but if it happens it won't happen the way he keeps saying it will, it'll do it the right way.

Can't find any of the other prediction pages, so here are a few of my own:

SE will rise (a bit). Moto will fall (a bit). Nokia will stay where they are.
Apple won't make a phone (or if they do, it'll not be very good but people will buy it anyway).
Ajit will continue to not post my comments on Open Gardens (three censored and counting, and I was actually trying hard to be excessively polite in the last two ;)
Mobile AJAX won't be feasible in any mainstream way by the end of the year. The browsers that do support it will be as fragmented as J2ME implementations. VCs will still pump lots of money into new startups basing their entire business on Mobile AJAX being big, which will all use the term 'beta'.
Flash Lite will still not be a mainstream platform by the end of the year, and implementations will be as buggy and fragmented as J2ME implementations are. It'll be more feasible than AJAX though.
Techype will be rude about some clueless startups.

That'll do for now, unless I have some flash of inspiration over the weekend...

Shoot The Email App

2006-12-12T09:53:00.000Z

App developer blamed for network setting woes - just one example out of hundreds, where the incompetence of the operators and the poor designs of the handset manufacturers are blamed on the developers; and people wonder why the Java content industry is not growing as fast as the analysts said it would...

(Mobile) Web 2.0 has Ajax, Web 3.0 Needs Toilet Duck

2006-12-07T07:52:00.000Z

(anyone interested in the pseudo-satirical Ajax/Toilet Duck bit - starts halfway down)
I've just read two posts in response to Assembly Java, an interesting list of tips for writing compact code. I think the Assembly Java post takes things maybe a little too far, but basically I'm with almost everything in it because if you write tight code to a good design, you can produce maintainable JavaME (still sounds wrong...) that actually works across the market.

First up we have John Flinchbaugh, who has apparently been reading about JavaEE and JavaME and decided that all this tight coding stuff is rubbish, he's going to just splurge out on objects , I'm sure because most of the handsets his friends have are all top of the line high-spec things, and so everyone must have the same. If you're coding a service entirely for gadget geeks then go for it, absolutely sensible, if not can you risk alienating 40-70% of the owners of phones (depending on how restrictive you want to be)? If you do create a service they can't access, be sure to put that factor into your business plan when you talk of the number of billion phones in the world and how big that makes the potential market.

Secondly we have a post from Thomas Landspurg which basically tempers the one class ascetism of Assembly Java and suggests three or four might be much more friendly (I'd go for anything less than 6-10 as long as each one can be justified by the design goals). Hits it right on the head. I also liked this post for one comment:

"It’s a really strange industry, where on one hand people are talking of “MobileAjax” as the killer app, where the cost of one Ajax line is probably equivalent to the cost (in terms of CPU, memory used,battery) of a full Midp1.0 application"

Which sums up Mobile Ajax nicely, except that it forgets to mention the bandwidth cost and time penalty of downloading an entire app to your browser whenever you want it and then being in constant XML communication with the server, on the flaky 2.5-3G pay per byte connections we use these days. I'll let him off because it would have been less pithy ;)

However, as an aside, maybe it's time we look past yesterday's Web 1.92 beta RC 324 (or even today's more hip-and-with-it Web 1.92 beta RC325) and see what Web 3.0 will look like. To do that we have to consider Ajax. Sure, Ajax is disruptive - I can think of nothing better to drop into a soiled toilet, but that's quite a localised disruption. For real market disruption you want ToiletDuck, with the bendy neck that gets right up under the rim. I confidently predict that when the Web 3.0 bubble begins to expand on the dregs of the burst Web 2.0 bubble, it will be ToiletDuck technology that carries our browsers on to an asymptotic future of tagged user-generated goodness.

Ouch

2006-11-26T17:32:00.000Z

Siemens pay BenQ €50m to take away their mobile unit, then have to pay for the redundancies of the workers when BenQ reneged and canned them. Just think of the poor executives who had to put aside that 30% pay rise, barely enough to keep up with inflation (~2%) let alone reward them for the amazing performance and sale price of the mobile unit. Cynically you might assume they just rolled this year's pay rise into next for PR reasons, but who knows.

If only they'd thought of making good phones about 2 or 3 years ago, it could all have been averted.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

2006-11-26T12:17:00.000Z

One of the many QR code reader companies, Kaywa, have now struck a deal with Kerrang magazine to link articles to mobile content. Whoever knew Technokitten was a Kerrang fan? But I digress...

She states exactly what I have maintained for a long time: QR codes are great if they are transparently integrated into the phone, as they are in japan where they are immensely popular and rightly successful. If the reader is separate from the handset's camera function requiring the user to learn a new set of behaviour to use it, it will fail - particularly when that path is longer than the path to the camera.

I see three possible ways to present a QR reading application:

The best - you take a photo as normal, the phone tells you there's a link embedded in it, done.
Second best - press whatever button(s) you need to get to the camera function, one of the options (next to 'take a pic' and 'record a video') is 'read a QR code', click it, done.
Won't get used - any function that does not sit on the camera menu. This includes, sadly, Java apps.

Japanese phones use 1 and/or 2, depending on the make.

If the app is awkward to use, or it is not stored where the user expects it, the user won't use it. If the app is easy to use and is stored where the user would logically expect it, the user might use it, if they remember it's there and it offers sufficient value.

Sadly today, that means 3rd parties can only offer this functionality on some smartphones, ie. well under 10% of the market. For all other phones, the manufacturer must put it in the firmware - at the operator's behest (pioneered by DoCoMo in Japan) or their own.

I'd love to see a world where Java could be used for this type of phone extension effectively, but it isn't an area even being addressed currently as far as I can see and certainly it isn't practical with today's phones. VCs should perhaps bear this in mind before pouring cash into the latest bandwagon.