The poll for the Carnival's best post for June is up…
My entry, “The Mobile Perimeter” is running – if you liked it, feel free to vote for me! 
ceo
Archive for June, 2006
Carnival of the Mobilist – Pick the Best Post For June
Friday, June 30th, 2006Carnival of the Mobilists 34 at W2F
Friday, June 30th, 2006
This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is
hosted by Jan Kuczynski at the Wireless World Forum – go check it out.
Visit the Carnival to read this week’s best writing pieces about mobile from mobility bloggers around the blogosphere.
Click on Carnival of the Mobilists
button below
to go the Mobilists website and learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate…
Enjoy!
ceo
Intel selling its phone-chip unit to Marvell is a big deal – think XScale
Thursday, June 29th, 2006It is all over the news: Intel sells phone-chip unit to Marvell for $600 million…
Buckley of MobHappy wrote on his blog about how this decision may signify the beginning of the death of Intel. While I don't think it will be the death of Intel, it does seem short-sighted. But also, this event is bigger than what people may realize… This may have a direct impact on the XScale microprocessor – XScale is what powers many of the handsets out there, from BlackBerry to PocketPCs to Palms and Treos…
ceo
On J2ME MIDP Navigation
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006Barbara and Tom Hume got it right – mobile applications should really follow the underlying UI metaphor/behavior vs. implementing their own in an attempt to create “consistency across handsets”… From the developer's perspective, initially it may seem such consistency is the right approach, as developers are deploying the same app across many devices… but in reality, the typical end-user has one handset, and having applications change the expected flow or layout (behavior) just confuses the experience… Handsets can run many applications, and not all applications will be developed by the same developer/company – the result will be many different behaviors per application.
Consistency is good, but such consistency should be enforced at a lower level vs. at the application level – this is why in MIDP abstract commands (soft buttons) exist. That said, the ability to override UI behavior must always exist.
ceo
Soccer Hurts
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Like the 1975 Nazareth song, Love hurts… but this time is about soccer…
Soccer hurts, Soccer scars, Soccer wounds, and marks...
If you follow soccer, and play soccer, you know how physical the game could be… And last week was my turn – an offensive move, a dribble towards the goal, shot, and a save by other team's goalkeeper, and the bloody goalkeeper hitting me in the ribs with his shoulder while I am in mid-air trying to avoid him. Today the Dr. confirmed that I don't have a broken rib, but boy, it really hurts – even sneezing is painful! Oh well, it could have been worst – I'll take a break from playing soccer and let it heal…
But what really, really hurt was seeing how Australia lost to Italia – unlucky defensive move…
Results for Developer Survey – Are You Using "Location" in Your App?
Monday, June 26th, 2006
The bar chart below shows the results for the developer survey “Are you using “Location” in your app?”, as of June 25th, 2006. A total of 90 developers have responded. As with past polls, this poll will remain open to continue capturing developer feedback…
Some observations….
The distribution between “using location” (30%) and “no need to use” (38%) is very close… If "API Restrictions" weren't an issue, we could say location in mobile applications is very close to 50/50. Next, and of no surprise is the effect of “API restrictions” (21%) on developers wanting to use location in their applications. And of surprise is how low “privacy concerns” are – but developers should think as end-users, and privacy should be a bigger concern.
Below is the map of developers around the world who participated in the survey. Thanks to everyone who participated…
Click to go to the full map at BlogFlux.
ceo
Is your text-typing speed slow? You may have Dystextia
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
While texting – communicating with text messaging, is great, the act of texting itself (typing) I hate – texting is a pain in the thumb. T9 and similar technologies never worked
to my satisfaction… This is why I rather use (and own) handsets with a keyboard – today I own a Treo 650 and a BlackBerry 7280.
The Times Online published some interesting news – “A team of researchers in Dublin has coined the phrase Dystextia to alert phone-users who notice a slowdown in their text-typing speed to be aware of potential neurological problems.”
Oh boy… do I have Dystextia? Or am I simply terrible at the error prone, time-consuming act of texting using triple overloaded keystrokes?
I know, “error prone, time-consuming” is a relative thing – my daughter is proof of that – her texting is extremely fast and accurate… And hard she laughs at my inability to master texting – oh well. It is a generation thing – the generation who started this messaging (technology) trend vs. the generation using the technologies, taking messaging to new levels…
ceo
[via textually.org]
Tom on Flash Lite
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
Tom Landspurg wrote a good piece, his perspective on Flash Lite, check it out – Another Flash from J2me developer perspective (Part1)
From the Flash Lite website:
What Is Flash Lite? Flash Lite is the Flash technology specifically developed for mobile phones and consumer electronics devices. Flash Lite dramatically accelerates the delivery of rich content and browsing, and customized user interfaces. Designers and developers now have a new level of expressiveness, efficiency and interactivity for content creation.
Java ME – Summary of CLDC-Based Profiles
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
“Explore CLDC and the Profiles defined for use with the Connected Limited Device Configuration. Enrique Ortiz writes about the most common Java ME execution environment.”
» Read Summary of CLDC-Based Profiles
ceo
Carnival of the Mobilists 33
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is
hosted by Rudy at his m-trends.org weblog… Great set of submitted articles covering a wide spectrum of mobility – go check it out. And good job by Rudy this week.
Visit the Carnival to read this week’s best writing pieces about mobile from mobility bloggers around the blogosphere.
Click on Carnival of the Mobilists
button below
to go the Mobilists website and learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate…
Enjoy!
ceo
Nokia to stop making CDMA phones
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006From Nokia to stop making CDMA phones:
- “The Finnish company said on Thursday it would pull out of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) phone manufacturing, which it sees as a shrinking market in the longer term.”
- “CDMA is the less popular wireless telephony technology, used by 25 to 30 percent of mobile subscribers, and competes with the GSM standard used by about 70 percent of the world's 2 billion mobile phone users.”
Yes, but 30% of “many” (i.e. millions and millions) is still a lot. CDMA and subsequent/related technologies (CDMA, CDMA2K, EV-DO, etc.) 1) will not go away, and 2) will be significant, specially in some parts of the world, such as U.S.A. There must be other factors why this decision… and the reasons are “technology licensing” “patent infringement”, and “Qualcomm”… That's too bad.
ceo
Get Your Patents Early (and wait 14 years)
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
Not sure if it is a typo or if it is for real, but Dennis Crouch of Patently-O: Patent Law Blog reports of a case where the PTO gave an estimate for a recently filed application, that it will be examined within fourteen (14) years of the filing date. Wow… I better submit now! You should consider doing the same…
ceo
[Image Source: Patently-O: Patent Law Blog]
The Actionable Mobile Context
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006The Mobile Context is comprised of many elements that distinguishes it from the desktop context. Some of these elements are time, space, the mobile perimeter, the social and personal aspects, and other, and how these define and effect the mobile usage and/or behavior – I will cover more of this at another time.
But one attribute makes mobile very different from the desktop – the mobile context is mostly actionable. It is important to realize this, as it has a direct correlation to the types of relevant applications to be developed. For example, mobile searching is about finding information now! – movies, or directions, news, who is online, and so on, information that is needed now rather than later – this is in contrast to a search from the desktop for directions, where such information is to be used later; if you are looking for directions from your mobile you are probably lost or must tell someone now how to find a place. Voice and messaging, or communicating with friends and family, is also actionable and about “now”. Casual gaming is another example of a “now” application – as in killing some time “now” while waiting for the bus to arrive.
It was refreshing to read that Dipchand Nishar, Director of Wireless Products at Google gets these concepts… From a BBC article on Google targets mobile future, “Dipchand believes that when people are out and about, they want very different answers from Google than they would if they were sat in front of a PC.” And I will add that the reason the answers are different is because mobile answers are by nature actionable. Not only information must be found “right away” (in other words, returning 10 pages of results to a mobile handset is not desirable or of much help), but must be straight to the point and accurate. In the aforementioned BBC article I find of interest the reference to “Japanese do make very heavy use of e-mail on mobile devices”, which goes back to a previous piece I wrote titled Analysis and Opinions on the Future of Messaging.
The BBC article has a number of quotes by Dipchand that are of interest, and that I totally agree with:
- “There are many emerging markets where people do not have a PC and will never have one,”
- “A PC is much more of a shared device,”… “But a mobile is not something I share with anyone.”
- “On a mobile it's important that you find it right away.”
- “Search on mobiles is about finding not browsing.
- “The same search query, because of the context, means very different search results,”
The last quote above is very powerful, because Dipchand is talking about search queries that takes in consideration the mobile context – time, space/location, calendar, and so on. That is the future of mobile searching, and mobility in general – it is about the mobile context, usage patterns, and the mobile experience.
ceo