Summer Holidays Sees No Let Up In Mobile News! - Week 31

Welcome to the end of another busy week in mobile, mobile fans! No I don't mean that you are literally a mobile fan, but rather potentially a fan of mobile. If you have stumbled across this post expecting an inane comment about gardening sorry! ;-) Still stay tuned, more to follow on the gardening front later. Yes it actually rained for about the first time in 2 months in London so that is something for gardeners to celebrate!

So again a quick recap on why I found the following stories posted to LinkedIn interesting this week.Think I might break this up into a tuesday/friday thing as for now there seems to be far too much to keep track of!

RT @IntoMobile LTE in the USA: First LTE mobile phone passes through the FCC, Verizon LTE dongle leaked http://bit.ly/dxLskO - really interested in LTE. Think that if we get the mentioned download speeds of 100MB per second then the mobile network becomes a real alternative as a replacement for the fixed internet. I see a future when your mobile becomes your router in your house with all appliances hooking up to your mobile via WiFi for data. Of course when you leave home the rest of your family are stuffed as their internet connection disappears! Heh, I am sure we will get around this use case. So any stories about LTE devices in the wild are good stories. The sooner we get it the better! It might not be so bad to be a bit pipe afterall as long as you are the bit pipe of choice!

Google CEO announces partnership with Zynga … well sort of, but maybe not http://awe.sm/58rTK - So not exactly mobile, but more smoke about the impending fire that might be another Google social network, or at least Google interest in gaming. Hey by the end of this week Google acquired Slide!! (http://awe.sm/594bg) despite Eric Schmidt saying they would significantly enter the gaming market (http://awe.sm/594bp) Could be a new platform for gaming developers and even mobile developers. The more avenues to distribute content the better. Who knows maybe cross social network gaming? Do you remember when mobile phone contract minutes could not be used cross network?

It’s not really all about the numbers but Android Market place apparently hits 100 apps http://awe.sm/58rVi - It isn’t really about the numbers. It should be about the quality. Still the numbers are pretty staggering. 100K apps in the Android market place. Somewhere in the region of 250K in Apple. This introduces a new problem with discoverability of all those applications! Still a great problem to have! Simply demonstrates that if you build tools for developers and maintain an active market through continual innovation, then developers will work with you. Everybody wins

UK Operator iPhone 4 contract prices compared. iPhone 4 launched on T-Mobile (UK) today http://awe.sm/58rXU - T-Mobile finally joined the iPhone 4 revolution. Apparently it changed everything again? Damn! Here I was just getting used to the last time everything changed! You want to change? Be prepared to wait! In the meantime check out the prices available. Who’d have thought a couple of years ago that Tesco would be an alternative! Do you remember the grief that was caused when Tescos started to sell designer clothes? The brands went mental as they thought Tesco were de-valuing them. Anyone think Apple might have a go at Tesco?

Another Froyo post to add fuel to the impending fire! http://awe.sm/58tC7 - It’s all about the frozen yoghurt baby! This weekend seemed to be the weekend that Froyo OTA upgrades, or version 2.2 of the Android OS, was being rolled out across various handsets. A whole lot of noise on the Friday about it. Unfortunately as the one I am carrying is carrier locked I won’t get the HTC Desire upgrade for some time yet. It says several weeks, fingers crossed it isn’t longer (see the end of this post about how one Carrier wrecked the upgrade. I hope mine does not follow suite!) Amazing how Google and Apple can generate such fever when it comes to product roll outs. Still this was announced 3 months ago so there have been a lot of Android Geeks waiting a good while!

Maybe Apple realised that making examples of others was not a productive solution to their iPhone 4 antenna issues? http://awe.sm/58w7n - I always thought it was really weak of Apple to try and dismiss the antenna issues they are having on the iPhone 4 by trying to highlight similar issues with other handsets. I had the impression that they had an army of their testers buy every smart phone on the market and manipulate it until some issue could be found. Just work out the issue as opposed to trying to pass it off on everyone else. I am glad that they seem to have stopped their testing efforts on other handsets and might learn from the issue and fix it.

BlackBerry being banned in UAE due to all network traffic routed through Canada. http://awe.sm/58w8B Opera mini next? – so Blackberry email traffic is routed through Canada and is encrypted by RIM such that no-one can read it. Unfortunately this means that snooping governments cannot see the content of the emails being sent. According to the UAE this is dangerous so they are banning blackberries! This will also be the case if you go over for a visit with a roaming Blackberry. This made me think of the Opera Mini service whereby all traffic is routed through Oslo! Dough! Will the UAE target low end mobile phone users accessing the internet through Opera Mini? Do terrorists use Opera Mini phones?

RT @lancej Google Is Destroying The Competition If Mobile Is All About Search | mocoNews http://cnt.to/m2c via @mocoNews – So apparently Googles share of mobile search is now 98.29%! Really? I find this hard to believe, but then think to almost every phone I have searched on my mobile search provider is usually Google, but I wouldn’t say that it exclusively is. This statistic means that Mobile Search is almost exclusively Google’s. Hard to believe! If it’s true it doesn’t mean carrier portal search deals really have a great deal of impact in the measures!

Heading into the Nokia dev event for the launch of the N8. Interested to hear the whole Nokia dev story. What's in it for us with Nokia. – I wanted this to be great. I wanted to go to a Nokia developer even and be blown away by some new development tools that would make my life easy. The main reason is that the more folks in the market the faster innovation will be driven. The more the merrier, and ultimately the better it is for the Customer. Of course continual innovation means the developer is continually trying to use the innovation. If it is on a popular platform development is like a gas consuming all of the volume that it is allowed to play in. Make a new API it will be used! Unfortunately I was not blown away. I was Power Pointed to death. See next entry though for a link back to my post about the event.

N8 Launch - Ovi Developer event in London today http://awe.sm/58ywx . Right msg, average delivery #ovidevsldn – no real developer demos dented the impact of this meeting for me. The right words were spoken but they were not backed up with the correct actions. Nokia have a long way to go. They say they are listening to developers and that is great. I hope the demos are done at their developer summit in London on the 14-15^th of September. Still it looks like they are in it for the long haul so not all doom and gloom.

RT @gomonews Mobile location will be an essential personal tool, says Yahoo! As devices become more location aware http://bit.ly/bLI8lK - I firmly believe that we have only scratched the service of LBS. There is so much more that can be done and I like the concept of location becoming increasingly important in ones life. Being able to know where you made a decision impacts the understanding of why the decision was made. Location context is incredibly important and simple check-in services, although fun, are not the end of the road by any means. Loads of fun to be had in this space!

GSMA OneAPI: 'operators as a whole have not done a great job of articulating what those benefits are' http://awe.sm/58zF4 - the OneAPI is a great idea. A single API definition that can be used across network carriers providing access to network resources, e.g. SMS, location, payment, etc…, however I think there are issues with it. Namely Identity. Carriers, and to be fair probably most of their Customers, are not happy to share the MSISDN with application providers. The OneAPI requires users to know the Customer Identity, so how as an application provider am I supposed to use it. If Carriers work out a standard anonymous identity service, that allows content providers to actually use the OneAPI then it might fly. This will also allow for an aggregator of the OneAPI so a developer can implement against a single end point as opposed to having to manage connections against all carriers. Having standard API’s is great, but being able to develop against a single end point is even better. Solve Identity, provide a single end point (and provide a payment interface ;-)) and you will have developers lining up at your door to do business.

Mobile browsers on 60% of phones in 5 yrs http://awe.sm/590gE Hard to believe this is not the case already! Not all markets the same – I cannot remember the last phone I had that did not have a browser. Probably an old Nokia from 10 years ago. Although the mobile internet is finally exploding (remember every year since 1997 has been the year of the mobile internet ;-)) it seems strange to realise not everyone will have access to your internet services! There is still a market out there that has not adopted mobile internet services. This creates massive opportunities! Convert the folks who still don’t get it (that should be easy right ;-)) or provide services in old tech to reach Customers. SMS might not be dead yet ;-)

RT @MobileCrunch Praise be! Facebook finally updates their Android app - http://is.gd/e1vhE - In the week that Mark Zuckerberg got himself an EVO 4G and installed the Android Facebook app, comes an upgrade for the Android Facebook app. The iPhone version of Facebook won hands done prior tot the Android update. I still think iPhone is better but Android is catching up. Its great to see that one of the internets biggest properties is going Android. Might encourage those that have not dipped into the Android pool yet to go for a swim.

RT @mashable Google Brings Your Search History to Your Phone - http://mash.to/2kI1h - A nice convergence of desktop and mobile. Search for where you are heading this evening while you are at work and have access to your searches when you get to the place on your mobile. Seamless convergence between desktop and mobile is great.

Ovi Store App Wizard http://appwizard.ovi.com/ - creating apps based on RSS feeds to publish in Ovi. Sound familiar? – Not sure what I can say about this. One thing is that it should fill the Ovi Application store with 1000’s of applications! The fact that they all look the same and are RSS based will make life a little dull. I wonder if you look at the successful applications for the Android and iPhone eco-systems how many of them will be RSS based applications. I am guessing none. Previously I said it is not just about the numbers. Access to a small number of compelling applications, in my view, offers a highly quality Customer experience than having access to 1000’s of RSS based applications. That being said this is an incredibly simple tool to use in order to get your content made available to millions of Ovi phones. This blog should be available soon, I hope, on the Ovi marketplace. If you have a Nokia phone you will be able to download it for free, if you are game to admit that you still own a Nokia phone!! Apart from all of that, the application and interface look incredibly familiar! I wonder why that should be the case?

"I'm not dead yet!" 300,000 Symbian phones shipped every day in Q2 2010 http://bit.ly/8WYhnC via @gomonews – Although Android sales have increase 886% since 2009, and all the news seems to be either Android or iPhone based, Symbian are not dead! They are still shipping 300K handsets a day, although Android are rapidly catching up.

RT @BGR Rumor: T-Mobile’s ‘Project Emerald’ is dual-core, Android powered, HTC Glacier http://goo.gl/fb/LDnw6 - Dual core? Pah! I am waiting for a quad core phone. Think it is bizarre how powerfull phones are getting. Still why not!

Android shipments up 886% http://awe.sm/591Gs but everyone else is up as well except Microsoft. Symbian still on top – So smart phone sales are on the rise for everyone! Except Microsoft! Lets take the figures with a grain of salt though. This time last year there was a single Android handset? Well maybe a couple. An 886% increase is great, but it is an increase on a small user base! That being said 200K handsets activations a day, and growing! It’s not going to be long before they have caught up on Symbain. When will Nokia announce an Android device? Who wants a bet that there is a skunk works project going on in Nokia right now working on this ;-) AS far as windows mobile goes? Horrible figures right? Well who is going to jump on board a dying platform? Lets see if Windows Mobile 7 helps their figures at the end of the year.

On Wave's demise - Schmidt - OK to try hard, fail and learn from it http://awe.sm/593pV "Remember, we celebrate our failures" – OK dispite the calm shrug off by learning from mistakes and celebrating failure, this cannot have been a great day. I remember the announcement of Wave at Google I/O in 2009 and then the clamour to get accounts. People were buying accounts on ebay for crying out loud! To have to admit failure only a year and a bit later must hurt! That being said, it takes a strong person to admit failure and move on. other companies could do well to learn from this. Mistakes are made. Move on and get onto the next thing that might work! So, despite the pain, Kudos to Google for getting on with it.

GOOG Android activities more than paid for by search and Schmidt loves iPhone for search distribution as well http://awe.sm/593pk - Eric Schmidt lets us know exactly what the business plan with Android is. Search distribution! Eric highlights that the search revenue from Android based searches has more than paid for all of Androids development activities. Also a love of the iPhone? Well why the heck not! Who do you use on your iPhone as a search provider? Google right? More search revenue for them thank you very much!

Another example of content distribution via the browser (Getjar + BOLT) as opposed to the portal http://bit.ly/b8wDpG via @gomonews - browser companies are increasingly looking to services to distinguish there proposition. As an example the note I posted last week about Opera teaming up with deCarta to deliver local based information directly from within the browser. Now BOLT are teaming up with GetJar in order to deliver application content straight from within the browser! Yet another dilution of the Customer! Operators are hit by OEM’s trying to get a piece of the pie, then Google taking over and now browser companies! To control the entire Customer value chain is so damned difficult but Apple in their walled garden make a great job of it! Interesting though that increasingly browser companies are trying to distinguish themselves with content.

RT @gomonews Vodafone screws up Android OTA update to Froyo 2.2 http://bit.ly/9E92Xm Please don't do this T-Mobile! - the Froyo update for HTC Desire owners on Vodafone seems to have been trashed with a 2.1 update with Vodafone specific content including porn! Wow. I have not seen if this is the case but I certainly hope not. I would be a very annoyed Customer if that were the case! I only hope other Operators won’t follow suite and try this themselves.

Thats it for now folks! More next week although again think I should probably break this up to a twice weekly summary. Might make life a little easier!

Cheers

m