It seems that mobile networking users are sticking to their old favourite platforms from the fixed Internet world: MySpace and Facebook are the most popular social networking sites across both mobile and fixed usage.

Nielsen reckons around 1.6 percent of UK mobile users now access social networking sites on their phones, compared to 1.7 percent of those in the US - almost double the rate in most European countries.

It’s no surprise that Facebook and MySpace are still the big names in social networking over mobile, especially given operators’ willingness to do deals with them to trim the data fees associated with such sites. But with the big two still dominating mobile social networking, is there any room for the more niche, mobile-only social networking platforms?

RIM might be best known for mobile email, but that’s not stopping it having a crack on popularising other enterprise applications on the BlackBerry. The latest contender is SAP’s CRM products, which the company is now integrating with the BlackBerry platform.

The pair said their first joint offering will be a “native BlackBerry smartphone client that will merge the power of the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application with core BlackBerry smartphone applications” like email and address book. Rather smartly, the twosome are promising that if you’re using SAP CRM and BlackBerry email, it won’t cost you too much time or effort to get this new system up and running.

Some SAP products have been available on the BlackBerry for a while, but this partnership will open up more applications to device users, and better data synchronisation. This is the sort of thing is playing to the BlackBerry’s crowd. While taking aim at the consumer market with social networking et al might help take the BlackBerry into pastures new, it’s these sort of good solid enterprise moves that will keep its natural user base from getting distracted by the likes of the iPhone or Windows Mobile.

There’s no denying haptics have a certain cool factor. Obviously they’re appealing to venture capital firms right now: motion-sensing software company InvenSense has attracted $19 million in a series C round of funding, led by Sierra Ventures and a load of other big names like Qualcomm Ventures and DoCoMo capital.

InvenSense, whose applications include image stabilisation and navigation, will put the funding towards “company growth and evolv[ing] both the company business and product strategy”. The company reckons motion sensing will take off in mobile gaming and in smart user interfaces.

Motion sensing is a fascinating area, but applications are still in niche and more gimmicky than useful. Still, it’s a chicken and egg problem: phones need to have the appropriate tech inside them to make use of motion-sensitive applications, and without the apps, why put the necessary tech into the handsets? Hopefully, with some funding and some R&D, the motion-sensing people out there can come up with some must-have apps.

Buzzd, which specialises in location-based city guides and social networking, has reeled in its first round of investment led by Greycroft Partners and Monitor Ventures but so far hasn’t put a figure on the funding.

Buzzd says it’s going to put the funding towards “product development and distribution” and will get a new board member in the form of Fern Mandelbaum of Monitor.

What’s clever about Buzzd is that, as well as delivering all the usual city guide info from the likes of Time Out, it also makes use of social networking techniques to give users reviews on bars and the like from their friends - and who do you trust more to send you to a good bar than your mates? It’s also done a tie-up with a tequila firm, so users can even send their friends free drinks - nice touch.

It’s the end of day 2 with my new Nokia Ovi-equipped phone. Over the next fortnight I’ll be giving the various services a workout, but this time it’s just about first impressions.

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Ever since I first posted about it I’ve wanted to take a proper look at the Ovi services- Nokia’s online service offerings for media sharing, gaming, music and maps - as a complete unit, but unlike many other contributors I’m not a daily N-Series user or even equipped with a camera in my S60 device, so the nice people at WOM World have leant me an N81 8GB and a set of bluetooth headphones to give it a work-over.  There’s no conditions or talking points - just a device capable of running all the services on my everyday tariff.

Talking of the hardware, whilst this isn’t the focus of the article, I should give some background… Launched mid-2007 the N81 8GB is by no means a class-leading device - it’s bested by the N95 and N82 easily on specs - but launched at the same time as Nokia’s music store with dedicated music and gaming keys and it’s obviously intended to complement these services.  The large internal storage is well suited to media use and the built-in stereo speakers are also strong indicators of its intended use. The H903 headset (a pendant-syle) features a similar keypad layout and finish and looks a good way to test the music services.

Unboxing the handset, as ever, it’s good to note that the Nokia automatically notes the network I am connected to and sets up the data and MMS access points automatically.  Similarly, the download icon on the main menu presents a nicely familiar list of S60 applications and I quickly download a few old favourites I can’t be without - Ovi aside, this will be my main handset for the next 2 weeks.  So far so good - I’m up and running with minimal fuss.

It’s not all good news though, the gloss plastic feels cheap and hollow - disappointingly so for a handset at the more expensive end of the market - and the many, poorly distinguished buttons on the front fail the ‘girlfriend test’ early on.  The presentation is confused and a bit intimidating - with a little explanation (in lieu of reading he manual) she happily navigates the main menus, but it’s too easy to hit the small silver media button and switch the view to a completely different view.

Ready to try some Ovi I search the device for a menu… nothing.  I look through the ‘downloads’ and ‘catalogue’ items… nothing.  Oh well… I suppose the service is still in beta, but I expected Nokia to be pushing it a bit more.  ‘Beta’ is a tag we’re all used to seeing on everyday web services, but I guess this is staying below the radar despite the bells and whistles launch.  No problem, I open the phone’s browser and navigate to www.ovi.com speculatively having seen the full-browser version.  That does the trick and although the main site is a bit light on details that I’d like I find a link to the N-Gage gaming site, create a login and download the client.

I’ve not been a regular gamer for many years, so am a bit apprehensive, but N-Gage immediately feels like a well polished product.  From within a single well-presented client I’m able to create my profile to utilise the social features and browse a catalogue of games.  There’s some big names listed with current titles and everything is available for a trial play.  I’m really surprised by the quality of some of the titles - it’s not going to embarrass a dedicated handheld but the responsiveness and video quality is much better than I would have expected.  Even my first game of Tetris for a good few years is well presented and makes good use of the dedicated gaming keys on the ear-piece which feel well placed and make gaming an involving two handed process.  I can see myself ditching some of the usual video podcasts on the train next week and getting back to  few games.  Kudos Nokia.

The other feature I decide to try out at a friend’s party is the photo sharing feature.  Before I leave home I access it via the Ovi website again and am disappointed to note that one of the earliest criticisms - the need for separate accounts for all of the services - is still the case… when you have a name as common popular as ‘Smith’ finding something consistent and memorable can be tricky!  Still, the process is slick and the site itself feels very simiar to Flickr.  I note it’s still using the Twango (pre Nokia aquisition) name despite the Ovi branding.  Over the course of the night I snap away pictures and am impressed to see the Share application will use Flickr and Vox as well.  Less good is the need to individually upload each image as taken.  It works, but during the evening the process begins to grate.  The image quality of the 2MP camera is also really poor - the phone has a bright flash, but it doesn’t seem to be able to use it well.  I ditch all of the pictures I take during the evening - in the poor light of the bar they’re worthless and pixelated.  The next day I take a few snaps in good daylight - these are better and it’s nice to be able to select the public or private channels for sharing from the phone with a greater range of embed codes than Flickr.  However, long-term I’m not sure I could live with the click-intensive client… we’ll see.

This morning I quickly played with the music store as I sat on the train.  However, of the free tracks available, only one would download and the clumsy client together with Shaggy informing me that it is a ‘mad mad world’ was enough for me to decide to give up and look at that more closely later…. not a good start though.  Sound quality through the buetooth headphones was very impressive though.

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More as it comes during the weeks.  Please let me know if there’s any features or questions you’re particularly interested in via the comments!

More doom and gloom from the handset people. After Nokia said it though the worldwide mobile phone market might shrink next year, Sony Ericsson has reported its profits have nosedived over the last quarter, its market share has dropped (enough to see it slip behind LG to number five in the biggest device makers) and a lower average selling price.

Sony Ericsson puts the slip down to a “slowing market growth in mid-to-high end phones in markets where Sony Ericsson has a strong presence”. At the same time, the company says it expects all the handsets that it announced previously but will sell in the next quarter will help make a difference in future - like the “high end” Xperia X1 and “high end” Walkman and HSDPA phones. If Sony Ericsson is having trouble shifting high end models and taking a profit hit, perhaps boasting about the slew of high end models coming soon is not the best way to rectify it?

Mobile software management outfit Red Bend has got itself a $10 million in funding this week, thanks to Coral Capital Management, which was joined in the investment round by Red Bend’s existing investors: Carmel Ventures, Greylock Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Poalim Ventures and Infinity.

According to Red Bend, the company will use the investment for sales and marketing to try to expand further into the mobile and machine-to-machine markets, as well as licensing its software for new devices like 3G data cards and embedded modems. It will also use the funding for more R&D work.

It’s easy to see the potential for products that can manage software and applications over-the-air without the user having to take any action, especially as operating systems get smarter and operators push more and more online services. It’s also a major plus for the enterprise market, giving companies the ability to lock down their users’ devices without having to get them all back to the office.

Linux is finally set to make its mark as a significant operating system in the coming years, analysts reckon. According to ABI Research, one out of every five mid and high-end handsets will be sporting Linux come 2013.

ABI says that the new acceptance for Linux will be spawned by the likes of Google’s Android, the work of the LiMo Foundation as well as Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, and in the future, take-up of open source operating systems will come from handset makers who want to “bring content-rich environments to users who currently utilize mid-tier devices” and get their customers using more web-based applications.

It does certainly seem like there’s a bit of momentum getting up around the mobile Linux world, not least thanks to enthusiasm for mobile virtualisation. Linux seems to have struggled on the PC due to a lack of big name support, as well as battling one single entrenched platform in the form of Windows - not problems mobile Linux seems to have.

According to PC World, today will see Motorola join a list of investors which includes Cisco, Intel, Cisco and Texas Instruments by funding mobile virtualisation company VirtualLogix.

VirtualLogix lets a user can access two separate operating systems on the same handset - allowing them to share some resources like memory, but also keeping other areas, such as applications, securely apart. VirtualLogix says virtualisation will make the inclusion of Linux on lower and mid-tier handsets easier by by allowing a handset to run the Linux operating system “together with the existing mobile phone stack simultaneously on a single processor core, without requiring a separate applications processor”.

Virtualisation is hotter than hot for enterprise PCs right now, and if Motorola’s bet is anything to go by, mobiles are going to be next frontier. After all, Motorola has a foot in practically all OS camps - Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian and its own proprietary stack - is this investment a sign it’s thinking of combining them? Or just a way of getting more Linux handsets into the market?

Gizmodo has some interesting tidbits on the upcoming release of Windows Mobile 7, courtesy of a now defunct article from Pocket Now, who’ve seen the OS in action.

Apparently, Window Mobile 7 “basically addresses everything wrong with WM6 today”. While there’s no hard details on what that might mean, I’m guessing this, along with the purchase of Danger might see a more user friendly, up to date interface on the way.

That said, Gizmodo says the expected release date of Windows Mobile 7 will be mid-2009. If that’s true, it’s a long time to wait for improvements that Microsoft should really have made iterations ago.

KDDI is the latest operator to try out new methods of mobile search: the operator has announced from the spring, it’ll be offering visual search to users with an au cameraphone. The technology, ER Search, will be provided by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual pattern recognition system.

According to the company, users can snap an object with the cameraphone and then get content sent back to the device about the object. For example, by snapping a CD cover, the user will get links to web content about the artist, sound clips of their songs and an offer to download a single or two.

I’d really like to see these applications in action - if they work as simply as they say they do, I can see them proving to be popular. Anyone know if any UK operators are trying this out?

I got this email in from an avid SMS Text News reader today. Have a read. Any ideas? I’m scratching my head with this one.

Hi Ewan,

We’re trying to organise a team challenge for our colleagues here. We’re going to do some kind of treasure hunt with a mobile twist - GPS, MMS, barcodes etc. I was wondering if we could include bluetooth somehow. What I want to acheive is to send a clue of some sort - text, whatever - to people within proximity of a certain location, much like you got that ad from the marylebone tup the other month.

I’ve found ways to do this from dedicated devices or laptops, which is fine. But surely there’s some way, like an application, of doing this from a handset? Ideally, a cheap way? Without having to manually pair with everyone?

Hmmm.

I immediately thought of the bluetooth service providers I know of (e.g. Bluepod) — they could certainly do this but I’m willing to bet their equipment might be a bit too expensive for an office treasure hunt budget.

Any thoughts?

I’ve picked up my MusicStation handset yesterday. I popped by and met Omnifone’s top PR chap Tim. He walked me through the service offering and kindly offered me a handset to borrow.

Only half way through Tim’s demonstration did I stop and think, ‘Er, it would have been good to QIK this,’ but, well…

I did do a video though — a small one:

Here’s me on the bus using the service (and not actually saying anything because there was an officious looking Policeman nearby who might have thought I was mad if I started talking to myself):

MusicStation, if you recall, is an end-to-end music entertainment service for mobile handsets. It’s supplied to operators by Omnifone and, to put it mildly, it’s a piece of genius.

It is everything a mobile music solution should be. It’s everything that mobile handset manufacturers — and operators — TELL you your on-handset music solution should be — only, when you get your handset home, you invariably find that operating and navigating the music functions is akin to retrieving spend nuclear rods from a reactor core. Not fun.

Enter MusicStation. Nigh on 2 million tracks. All of them are yours for (in the UK, via Vodafone — exclusively at the mo) 1.99 per week. Call it a tenner a month.

All four of the major labels support it so you can find everything from The Proclaimers to Faithless to Aerosmith to Leona Lewis. I know. I checked. I listened. That Leona’s one is quite catch, actually.

You simply browse through the music library as you would with the likes of iTunes or any other music service. You can search by free text, artist, album and so on. There’s some live charts (based on what other MusicStation users are listening to — genius) to check out if you’re needing inspiration.

Find a track you like? Click on it. It’s downloading in the background now. The download happens pretty fast — particularly since Omnifone have heavily compressed the sound file but without — and this is IMPORTANT — without losing any discernible sound quality.

Want to download a whole album? Sure thing. Click and it’s with you in a few minutes. Only like the first three songs? No problem, stick them into a playlist and you can come back to them later.

Heading to the gym? Hunt around for some pumping dance tracks. Stick’em into a special gym playlist. Enjoy.

The application dynamically controls the amount of data stored on the handset (or the memory card, more like) so that if you’re running out of space (unlikely on a N95 8GB, more possible on the Sony I am testing), then the least played tracks stored on your handset are replaced with the ones you’ve recently requested. Seemlessly.

When you want to listen to them again, no bother. No bother at all. They’re simply sucked out of the cloud back to your handset on-demand.

You’ve always got your current selection of tracks on your handset ready to play irrespective of network coverage. The application is smart. It reconnects immediately when you get into network coverage (I tested this on the tube for a lot of yesterday afternoon as I went from meeting to meeting) and sucks down what it needs.

Stop paying your weekly subscription because you run out of credit? No biggie. MusicStation is inoperable until you’re ready to reactivate. When you do, it remembers exactly where you were and reactivates the on-handset tracks for you once more.

Credit? Did you say credit? Yes indeedo. MusicStation works for both contract and pay as you go customers — a very important point given the biggest music consumers are generally teenagers — who generally use pay as you go. That’s why it’s a manageable 1.99 per week that comes off your credit and not a whopping tenner.

And don’t worry about data. All the downloads you make to MusicStation are free of charge — Vodafone won’t be hacking a pound of flesh for the data charges since Omnifone deal directly with them. This was and still is a huge issue when you’re downloading single tracks from other services (i.e. paying 3 quid for the track and another 8 quid for the data fee). All you pay with MusicStation is the 1.99 per week.

Navigating around the application is easy. I quickly got how it worked and very quickly enjoyed searching for new tracks and arsing about with playlists.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to use a mobile phone as a music player. Properly. No arsing about. No converting files and sideloading. All in the cloud. It is nothing short of brilliantly conceived for the consumer.

Absolutely phenomenal.

FINALLY I am using a handset that does both music and ‘phone stuff’ brilliantly. The Sony Ericsson’s own music offering doesn’t hold a candle to MusicStation. The fact you can reliably using MusicStation the whole day (with, what appeared to be a noticeable but ultimately benign additional draw on the battery) and use the cloud to retrieve the music you want, when you want it… geez. It’s finally here.

I thought as much when I saw MusicStation launching but its only now that I’ve had the opportunity to use it for a while that I 100% recognise this.

This is the only application I’ve ever seen that does music as it as intended to be — as it should be. Yes, the iPhone offers a seamless offering — but I’m talking about consumer, consumer, consumer handsets. This works on your bog standard every day nice looking Sony.

This whole space is going to be very exciting over the next few years, particularly with Nokia’s music offering coming shortly. I’m going to continue using MusicStation for now and see how I get on.

If you’re on Vodafone, check it out. Go to Music from Vodafone Live and you’ll see the MusicStation download if your handset is compatible. Let me know what you think of it.

Microsoft has finally completed its buy of smartphone software maker Danger. Now part of the Redmond fold, Danger will be part of the Premium Mobile Experiences team, a group within the Mobile Communications Business of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft.

Apparently, according to Microsoft, acquiring Danger will let it “deliver cool, new, fun mobile experiences”. Cool and fun aren’t words I’d associated with Windows Mobile in a million years - can you be fun if you’re part of a team in a unit within a unit within a unit - but fingers crossed Danger can do something about making Windows Mobile a little bit more intuitive and, who knows, maybe take Microsoft out of its business mobile straightjacket.

Mowser was a browser that would take sites designed for the web and render them for mobiles, launched last year. I say was, because its founder, Russell Beattie has decided to pull the plug after struggling to find funding.

Aside from his debts, Beattie said on his blog that he decided to stop development on the browser because “I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence”.

But Beattie isn’t suggesting that people don’t want to use the mobile web *at all*, just they don’t want to use it when it feels so much worse than a PC browser. The solution to getting more web traffic, he says, is better devices and better browsers. Here here. Perhaps if every phone had a whizzy browser and a big screen, the mobile web would be used everywhere. But given we’re years off mid tier and low tier devices getting such capabilities, if they ever do, is there a way of encouraging mobile web take up in the meantime?

I’ve been playing a lot with QIK recently — it’s very smart, but there’s one issue I’ve got with it: If I don’t have network coverage, I don’t appear to be able to stream my videos.

FlixWagon sent me through a newsletter this morning — it’s second item contained this paragraph:

Can you hear me now…?
You never know when something Flix-worthy might occur. Maybe you come across some break-dancers in the subway that would make an awesome video but you have no service, what do you do? Record it anyway! Flixwagon guarantees that all videos WILL be uploaded to our site. That means that even if you have no network coverage, your videos will be uploaded online the second that you do.

This is good news. I managed to stream a QIK video of my friend Angus running the London Marathon on Sunday — unfortunately it didn’t upload, for one reason or another, because I was something like 10 minutes behind streaming and I ended up going into the tube and losing network signal.

I’m excited by the innovation between the likes of FlixWagon and QIK. I’m going to put FlixWagon on the E90 again and see how it functions.

I’ve been wanting to try out Omnifone’s MusicStation for absolutely ages. It looks like a rather graceful method of accessing and playing music on one’s S60 handset, plus it is also the only decent alternative to iTunes that I’m aware of.

I’ve been trying to get a demo but I’ve not been crazy-keen enough to go out and *buy* an N95 8GB from Vodafone just to do so.

I tried using my Nokia E90 to download the application from the Vodafone site. Unfortunately it won’t let the E90 access the download page. I’m reliably informed that it *should* work on an E90… just, I can’t get at the SIS file . If you’ve got the SIS file anywhere, could you whack it to me by email?

If you’re a MusicStation user, could you write me an email with your thoughts on it? I’ve had a lot of enquiries from people wondering what my opinion is … and, well, apart from replying ‘Er, it, well, it looks good but I haven’t actually tried it,’ I’m reduced to delivering blank looks.

Andrew over at StrategyEye published news this morning that CNN has knocked up a deal with mobile manufacturer, Samsung, to preload their java news application on their upcoming range of five megapixel handsets.

The news application gives users access to CNN reports, images and video. Users can also submit their own images and videos to CNN’s citizen journalism website through the java tool.

It’s a shame that CNN felt it had to go direct to Samsung.

If we needed an indication of just how nailed the mobile industry is at the moment, this is a brilliant example.

One on side, CNN, the global news giant, wants to get to potential consumers of its content.

On the other side, Samsung has products that it ships to a few hundred customers around the planet. Let’s be clear, Samsung’s customers are mobile operators, NOT you and I. Rarely does anyone buying a Samsung pay full market price for it — the devices are generally subsidised by the mobile operator. It’s the mobile operator who decides whether to offer the device to their customers.

What a screwed up situation.

CNN, I’m sure, recognises the massive challenge of getting consumers to download an application to their handset. It ain’t gonna happen.

Some people download applications. It really is a tortuous process for a lot of consumers though.

If you want to boost audience and actually make it simple for users to ‘get’ your content, what do you do? Go direct to the handset manufacturer?

It’s a real shame when it’s come to this. I understand the logic. It’s the one absolute that you can guarantee. IF it’s installed on the handset out of the box, at least it will work. At least you can be sure users *could* use your service. The next issue is getting them to click on the icon.

It’d be rather neat, actually, if you could scroll a news feed along the bottom of the menu window by default.

Is the global array of mobile operators that difficult a minefield to navigate that you’re better going direct to the handset manufacturer? Yes, as far as CNN is concerned.

I really don’t make many phone calls. At all. I’m not doing much mobile e-mail of-late either.

It’s not that I’m a particularly anti-social sort (honest!) it’s just that my current project keeps me in an office surrounded by the people I need to speak to routinely. Similarly as I’m commuting by car to this client I’m doing less browsing on the move (they really frown on that on the M25).

Not much of a start to an SMS Text News post, but there is a point here… My work-day has changed and I’m appreciating a different side to my mobile day: specifically calendaring. The project I’m working on is just starting up - there’s literally hundreds of clients, suppliers, sub-contractors and team members arranging meetings, briefings, reviews and interviews and it’s a challenge to remember where I should be and when. My E61’s home screen maps out my day and I furtively glance at it during meetings to see if anything new has been added since I was last at my desk…

So?

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt, but e-mail and browsing by mobile no-longer really feels like a second-class experience as it did a few years back with my first company-provided XDA. Sure, it’s different to the big-screen laptop experience, but not worse or (much) slower. So it’s frustrating, as I come to rely on it so much more, to feel so limited by my mobile calendaring…

The basics work well - either the E61 or the iPhone both present clear and useful views and manipulating individual items of my primary calendar is simple enough, but I feel like I’m wearing blinkers… I have calendar tunnel-vision. On the desktop I have my team’s calendars side-by-side on screen - I can see who’s going where and can often tell more about a meeting from the cluster of diary bookings than the published agenda. It’s a kind of crude visualisation of my data. Outside of work too, I’m a bit of a calendaring nut pulling in all the information I need… My Mac has all the obvious stuff added in - public holidays downloaded from Apple’s own repository, but also stuff more specific to me: school holidays and the local college’s term dates are useful to know when the local roads and trains will be busy (it makes a huge difference). Also, I’ve also got the match calendar of the local rugby team (who’s stadium is opposite my home) and the events schedule of the Twickenham Stadium - an 80,000-seater venue which is a popular music venue and the home ground for English Rugby which is nearby - when it’s an major event day the roads are closed and you can’t go anywhere fast…  Flights, hotels and travel bookings are also imported directly from my Tripit feed.

All of this information is imported into my desktop calendaring programs by subscribing to iCalendar feeds - the calendar equivalent of a blog’s RSS feed. Much of it is published directly in that format - Google Calendar has been a saving grace here allowing people to easily create and publish community event details - and for the remainder I use Yahoo Pipes to scrape web pages and transform data into iCal format.  With more and more services adding the feature I’m increasingly able to subscribe direct - to friend’s availability (from a Plaxo ‘busy’ feed) or their travel plans from Dopplr.  It’s becoming mainstream…!

So why can’t I handle these feeds properly on my mobile devices? Exchange synchronisation on my E61 (via Roadsync or Mail for Exchange) can’t process or add this type of data. iTunes sync for the iPhone does copy this data (if selected), but it’s presented indistinguishable from my regular calendar items.  I want the same choices of presentation and the option to subscribe directly…  I want options to import reminders or just to view reminders. I want it done… properly.

Dear Jim,

Please could you fix it for me to have proper calendar support in my mobiles. I’m not really sure what’s going on at the moment.

Regards,

Ben

Whatleydude is thoroughly enjoying using Mobbler — recently blogged by Dotsix over at Symbian Guru:

Michael Coffey has just posted a beta of Mobbler, an S603rd Edition client that will scrobble your played music to your Last.fm account. The beta now has a very easy and simple interface where you only enter your username and password, then connect, and leave it running in the background. You can then launch your music player and let Mobbler do all the job. I have it now running on my N95-1 and it seems to function well.

Although I’m a last.fm subscriber and big fan of the concept of mobile scrobbling — and, by extension, Mobbler, I think you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming through the streets naked before I would use a Symbian Series 60 device to listen to music.

Great concept!

Mobile web browsers are about to get a whole lot better, according to analysts ABI Research, with open-Internet browsers (browsers which sport capabilities like AJAX and RSS) for mobiles growing from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million browsers in 2013.

“The move towards web-based applications means browser and web services engines will become increasingly important for mobile, whether these are in a commercial browser implementation or a customized widget. Ultimately, the long-term trend away from native applications to web-based applications means browser and web services engines will be increasingly important components in the mobile environment,” research director Michael Wolf said.

It looks like despite all the hype and bluster the iPhone really might have kicked off a bit of a shake-up in the mobile world - the device has shown people what mobile web browsers should be like and reminded rival mobile manufacturers that its time to polish up those interfaces.

Opera Mini has just unveiled a version of its mobile browser for Google’s Android platform. The company wants developers to get involved with testing it, so if you fancy experimenting with the browser, it’s available here.

Once the feedback is in, Opera has promised the Android-specific Opera Mini will enter beta form soon, with the usual Opera goodies: small screen rendering, zoom, synced bookmarks and integrated Google search etc.

So now we’ve got the Android browser, we just need the handsets. Anyone? Anyone?

It seems Microsoft could be following Yahoo into the world of voice-enabled search: the company has released a research paper which shows its been working on a product called BlindSight, which promises “eyes-free access to mobile phones”.

Microsoft, along with the University of California, is looking into ways to recover information, like checking a calendar or contacts list, while you’re on a conversation and can’t look at your phone screen. Instead, the idea is you get is the details delivered audibly, while you carry on your conversation.

I can’t decide if this is a great idea or an awful one - no need to ring someone back while you dig out that phone number you promised, which is handy, but then again do you really want to be trying to listen to that phone number in one ear and a conversation in another?

Adobe has decided to fuse its mobile unit with the rest of its operations, with the company’s Mobile and Devices Business becoming part of the company’s Experience and Technology Group. According to Adobe, the move is meant to help the software maker in “engineering our desktop and device technologies more closely together”.

Or, the other way of looking at it is that the boss of the unit, who’s been at the company for 30 years has left and time was ripe for a reorganisation.

Whatever the motivation, there’s no denying it’s a smart move. Mobiles and PCs (and PC type devices) are only going to get closer as the industry moves away from the idea of mobile-specific platforms like .mobi and towards open access. If Adobe can replicate the same success with Flash on the mobile as it has with Flash on the PC, it’s laughing.

Bored with text input for mobile search? Yahoo has taken the wraps off voice enabled search for its oneSearch product for the BlackBerry users in the US, with more devices and countries coming soon. The base of the service is Vlingo’s speech recognition, which grabs the spoken search terms and enters them into oneSearch.

Yahoo is obviously rather fond of this technology - it’s also announced that it’s invested in Vlingo as part of a $20 million series B funding round for the company. Vlingo said it will put the money towards expansion and R&D.

Voice is, let’s face it, still the killer app for mobiles so it’s actually surprising there aren’t more people talking up voice-enabled search, especially given the push for mobility in emerging markets where literacy rates may be low. Does anyone know what Google’s up in this area?