Adobe is making some serious moves into corralling the mobile development market. It’s just announced its latest plan for mobile domination, called the Open Screen Project, with a series of big-name partner like Cisco, Intel, LG, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, and the BBC all getting involved.
Adobe says the project is aimed at “enabling a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications” across all handsets and other devices, and allow all mobile programming to be updated over the air.
Here’s the nuts and bolts of what Adobe will do:
- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
Making it cheaper and easier for developers to write for a variety of mobile operating systems - what’s not to like?
Sony Ericsson has taken the wraps off the interestingly named Project Capuchin, a technology which it says will bridge the Java ME and Flash Lite development platforms. Accordign to Sony Ericsson, Project Capuchin will let developers cherrypick the best bits of both to create the best content-rich mobile apps.
The bridging technology will come in the form of an intuitive tool to create applications and allow “Flash Lite content to be encapsulated in Java ME applications”. Sony Ericsson has promised developers should be able to get their hands on the goodies in the second half of this year.
Microsoft’s Flash rival Silverlight came a bit late to this party and technology like this, which strengthens both the incumbent mobile platforms, won’t make it any easier for Silverlight to make its mark in the mobile world.
It looks like China really has done it: after seemingly never-ending delays, according to local news service Xinhua, China has now got its 3G service up and running in just a matter of months and yes, it will be ready for the influx of visitors for the Olympics later this year.
China Mobile is giving away 15,000 3G handsets to Olympics officials and 3 million yuan of call credit to boot, says Xinhua. They’ll be able to get the higer-speed TD-SCDMA connection in eight cities, five of which will be hosting the Olympics.
China Mobile first started testing the service back in April - it’s amazing that it will go from pilot to full launch within four months. Some people take that long to test an application, not an entire network. Or am I being too optimistic - is a short testing period likely to signify a network that hasn’t had all the gruelling testing it needs?
IBM has been touting the latest initiative to come out of its Research Labs, aimed at building a slew of services for the developing economies where mobile phones are the de facto web access device.
There’s a lot of fluff around the initiative (social networks go mobile - who’d have thought it?), but some potentially interesting work. Here’s what IBM says it will be working on:
Universal Mobile Translator
IBM’s researchers are developing new technology to facilitate speech between individuals who speak no common language with the goal of free-form dialogue facilitated by a PDA. IBM technology is already allowing travelers using PDAs to translate menus in Japanese and doctors to communicate with patients in Spanish. IBM real-time translation technologies will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.
Portable Power in Your Pocket
IBM’s SoulPad software allows PC users to separate a computer’s “soul” — the programs, settings and data it holds — from its body, the disks, keyboard, screen, processor and other hardware from which it is comprised. Once a computer’s soul is stored on a storage device like a portable USB hard drive or iPod with SoulPad software, it can be carried around and reincarnated in any other computer simply by plugging in the storage device and starting the computer up.
Social Networks Go Mobile
Consumers can communicate with their social network friends regardless of where they are with voice and SMS from either a PC or a mobile phone. This is huge for generation Y consumers. For example, young shoppers looking at purchasing clothes in a store are increasingly looking for immediate feedback via their social networks, and the easiest way to make this happen is via mobile devices.
Healthcare Goes Mobile
IBM Research has brought together mobile phones and “presence” technology combined with health records to provide a potential “good samaritan” with information on how to aid people in critical medical situations. This combination of IBM Research capabilities and IBM WebSphere Presence Server exemplifies IBM’s ability to create enhanced mobile applications for everyday life.
Interesting, it also says it’s working on “voice-enabled mobile commerce” - if there ever was an application that should be more developed, it’s speech input, particularly for developing economies. After all, how useful is text input and SMS in countries where there’s an 50 percent illiteracy rate?
A handful of mobile heavyweights, including the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, NEC and Alcatel-Lucent have announced they’ve got together and worked out a patent sharing system for the development of HSDPA’s successor, LTE.
The framework will give all of the company “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” for licensing each other’s essential patents. The deal will also make sure that those involved can’t charge royalties that are more than a single digit percentage of the sales price of phones using their patents and for embedded LTE modems, the maximum level will be a “single digit dollar amount”.
Getting the patent regime - and particularly the pricing - for using patents agreed before anyone starts using them is a simple but very clever idea. Perhaps if Nokia and Qualcomm had set up a similar agreement they could have saved themselves a truckload in legal fees.
I had a note in from Scott Beaumont at Mippin to let me know that their Mippin Maker tool is now available. Essentially, if you’d like to create a perfectly tailored rendition of your site for every mobile handset, Mippin Maker is for you. It’s free, too. (You do actually need to have a site with an RSS/ATOM newsfeed in order to take advantage of Mippin Maker.)
I’ve got one already, thanks to the team there. You can see it at mippin.com/smstextnews. Here’s how it looks rendered on my desktop browser:
I decided to try out the Mippin Maker process with my brother’s Bladewatch blog. All I did was type in www.bladewatch.com into the Mippin Maker URL box and *immediately*, I mean IMMEIDATELY, this page appeared:
Smart! That was it created. It’s got a temporary URL — mippin.com/mippin4030 — I imagine if my brother ‘claims’ the site, he’ll be able to change that to something a little more relevant.
It really is that fast. Give it a go with your blog.
Following in the footsteps of Google and Apple, AT&T has decided to open up and make information available for developers that will help them create applications for pensioners and users with disabilities. The methodology, called Universal Design, is “the practice of designing products and applications that are usable by the broadest possible range of consumers”, according to AT&T.
AT&T has already created some applications based on Universal Design, including Mobile Speak, a screen reader with Braille support, and Mobile Magnifier, a magnification application that supports low- and high-resolution screens, which it says are now open to the broadest range of handsets.
If any budding developers want to take a look at Unvirsal Design, the documents are available here. There are already some incredibly smart apps out there for disabled users - hopefully this will add to that number.
If reports are right, it looks like the partnership between Sony Ericsson and Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo might have hit a snag. According to Trading Markets, the pair are reviewing their product development plans but declined to say what the results might be.
Earlier reports had suggested that Sony Ericsson would stop supplying devices to DoCoMo altogether, but Sony Ericsson has been denying this and the AFP quotes a spokesman as saying the company has no plans to ditch the Japanese market.
I’ll be interested to find out how NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson will change their plans, but I can’t see the attraction in cutting ties completely - Japan might be a tough market right now, but it’s still practically the centre of the universe for mobile developments.
It’s all go on the mobile web front this week. Nokia has announced it’s bringing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology - a web development technology for multimedia applications - to mobile. For developers, it means a program built using Silverlight can be put on any number of devices or platforms without the need for more coding.
Silverlight will be available for Nokia’s S60 phones, as well as Series 40 devices and Nokia internet tablets. Nokia said that support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.
The interesting thing about these sorts of announcements from technology companies is the time lag between a product coming out for desktops and its release on mobile devices - Microsoft released Silverlight in its PC form in the middle of last year. While it’s great to see the gap between the two platforms closing, tech firms should be realising that mobiles will soon be the most popular way of accessing the internet - and giving their mobile development the same kind of treatment as their PC development.
It looks like the launch of China’s 3G is getting a little closer. According to Forbes, the country is experimenting with its own homegrown variant of 3G, TD-SCDMA, in 10 cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Qingdao and Baoding.
According to Xinhua, the trials have been successful and the connection is “good and steady” with video calls coming off without a problem. After waiting so long for the advent of 3G, it seems, we’re almost there. The countdown to the Olympics is on - hopefully 3G will be there on the starting blocks.
Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital department of the Finnish behemoth, has invested in Morpho, Inc., to the tune of 165 million Japanese Yen (~US$1.5 million). Morpho specializes in image processing software for mobile gadgets. PhotoSolid and MovieSolid, both from Morpho and designed to help with image and video stabilization, have grown to be well-respected in the industry. Morpho also offers embedded solutions for motion tracking, panoramic imaging, and backlight compensation.
With Nokia’s Nseries handsets on the frontline of cameraphones and the Nokia N82 sporting a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics, and Xenon flash, the ability to efficiently process the image with enhanced features is going to be key. Samsung’s G810, which was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2008 and sports Nokia’s S60v3 Feature Pack 1 OS, like the N82, already has an image stabilization feature.
I’ll be anxious to see how Morpho progresses, and if we see more Nokia interest in imaging-related companies.
A team of 27 researchers and students at the Melbourne University recently unveiled their new GiFi chip, which they hope will be ready for market in 2009. The chip, which measures 5mm on either side, only uses 2 watts of power and sports a tiny 1mm antenna. Since this little chip is manufactured using CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology, it will cost about $10 to manufacture, as well.
Using the 60GHz frequency, GiFi would be capable of data transfer speeds up to 5Gb over a 10 meter radius. This is like super-powered Bluetooth, here. Possible uses would be a video kiosk, which could send a full-length high-definition movie to your phone over GiFi in a matter of seconds, and then you could stream that to your TV once you got home, or transfer it to your PC for later viewing. The possibilities seem pretty endless.
Via: Phonescoop
The S60 Blogs are a source of all types of information, from application betas to marketing thoughts, and every now and again, a gem such as this post from Peter Harbeson. As a bit of an experiment, using his S60 handset, he wanted to see just how much he could do with his phone using ONLY the web browser. Peter was surprised to find that, somehow, he was able to do just about everything.
Peter’s list included being able to:
keep my calendar in any of several web-based calendars (Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, and probably a dozen others)
send and receive email using the web (pharbeson [at] gmail [dot] com, by the way)
send SMS using bigfoot.com
maintain a to-do list
view and edit Office documents using Google docs
listen to music
watch videos
back up data (although most of my data isn’t local, so it’s already backed up)
maintain and use a contact list — this is not as well integrated as it could be, but it’s possible
read ebooks
subscribe to and read RSS feeds
subscribe to podcasts (although I listen to them without the browser)
He goes on to wonder just what the benefits of an entirely browser-based UI would really be. Obviously currently there’s a network connectivity issue, but what if that was solved? How much easier would it be to ‘fix’ the UI or customise it to individual users if it was merely a web page?
If you’ve not seen it, here’s the video on YouTube of Nokia’s S60 Touch UI, as demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress. Thus far, everyone I’ve read were appalled that it was so poorly demo’d. Personally, I’m more excited about S60 Touch now than I have been in the past. I’ve noticed four major complaints that I want to counter:
1. It was demo’d on a tablet, connected to a PC running an emulator. When you’re wanting to show off the UI of something, but don’t want to give any clues as to the hardware, how *ELSE* would you suggest demoing it?
2. It looks just like S60 does. Duh. It’s called ‘S60 Touch’, not “Entirely New Touch Interface”. As is stated in the video, one reason behind this is so that users can easily swap from a non-touch S60 device to a touch-enabled one and not have a learning curve. With over 6 years of history and millions of S60-based handsets on the market, and both Nokia and Symbian kicking butt, why on *earth* would you want to alienate your existing userbase? There’s just no sense there.
3. It doesn’t look like the iPhone. Again, duh. Nokia doesn’t want their products constantly compared to the iPhone, just the same as Jobs doesn’t want his iPhone constantly compared to the S60 handsets. Why not? Because they’re targeted towards entirely different market segments, with only slight overlap. The only thing that they have in common is that they both ‘do’ more media than most phones, and they’re both priced higher than most consumers want to pay for a phone, at least in the U.S.
4. ‘If this is how far along Nokia is, they’re in trouble.’ Personally, I don’t think Nokia/S60 sees touch as a necessity. Everything that I’ve heard points to Nokia/S60 looking at touch as just another input method, to be offered alongside hardware buttons as a convenience in some situations.
Microsoft is having a stormer of a Mobile World Congress. After announcing its decision to buy the software company Danger, hot on the heels of its play for Yahoo, it’s dusting down its consumer effort for mobiles with Windows Live @mobile, where operators will be able to run Windows Live services - Hotmail, Messenger etc - either on a subscription basis, for a one-off payment or as an ad funded service.
And that’s not all, there’s the Windows Live Mobile Developer Program. According to Microsoft, the program will mean developers will be able to create mobile versions of its Windows Live services for mobiles, whether they run Windows natively or not.
It’s a pincer movement from Microsoft to try and take its products into the consumer realm - get a consumer manufacturer on your side with the operating system, with Sony Ericsson and then make sure you can your applications onto any other device with any operator. Clever moves from Redmond.
It’s been a bit of a red letter day for the LiMo Foundation, chief cheerleader for mobile Linux, with the foundation using Mobile World Congress to announce the first handset based on its open source platform as well as new members signing up to the group.
The handsets exiting the LiMo stable feature six from Motorola, including a couple of Razrs, as well as one from Samsung and a shedload of FOMA devices from NTT DoCoMo. The foundation also announced a couple of prototypes in the works, from LG and Aplix. All in all, there are 18 devices from 7 manufacturers to look forward to.
Meanwhile, nine new members signed up: ACCESS, LTD, AMD, FueTrek, Open-Plug, Orange, Renesas Technology Corp., Samsung SDS, SoftBank and STMicroelectronics.
It’s good to see LiMo’s work showing some results and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some of those handsets. It’s also good to see some unity in the Linux movement, with Orange - which supports another Linux group, LiPS, - joining up with LiMo too.
Sony Ericsson has decided it’s time to flirt with another mobile operating system and has leapt into bed with Windows Mobile. The first device resulting from the union will be due in the second half of f this year and comes with a whole host of goodies: wi-fi, qwerty keypad, touch navigation, 3.2 megapixel camera plus all the Windows Mobile standards: Outlook, IE, Word, Excel and a load more.
The handset, known as the X1, will be the first in Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line of devices, all sporting a qwerty keyboard and gunning for converged, mulitmedia-phone-hungry users.
And it’s a good looking device to boot. So with Sony Ericsson on board, Microsoft has now got four out of the five of the biggest phone makers with at least one Windows Mobile device on their books. Good news for Microsoft then, but what does it mean for Symbian? Sony Ericsson has no plans to drop Symbian, as far as I know, but I’d be interested to see what proportion of its smartphone line up will be Windows Mobile in the next year or two.
Here’s a fun new project taking place in Berkeley, California. Students at the University of California at Berkeley will be participating in a project called the Mobile Century experiment to use cellphones to report current traffic conditions. About 100 students will be using Nokia N95s to drive a 10-mile stretch of the I-880 freeway between Fremont and Hayward, CA. Along the way, their GPS-enabled handsets will be reporting speed and location information to a base station wirelessly every 3 seconds. The information will be processed at the base station to determine traffic conditions along the freeway.
This is completely brilliant, using cellphones to report traffic. An interesting part of the report mentions that they’ll be using Nokia Next Generation Location Based Services Platform as part of this project. I wonder what else this platform is being tested for. In any case, if you’re a UC Berkeley student who’s hard up for cash and 21-years old, you can sign up and snag yourself US$250 and a free Bluetooth headset (for safe driving). A lucky 4 participants will get to keep their Nokia N95 handset, as well.
After all the waiting and wrangling, China has finally decided to hand out its 3G licences, with six lucky handset makers — including ZTE and Lenovo — getting the nod, according to local press reports.
China isn’t using the 3G standards most people are familiar with, preferring a homegrown variant called TD-SCDMA. China has been notoriously slow to move on 3G and so it’s good to see the country gradually shifting from the trial phase into something approaching a full-on commercial launch.
The question of standard is still hanging over China though - by picking its own flavour of 3G and one that’s only used in China, there could be problems with roaming and with persuading the mobile makers to create TD-SCDMA compatible devices. Nevertheless, China has the advantage of being a huge market - by 2011, analysts reckon there will be 51 million users on TD-SCDMA and presumably a lot more to come. If nothing else, China has the sheer weight of numbers on its side to get the mobile industry interested in its version of 3G.
Loopt has set up a cool new developer program designed to get the most out of their social-mapping and communication service. Loopt is the power behind Boost Mobile’s Buddy Beacon service, which allows you to easily see where your friends are on a map, making it easier to coordinate social gatherings and the like.
Loopt’s new developer program will give a select few developers access to Loopt’s location feed, so that they can develop rich applications for devices on any platform. Loopt’s CEO Sam Altman says,
If you have a great idea for a location-aware application and want to build it, the Loopt Developer Program will provide the software and infrastructure to create a proof-of-concept product. We’ll provide a path for commercial release and monetization across carriers and devices for the best applications.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Some developers will get awesome access, and Loopt will get to be the driving engine behind the latest Location-based applications. Interested parties should visit developer.loopt.com and submit a synopsis of how Loopt’s live location feed could be used and the application that they plan to develop. Loopt will select 15-20 individuals to make these dreams a reality.
Here’s another tool for any of you interested in setting up your own mobile website. MobiSiteGalore.com has just launched v3.0 of its easy site creation tools, with several new features added or improved.
Highlights of this setup include M-Commerce features such as Paypal and Google Checkout, free temporary hosting (60 days), and integrated advertising. It’s free to get setup, and you can punch your website’s URL into a box on the front page to see what it will look like on a mobile phone in its present state.
It’s also fully compliant with W3C and .Mobi, though you could obviously use it to design an m.website as well. I really like the idea of services like this, making it dead-simple for companies to get setup on the mobile web. There’s absolutely no excuse for any business to not have a desktop website, and now more than ever, there’s little excuse to not have a mobile one, as well.
I’m fascinated with the idea of mobile gaming, and fully believe that it’s a massive market opportunity. I’m seeing more and more ways to game on your mobile, and I wanted to highlight two of them today - NokMote and PSX4iPhone.
NokMote was released right around Christmas by an independent developer. He’s doing some really cool stuff for S60 devices with the accelerometer built-in. Nokmote is mainly for gaming, and allows you to use your handset like a Wii controller for games, but it also works throughout the various menus. Paired with TV-Out on the Nokia N95, NokMote turns any N95 into a motion-controlled gaming system. There’s tons of videos, but the one that I like the most is here, showing off a guy playing Quake, running off his N95 with NokMote installed.
PSX4iPhone is a Playstation emulator for the iPhone, for PS1 games. Most all games work, and you can control them right there on the touchscreen of your iPhone. This is the first PS1 emulator that I’ve seen for a mobile handset, though I’ve used emulators for NES, SNES, and Sega systems on my S60 for a while now.
This is all fascinating to me because it shows how far mobile gaming has come. From the first Nokia’s that sported the black-and-greenish-yellow version of Snake, to being able to play games that were designed for a full desktop computer. The fact that our handsets are starting to now detect movement, and be able to project their displays onto a TV (via cable) is really mindblowing when you think about it.
I still imagine a future of gaming where I’ll be able to play against you while I’m in line at the grocery store and you’re sitting at home on your console system. The connection of console and mobile games into one platform, I think, is something that will really take the mobile gaming scene to a whole new level.
What do you think? When was the last time you played a game on your mobile handset? Did it impress you at all?
Link: Netsize Makes Handset Technical Specs Available Via Web API
Mobile messaging aggregator Netsize has launched a new mobile handset technical database.
The service, called mDevices, contains details of handsets, their capabilities, features and functions - and best of all can be accessed remotely in real time via a web-based API.
According to Netsize marketing director Renaud Menerat, “Optimising mobile browsing experience and product merchandising according to devices capabilities may sound trivial or obvious. However with close to 2,500 mobile handsets in the European market and couple hundred new models coming out each year, this information update can quickly become a nightmare for brands and merchants and be of crucial necessity if they wish to propose their consumers a compelling shopping experience on mobile”.
If you’ve ever thought of developing an app for the Nokia E-series smart phone handset range but have been put off by how complicated Symbian coding is, or don’t have the budget to develop a proof of concept, it might be worth checking out SmartApps - a new development environment just released by enterprise software company HansaWorld.
According to their Chief Exec Karl Bohin (pictured), “Smart phones have become powerful computers in their own right. We’ve matched that with a simple, accessible development environment that will enable people to create their own applications for E-series phones.”
Bohlin says SmartApps is an usually easy development tool: “Until now many applications have been too difficult or too expensive to write. Now just about anybody can use SmartApps to create fast database applications, from private individuals to people with new business ideas and professional programmers.”
The development tool is free to download and use - and developers will be paid for applications that find users. “We’ve created an absolutely transparent business model,” says Bohlin. “Anybody can download SmartApps to develop anything they want and publish it. End users pay HansaWorld to use the applications, and in turn we pay developers.”
“We’re hoping the tool will trigger an explosion of new application development for the E-series phones,” adds Bohlin. “There are tens of thousands of possible applications. We’re looking forward to seeing what people come up with.”
Bohlin anticipates two primary categories of use for SmartApps. “Firstly, people will want to create mobile versions of existing applications like timesheets, expenses claims and travel logs,” he says. “But we also expect to see many new applications that are only possible with a mobile device.”
“For example, imagine a technician who is called out to repair a piece of equipment at a customer site and finds the problem can’t be fixed immediately. He could photograph the problem with his phone, type in the serial number, add GPS co-ordinates for the location and upload the entire package for his colleagues.”
“This is just the beginning,” says Bohlin. “We can see exciting possibilities for real estate agents to send individualised portfolios to their clients’ mobiles, for the creation of online marketplaces and for news feeds, to cite just the business uses. There are also many private uses, for example for communities and interest groups to share information including pictures, comments, GPS data about anything from restaurants to birdwatching sites to crime hotspots.”
Mobile entertainment company ROK have announced today they’ve acquired data optimisation and compression specialists Blubox Software.
Commenting on the acquisition, Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman of ROK said “Blubox have created the most powerful, user-friendly and original compression technologies for the management of digital imagery and data files that we have yet seen and, with our core interest being in mobile phone applications, we know there is a massive potential, worldwide, for this technology in the mobile phone space in addition to, and in conjunction with, the online service.”
If you’ve never heard of Blubox before, here’s the scoop. They’ve got technology that typically compressed JPEG images by about 80% - which means you can upload those pics faster from your phone, and use less data in the process. They’ve also got a nifty PC application that allows you to manage, encrypt, upload and compress your photos.
The implications for this sort of technology being used on mobiles is potentially huge. Even though phones nowadays are coming with increasing amounts of storage, the resolution of digital cameras on mobiles is also increasing - so space is still at a premium. Factor in the average £3/meg data charge, and you could quite easily splash a tenner just uploading a handful of photos. By reducing the file size by up to 80%, you could benefit from less memory usage, faster upload and splash a lot less cash on getting the photos up to your favourite photo website, like Flickr.
