Author: atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

Dial2Do, not much new

CTIA is definitely approaching and these days I received quite a few press releases and contacts about new products and services coming out.

There’s a new service called Dial2Do, it does not sound like anything impressive nor particularly new, but I have to admit it rang a bell in my mind. I remember when around the end of the nineties Bware Technologies made an SMS service that allowed you to do about the same things. You could write an e-mail, send an SMS to a number of recipients and about anything that was connected to internet. One useful service, at the time, was to ping a remote server and get a reply from the SMS service that would tell you if the site was up. In those days when you were not connected all the time it seemed like a useful service.

Dial2Do really reminds me of that with the difference of voice recognition. Of course this sounds like a service more appropriate to consumers, while our old service was more for geeks.

I have not tried the service, only saw the announcement, so do not complain to me if it does not work. If it’s a great service, let me know. 😉

“Over the Air” event in London

Make sure you note these dates on your calendar. On April 4-5 there will be a very exciting event in London called “Over the Air“. We are all mobile mammals (read fans and addicts) and this event is really the place to be: the topics will be anything that has to do with services provided over the air. It will not be limited to browsing, one of the most common topics of dotMobi, there will also be Android, iPhone web apps and native apps, J2ME and more.

If you are in London it’s a must, if you are not, it’s probably worth to start looking for a flight and a hotel.

I will be talking about DeviceAtlas, of course.

See you there.

Volantis goes fully open-source

Volantis had announced a few months ago that they would open-source their software. They later offered a binary download while making the final touches to the open-source version. Well today is the day they release the entire software to the community.
BIG step for a company that has sold the software for so many years.

Here is an e-mail I just received:

Andrea

I wanted you to know that we have today released a version of the Framework, the Volantis Mobility Server, to the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version three.

Volantis is the first mobile content delivery solutions vendor to open source its code. In offering its Mobility Server to the community, Volantis aims to drive adoption and encourage more companies to bring usable and compelling content to the mobile Web.

“The Internet grew, in large part, because it was easy to develop for the Web. Not only were browsers relatively standardized, but the tools to create databases and complex systems are open and available,” said Volantis CEO Mark Watson. “Our goal is to bring that same openness to the mobile Web. Developing for this market is difficult thanks to the splintered phone market, which will only continue to diversify. Developers need an easy-to-use tool with a proven device library in order to help their creativity come alive.”

If you would like to receive a copy of the full press release please let me know. You can visit http://opensource.volantis.com to access the software and for further information and you can contact us via the community website or me individually at this address.

Regards

Su Johnston
Volantis Systems Limited

Here is also a link to the official press release on their site.

Of course Volantis is also a partner of DeviceAtlas and we are working closely with them in order to integrate their great device database with ours so that developers can get the best of the best.

Mobile Search & Discovery at Mobile Monday Milan

This is the month of Mobile Mondays for me.

I will be speaking in Milan about Mobile Search and Discovery, something that we have been working on for 1 year full time at dotMobi. Did you hear about find.mobi? If not you should check it out with your mobile.

Title of the event if Mobile Search & Discovery, all the details are on the site. If you are in Milan, join us, Taptu and Pagine Gialle will also be speaking. Sounds like a very interesting event!

Tchao Andrea!

It looks like someone who knows me used logme.mobi to send me some greetings, in fact last week (25 Feb 2008) 1 hit was recorded from Ireland and the user-agent string was “tchao Andrea!”

Well, I don’t know who you are, but “Hello to you”.

Modu Mobile anyone?

During the MWC I’ve heard more than once that one of the few things that were worth visiting was the stand of Modu Mobile.

I did not get to see them, but I was told what the device is. Sounds interesting, but I’m not sure I’d like to buy all the extra “jackets”.
I’m not the average consumer, of course and if they get some nice design on the jackets might easily become trendy. Remember the old Nokia covers? Make sure you check their site, it’s definitely worth and they have nice short videos explaining how it works.

SE X1, the only new device at MWC

There were not many exciting new devices and no iPhone-killers, really.

I was especially surprised by the “new” devices by Samsung, where the UI is worse than ever. While testing their new high-end U900 (not the SCH-U900 available in the US that is completely different), one of the guys working in the stand even made fun of me saying something like “Can you get it to work?”. The comment was actually appropriate, but certainly not a compliment to the device interface, in fact I kept pressing the wrong buttons because they were all “misplaced”. It’s true that there is not a right place for a key, but in a good UI they should be where you expect them to be. Here’s a picture thanks to gsmarena. The keypad in the middle changes icons depending on the menu you’re in and you immediately get used to it, but the two softkeys that are outside the pad, are actually needed for any confirmation. That’s unusual to me.

The only device that caught my attention was the Sony Ericsson X1, to be released around June 2008. It’s very interesting, but to me, it’s going the opposite direction of the iPhone. It is definitely overloaded of buttons and functionalities. You have 4 softkeys, a trackpad for scrolling, the touch-screen and you can slide it and have a full QWERTY keyboard. If this wasn’t enough, you can choose among 9 different screens, that is to say you pick a different screen configuration depending if you want to play music, use as a phone, use as a PDA and so on. The functionality of switching is pretty cool and reminded me of desktop transitions in OS X or Vista, but to me sounds like an admission that Sony Ericsson could not find an appropriate design that would match all the functionalities. Sounds a lot like “we couldn’t decide, so you do it” and I think the result will be that users will take advantage of 1 or 2 screens and probably half of the input devices available. The device runs Windows Mobile 6, another surprise, if you think that Sony Ericsson now owns UIQ. Last but not least, they already plan to sell a bigger battery in case the default one lasts too little for you.