Category: Mobile

Parties at the 3GSM

There are rumors that people don’t go to the 3GSM for business reasons, but for the parties. Obviously it is not the case with me, but I have to say that I had a chance to join a couple of nice ones.

Here are a couple of pictures I took during Swedish Beers. Special thanks to Helen A.K.A. Technokitten for arranging the evening.

Swedish Beers Party 3GSM image 1

More pictures from the Swedish Beers party are available on Flickr, in the Swedish Beers group.

PS: Rumors are that I missed the Playboy party!!! I can’t think of any other chance in my life to join it. 😦

3GSM World Congress is over

So the 3GSM World Congress is over. Our 1 time meeting for 2007 is gone. Last time I visited was many years ago and it was still in Cannes. At that time I thought it was a huge Expo and that it was very crowded. I had heard that they moved from Cannes to Barcelona because it’s bigger, well now I understand.

I heard 60.000 people attended. Day 1 was already crowded, but days 2 and 3 were really unbelievable. Hall 8, the one with all the big manufacturers was inaccessible and even if you could get in, it was almost impossible to reach the devices available for testing or talking to anyone at the booth. You HAD to have an appointment and in most cases they only lasted 10-15 minutes. All the big manufacturers had separate rooms or upper floors for meetings, but anyway it was really full of people going back and forth, chatting, talking, exchanging business cards.
The atmosphere was amazing. Everyone was clearly there to make business. I have visited other Expositions, of course, both as a normal visitor or to make business, but this one, it was clear to everyone that they were there to make business. Everyone was open to talk, ready to explain what they do and listen to what you do and see if there’s any chance to buy or sell something. It’s been really amazing. I’m not a sales guy, of course, but really anyone, even me, could have made business during this show.

There are already a lot of articles about the Congress, so I’ll go straight to the main points.

What did not surprise:

  • Motorola: was it 2007? 2006? 2000? It seems like it’s still the StarTac from the Nineties. Aren’t their phones all clones of the RAZR which is a slim version of the StarTac?
  • Nokia: same as above, where is the innovation?
  • mobileTV was everywhere
  • IMS was everywhere

What surprised me:

  • SonyEricsson W880: imagine the already very good W810i, imagine it thinner, lighter, nicer, faster. If the price is reasonable, this is going to be a BIG hit. A lot of people I spoke to really liked it, it’s really good!
  • LG KG800: we all know the phone, it’s not new, but the softkeys are really weird. You don’t feel when you click and you never really understand if anything is going to happen. Disappointing experience, sorry.
  • mobileTV hardware vendors, integrators, solution providers were everywhere, but where is the content? Where is that thing that makes everyone want it? Where is that bit that makes it go from the current low-satisfaction state to a big service for everyone?
  • Trolltech had a big booth with about 20 devices running their Linux-based Qtopia. I did not know so many devices use it.

What I liked:

  • Meeting in person with people I have talked via e-mail for years (including Mike, of course!).
  • LG Prada: I was skeptical, I thought it would just be a marketing invention, instead there’s a lot in it. It’s all screen, much like any Palm or subsequent PDA, but it’s made to be used with your fingers instead of the stylus. It’s reasonably responsive, nice graphics, nice features. It’s basically a smartphone with style. As per the KG800, the feedback on fingers is not good, it’s like clicking on my kitchen table.
  • Forum Nokia had a full floor above the normal Nokia booth. I had the pleasure of meeting Finn, was a great chat!
  • The general feeling of being part of this market that sometimes feels global and big and some other times you meet the same guys and feels like a small family.
  • Outside of the 3GSM (yes, sometimes I put my nose outside) the general feeling is of a very young city, full of energy, working hard, but also having fun at night. Nice bars, (thank you mystrands), nice restaurants, nice people walking around and having fun.

What I did not like:

  • WiMax: what is it? There were a good number of stands and booths about it, but how does it integrate with the existing networks? I talked to a Sprint representative, I asked why I should buy a WiMax card or phone instead of HSDPA, he said he could not help me as he doesn’t know about HSDPA. So is WiMax for those who don’t know HSDPA? WiMax is for mobile services as per HSDPA; it’s 1-2Mbit when HSDPA is already 3.6. So?
  • Once again Yahoo! Weather tricked me. It was WAAY hotter than expected!

Where is Mike?

I feel in one of those movies from the seventies or even better in a cartoon where you see someone entering in a room, someone else is running after him, enters the same room and at the same time you see the first person to exit from another room and so on.

Where is Mike Rowehl?
Where is Dan Appelquist?

Not that I need the 3GSM to talk to Dan, but I joined the PartyStrands to say hi to Dan and meet Mike in person and I missed them! I arrived around 9pm and they were gone, already (or at least I haven’t seen them!). 😦

I got to meet a lot of interesting people. Make a lot of networking. Met people from Italy. We are really everywhere! They say Spanish is the most commonly spoken language and English is probably going to pass it soon, but Italians are everywhere!

The mood is good. Lots of technologists, mobile people and big companies.

Tomorrow is 3GSM first day!

LiMo Foundation launched

Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone have launched the LiMo Foundation, to stimulate the development of Linux for mobile devices and most of all unite forces to make a common effort.

It looks like Vodafone lately is part of any possible alliance, .mobi, LiMo, the operators teaming to make mobile search engines…

Anyway, I had already posted about linux on mobile devices (Mobile Linux, ever taking off?) and they still have to convince me that the manufacturers really want linux on the mobiles.
Apple, in my opinion, is demonstrating once again that if they want to take an open-source OS and make a solid product, they can do it. They did it when originally launched OS X bringing a GUI that *nix systems had never seen and they are doing it again bringing their BSD/OS X to the iPhone.
OEM’s like Motorola have been producing linux-based devices for years, but never brought it to the mainstream devices.

Is the LiMo going to change this?
Can a foundation like this change anything? Where is Savaje Technologies? Wasn’t it a company built with a similar spirit? Name 5 mobile devices that run their operating system.

Sorry, I’m skeptical.

WURFL 2.0.4 ready for download

A bit more than 2 months have passed since the last public release of WURFL (Nov, 16 2006: WURFL 2.0.3 is ready).

I originally hoped to be able to make a new release every month or so, but Christmas and new Year were in the middle. Also, we always have so many great contributions that it’s hard to say “STOP, we make a release and then we can restart collecting data”.

So WURFL keeps growing, our community of users and contributors keeps growing and keep getting better and better. We have almost reached 2000 unique devices (1984) and passed 9600 unique user-agents. I can tell you from now that I already have a queue of updates and that our run for the coverage of all the mobile devices won’t stop.

If you are serious about web browsers too, you should not forget to check out the web patch. There are some updates in CVS, see here: WURFL web browser patch (please use the CVS client as the web interface is very good to check logs, but not as good to download big text files).

So go ahead and download WURFL 2.0.4 (zipped is easier).

.mobi case studies

This article was actually published before the job posting that I mentioned earlier, but I thought I should write about it anyway.

.mobi is looking for case studies, companies or projects that have developed a mobile site, faced particular problems and solved them.

If you are looking for a little of extra visibility for your project it’s probably a good chance. Check out the .mobi blog posting, Wanna be a .mobi case study?

Community resources for the mobile

I wanted to recap a few valuable resources that developers can find on the web to help them start or improve their skills to produce sites for mobile devices.

My favourite, of course, is The Wireless FAQ, simply because of the time it took to bring it to a Wiki. I think it has done a big step ahead since that day and thanks to the wiki approach we have been able to add a number of resources about very important topics such as DRM, Video downloads, multimedia content delivery and more.

On the same track you might also want to check out the Techniques for the Best Practices, originally developed and maintained by the W3C. It’s another Wiki site and it’s about the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 that the group has produced. The Wiki was chosen because the group is looking for user contributions. If you are interested you should go, read, ask questions and add content, if you feel like willing to share with the W3C community.

A more specialized site, maintained by Barbara Ballard of little spring design inc, is Mobile User Interface Design Patterns. The title says it all, Barbara is a super-expert of User Interfaces for the mobile. She has already created a lot of valuable content and while it’s less technical from a certain point of view as compared to the other two sites, it actually provides great guidance about the general UI and presentation that you should use in your mobile site. Barbara’s Wiki is certainly something to read and put in practice in your mobile sites, maybe using some techniques suggested in the other 2 sites previously named.

The last site I wanted to remind to the community is mTLD‘s developers site. The site does not have a Wiki, but rather a forum, blogs and a few selected articles, all about the mobile. The site is relatively new and the administrators are working hard to provide more and more resources every day. It is obviously a different approach, the site aims to provide all the guidance and help to develop mobile sites, also linking to external resources, of course. It’s another great place to start from and to ask questions if there’s something you can’t do or is not clear. You can reach it at dev.mobi. The site can be visited both from your desktop computer or on the move.

Telefonica launches Opera browser

It must be clear to everyone that today I have more spare time. Meetings are done for today, all I need to do is go to eat and then I have a few hours free.

I took a chance to clear a bit of my backlog of things I wanted to post on the blog, then.

Via Marco Casario I found out the Telefónica Móviles has partenered with Opera to provide to their users a custom version of Opera and Opera Mini.
They are not the first ones and to me is another demonstration of the quality of the Opera browser and that a better user experience will lead more users on internet using their phone.

There’s a full Press release, of course: Telefónica selects Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to deliver the mobile Web.