Category: Mobile

OTA Firmware upgrade

I have always loved to have the most recent software version of everything.
I always check for updates and install the very latest betas. Sometimes is good, sometimes is not, if they are Beta there must be a reason!

I have to say that as a mobile phone fan I have always been a bit upset about the inability to update my phone or actually change the firmware version. For testing it is sometimes useful to be able to jump to a different firmware version.

I remember when Siemens first provided firmware upgrade softwares from their sites. It was the series 45 and a number of sites appeared with hacked upload softwares that let you change the firmware version and sometimes enable some debug features. It was a great time! I remember testing different versions, browsing sites to know the changelog and so on.

Siemens has been the only one to offer that service for quite some time and they actually removed it in subsequent families of devices.
Siemens was probably the only one that let you upgrade your firmware without wiping all your software. Nokia is famous for deleting all your contacts and calendars and settings when upgrading the firmware. Once it was not possible or very hard to keep the contacts syncronized with your computer and losing all of them would mean wasting a few hours to copy on paper and then insert in the new software version (not to mention possible mistakes!).

A few days ago I was browsing the Benq-Siemens site and discovered that they are supporting what they call S.O.A., an acronym for Software Over the Air.
On their website there’s a flash, you pick your phone and then you can download the software on your PC or directly on your phone, depends on the model.
This is GREAT! I WANT one.

Special thanks to Erik for a nice gift he sent me these days. In fact I just received a shiny new SE W810i!
To my surprise I discovered, while playing with it, that SonyEricsson offers the firmware upgrade too. You need to specify a connection profile, of course, it checks the central server and notifies you that a new firmware version is available. You are then allowed to download and install or postpone. In my case it was 1.4MB!
I decided to do with a USB cable actually, because I wanted to force the update for Italy instead of Norway. I still need to work on it, but I’m going to make it work. 😀

I wonder when will Nokia make it.

Mobile Phone renamed or bad copy & paste?

I was searching for the Samsung ZM60 and I found its page on Samsung’s UK site.

As I usually do while searching, I go on Google and open 2-3 tabs in the background and then scan page titles and read contents. In this case the page title tricked me, because the page clearly talks about the ZM60, but the page title and URL are for the Z300.

I wonder if the author used the Z300’s page and updated it or the device was renamed and they forgot to change the title. It looks like I can’t find an official page for it and review sites posted pictures that look a lot like the ZM60.

Opinions on the Mobile Web

The W3C and especially Tim Berners-Lee often talk about “One Web”.
It is great to hear them talking about the idea that the web should be only one and that everyone should be able to access the exact same contents indipendently from the language, region or medium used, wether he/she has any visual deficiency or any other handicap. We all wish for that to be true some day soon.

On the other side we, as developers, are facing problems to make this a reality. Someone believes that with a little extra effort we can do it well, someone else thinks that some barriers can not be passed so easily.

Barbara from Little Spring Design clearly states that the “Mobile Web” is not going to be part of the “One Web” anytime soon and provides a good number of reasons. She recently wrote an article named What’s wrong with the mobile web? (part 1).

Very interesting to read.

WURFL survey results

First of all thank you everybody for taking the time to answer our little survey. All the data that we have collected will help us to improve the project in the near future.

It was really flattering to see that more that 50% of the respondents think WURFL data deserves a 4 out of 5, 10% thinks it deserves a 5 and 30% a 3. This means that all respondents thinks WURFL is pretty good.
We know that in the mobile space there is a huge variety of devices, browsers and different capabilities, so not only is important quality, but also quantity. It seems like the respondents agree that we are covering most of their needs as the unsatisfied are just 5%, the remaining 95% is happy with what WURFL provides and 23% rate it 5.

It is interesting to note that most users download the official XML when it is released (54%), but then 41% of the users need to patch data with their own information. This means that probably WURFL could be updated more often and that these users should try to contribute more regularly with their data. In fact, from the open-ended answers, we can see that a lot of developers are too lazy or don’t know how to contribute. This is something that we can easily fix on our side providing better documentation about how to contribute and how contributions will be used, but we certainly need more support from developers that are doing their own device testing and being too lazy to send the data.

So, what are users doing with all this data? 91% of the respondents use the XML data, more than half uses the API’s that we provide and almost half of the users uses WALL (java 31%, PHP 16%).

And now the final question, who is using WURFL. Well, the bad news is that we can’t exactly say who is using it. The good is that the reason why we can’t say it is because everyone in the mobile ecosystem is using it, from site developers, to content aggregators, news sites, games developers (Java, BREW and online), and R&D divisions. It looks like WURFL is really covering all the bases.

You can download and see the full results here.

Cingular’s Firefly

Cingular’s Firefly is a mobile phone for kids.

I had seen it a couple of months ago, while browsing around their developer’s site. It really surprised me. I was looking at the picture wondering where the keyboard is. I later talked about it with Charles, my colleague at M:Metrics and it actually turned out that the device sells well, considering its niche market. In two words, this is a phone for kids with a small addressbook where parents store important numbers. It doesn’t have a keyboard, but just a few buttons to answer calls, access the addressbook. It also features three special buttons, on the front 2 buttons to call Mom or Dad and on the side a special “911” number (look at the 360° view).

Now that I look at it I wonder how you will set the numbers in the addressbook. Maybe connecting to a PC?

Any Widget?

It seems like Widgets have become really popular, something we can’t live without!

I was reading some news yesterday and got on Google’s Gadget. The funny thing is that I opened it in a window that I left in the background… Later I came back to that window and stood there a for few seconds wondering how I got there… And wondering what the heck it was. I looked at all the little icons and names and then realized they are widgets (Google Desktop required!).

Konfabulator has been around for years, for the Mac initially and later for Windows. Then Apple launched the Dashbord, I remember the disappointment from the guys behind Konfabulator. Apple released, for free, included in the default install, a software that was just like their little pet. I would have been disappointed myself!
Soon Yahoo! released a Widget for Apple’s Dashboard.
Suprisingly Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator and renamed it to Yahoo! Widgets. They probably thought it was a good business.

Now comes Google. (Has it been there for a long time?)

I have used Konfabulator, before Dashboard was released. Really nice graphics, TONS of Widgets, but… useless.
Later I tried Apple’s Dashboard, it is SO damn slow that, even if there was anything useful, I would not use it. Not to mention that Widgets most of the times are little boxes of services that you can get on the web or with an RSS reader. Tell me something you can do in a Widget that you can’t do with a browser.

As a user… I don’t see the use.

Also good to read, a comparison between Dashboard and Konfabulator.

WURFL survey

Wether you are a WURFL user or not you should take 5 minutes to answer to a survey that we prepared.

We are looking for some feedback about the usage of WURFL or, if you don’t use it, why and what you use as an alternative.

There could have been tens of questions, but we don’t want the survey to take too long. It should be something quick and not stressful. So, please, take it!

“Detecting Enhanced Devices” according to Cingular

I was reading an old email from devCentral and found a link that was supposed to described how to detect enhanced devices. It seemed quite interesting.

The passage (seemed more like an FAQ) was pretty disappointing.

I think that parsing the accept headers is not enough, unless you think that a device that supports XHTML is an enhanced device. To me, an enhanced device is a device that supports images, colors and has a big screen. A stylus is a big plus, of course.

WURFL is certainly a much better starting point than simply HTTP headers.