Tag: mobile

“best Java game for the new Samsung D900” contest

Samsung has launched a new contest for the development of the best Java/J2ME game for the new D900.

Prizes are actually very interesting, with a Grand prize of 20,000 USD.

You are required to subscribe to Sharewire, upload your game and then the final winner will be calculated summing the number of downloads and the votes casted by a number of “selected experts” evaluating innovation, fun, usability, graphics and sound quality.

Considering the high prize it is certainly interesting for new and young developers.

This is also a demonstration of how hard it can be for a developer or a small company to reach large audiences. Appearing in a big site or in an operator’s portal is not easy and often the top listed games are developed and distributed by large firms. Smaller companies generally don’t get the same visibility.
Not very different from the music and movie industries where big names are always highly visible and the less famous, but maybe as good (or better), are relegated in the back of shops or rarely aired by radios.
On one side I’m glad this could give a boost to someone and maybe provide some fresh money, on the other side it’s disappointing to think they have to give away a fresh and good idea (a game in this case) for free. This is a tough topic, I could write for hours and no one would reach the end of the post, so I won’t go down to the details of my thinking, but I’m sure I’m not alone. Internet gives you the possibility to reach anyone anywhere, but what you really need is a high position on a big site or on a search engine, otherwise it’s so crowded that nobody will see you.

Samsung Developers Club

The Developers Club is Samsung’s developers site. It’s been around for a few years now. It was on my list of sites to be reviewed here, but I’ll wait a little more. The overall vote would have been negative. There are some decent resources for J2ME development, but there is nothing about all the rest. Also, the site is accessible only using MSIE, not because it’s particularly complex, it’s very basic with a really bad forum and a list of downloadable file, but because the login page only works with MSIE. Firefox seems to login, but then you’re not.

I am going to wait for my reivew because I just received a newsletter that describes an overall rebuild. Here’s the original text, I’m sorry I can’t link to a web version of the newsletter, but I could not find it.

The renewal process of the Samsung Developers Club is nearing completion.

The new site features a comprehensive device information database and an enhanced forum in which you can create your own message-boards.The design of the site is based on the new Samsung Fun Club look and feel which is much more in keeping with the current brand guidelines and corporate image of Samsung mobile.

Further improvements include direct access to the device information from the front page. The database also allows users to compare different models as well as exporting data to Excel. This is surely a first for any developer support site. We hope to have ironed out any bugs before launch but ask you to bear with us in the first weeks as some glitches may take some time to be uncovered and resolved

new CTO for .mobi

Rumors and news run very quickly on the net. I was about to send an email to James to say congratulations and realized that all I have is his “now old address” at ArgoGroup.

So here’s my congratulations message, broadcast directly on the web.

Congratulations to James Pearce (Tripleodeon is his blog), who has just become the new CTO of mTLD.

I have known James for 5 years, I’d say. We had the pleasure (or at least *I* did) of exchanging e-mails both privately and on wmlprogramming for a long time. While his company, Argogroup, has had a device database for years and they had their own testing house, WURFL and mobile development has always been an open argument of discussion.
We met in person about 1 year ago, I’d say. Meeting in person with someone you have “talked” to for years, but only through internet is always strange. Meeting with James has been a pleasure. We often found ourselves thinking the same way so I have a very good feeling about his new position and I am confident that mTLD has chosen a very experienced person who has been around since day 0 of mobiles.

Botanicalls

I read this from Tom Hume, but was too odd not to repost it here.
I know at least 3 people who would need it, if only I had known it a month ago, I would have had a much easier time with the Christmas presents.

Check out Botanicalls, the hardware and software to let you plants call you when they want to be watered!

Premus update!

A little bit of publicity and links are worth much more than bare money.

I wrote a short Premus review here the other day and now David has updated the online demo to the latest development version that includes the validator, better source view and syntax highlighting.

He also squashed a few bugs here and there.

Bookmarking has been disabled due to spammers immediately using it to publicize their sites. The current version shows how bookmarks can be used, but you are not allowed to create new ones. If you make a local install you will be able to use them, of course.

See the updated Premus live, or read the CHANGELOG for a few more details about the changes.

Message to David: you need to practice your communication skills, the changelog is too short! 😛

Premus

“The name Premus comes from PRoxying EMUlator Service. It is a mobile browser emulator that converts WML, XHTML MP, cHTML and Vodafone’s PML (c. 2004) into standard HTML that you can browse in your normal web browser.”

This is what David Johansson says on the site as a short description of the software. David has been developing mobile services for many years now and he was among the early supporters of WURFL.

Premus was born from the need of testing mobile sites, WML in WAP 1 in the beginning and later many more markups. I would not call it exacly an “emulator” as David does, but rather a testing tool. In two words, Premus lets you pick a user-agent (from WURFL, of course!), define a URL and specify extra headers, if you’d like. The software makes the request and reformats the markup so that it renders well in your web browser. It’s not a Java application or applet, it’s not a real emulation engine or and SDK. It’s a web-based tool that lets you easily test your sites and make sure that all the links work and the pages look as you expect.
You should not expect a faithful representation of how it will look on the mobile device; it does not show alerts if you picked the user-agent of a WML device/browser and the remote site returns XHTML. It is intended for programmers and authors that have developed a site or a complex service and need to check that everything is OK.

Since real device testing is ALWAYS suggested, this is the perfect light-weight tool to make a general test before going with the mobile.

More in detail, while browsing with Premus, you always see the general page layout, but you can also see the original source, you see, edit and force cookies and headers. By default you have a some input fields on the top of the page for the user-agent, URL and manage all the proxy features and see the page in a dedicated box. De-activating the “frame” checkbox you can see the page layout in a window on its own, more similar to the mobile browsing.
A very helpful feature is actually on the bottom of the page. It shows a list of external resources (normally images) and the size of each. Also provides the time needed to download the markup and all external contents. The time is calculated on the fast internet connection of the server, not calculating the mobile networks latency, but will be useful to compare different pages and sites.

Premus will help you save a lot of time.

Premus is now released as open-source so you are free to download and adapt it to your needs.
If you look at the version in development you will see some new features that are not in the online demo, yet. These are features that I have strongly suggested to David and actually it really took him a few hours to implement them, but I think they will make a big difference.
Syntax highlighting has been added for the source view, very useful when you need to check your markup. Also the spacing has been changed for better readability.
Even more important to me is the markup validation. It’s disappointing when you build a big site, get ready to test with your mobile (take it from the drawer, put the correct SIM card, check the WAP profile, go online) and discover there’s a typo in the XML declaration. Checking that your markup is validated will certainly guarantee the best interoperability with all browsers. When you want the best possible support you really want this. Well-formedness is the first thing! Look what happens if you validate http://m.gmail.com/ :

Premus validation resulf for mobile Gmail
All the code is Python and should be easy to install on most modern Linux disto’s.

Some other minor things could be cleaned up and improved. Nevertheless this is a very good testing tool. If you are a mobile sites developer, I suggest you try it out, especially the development version that adds those 2-3 features that will actually ease your work a lot.

MOTODEV, useless?

In the last couple of months I wrote posts about developers’ sites around the planet. I mostly wrote of updates or new sites that I found. Today I’m talking about a developers’ site that has been around for quite a few years, at least 3 or 4, I’d say. The site I’m going to talk today is MOTODEV, by Motorola.

While it’s been around for a long time and I have known it for a long time, I hadn’t felt like talking about it, yet. Why? Because there’s not much to say. Why? Because there’s nothing interesting to read or download!

Info about WAP capabilities is reduced to the VERY minimum and by minimum I mean that on most device spec pages (and files) you get something like “WAP 1.0” or “WAP 2.0”. Links generally target to OMA’s homepage or even the WAPForum’s.
Multimedia is sometimes described with very generic terms such as MP3-support, but nothing about other formats.
In general you can’t find accessory information about e-mail client, MMS (other than “supported”), messaging, IM.

The site in general is very poor.

Many devices are missing.

Downloadable spec files are generally a PDF version of the web page you were reading. 99% useless considering that you could save-to-file the page you’re reading.

Only thing that is decent on the site are specifications about J2ME capabilities, API’s and so on. This is decent, but not all devices have the documents available.

My overall vote to the site 4 out of ten and only because there’s J2ME information, otherwise it would have been a 2.

Something that clearly demonstrates the quality of the site. I tried to update my profile as it’s outdates, this is the result:

While writing this post I browsed the site looking for examples and re-check what exactly is available. The site has slightly changed the layout and some extra information has appeared. Looking at the device spec of the Motorola RAZR V3 we can now see the browser vendor that was not available in the past. As pointed out before, resources about J2ME are decent. The rest is mostly very similar to the end-user site, information about the generic support of SMS, EMS, MMS and IM. What IM, for example? OMA’s? AIM? ICQ? I have a V3 and I know it’s OMA IMPS (or Wireless Village), but data is still lacking.
I can see for example another V3 with CLDC 1.1, how do I distinguish the two models?

What I find disappointing in general is that all around the site there are very few details and it seems like the Motorola devices are 100% adherent to the standards and all the links are to the official documentation, while we all know that this is not entirely true, that all devices and implementations have their own peculiarities and in most cases this will not even put in evidence extra features the devices might have. Something you should actually put in the spotlight if you want developers and content providers to be able to provide the best for your devices.

I have to admit I have seen a slight improvement in the site and see new filters to search for devices that were not available 10-15 days ago when I had to do some research on them. Two weeks ago, in the handsets page there was a filter only by year. Now that filter is gone and new ones, more detailed and more interesting for a developer are present.

Related links:

Motorola open-source

I wanted to make this post about fifteen days ago, but then other things took over and this was left behind.

While doing my daily news-reading and “siteseeing”, I found a site that seems to mean that Motorola is into the open-source. Reading more deeply it is clear that they have open-sourced some parts of their J2ME implementation for mobile devices and the full software for some linux-based devices!

opensource.motorola.com offers a number of downloads. The most active, according to the published statistics are JSR’s in general and more specifically JSR 271 (Motorola ‘s JSR 271 implementation or the JCP JSR 271 specification).

Even more interestingly, there are links to access parts of device kernel, drivers and applications that are developed as open-source. You can access kernel and packages for the ROKR E2, A1200 or A780 and E680.
This is very cool.
The community is not very active also because it’s a very specific topic, but still it’s an initial effort. It’s incredible how much traction Linksys got after they released the full firmware of their WRT54g and later.

As a test I downloaded the firmware of the A780/E680, 72MB! It’s all RPM. There are many packages included and other packages are stored outside of the “firmware package”. It seems like there’s everything.

Why should I buy a greenphone, now that I have discovered this?
Hackers wanted to test these files and play around.

opensource.motorola.com announcement to the press.

X-Series is now reality

A few days have gone since X-Series was launched in the UK by 3.

A few reviews and news items were published, but I still could not find any real review. There was one on Mobile Gazette, for example, but I would not really call it a review.

Since I’m not in the UK I can’t really say much about it except what I read on the online site.
I am personally not very interested in Sling and think that Orb *might* sometime turn out to be useful, but that is actually not the main reason why I buy the X-Series package.
What are the other features included? Yahoo! search and eBay. I see it as a good branding opportunity for these two companies, but I don’t think it’s very compelling… While I see the value of getting their name next to a flat-fee data plan, I would not buy the plan just because I can search with Yahoo!. I can search using it anyway! 😀
To me, the most interesting features are messaging and unlimited internet. This means e-mail, browsing, but maybe also using other applications such as bluepulse (I also just wrote a review on bluepulse) or more that might come in a few months specifically for this kind of data plans.

Another big thing is Skype on 3 as they call it on the Skype site. The devices will have Skype pre-installed. The client is compatible with the standard service so you will be able to login with your existing account (or create a new one, of course). Users can call each other for free and this is great. SkypeOut is still not supported, but should be enabled in the next months. This will certainly take some revenues away from 3, but I’m sure it will make a lot of customers happy!

Reading the fine print you discover that data usage is unlimited, but actually 3 has defined some soft-limits that they have identified as “fair use limits”. On the website it is not written clearl, but my understanding is that surpassing these limits every months might result in an early interruption of the service from 3. The limits are high and I surprisingly agree on the limits they have identified. This is a good sign from 3. Example of Fair Use Limit for data: 1 GB each month (taken from the X-Series site).
One thing that I did not like is that the data usage is limited to the phone. In theory, if you want to connect with a PC you will have to get an extra data-plan or pay-per-use as you would normally do. Customers of this plan will initially be geeks and business people. All customers that will ALSO need internet access with their PC. The two devices provided are Symbian, but are not a BlackBerry or a P990i or an E61. They are both media-rich devices rather than business phones. I think this is not a pro.

The price is VERY interesting and while it’s a promotional price (starts from 20£ per month, which is about 30 Euro), the final price (starts from 35£, about 50 Euro) is still a very good price considering that it includes a BIG LOAD of messages and a lot of calling minutes. I would like to hear how much you pay per month, because if we consider the taxes (at least in Italy), data and calls… I’m already above that and I don’t use as much data as I would with the X-Series.

I was a bit worried of the price when they announced it, but I think it’s very compelling.
When are the other operators following? How long will it take? 6 months? Less? Never?

Also check out the X-Series blog.