My friends at actionscript.it have just launched a new contest to develop mobile games.
This is the second edition and the first provided a number of nice new games. This year both flashlite and J2ME are allowed, so go on, show us something innovative!
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.
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.
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.
I just posted about Cingular’s Firefly phone and now I found another similar phone from Orange. It’s not for kids, but “aged” users.
Same concept, really basic features, minimum buttons, easy to find and press.
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?
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.
Writing a FAQ entry is not hard at all. Well, first of all you need to have a question, of course and then you need to search for an answer.
It’s not that hard and you certainly know a lot of answers that other people doesn’t know. I think this is the basic principle on which is based Google Answers.
In this case, anyway, I’m thinking about The Wireless FAQ. We brought back the site to life, but if we want it to shine as it used to, we need to collect questions and answers.
I am sure that you know a lot of things about mobile, all you have to do is think to something that sounds interesting or particular, and write a question and its answer.
You know all about downloads? Then maybe you can write something about download methods (OMA DD, Openwave’s DownloadFun, direct downloads, OMA DRM, more), maybe you know all about images, so you might write something about wallpapers and screensavers or about iamge resizing both for downloads and for browsing.
Maybe you know a lot about messaging, we have a section for SMS and another one for MMS.
Are you CSS expert? Well, we need to feed a lot of contents about XHTML, XHTML-MP, WCSS and CSS in general!
First of all you will need to create an account, I’ll give you write access and then you can write everything.
If you’re lazy and don’t want credit for writing, don’t worry, send me the text and I’ll publish it.
Seriously, there is no reason why you should not contribute!
RSS feeds have been available for quite a while now.
As an old timer Opera user, I have always believed that setting a number (5-7) of homepages would bring me to the sites I visit most often. Then I would browse from there.
Lately RSS feeds are more and more common so I eventually decided to give it a try. I downloaded NetNewsWire (for Mac, of course!) and this was the beginning of the end. The software (unfortunately) includes a HIGH number of feeds. Of course I subscribed to a bunch of them PLUS all the pages I regularly visit. Now I have about 100 news to read every day and if I don’t read them regularly they GROW UP!
Now I’m addicted.
I have to say it’s pretty cool. Some sites offer the full news through the RSS, some other will give you a short description and then you may read the full news on their site. Both solution are cool to me.
It looks like many people likes this new way of staying informed… And probably I’m one of the last geeks to discover this “new technology”.
Anyway, going back to the wireless business, a couple of people already started to port this “new technology” to the people on the move.
Here are the links:
pixs.jp
www.ifeedyou.com
In my previous post I talked about Marcus. He’s the author of pics.jp.
Jérôme Chevillat is the author of Ifeedyou and uses wurfl for the multimarkup rendering.
Both services let you read the news title and the short descriptions, the problem arises when you need to read the full article. Maybe while you’re on the move you don’t need to read the entire article. Too lengthy texts might not be so comfortable to read on a normal device like my V3.
It looks like MobileResearch (a startup company?) has gotten quite some good friends on the net. They are presented as
“the first commercially available solution that provides mobile developers and content publishers the data they need to address the problems associated with mobile device fragmentation”
on their site, here, here and probably on many other sites.
They certainly have a great marketing team and I’m happy to see that more and more people realize that knowing what a device can do is really important.
I am not saying that WURFL is better (or worse) than their product, I haven’t seen it. The good thing and probably their advantage over WURFL is that it’s specifically targeted for the US market (but it looks like they will deliver something for the European market later this year) and WURFL hasn’t had that many contributions from the US market. We have recently (the last 2-3 months) started receiving contributions from the US, this means that they are eventually understanding and feeling the need for such database.
I am sure the guys at MobileResearch have worked and ARE working hard on their project, but you will all agree with me that it’s a great marketing-ONLY statment the fact they are the first… It’s true that WURFL is NOT a commercial product, IT IS FREE! On the other side it is also true that there are other really valuable and EXPERIENCED companies offering similar products. The question is:”Are they as well trained and are they targeted to the US market?” Maybe they have worked hard on the GSM/European market and don’t have much information about US devices. Audiovox devices are not being sold in Europe. There are many devices from Sharp and Sanyo being sold in USA only. Danger is another one, and I could list more.
I just wonder how much marketing is behind this software and how much “substance” is behind the product.
Knowing that more people is working on something like WURFL just confirms the value of the project and seeing that they ask you almost 30.000,00 USD makes me understand the monetary value of WURFL.
I wonder were WURFL could go if people donated some money or time or resources.
PS: while writing this post I noticed they are also putting banners on Google.
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