Tag: mobile

Volantis Mobility Server 5.1

I’m pleased to see that Volantis Announces Mobility Server 5.1. According to the PR version 5.1 is focused around adding connectors for web 2.0 applications such as Picasa and Flickr. Also, the device database has been updated and they now claim more tha 5600 devices! I see that the open-source version of the server is still at 5.0, but I know they are really committed to open-source, so I’m sure they will follow up quickly. These days I’d be especially curious to see the Media Access Proxy in action, if done right it’s still one of the most important things in mobile (get the images right!).

They also announced an update to BuzzCast last week, hopefully my operator will buy it so that I can test it. 🙂 I’m a NetNewsWire addict, so BuzzCast seems quite interesting to me.

webKit the official mobile browser?

Initially Nokia announced the decision of using the webKit browser in their mobile devices in the S60 series and they called it S60 Browser (running on the S60WebKit). That was already a landmark, I think.

Apple of course boosted the users of webKit and Safari releasing the windows version of Safari and then Safari in the iPhone.

Google followed announcing webKit in Android and now with Chrome.

MOTOMAGX is a linux platform by Motorola. They use it for some of their PDA’s. The other day I received their newsletter that among the other things mentioned widgets for MOTOMAGX and guess what? The official browser is the webkit.

A lot of big companies are jumping on the webKit band-wagon, but I think my original question still stands, Will Apple share ownership of the webKit? It’ll be especially interesting to see how Google will contribute and try to take control of the platform as now they have a lot of interest in making sure it goes in the right direction. So far it looks like Nokia did not have much voice in the project, at least from what I see.

More open questions:

  • Where does this leave Opera (Mini)? Will there still be space for them?

  • What about the Mozilla’s Fennec mobile browser? If you want to know my opinion, they might be late to the party.

  • What about other browsers like Skyfire and Teashark?

Is transcoding a crime?

I was reading my RSS feed and of course this news item from TechCrunch caught my eye, Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case (includes longer excerpt from the ruling and a video).

I was initially surprised that TechCrunch spoke about transcoders for mobile sites (remember Novarra, InfoGin, Openweb, etc?) and in fact they are talking about video and flash. The ruling is interesting and here is how it starts:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software.

The topic is very different, but if you read this text and applied it word-by-word to what proxy transcoders do, it would still make sense. So I wonder (and I’m not a lawyer by far), will this ruling also apply to mobile proxies?

DISCLAIMER: I agree this is extreme, but not entirely impossible.

HTC naming madness

The other day I was trying to do some house-cleaning of HTC device names, clones and HTTP request headers for DeviceAtlas.

The result was that I was one step from going crazy. All those devices have names that are almost the same, UAProf or user-agent string refer to slightly different names, different network operators re-brand with *other* different names.

Just to give you an idea, I found a couple of useful sites that talk about HTC devices, platforms, and model names:

One of my favorites is the T-Mobile Atlas, a.k.a T-Mobile Wing, a.k.a. HTC Herald, a.k.a. HTC P4350 and probably some more names. The saint had less alternative identities!

I think it’s almost impossible to keep up with all those names and re-branding. If you know a good way or you work for HTC and want to help me, *please* contact me.

m.newsgator.com vs netnewswire for iPhone

I have been a happy NetNewsWire user for years now. As I posted in the past, I understand a lot of users have moved to Google Reader, but I still like my NetNewsWire client for the Mac and especially the ability to read articles offline.

NetNewsWire was acquired and integrated with Newsgator a few years ago and now it’s all free (this is free publicity for the newsgator guys!). This means that I can read my news on both web and client interfaces and get everything synchronized. I’ve started using the mobile version more or less a year ago and while I still don’t understand why they don’t use their .mobi extension, I think they have made a good effort. They started with an iPhone version only and quickly had to make it at least XHTML Basic so that other mobile users could access it (the full web version, for example, is too AJAXy even for clients like Opera Mini).

I have recently upgraded my iPhone to version 2.0 and immediately installed the free NetNewsWire for iPhone client (this is more free publicity for you guys). The interface is very similar to the Mac version, adapted to the small screen, of course. Every time you load the main page it tries to update the feeds. Only feeds with unread items are displayed. This is very reasonable as on the mobile device you’d rather want to quickly go to new items (while on the Mac client you can also see feeds with old items and read them again). Nothing particularly fancy happens, you select the feed, get a full list of news items, read them. You can make the entire feed as read.
This is, all in all, everything you would expect from a mobile feed-reader.

I have to say that I’m surprised that some of the good features of the mobile web version haven’t been translated into the iPhone-client. The mobile web client has a minimalistic approach, in fact news items in a feed are split into pages of 10 or so items. The iPhone client lists all the items in one big page. Scrolling to the oldest news is of course much quicker than on the mobile web version, but at the same time, if you have a very active feed and haven’t kept up for a few days you’ll find yourself with 100+ items in one long page. In the mobile web version you may mark all the items in one page as read, but on the iPhone client you may only mark all the feed as read. Imagine I have a feed with 100 items; I start from the oldest (that’s what I normally do) I go up; as I read articles they are marked as read, but of course I will not read them all. If I have to close the application, when I come back I will only see the unread items of that same news feed, but since I could not mark “as read” items that I did not want to specifically read, I will still find them there. This means that I have to go back to the bottom and go through the same articles again. I will be quicker, of course, but if I could mark groups of items as I can do in the mobile web version, that would be much easier.

Another feature that is present in the mobile web version and not in the iPhone-client is the ability to mark a single item as “read” without opening it. Again, in the iPhone client you either really open it, or you’ll have to mark the entire feed as read.

For some reason in the iPhone client is possible to mark items as “clippings”, but you are not able to see the “Clippings” folder. Clippings are the same as “starring” an item on Google Reader, news items that you want to store for some reason, they will appear in a special folder and not go away even if they have disappeared from the feed.

While it’s obvious that the mobile web version is synchronized in real time as you are in fact connected directly with the newsgator site, it’s unclear how synchronization happens on the iPhone client. You may at any time force the feed update, but you have no way to force synchronization and there is no preference pane. Using the Mac client almost at the same time gave me the feeling like the two were a bit out of sync. On the iPhone I am often offline (I only use Wifi) thus the ability to force-sync would be much appreciated and I think it’s something that is particularly useful for a mobile client in general. You never know if and how the user is really online and actually the advantage (maybe the ONLY one) of the NewNewsWire client is that you can read news offline.

The browser and some, but not all applications in the iPhone let you use it either in landscape or portrait mode. I got used to it and I like it. Why can’t I read my news in landscape mode? This is definitely a needed feature for the NetNewsWire client.

Overall I think that feed-readers show how thin is the list of advantages of using an online/web-based feed reader as opposed to a specific client. Offline reading is probably the only consistent advantage, so I think NetNewsWire should spend time on this.

Newsgator mobile (with the iPhone browser) and NetNewsWire for the iPhone, have almost the same interface and responsiveness. Hopefully they will improve the client a bit because I LOVE reading the news offline. Overall rating is positive, but of course you need to be a newsgator user. I look forward to see improvements to the client, because it’s definitely worth!

Final note: I have no way to really measure this, but it seems like running the client eats up a lot of battery. I have no grounds to base this except for a “feeling”.

comScore acquires M:Metrics

M:Metrics has been sold, eventually. When Nielsen acquired Telephia, some thought it would be over for M:Metrics, but I think M:Metrics has proven the great quality of their products and services, they kept going and leading the market and now they are joining comScore.

I think this is great news for all my former colleagues in London and Seattle. Hopefully the products will keep growing and leading the market.

I look forward to the future of M:Metrics’ products.

US Smartphone users browse twice the British ones

According to M:Metrics US owners of smartphones (can someone tell me exactly what a smartphone is?) browse the web twice as much as British users.

It is obvious that users who bought a smartphone will make a use that is different from users who bought a cheap mobile device. I always thought Britain was one of the most active countries in this space, anyway.

Interesting how the only site in common is Facebook. No wonder they did an iPhone UI and are getting more active in the mobile space.
No Google? Only live.com? No eBay in Britain?

These are the numbers coming straight from M:Metrics.

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United Kingdom

Domain Company Total
Total Total 2:24:58
facebook.com TheFacebook, Inc 1:44:47
three.co.uk Hutchison Whampoa Limited 1:30:51
sky.com British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc 1:15:28
live.com Microsoft Corporation 1:11:06
bbc.co.uk British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 0:48:10

Top Domains by Time Spent Browsing per Month: United States

Domain Company Total
Total Total 4:37:48
craigslist.org Craigslist, Inc. 1:38:51
ebay.com eBay Inc. 1:25:41
myspace.com News Corporation 1:25:13
facebook.com TheFacebook, Inc 1:24:09
go.com The Walt Disney Company 1:07:04

Also, Mark Donovan, senior analyst, says:

People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium. Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.

And Paul Goode, senior analyst, adds:

A primary factor in the discrepancy in the duration of time spent browsing between British and American smartphone users is the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the United States, where 10.9 percent of users have an unlimited data plan versus only 2.3 percent in Britain. Other factors to consider are the popularity of devices with QWERTY keyboards in the United States—where nine of the ten top smartphones are QWERTY, while the inverse is true in the UK–and the greater penetration of smartphones in the British market.

Flash, Flashlite, SVG and Java

Flash is a huge success on the web. It’s been like that for a long time now.

SVG is a recommendation (read standard) by the W3C that should address some of the functionalities of Flash.

While Flash Lite has been very successful in Japan for many years (and I think simply because DoCoMo decided it would be the default on all devices), it has struggled in the rest of the world.

In the last couple of years Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other top vendors have more or less quietly implemented SVG Tiny (a subset of SVG for mobile devices). From my perspective it seemed like SVG would take over Flash (Lite) in the mobile space, but it looks Adobe is moving to make sure this does not happen.

A few news that I’ve read in the last couple of weeks, all within just a few days:

dotMobi acquires Mowser

The word is out, dotMobi has acquired IP from Mowser and will now be in charge of running the service.

There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said already. James over Twitter, Miker, Russell.

I am mostly curious about what will the community say. It’s a bold move for a company that has been advocating “Build for mobile” for years while Mowser seems to come from the opposite direction. I think we have some strong ideas about how to use Mowser at best and you’ll see it happening quickly.

Working with Mike and Russell is going to be exciting (except Russell is not in Ireland, but I’m used to working long-distance!).