t.wurfl.com is gone welcome logme.mobi

It looks like there has been a change in the DNS for wurfl.com and t.wurfl.com went lost with it.

I think t.wurfl.com was a great resource and I’ve seen a lot of hits without much publicity.

I’ve decided to keep it up and register a new domain for it. Some of the names I would have wanted to use were taken, already so I’ve gone for logme.mobi. Hit it with your mobile and you’ll get everything you used to get with the old t.wurfl.com. logme.mobi/query is still there, of course.

Let me know if you see any issues, I quickly fixed the URL’s, but maybe some links are not fixed, yet. Allow a few hours for the DNS to propagate.

See the latest mobile phones

Last night I was literally hypnotized by a very simple script (AJAX?) that refreshes every few seconds. I was browsing around and got on AdMob‘s site and immediately was captured but the device names on the right. I kept reading device names, countries and mobile operators for quite a few minutes… Yes, I know, I’m sick! 🙂

I just love these features, I can’t get away from them.

In a similar effort and only for the happiness of my eyes, I recently added a feature that is totally useless, but makes me giggle every time I see it.
Every time someone visits t.wurfl.com the user-agent is recorded in a database. It is possible to query the user-agents and see the values captured through another webpage. Well, I have added device thumbnails just to entertain myself, of course. If you wanted to see the last 10 Sony Ericsson devices that visited the site, for example, you will see the nice thumbnails.

All this was developed using free software, of course. WURFL, Tera-WURFL and the device pictures that the community has collected. Device thumbnails were developed this Sunday, instead of going out, seeing people and having some real relationship with human beings…

Mobile Linux, ever taking off?

I was reading this not-so-new post on Mobile Open Source entitled Mobile Linux going up the stack with Trolltech Greensuite.

The Greensuite Initiative should ease the development of linux-based devices. This should speed-up the development and lower the costs. Fabrizio Capobianco is very confident that this is the way to go and that Linux will eventually win the race against Symbian and Microsoft.

I think this is a very optimistic view. I have been looking for a linux device to be successful for quite a few years now and all those devices have been selling very low numbers to a very tiny slice of the market (think of the Zaurus, so cool, but so little devices sold).
Seeing Linux become a player in this space would be really great, but I think that it needs a lot of money and the development costs of a mobile device, today, are still too high to open the doors to this. I am always amazed at how Apple could take freeBSD and Mach kernel and build such as great GUI on top of it, while the open-source community has been developing X11 and other Window managers for so many years with so little success.

I really hope that someone puts some serious money and development time on Linux for mobile devices and make it real. I am just not sure that this is the event (or initiative) that will change things drastically.

Motorola has launched quite a few devices running Linux, but actually the latest smartphone/PDA that was lunched with lots of commercials and hype is the Q and is Windows-based, not Linux.

feature-free mobile devices

via Fierce Mobile Content:”The company [Verizon Wireless] also introduced a new feature-free handset, the Motorola W315, designed specifically to court consumers with absolutely no interest in mobile video, music downloads or any other bells and whistles beyond voice and simple SMS.

This confirms the two diverging trends of devices with more features every day and devices that are going to lose features and go back to super-simple tools to make calls and basic features.

Some other interesting readings on the topic of making things simple and not flooded of features:
– Google’s Plans for 2007
– Apple’s iTV may extend “beyond streaming video”
– Cingular’s Firefly
– Vodafone primofonino