WAP Review — The Telegraph’s New Free Mobile Site
The Daily Telegraph is the UK's largest newspaper in terms of circulation, The paper was also one of the first to adopt digital distribution, launching its first web site in 1994. They've had a mobile site for while too but I never really paid much attention to it as it's a £5/month subscription deal. The pay version still seems to be available but I guess not many people were willing to pay the equivalent of $10/month to read the news on a mobile phone as the Telegraph launched a free mobile service in April.
The new site comes in three variants.
- A "Standard' text-only one at telegraph.co.uk/mobilebasic
- An "Enhanced" version at telegraph.co.uk/mobile which adds 300 px wide images to the body of about half the news items.
- A text-only "WAP" edition (telegraph.co.uk/mobilewap) using legacy WML markup instead of HTML.
Other than the presence of images and minor layout difference all three versions are identical, consisting of 28 news items organized into News, Sports and Travel sections. The Telegraph doesn't automatically redirect mobile devices to the most appropriate version based on the their capabilities but for most phones either the standard or enhanced versions should both be fine. If you are paying for data by the kilobyte the images on enhanced version add about 15 KB per page.
The content on the site is good but there needs to be more of it. 28 stories is nothing compared with the BBC and other major world newspapers, including The New York Times, which put hundreds of stories, essentially their entire content, on the mobile web. Unlike those other sites, the Telegraph's mobile site carries no advertising. I think they ought to go ad-supported. Without advertising there's no revenue and thus no incentive to drive traffic with more features and content.
Source: Omio
Mobile Link: telegraph.co.uk/mobile
Ratings: Content: 
Usability: 
dev.mobi blog — An Operator Decides to be Polite…
Say what you will about the network operators with whom we have to play in the mobile space, but every now and again they do think of the developer community before implementing changes that may impact us all. Case in point, our friends over at AT&T devCentral recently sent out an announcement to the developer community about changes that will be coming as a result of some modifications to their gateway.
Enrique Ortiz — Google introduces Android Market - the Google App Store for Android
As (I) expected (and predicted), Google has launched its own application store or marketplace; see Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system (Android Developers Blog).
And with the Android Market solution, Google is addressing the problem of application discovery and download; and their approach is user-centric, similar to YouTube — very, very good; exactly as how I would have approached it… YouApp!
Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube.
:
Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.
Very cool…
Related to this see The Next Big Thing in Mobile: Local Applications, and how the iPhone will, and how the OHA and Android can change perceptions.
Interesting to me is Google’s user-centric approach to the mobile application market, as I had started a project on my own, YouApp.mobi, whose goal or paradigm is exactly that: a user-centric application discovery, sharing and download — Google beat me to it 
ceo
Enrique Ortiz — Mobile Web Megatrends 2008 (Sept 8)
A quick note about the Mobile Web Megatrends event, organized by Ajit Jaokar of FutureText. The event is on Sept 8th.
The event is a gathering of mobility experts including Mike Rowehl (Skyfire), Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design), Michael Mace (Rubicon Consulting), William Volk (MyNuMo), and folks from OMTP, Oracle, Cellfire, and many other. Me, I was scheduled to speak, but can’t make it.
From the event web site:
The Mobile Web Megatrends is a unique one day event that addresses the strategy and best practices relating to key current trends for the Mobile Web. The simple idea behind Mobile Web Megatrends is to create a small, niche event focused on developments that are key to the Mobile Web currently (2008/2009).
Also, remember the MobileWidget Camp Austin, a day before Mobile Web Megatrends, on September 7th, 2008.
ceo
MobileCrunch — Nortel tests LTE 4G wireless at 60 mph
Note the BS
The biggest issue with 4G networks is handover. When you’re speeding down the highway, your cellphone and wireless devices constantly hop from station to station, picking up connectivity as you go along. In a perfect world, this handover is seamless but, as we all know, in the real world it isn’t poifect.
Nortel just tested their LTE standard with vehicles moving between coverage sites at about 60 miles an hour, a fairly large breakthroug in the 4G LTE spae. When will you get to use your own LTE dongle? Not in a while, sadly, but keep dreaming.
Simon Judge (Mobile Phone Dev) — 38% Smartphone Market Share in 2012?
In a very recent interview, an analyst from Gartner said that, in 2012, they…
"…expect smartphone unit sales to reach over 700 million of the total 1.8 billion handset market; that’s 65%, or $200 billion-worth, of the total $312 billion mobile phone market at that time."
To put this into some perspective, global smartphone sales currently represent (extrapolating) roughly 120 million of what might be 1.2bn units this year - say about 10%.
Here are what these figures look like as a pie charts…
If Gartner is correct, there will be many new opportunities. However, don’t forget that the figures represent new sales in the given year (2012). This isn’t the same as the total market for smartphone applications and services (which will be larger) because this will include people who purchased phones in previous years - and some of these will also have been smartphones.
Related Articles:
MobileCrunch — Motorola officially launches the silver MOTO Q Global
Remember that Silver MOTO Q we mentioned had found its way into a few AT&T stores last week? Its made the jump to the land of the official, available immediately as an AT&T exclusive.
As mentioned before, it’s pretty much a MOTO Q9h pre-flashed with Windows Mobile 6.1 and given a flashy silver makeover. Same quad-band radio, UMTS dual-band 3G, 2.0 megapixel camera — same everything else.
If you’ve been lookin’ to grab a Q9h but just weren’t feeling the black, you can nab one today for $149.99 if you’ll promise to be AT&T’s girlfriend for 2 years.
WAP Review — Opting Out of Transcoding
- Logo courtesy of the W3C
Remember the furor that erupted on the web and the wmlprogramming Yahoo group over transcoders? Specifically, the ones that Vodafone UK and other carriers implemented with the goal of making non-mobile web pages more usable on mobile handsets? The issue was that these services had the (hopefully unintended) consequence of degrading or completely breaking numerous mobile web sites and services. Ring tone and game downloads no longer worked, some mobile web sites didn't load or displayed malformed content. Sites that relied on being able to detect mobile browsers and deliver optimized content no longer worked as designed because the transcoders removed or changed the HTTP headers that identified the browser, user's language settings or preferred content types.
Developers and content providers upset with the disruptions to their sites and business models rallied around Luca Passani, co-creator of the WURFL mobile device repository to formulate a document, "Rules for Responsible Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto" which suggested guidelines that transcoders should follow to avoid disrupting existing mobile sites and services. The "Manifesto" was generally well received in the mobile web development community and was also endorsed by three of the major transcoder vendors InfoGin, Volantis and Openwave. Openwave provides the OpenWeb transcoder used by Sprint.
The furor had died down, but now it's been rekindled by the W3C's release of a draft of its "Content Transformation Guidelines" recommendations, which like the Manifesto, describes best practices for mobile transcoders. The Guidelines are open for public comment until Sept 16. Anyone can comment by sending an e-mail to public-bpwg-comments@w3.org (note that your e-mail address will be published on the web - I recommend that you use a disposable e-mail address!). All comments can be viewed at lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-bpwg-comments
Their are some clear differences between the two documents. The W3C Guidelines doesn't go as far as the Manifesto in limiting what is acceptable behavior by transcoders, particularly with regard to changing HTTP headers. The Guidelines also place a larger part of the responsibility for interoperability on mobile web developers and publishers rather than transcoder vendors. All of which understandable given that the members of the W3C, including the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, are primarily representatives of commercial organizations including mobile carriers, transcoder vendors and large web publishers while the Manifesto comes out of the mobile web developer community.
There are lively discussions about the W3C Guidelines going on both through the comment process and on the wmlprogramming Yahoo group. Luca and others have proposed changes to the Guidelines that would bring it closer to the Manifesto. It remains to be seen if these suggestions will make it into the final document.
In reading both the Guidelines and the Manifesto, I noticed that neither said anything about allowing end-users to opt out of transcoding. I think it is essential that all transcoders offer ordinary users a way to disable the transcoder, either temporarily for the current site or page, or globally for all sites.
In spite of everyone's best intentions, transcoders will sometimes break sites that would otherwise be usable on a given handset. If you have ever used Skweezer, Mowser or the transcoders that Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft Live use to reformat web content returned from search queries, I'm sure you've noticed that some sites come up blank, broken into one line pages or missing essential parts and functionality when transcoded. Fortunately those services are opt-in, no one is forced to use them, and except for Yahoo and AOL, they offer links to the original version. With the carrier transcoders there is often no way to opt out, leaving users no alternative if the transcoded version of one of their favorite sites is broken.
Secure sites pose a special problem for transcoders as they can not be transcoded without decrypting the the secure content, potentially exposing users to "man in the middle" attacks. Users need to be able to opt out of transcoding when doing online banking or shopping when account information or credit car numbers are being passed.
I've left a comment with the W3C arguing for making user opt-out a requirement for all transcoding proxies, I won't bore you by reprinting it here as it essentially restates the above. You can read it in the W3G BPWG archives.
The issue of transcoding, is a very important one for the future of the web on mobile devices. Take a few minutes to skim the Guidelines and the discussions at the W3C and wmlprogramming and if sufficiently motivated, email comments on the W3C Guidelines to public-bpwg-comments@w3.org by the Sept. 16th deadline.
Related:
Vodafone’s Heavy-Handed Transcoder
How Web to Mobile Transcoding Should Work
OpenWeb and InfoGin Adopt the Developer Manifesto!
Taro Matsumura — 「ゲリラ豪雨」と空見
タイトルの「空見」は「そらみ」という訓読みで使おうと思ったんだけれど、辞書によると「くうけん」という仏語で、空に執着した考えのことだそうだ。偶然であった言葉とはいえ、ちょうどよいので採用。
今年は「ゲリラ豪雨」という言葉が市民権を得ることになった夏だった。
この言葉、僕の記憶なら初出はウェザーニューズのメールサービスだったと記憶している。突然降る豪雨のことで間違いないだろう。なるほど言い得て妙と思っていたけれど、いつの間にかニュースで使われ、しまいにはNHKのクローズアップ現代でも取り上げられた表現になった。ネガティブな意味での流行語として残りそうである。
余談になるけれど、広告代理店の方に先日お話を伺ったところ、媒体取りで今一番苦労しているのが山手線のドア上の画面だという。都市生活をしている人にとって、この枠はとても影響力があり、最も効果的じゃないか、とされているそうだ。
そこでピンときた。
そういえばウェザーニューズはこの枠でスポンサーとともにエリア天気予報を提供していたじゃないか。そのコメントで「ゲリラ豪雨」という言葉が頻発したため、これだけ言葉が広まったのかもしれない。
しかし「ゲリラ豪雨」は単なる流行りだったり一人歩きしている言葉ではなく、割と自分たちの生活に影響を及ぼすレベルにまで発達している現象と言ってもいい。今日も四ッ谷を通りかかったときに滝のような雨に遭遇して、丸ノ内線のドアが開いた瞬間、ドア近くに立っていてちょっとびしょっと水がかかってきた。8月28日の夜は、日光などで120mm/h以上の雨があったと見られる、などの観測データもあり、また東海道線沿線も大雨でダイヤが不安定な状態が続く。
今日は雨が降るだろうと予測されていたけれど、傘を持たずに出かけてしまった。どうせ降り始めたら役に立たないくらいめちゃくちゃになるんだったら、邪魔だしいいや、という感覚が功を奏した格好である。なんだか、半ば雨の中活動するのを放棄したような感覚が、ちょっと都市生活者っぽくない気もしているんだけれども。
カトウさんが以前、天気に対して興味を持つことは大切かもしれない、という話をしていた。しかしこのゲリラ豪雨を相手にするなら、自分の五感をフルに働かせて空と対話する必要があると思う。
目視できる積乱雲、遠くで聞こえる雷鳴、ガストフロントの余波でひやっとした風を感じたり、さすがに味覚は関係ないかもしれないけれど、これらの情報と経験を頼りに、自分が今いる場所が10分後、良い天候になるか、悪い天候になるかくらいの判断はつくはずである。
ウェザーニューズのケータイサービスは、写メールをウェザーニューズに送ってもらい、それを直径10km程度、単一セルなら1時間以内に寿命を迎える積乱雲の活動解析とユーザーへの情報提供に役立てるサービスを2008年に導入している。以前から「雨プロジェクト」としてユーザーに雨を観測してもらう試みを行ってきたウェザーニューズの第8弾の企画ということになるが、これはとてもいい試みだと思う。
もちろん狭いエリアの気象の解析にとても有効な情報収集手段として使えるという、ウェザーニューズ側のメリットも大きい。しかしユーザーは、先ほどあげたような、積乱雲をはじめとする空との対話を始めることによって、結果的には気象災害から自分の身を守ることにならないだろうか。
もちろん空を眺めているだけでは気象現象すべてがわかるわけではなく、レーダーや高層気象観測やスーパーコンピューターによる計算も予報に役立っている。しかし暴れる気象を単なる恐怖として見るのではなく、その恐怖に興味を持つことも必要ではないだろうか。
穏やかな空を見上げることがきっかけになるなら、ぜひとも空を見上げるべきだと思うのだ。
MobileCrunch — Samsung Instinct $99 at Radio Shack
Starting tomorrow, Radio Shack will be selling the Samsung Instinct to new Sprint customers for $99. If you’re an existing Sprint customer looking to upgrade, it’ll cost you the normal price of $129. The sale is going on through Labor Day, so if you’re going to Radio Shack anyway, why not pick up a new Instinct?
What am I saying? Nobody goes to Radio Shack. What I meant to say was if you’re looking to buy a new Instinct, why not drop into Radio Shack for the first time in ten years? Ah, that’s more like it.
MobHappy (Buckley & Longino) — Bluetooth and the MMA
I was lucky enough to be elected Global Chairman of the MMA a few months back, on top of my role as Chairman of EMEA. This is an unpaid and part time role, in case you wondered, and has to be squeezed into my day job, blogging, my involvement in Mobile Monday and any kind of leisure time I might foolishly aspire to.
Having said that, I take my MMA role very seriously and am thoroughly enjoying it - even the challenges and controversies that inevitably come with this kind of job.
Speaking of which….you might have seen that the MMA has just published in draft form its “European Bluetooth Guidelines” for public review. This has been greeted in some quarters, like The Register with accusations that the MMA is encouraging spam and many people have written to ask me what my stance is on this.
This is a complex question in reality, especially as I need to balance my own opinions and that of my Chairman role. But I’m happy to be lay out some of the thinking here and am very fortunate that I have the platform to do it.
Firstly, let me make absolutely clear that these guidelines are not the final document that we’ll be going with. The process within the MMA for this kind of work is that members who have a special interest in a topic get together and form a committee. This committee then debates the issues, develops a position and drafts a paper - in this case, these Guidelines - and this can take many months of hard work, thought and negotiation.
After that, the guidelines are published for the public to provide feedback on. That feedback is consolidated, considered by the committee and may or may not be incorporated into the final guidelines that are then published. The guidelines may then be reviewed and changed on an ongoing basis, as opinions change and as technology develops.
To be completely transparent, I haven’t seen these guidelines either before now, as I wasn’t part of the committee. I can’t possibly oversee or even be involved all the work the MMA does and neither do I need to be.
So, my first request to all of you is to read the guidelines and comment as you see fit - read and comment here. And you don’t need to be a member of the MMA in order to do that.
As a brief background to the controversy here, there are broadly two types of Bluetooth campaign - just as there are two types of mobile marketing. Firstly, there is Pull. This is where (in the case of Bluetooth) the consumer sees the opportunity to interact in another medium and actively and consciously decides to initiate a contact. As an example, you might go to the cinema, see a poster and as a result download via Bluetooth a trailer for a forthcoming film, or a ringtone for the soundtrack of the movie you’ve just seen.
This is generally regarded, and I absolutely agree, as being totally acceptable. The consumer can choose to interact with the promoter or not.
The second type is Push campaigns and this is where the fun begins. With say, an SMS push campaign, we can stipulate that the consumer must opt in to receive messages from the promoter and of course, have the ability to subsequently opt out. This is actually a legal requirement in Europe and some other markets.
However, with Bluetooth, the modus operandi is to send a message to random phones that have Bluetooth switched on, are in discoverable mode and are in range of the transmitter, asking if they would like to receive a marketing message. If you take an SMS analogy, this is like sending an SMS to someone, asking them if they would like to opt in to a campaign. It might be polite and courteous, but it would still be unsolicited and still regarded as spam, in my opinion.
Proponents of Bluetooth Push campaigns argue that if people don’t wish to be contacted, they can either switch their Bluetooth off, or make it undiscoverable (so they can still use, for example, Bluetooth headsets). Opponents (and I’m one) say that that’s like saying if you don’t want to get email spam, don’t buy a PC or don’t use your email client.
There’s some even murkier aspects to this.
Firstly, it’s generally not covered by legislation, unlike say unsolicited email or sms. So no one is breaking the law in any way.
Secondly, there’s the closed community aspect. As an example, you go to a Madonna gig at the O2 Centre. The organiser decides that they’re going to send everyone (with Bluetooth switched on) a personal message from Madge, inviting them to download a free ringtone from her latest album. Technically, this is unsolicited, but then it’s hard to see who on earth would be offended by this and perhaps then it’s acceptable? In any event, it’s a far cry from the scenario of walking down a High Street or in a shopping mall and getting a “Can we send you something?” message from all the shops in the area.
Other areas of concern is that many people wouldn’t know how to change the Bluetooth settings on their mobile. And ultimately this would be a great way to distribute viruses to mobiles, but maybe this is getting just a bit too paranoid.
My position as a member of the MMA and a marketer is that the MMA should recommend against the use of unsolicited Bluetooth messaging campaigns, no matter how politely those messages are phrased. I would make an exception to promotion to closed groups, such as the Madonna scenario I outlined above.
But it’s more complicated than that. As Chairman of the MMA, I want to keep the members who promote these campaigns within the Association, as it means that we can continue to have a dialogue and discussion - and make them see that it’s not a good way for a marketer to behave. An outright ban would almost certainly encourage them to set up their own organisation and I think that this would be a bad thing for the industry.
Ultimately, I also believe that these techniques will die anyway, whether because of a massive consumer backlash at some future point or because legislation will ban it. It’s only remotely acceptable today because relatively few messages are sent to relatively few people.
The Bluetooth push proponents are almost all reasonable people and some privately admit that they would rather not run these types of campaigns. But if their competitors all do, they have to service clients who demand it, whether or not those clients and suppliers are MMA members. This is an argument which I have some sympathy with.
So what’s the answer here? I believe that the Guidelines at this stage should reflect that Bluetooth push campaigns while legal, are controversial, could reflect poorly on brands that choose to promote themselves in this way and don’t represent best practice.
The MMA is a democratic and consultative organisation, so while I have a definite opinion, we must be led by the majority. Which is why it’s so important that as many people comment on the Guidelines as they stand, whether or not they agree with them. So please make your voice heard while it’s fresh in your mind by heading over there now by clicking here.
Andrea Trasatti — Is transcoding a crime?
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.
WAP Review — Browser Comparison - TeaShark vs Opera
It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Opera Mini, the free full-web browser that makes it possible you use almost any website on most any phone. Amazingly, using sites designed for an 800x600 px screen on one a tenth as large is both practical and pleasant in Opera Mini, thanks its combination of server side compression, smart reformatting techniques like content folding and fit to width and a brilliant user interface built a around one and two-click shortcuts for common tasks. I use Opera Mini for a couple of hours a day and it has largely eliminated my need for a PC for checking email, following over 100 news feeds and approving comments on this site.
Opera Mini's success seems to have encouraged other companies to create their own free, installable browsers for mobile phones. This is a welcome development. As good as Opera Mini is their is always room for improvement and competition spurs both improvement and innovation. A few sites that I use don't work well or at all in Opera Mini so I'm hoping one of these alternate browsers will. It would also be nice to have features Opera Mini lacks like tabbed browsing, the ability to copy text from a page and to spoof the browser user agent for sites that block access to mobile browsers. Probably impossible in a Java based browser but certainly desirable would be support for embedded media especially Flash video.
I've been trying out three alternate browsers that promise full web browsing like Opera Mini and offer additional features. This post is dedicated to looking at the TeaShark browser. Subsequent posts will examine UC Web and Skyfire.
TeaShark, like Opera Mini, is a proxy based or server assisted browser. When you request a page, a server loads, parses and renders it using an actual desktop browser engine and then compresses the displayable page in a proprietary format and sends it to a thin Java client on the phone for decompression and display. This is what makes it possible for both Opera Mini and TeaShark to deliver fast full web browsing to low end phones on slow networks. The two browsers use different desktop rendering engines, Mini uses Opera 9.5 and TeaShark, the open source WebKit browser engine.
I'm going to compare the three browsers in seven areas, features, performance, rendering accuracy, usability, compatibility with a variety of sites, compatibility with various phones and security.
Features
TeaShark has several features that Opera Mini lacks, the best of which is tabbed browsing. Both links in a page and URLs that you type in can be opened in a second tab (top image). It's not possible to open a bookmark in a new tab, however and TeaShark seems to be limited to to two tabs. Switching between tabs is a simple two click operation, press the "7" key and press "Up" on the dpad up to go to the 2nd tab or "7" plus "Down" to go to the first one
There is a limited copy text function in Teashark which is also quite useful. You can select text on any Web page and then search Google, Wikipedia or UrbanDictionary.com for the selected text (2nd Image). If the text is a phone number you can call also the number.
Teashark has inline editing of text fields, unlike Opera Mini which opens the phone's native full screen edit window, hiding the original form. When editing inline, Teashark does word completion based on prior entries but only triple-tap mode is supported. By choosing "Menu > Edit" you can bring up the field in the phone's native full screen editor where all the built in entry modes like t9 (or iTap), symbol and numeric are available.
The history function in Teashark works much like history in S60Webkit. When you press the right-softkey, which is TeaShark's "Back" button, a small window opens at the bottom of the screen showing thumbnails of visited pages (3rd image). Scrolling through the thumbnails instantly loads the page if it is in the cache. This is nice but Teashark's cache only seems to hold two or three pages unlike Opera Mini which can cache a dozen or more. As with desktop browsers and with Opera Mini, Teashark's history is persistent across sessions (4th image).
However, Teashark lacks a number of useful features found in Opera Mini. There is no "Fit to Width mode", saving of pages or images, bookmarklet support or direct file upload or download. Teashark is unsigned so obtrusive security prompts appear on many phones.
Winner: Opera Mini. Athough I really like TeaShark's tabs and searching by copying text, I use bookmarklets, page saving and "fit to width" in Opera Mini daily. There's no way I'd give those features, not even for tabbed browsing.
Performance
I define performance as speed plus reliability, how fast do pages load on the average, and if the browser can load a given page, can it do so all the time, every time without breakdowns or crashes.
Opera MIni is noted for it's speed and most of the time it is extremely fast. To test speed I used the WapReview Mobile Directory's 447 KB page for the "News" category. I loaded the page three times, clearing the cache each time and averaged the results. On a Nokia N95-3 using ATT's 3G connection, Opera mini in desktop mode loaded the page in 19 secs. After the Mini server preprocessed and compressed the page it was only 191 KB.
Teashark surprised me in this test by loading the page even faster, averaging only 16 seconds. The compressed page size was 217K.
Service outages on Opera Mini are extremely rare, I only remember experiencing three all this year and only one was longer than an hour although the one that was lasted most of a weekend. The Opera Mini servers do slow down occasionaly, doubling or even tripling load times but again this is uncommon. Crashes and lockups are also rare with Opera Mini although they do occur.
I've only been using TeaShark for a week and I've found it quite unreliable. Pages that normally load in a few seconds suddenly start taking 10 times as long or fail entirely with a timeout error. TeaShark's timeout is fixed at 40 seconds, unlike Opera's with can be increased to as much as 3600 seconds, essentially unlimited. At least TeaShark is pretty stable, it only crashed once during the week I was testing it. Opera Mini also crashed once in the same period.
Winner Opera Mini. Teashark's slight speed advantage doesn't begin to compensate for it's unreliability.
Rendering Accuracy
Both browsers generally do a reasonably good job of faithfully rendering desktop sites. Both are occasionally guilty of overlapping text or are missing parts of the page, particularly buttons and images. With Opera Mini, pages with overlapping or missing elements in "Desktop Mode" are often OK in Fit tTo Width "Mobile View" and vice-versa.
Both have browsers don't properly display italic text. Opera Mini displays it as regular text, Teashark displays regular Italic as bold italic. Bold italic text is displayed as bold regular by both browsers.
Tie. Neither browser has clear superiority in rendering.
Usability
I'm biased as I've used Opera Mini daily for the last three years and know its UI inside out, but I think it has much better usability. The main difference is the use of shortcuts. Opera has 33 one or two-key combinations for just about every common task. All functions are also available through the menu system in case you don't remember the shortcut. TeaShark has just nine one-key shortcuts (5th image), mostly for page navigation (Zoom, page up, down, left, right etc.) Opera Mini has those plus 15 two-key shorts to perform common operations like jumping to the bookmark list, settings dialog or home page and for bookmarking or refreshing the current page. In Teashark, these operations require going into the menu system which always takes more clicks (6th image). And then there is Opera Mini's Speed Dial which provides two-key access to your nine favorite bookmarks or bookmarklets. TeaShark doesn't have any equivalent of Speed Dial and doesn't support bookmarklets either.
Winner: Opera Mini
Site Compatibility
Although Opera Mini can handle more different full web sites than any other mobile browser I've used, there are still a few sites it has problems with, Including three that I use regularly; the full versions of Yahoo Mail, Bloglines and 1and1 Webmail. I was hoping that Teashark would work with at least some of these.
The problem with Bloglines in Opera Mini is that although I can log in and view the list of my subscribed feeds, when I click a feed, which should load the unread items in that feed, nothing happens. This occurs with both the "classic" version of Bloglines and the Beta at beta.bloglines.com. I first tried the Beta , which I prefer, in Teashark and got nowhere. I couldn't even log in, as the Submit button on the login form was missing! But I found success with the "Classic" version of Bloglines which works perfectly in TeaShark.
The full-web Yahoo "Mail Classic" isn't too bad in Opera Mini. The only real problems I have with it are that I can't do mass operations, like tagging several emails and deleting them or moving them to a folder as a single operation. The check boxes and buttons are there, but when you try to use them the page just reloads without doing anything useful. I can at least delete emails one at a time by opening each one and then pressing the delete button for that message. Moving messages doesn't work even in single message view. When you press the Move button, a drop down list of folders appears but the folder names will not accept focus so there is no way to chose the one you want to move the message to. Teashark was no help, it had the same issues as Opera Mini plus even deleting messages one at a time was impossible as the delete button was missing in single message view.
I use 1and1 for hosting, including my mail server. They provide a webmail interface for reading and managing email. Unfortunately I can't use 1and1 WebMail with Opera Mini, as after I login it "hangs" on a "Loading.." splash screen. I was very pleased to discover that Teashark handles the site with no issues whatsoever.
Although TeaShark can open some pages that Opera Mini can't the opposite is also true. It has problems with quite a few sites that work well in Opera Mini. It consistently fails to load certain Wikipedia results pages including those for "Japan", "Tokyo" and "India". At least it loads Wikipedia's entry for "Teashark" ):. I don't seem to be able to open pages that use HTML Basic Authentication with TeaShark either. And on my personalized Yahoo home page, half my RSS feeds show no content, just the text "loading...".
Another Tie. Neither browser works with every site. But if you have both of them installed on your phone there is a good chance that one or the other will.
Device Compatibility
One of great things about Opera mini is that it runs on almost any phone from the latest S60, Blackberry and UIQ handsets to inexpensive prepaid phones like Boost Mobile's Motorola i425 and i855. There's even a low memory, MIDP 1 version of Opera MIni 3.1 that works well on ancient handsets like the Nokia 6200.
I tested Teashark with three phones, a Nokia N95, Motorola Z8 and a Motorola i855. Teashark worked well on the N95 and Z8 but not the i855. I could only run it once on the i855 and even then the key mappings were all wrong. The phone's menu key performed the function normally mapped to the OK button. The softkeys and dpad did nothing at all: there was no way to bring up TeaShark's main menu which is mapped to the left softkey. Plus, once I shut down Teashark the first time it never ran again, only displaying a blank white screen when launched.
There are no low memory or MIDP 1 versions of TeaShark, further limiting its compatibly.
Winner: Opera Mini
Security
Opera Mini and Teashark are both proxy based browsers. All traffic passes through the vendor's servers where it is parsed, reformatted and compressed. This means that a "Man in the Middle" attack is possible. An unscrupulous employee or a hacker who has gained access to the server could theoretically see the pages you are browsing, including reading your web based email and data entered, even passwords. Data protected by encrption on secure (SSL) sites is vulnerable too as the proxy server has to decrypt the data in order to process it.
Opera Software is a public company based in Norway with offices around the world. The identities of it's officers and principals are a matter of public record. Opera is a profitable company which counts mobile carriers and e-commerce sites including eBay as customers. It has a reputation for integrity and its business model depends on maintaining that reputation. All of this makes Opera accountable. I consider an Opera Mini security breach extremely unlikely. However, I don't use Opera Mini for online banking or shopping, preferring to use S60WebKit or Opera Mobile with their end to encryption for those purposes.
The origin of TeaShark is a total mystery. Teashark.com has download links, a list of features, FAQ page and privacy policy but absolutely no information about the company's ownership or even where it is located. The only way to contact Teashark is by email. The teashark.com domain is registered anonymously. I won't say that using Teashark is unsafe, just that there is no information available to judge if the company is trustworthy or to evaluate its security practices. For these reason I won't use TeaShark to log into any Google services as my Google password is also the password for Google CheckOut and Adsense and if compromised my banking and credit card information could be stolen.
Conclusions
I'm keeping Teashark on my N95 and Z8 as an alternative browser for use on sites like Bloglines and 1and1 Webmail where Opera Mini doesn't work. But for the vast majority of my browsing I will still use Opera Mini. TeaShark's unreliability, lack of features important to me, especially fit to width and bookmarklets, and doubts about its security will keep me from using it as my main browser.
Blue Flavor — Information Architecture Deliverables: Page Description Diagrams
In the second installment of my Information Architecture Deliverables series, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite (and one of the most tricky) deliverables: the page description diagram. In case you’re not familiar, a page description diagram is a text-based list that explains the importance of content that appears on various pages of a website. Here’s a sample of what one looks like.
One of the main reasons why I love pdd’s is that they effectively remove visual design and layout-based discussions (which should be reserved for the visual design phase of the work) from the IA process. Presenting and discussing only content forces a client to focus on choosing what is and isn’t really important on a given page, helping to communicate their core message.
That said, I’ve found that there are two scenarios in which Page Description Diagrams might not be the best choice. The first occurs with clients who really don’t want to get involved with anything unless it’s visual. For instance, I recently worked with an architecture firm who told me up front that their group was very visual, and that text-only deliverables weren’t going to enable them to provide valuable feedback. For this client, I chose a more visual-based deliverable.
The second scenario occurs when we’re working with web applications or more interactive-type sites, where discussing interactions is key. Interactions are more difficult to portray textually, so Page Description Diagrams often leave important questions unanswered and aren’t the most appropriate for these types of projects.
Aside from these two examples, Page Description Diagrams are an ideal deliverable—especially for content-heavy sites. They’re a great way for the information architect to focus in on the content and its overall importance per page, rather than visual design and layout only.
If you’re not architecting a site with heavy interactivity, I’d highly recommend them as a great way of getting everyone involved and on the same page during the site building process.
MobHappy (Buckley & Longino) — Would You Ever Willingly Ignore Insight Into Half Your Customers?
Our good friend Helen Keegan, as you may have guessed, is a woman. She also works in the mobile industry — and is an authority on mobile marketing, and a frequent speaker at industry events. But she wants to know why there aren’t more women up there with her, and singles out three upcoming events for the lack of women on their speaking agendas:
Why so few women speakers, panellists or moderators?
And don’t tell me this is representative of the industry because I know it isn’t - we have good female representation at Mobile Mondays, more women come to Swedish Beers now (and growing) and the women in the Women in Mobile Data Association are plentiful! I even hear along the grapevine that the MMA has a strong female contingent.
And yes, this is a particular bugbear of mine. But with good reason. So bear with me.
I’m fed up to the back teeth of conference organisers and their sponsors ignoring women in the mobile industry (Informa being a recent obvious culprit, but they are certainly not alone) and coming up with lame excuses as to why women aren’t involved. And many of these events are actually organised by women which makes it even worse. Do women still defer to men? Do women need a license to speak up?
Underrepresentation of women is a big issue across all of business. I was surprised to find six women out of 21 students in my MBA cohort, given their underrepresentation in business schools nation (and I presume world-) wide. Here’s the thing, though, you don’t have to be a woman, or a “bra-burning feminist,” as Helen says, to take issue with this. The lack of diversity at these events, across the mobile industry, and across business in general isn’t a feminist issue, it’s a business one. Given that roughly half of the market is women, doesn’t it behoove us to, you know, have them around? Same with other subsets of the overall population/market. How can we expect to answer their needs if we don’t seek out and welcome their input. Is that smart?
Helen hit the nail on the head for me in an email she sent:
I’m bored of seeing a sea of men in grey suits and hearing the sound of my own voice at events. We desperately need some diversity in order to attend to the needs of the whole industry and the whole of our customer base. I’m looking for ways forward, some things to try, some benchmarks to set. Maybe we can *actually* do something about it? And in doing so, make better business decisions, provide products and services that appeal to all members of the community and become a more vibrant, healthy industry as a result. Well, I hope so at least.
I think we can all identify with going to events and seeing the same people, or same groups of people, speaking and rehashing the same points of view. If they’re representative of the industry as a whole, perhaps it helps explain why things take so long to progress — and why we keep facing the same problems over and over.
This isn’t an issue of appeasing women to make them happy; it’s an issue of embracing diversity and differing viewpoints to improve our industry and our businesses. We can all agree that if a lack of opportunities is borne out of sexism, it’s stupid. But if it’s borne out of anything else, is it any less ignorant?
Helen’s looking for feedback and suggestions on ways to improve the situation, so head over to her blog and weigh in on this issue.
MobHappy (Buckley & Longino) — A Few Things I’ve Seen…
I’ve snapped pics of a couple of things recently I thought I’d share.
First up, I was checking out grills at my local Lowe’s, and saw this ad for an audio tour about the product. You just call in to the 800 number, and you get walked through the grill’s features while you’re standing there looking at it. I think stores used to have these things called “salespeople” that did this sort of thing, but it probably behooves manufacturers to take these sorts of steps. Particularly for a product like barbecue grills, where a store’s got about 30 different models on display and they’re all relatively similar. I’ve seen this audio tour thing at a lot of art museums my wife has taken me to, but this is the first time I’ve seen it on a product in a store.
Over the weekend, I popped into Best Buy to get a replacement for my dying Wi-Fi router on sale, and saw this: a Wi-Fi router into which you can plug a USB cellular modem and share it’s connection. This isn’t a new idea, I remember seeing a similar product, but for PC cards, at a CTIA show several years ago, there’s been things like the Junxion Box, and I feel like Sprint had something along these lines at one point. But it’s the first time I’ve seen one on sale in a place like Best Buy, and for the relatively reasonable price of $250. Pretty cool IMO — especially when you consider I remember paying something like $400 for my first Wi-Fi router many moons ago.
However, the best thing I’ve seen lately was a “Don’t Drive While Intexticated” sign. I figured they probably wouldn’t appreciate me using my handset camera to take a picture of it while I was driving, though.
MobileCrunch — Dual-band Verizon gear coming soon: Travelers rejoice.
The Samsung SCH-u810 and the SCH-i770, both from Samsung, should offer red hot roaming capabilities to those stuck on CDMA networks in the states. These two phones, along with a Novatel USB dongle and internal WWAN adapter for laptops, will make up Verizon’s Q3 global offerings, ensuring you won’t go phone-less when you travel. The i770 is a BlackJack-esque QWERTY with quad-band GSM, G.P.S. and Wi-Fi along with EVDO. The u810 is pretty boring.
MobileCrunch — Review: Palm Treo Pro
So we return to the Palm Treo Pro, a $549 unlocked Windows Mobile Treo aimed squarely at the business set. It’s been about a week and I’ve used this guy off and on. It kept a nice charge - two days, for the most part, without much data use - and fit nicely in the pocket. But is it the Treo of which we all incessantly dream? Is it the Treo that will bring us closer to world peace and better burritos on the East Coast? Is this the Treo for you?
Yes, it is the Treo for you if you are a business professional forced to use Windows Mobile and you travel quite a bit and hardware price is no object. This is also the Treo for you if you’re buying a few cellphones for the CEO and the CFO and you want them to be productive without having to change your Windows-based IT and communications infrastructure. If you are neither of those people, think of the Treo Pro as a vision of Palm’s future.
The Treo Pro is one of Palm’s most attractive Treos to date. Gone is the lumpen plastic of the Centro and the low-gloss ho-hummery of the 800w. Whereas the Centro and the 800w took design cues from the lower end of the market, Treo tapped HTC to design this new looker and for good reason. The RIM, in a general, sense, was eating their enterprise lunch and the Centro was doing just fine.
So we have the Treo Pro. As its name implies, this isn’t for amateurs. Because it’s unlocked and unsubsidized you’d better have a damn good reason for going Windows Mobile. This could mean IT departments buying in bulk for their executives or a mobile professional who wants a messaging phone but still likes ActiveSync. Europe loves them some Windows Mobile, so their unlocked model is a good move. The US market, sadly, looks at expensive phones and then looks elsewhere. The Blackberry Curve didn’t get where it is on its good looks.
MobileCrunch — JuiceCaster rolls into beta on BlackBerry
There are really only three things you need to know about JuiceCaster:
- JuiceCaster is a free application which lets you upload videos, pictures, and status updates (where appropriate) to a wide variety of popular social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Photobucket, and a handful of others. It also acts as a bit of a social network of its own, with custom groups for sharing status and content updates.
- JuiceCaster for BlackBerry is now available in an open beta. You can sign up here.
- Regardless of its name, JuiceCaster has absolutely nothing to do with projecting liquids extracted from fruits.
I’m on the road without a BlackBerry in sight, so you’ll have to boulder on alone this time. Check it out, and let us know what you think.
[Via CrackBerry]
MobileCrunch — Target leaks Motorola i776, the ugliest handset ever created
So, pretend you’re Motorola’s handset division for a second. You’re constantly under fire from the vast majority of the blog-bearing internet for failing to create anything vaguely interesting since 2003 1996. Your future existence relies on the success of two handsets. What do you do?
Apparently, you strive to create the ugliest handset the world has seen in a really, really long time. Target let some details slip on this monstrosity on the way for Boost Mobile (check it out yourself - just punch B001DE4BF2 into the search box), and we can only hope that the image shown is a gag placeholder. If the brown/silver/purple color scheme doesn’t have you drooling, the oh-so-chic ginormous external antenna surely will.
All we know about it so far is that it’s headed for Boost prepaid, its got GPS, and 3.5 hours of talk time. Oh, and that it’s really, really ugly.
Andrea Trasatti — HTC naming madness
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:
- All HTC models - PocketPC and Smartphones @ gsmarena
- Smartphone Guides @ htcwiki
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.
Thilo Horstmann (Das Zentralorgan) — twibble for blackberry
The latest twibble mobile 0.8.3 now runs on Blackberry devices as well. At least if you have a recent device like the 8800 or 8120. It supports all the features like twitpic integration, maps, and even GPS (if you have a fancy GPS enabled BB). Please bear with us if it’s still a bit rough around the edges. Thanks to @mcdent for the testing!
0.8.3 has some other improvements which apply to all devices: @replies and direct messages are displayed in different colors, the main menu has been better organized and should display faster. In addition to the numeric shortcuts there are some keyboard shortcuts for QWERTY keyboards:
- [t] opens the tweet dialog
- [r] for @reply
- [d] for a direct message
- space fetches new tweets
And finally due to a new twitter API extension @replies are now properly linked to the related tweet. To install point your phone browser to http://m.twibble.de and follow the instructions.
MobileCrunch — Free tetris clone Tris removed from App Store
EA Games pushes out an iPhone port Tetris, and sells it for $9.99. An independent developer goes and makes his own Tetris clone (as has been done on just about every single electronic device ever created since the dawn of man) called Tris and offers it for the world for free. This is all going to go perfectly smooth, right?
Of course not. Tris’ developer Noah Witherspoon has received word from Apple legal that owners of the Tetris trademark, The Tetris® Company, have started to throw around legal jargon. As a result, Noah has pulled Tris from the App Store while figuring out where he stands legally.
Screw it, Noah. It’s Tetris. It’s the most heavily cloned game in the history of ever, and one with a long history of legal controversy. If you’re able to make a free alternative for something which would otherwise cost a Hamilton, more power to you. Rename it as “LOL FALLING SHAPES!”, and you’re good to go.
MobHappy (Buckley & Longino) — Arby’s Starts Mobile Couponing
US fast-food player, Arby’s has just announced that it’s starting to experiment with mobile couponing with Cellfire.
This is evidence that mobile couponing is slowly starting to go mainstream, although these things always seem to take longer than you think. However, the couponing industry is massive and certainly mobile seems to be an obvious way for it to develop in the future.
Consider that in a relatively small market like the UK, around 8.2 Billion coupons are processed and redeemed each year and perhaps as many as 800 Billion issued in the first place (I’m using an average redemption percentage from 1999, so this might not be totally accurate). This would be dwarfed by the US, home of the Free Standing Insert.
The mobile couponing market is such a huge opportunity though, because if it works, it’ll attract FMCG companies to digital marketing with spends that we can only dream about so far. This is because (with a few notable exceptions) FMCG marketers haven’t done much with the web, mainly restricting themselves to a pretty website and having ticked that box, move onto something else.
However, couponing is an area they understand, that is measurable and accountable and that they already invest billions of dollars in every year. So what’s stopping them trampling all over each other in the rush to start mobile couponing?
The main issues come down to retail redemption. Companies like Arby’s are in control of their own destiny as they own the redemption process and the retail environment (or at least it’s a franchise). Therefore, they can install the technology needed to process mobile coupons, which can range from a high-tech approach (say, a bar code reader) to low tech - a notebook at the till for staff to record redemptions in.
With FMCG players, other retailers control the redemption environment, which complicates the process considerably. Not only do these retailers need to be persuaded that mobile coupons make sense, won’t interrupt the checkout flow and install the right technology, but (and this is the big area everyone forgets about) their staff need to be trained. There’s nothing worse that presenting a coupon (mobile or otherwise) to be met with a blank stare from the store clerk.
I’m sure FMCG couponing will happen eventually and it’ll be incredibly disruptive for all the existing players, unless they get in first. Consider NCH Clearing in the UK, with 85% market share of the coupon processing business. If mobile couponing takes off, it’s going to wreck their current business model. But whoever does succeed in the new world will benefit from a chunk of a billion dollar business, which is a prize worth the game.
dev.mobi blog — TADA - Alive and kicking, and DA 2.0 (preview)
The DeviceAtlas 2.0 Preview was released on Monday, and with it, access to our TA-DA test suite was opened up to the unwashed masses.
A total of 5 new test have been added to the list, which is due grow further with the full 2.0 release due in the coming weeks. An interesting result of these new tests, will (hopefully) be a more accurate representation of which devices support the controversial "SMSTO:" URI, "SMS:" URI, or both.
WAP Review — More Mobile Transit Sites
I'm a confirmed public transit user. When I can't walk or ride my bike, I take local buses, trains and ferries. With global warming and ever rising oil prices we should all be trying to limit our driving by making at least some of our trips on public transportation. Transit, a least when it's working right, is a great way to get around in cities. But it can be pretty frustrating too. Like waiting an hour for a bus only to discover it only runs on weekdays and today is Saturday. Or getting on the wrong train and getting lost. Or missing the last bus home after a night on the town and having to walk 5 miles.
In many cities, the mobile web can help make transit a relatively efficient and worry free experience. This is an area of the web on phones that's really starting to take off, mobile trip planners, timetables and real-time arrival information is now available for most major cities in the US and around the world. Here are five mobile transit sites that I recently discovered. This brings the total number of transit related mobile web sites in the WapReview Mobile Web Directory to 29. Please contact me or leave a comment if you know of others.
Washington, DC's transit agency, the WMATA, has had a mobile site for years now, it's at wmata.com/mobile and is an old school WML site that requires you to type in station names for some functions and is a bit quirky but offers a lot of information. There's a point to point trip planner, real-time arrival times for buses and trains and escalator outage information.
If you are looking for something a little more modern AND you have an iPhone (or possibly a phone with a Netfront browser or a Palm with Blazer) you can use Meenster.com. It's a bit more single purpose than the official site. There's no trip planner and it doesn't cover bus lines, only the Metro. What Meenster does do is show you the departure time for the next six trains for any Metro station. There's also a link to a Google Map centered on the station. Google detects your device and provides a mobile formatted interactive map that lets you zoom in and out, scroll around, search for nearby businesses and get driving directions. Source: Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's Web 2.0 blog
I tried Meenster on a number of non-iPhone phones and mobile emulators and sadly it doesn't really work on most of them. However the NetFront 3.2 Simulator does handle Meenster perfectly, so I suspect that phones with NetFront or Palm's Blazer (which is NetFront re-branded) should work. It's really a shame that more of these iPhone sites aren't compatible with other mobile browsers. It seems to be related to the use of iPhone specific JavaScript libraries. There is a real need for a cross platform mobile Ajax library that can adapt to the different JavaScript environments of Opera, NetFront, S60 WebKit and the iPhone and maybe even degrade gracefully to plain xhtml for non-JavaScript mobile devices.
Ben from Mobile Web Site Watch left a comment on my Mobile Train Schedule review that included a link to several mobile transit sites from Usablenet.com. Some of these (Los Angeles MTA, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit) are already in the directory but the following three are new:
Boston's MBTA (mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.mbta.com) This site includes schedules for every one of the MTBA's hundreds of bus, rail and boat lines. The schedules are static, listing all trips for a given line, direction and day of the week in as a single paginated list. Not the most usable mobile interface, it would be a lot better if there was an option to restrict the listings to a specific time, defaulting to the next hour or so. There are route maps too, in PDF format, a strange choice for mobile as few, if any phones natively support viewing PDF documents. The site does provide links to downloadable PDF readers for Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and some Symbian devices.
New York MTA (mobile.usablenet.com/mt/mta.info) includes New York's city buses, subway and the Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter trains. The Metro North schedules are a static list of all trains for a given day of the week and direction, but the Long Island Railroad's allow you to specify the time, start and destination station to receive a custom schedule. For New York city buses and the subways, the site provides a full featured point to point and round trip planner and a "Service in the Area" feature that lists all lines within a mile or less radius of a given address. The site also has service advisories and PDF maps.
Phoenix AZ Valley Metro (mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.valleymetro.org) offers an interactive trip planner, static schedules, service advisories and maps in .gif format. The maps are resized on the fly to fit various mobile screen sizes ranging from 96px to 320 px in width and should load on almost any phone, although they tend to be hard to read in the smaller sizes. There are links to PDF maps too but the ones I tried didn't work. There are also turn by turn text descriptions of each line's route which are probably more useful than the maps.
Tokyo and Japan: If you are in Japan or plan to visit there check out the Norikae-Annai (Train Route Finder) from Jorudan (jorudan.co.jp/english). It's an all-inclusive trip planner that not only covers commuter and subway trains in Tokyo but also intercity rail, bus and air connections throughout Japan. For each trip, Jordan will list the fastest route as well as several alternates. For intercity trips over a few hours the first route will be via air, complete with local connections to and from airports. Train Route Finder is an iMode site but seems to work reasonably well with the mobile browsers of most Western phones.
MobileCrunch — Newest PwnageTool brings iPhone 2.0.2 jailbreaking to OS X
While Windows users got a few days of exclusivity on the firmware 2.0.2 jailbreaking front with the release of QuickPwn, Mac users are now free to get in on the fun.
The iPhone Dev Team released PwnageTool 2.0.3 this morning, which should be able to crack iPhones/iPod Touches running firmware 2.0.2. It comes pre-loaded with the most recent version of the Installer beta (b6) and German language support.
While QuickPwn for Mac is still in development, they’ve released a new version of QuickPwn for Windows which includes some UI enhancements and a few bug fixes. Much love to the iPhone Dev Team.
(Oh, and it should go without mentioning: Even if it weren’t beta software, this is still hacky and relatively risky. Take precautions, follow directions, and don’t blame us if your iPhone melts.)
MobileCrunch — MediaFLO adds three new all-news-all-the-time channels
Qualcomm’s mobile TV arm, MediaFLO has expanded its news coverage, just in time for the U.S. presidential race. The mobile TV service will now include three new 24/7 news channels: CNBC and MSNBC from NBC Universal and FOX News.
MediaFLO said the news services were timed to launch for the political party convention season.
MediaFLO USA’s mobile TV service is available to AT&T subscribers as AT&T Mobile TV and to Verizon Wireless customers as V CAST Mobile TV.
All three channels will offer simulcast programming, airing content at the same time as it appears on cable.
Blue Flavor — Business Communication Throwdown #2: Spec Docs
Estimates, job orders, and other types of spec docs are an important part, and necessary evil, of agency work. They describe our services and frequently serve as binding contracts between us and our clients, so it’s important to spend time ensuring they’re clear, focused, and purposeful.
What’s the Purpose of a Spec Doc?
The main purpose of a spec doc is to describe, in great detail, what kind of work you’re going to do for your client. Anyone who’s worked for an agency knows how tricky achieving this kind of clarity can be, especially when you’re dealing with complicated development work or clients who need a little hand-holding to understand the web design/development process.
Transparency
At Blue Flavor, one of our primary goals is to achieve transparency. This goal infiltrates all phases of our process—right down to spec docs.
To ensure our spec docs are purposeful, clear, and transparent, we spend a lot of time with a magnifying glass, specifying the following:
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Phases: This one seems obvious, but it’s easy to mess up when you’re on auto-pilot. There is a big difference between, say, ‘content production’ and ‘content production strategy’ (one involves the actual production of content and the other involves a strategy for producing content), and we’re sure to point this out in our documentation.
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Deliverables: If we’re going to provide you with photoshop comps, we say it directly. We always end a phase (whether it’s IA, Visual Design, or Templates), with the words “final deliverables will include [number], [x, y, or z]-type files”.
- Rounds of revision: Since rounds of revision effect cost and measure how much input a client will have on a project, we’re always sure to specify them. We also spend time talking to our clients about what a round of revision involves and what kind of responsibility and time commitment it will entail on his/her end.
- Lead assignments: To keep our resourcing and scheduling in check, we almost always dedicate resources to a project well before it has begun. This allows us to plan internally, and sets the expectation that our clients will have an ongoing relationship with a specified member of our team. Similarly, we avoid switching resources mid-project unless we absolutely have to.
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Legal: We hate legal wrangling, but there’s no getting around the fact that the legal language in our spec docs has to be nearly airtight. We’re able to (slightly) adjust our legal language in certain situations, but we generally keep these types of iterations to a bare minimum.
Formatting
We treat spec docs as an extension of our marketing materials and pay close attention to how they’re formatted. We make sure that the look and feel of our spec docs is consistent with our branding and try to treat them as seriously as we do designed client work.
We also focus on describing our work in simple, clear language. And we protect our clients from having to wade through paragraph after paragraph of information, by avoiding paragraphs altogether (bullet points are better). Additionally, unless we’re forced to conform to RFP requirements, we limit our estimates and job orders to just a few pages. And of course, we always include a ‘bottom line’ cost and services break down that someone in a hurry can skip to if they want the big picture, right away.
The Bottomline
Spec docs aren’t the most exciting aspect of agency work, but they’re an important part of communicating well, achieving transparency, and gaining your clients’ trust. Describing your work clearly and in great detail will help clients feel safe that you’ll always tell them exactly what they’ll get, and at what cost.
MobileCrunch — AT&T introduces slightly less ridiculous international data plans for iPhone
What would you rather pay for 200 megabytes of data while roaming international lands: $3993 dollars (204,800 kilobytes at a rate of $0.0195 per kilobyte, AT&Ts pay-per-kb rate), or a lump sum of 200 bucks per month? (Yeah, we know the only rational answer to that is “Screw that, both prices are ridiculous.”)
AT&T today unveiled the details for two new international data packages for iPhone users: $119.99 for 100mb (1.19 per megabyte) or $199.99 for 200mb (0.99 per megabyte). The packages are available while traveling to any of the 61 countries in which AT&T already offers 20 megabyte/50 megabyte smart phone data plan packages.
Sure, it’s cheaper - but it’s still absolutely ridiculous. I will never pay this much for bandwidth, and neither should you. There simply isn’t enough overhead anywhere in the system to justify it; be it AT&T or the international carriers, someone is gouging up the price to the point that it’s absurd. Find a LAN cafe, make friends with a local family, whatever - just don’t pay a friggin’ dollar per megabyte in 2008.
MobileCrunch — Google explains why it dropped GTalk and Bluetooth from first round Android
In its developers’ blog, Dan Morrill, Google’s ‘Developer Advocate’ explained why the company is not including GTalkService and Bluetooth in Android 1.0 SDK. In a nutshell, Google: “plain ran out of time.”
Specifically GTalkService was postponed due to security concerns that the company felt “placed a significant burden on the application developer to avoid security flaws and perform user and relationship management.”
While the Bluetooth was far enough along to be included in beta releases of the SDK, it “needed some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK…Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it.”
Google assures us that Bluetooth headsets will still work with the first round of Android-based handsets and that the company “absolutely intends to support a Bluetooth API in a future release,” though no specifics on when that will be.
Via the Android Developers Blog
Barbara Ballard (Little Springs) — signaling and transport
Netflix is perhaps my favorite use of clever signaling, as well as a nicely understandable analogy. The DVDs are the data. They are sent via mail – the USPS is the traffic channel. The website (and to a lesser degree, email and RSS) is nothing but a signaling channel: a way to indicate what data is needed, queue future data, and confirm sending or receiving of data packets.
A similar method is used when the credit card company calls you to confirm a transaction you are performing in person, or on the computer. The phone call is an out-of-channel data confirmation signal, different from the ordering and payment process you are trying to perform elsewhere. A key use of out-of-channel confirmations is for security purposes – spoofing or intercepting one channel likely does not mean other channels have become vulnerable.
One of the things that has always made mobile telephony neat to me is that it’s inherently multi-channel. The IS-95 standard – the one with which I am most familiar – uses the paging channel to send information about the network, separately and at much lower bandwidth consumption than the traffic channels. (This is why add-on VoIP systems blow your battery so fast; signaling occurs in the traffic channel, so it has to stay up all the time).
One of the more beneficial ones is SMS. We do a lot of projects that use SMS as a signaling method. Much like the Netflix example above, users can receive an SMS with a link. This can then fires off a download, a web address or an already-installed application (usually. A few carriers like Verizon don’t let most messages carry active links).
That last – coupled with Java push messaging, not requiring the user to explicitly accept the SMS – is by far the snazziest. Pretty much every application on my phone, even the “widget engines” sits there dumbly until I fire it up, and often continues to sit there until I explicitly request data. Instead, you can build a push system, and whenever a weather alert is sounded for your area, or the flight is delayed, or a co-worker loads changes to the project plan, a specially-formatted SMS is sent to your phone and the appropriate application opens right to the most relevant screen.
(As an aside, credit card companies are starting to perform a variant of the out-of-channel confirmation signaling over SMS)
Other such practices, extending these principles, will presumably emerge over time. Telemetry data (your position, and other such information) is already being sent to the operators routinely. If this back-channel signal can get used by 3rd party services, they can analyze it and send out messaging based on your current state. Most talk along these lines is for push advertising (visit the Starbucks 1 block over and get $2 off!) but most any mobile service could be enhanced by it. This is the contextually sensitive world I’m waiting for.
©2008 Little Springs Design • See us at Design For Mobile, North America’s first mobile design conference. September 22-24, 2008 — Register by August 1 for early bird discount
Vision Mobile Forum — Application Environments: Order from Chaos
[Flash, Web Runtime, OSX, widgets, Java engines, Python.. the array of software platforms is chaotic to say the least. Research Director Andreas Constantinou digs deeper into application environments, explains who’s what and identifies 5 clear market trends].
Talk in the mobile industry is often peppered with software mega-brands; Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Linux (see earlier article on the 7 centres of gravity). After a long 7 years since the introduction of smarter mobile phones, software brand names like these are making a splash into the mobile phone scene.
But the array of software platforms for mobile phones keeps growing.. and gets more and more entangled by the month, as new platforms surface. Of particular interest are Application Environments (AEs), the software layer which enables developers to develop, deploy and execute their applications on a mobile phone. Here I attempt to shed some light into the darker corners of the AE space, based on a similar presentation I gave at Informa’s Handsets World conference in Berlin in June 2008. For access to the full presentation see the end of the article.
A very diverse range of application environments is available today:
- Java ME, Flash Lite and BREW (and their implementations) are the most well known application environments. Silverlight has made a lot of noise recently as a Flash Lite competitor licensed by Nokia. Microsoft’s .Net compact framework and Red Five Labs’ Net60 are also noteable.
- Google has introduced the much talked about Android operating system which in most part is a well designed application environment for Java SE-like apps.
- decending from the web ancestors, the WebKit core and Nokia’s Web Runtime are also suitable for running lightweight apps with HTML elements and in some cases access to native device APIs.
- on the scripting front, a diversity of scripting engines exists such as Lua, Bling’s ECMAscript engine, Sun’s JavaFX and ActionMonkey (the merge of Mozilla’s Spider Monkey and Adobe’s Tamarin).
- SVG player vendors like Ikivo and Bitflash are actively evolving their software into application environments for custom operator and OEM applications.
- Smartphone operating systems (Symbian/S60/UIQ, Windows Mobile and OSX) are often portrayed as ‘open’, where in reality they offer yet another application environment, which exposes (some) phone internals to application developers.
-Linux-based operating systems like MontaVista, WindRiver, PurpleLabs, Azingo and Access ALP all encompass some form of application environment
- traditional real time operating systems (RTOS) also feature proprietary application environments – including Mentor Graphics’ Nucleus, ENEA’s OSE and lesser known OSes like OpenPlug’s ELIPS. Naturally every tier-1 OEM has multiple, proprietary in-house application environments.
Clearly, this makes for a huge choice of platforms to write mobile software with. So who’s who ? who’s what?
(more…)
MobileCrunch — FCC approves new Hitachi Casio 8-megapixel camera phone
The FCC has approved the latest product of the Hitachi, Casio partnership; an Exilim-branded 8-megapixel camera phone. Unfortunately, just because the FCC approved it doesn’t guarantee the swivel screened, clamshell will actually be launched in the U.S. anytime soon, but still it gives us a reason to hope. As a follow up to the W53CA, this new phone is called the W63CA.
According to the FCC docs, the W63CA is “a cellular phone for the global roaming of the CDMA method of 3G with the Bluetooth function and the FeliCa function sold in Japan.”
We’re guessing the handset features include more than just FeliCa, japan’s contactless payment solution and Bluetooth, most likely the display will feature the same 800 x 480 resolution as its predecessor.
More reason to hope the handset might land in the U.S. is the recent news that Japan hopes to promote its high end handsets in overseas markets.
MobileCrunch — HTC S740 smartphone to Europe in September
Dammit. Finally the perfect HTC phone for a guy like me and it’s only going to be available in Europe. Who knows, maybe it’ll find its way over here someday. The S740 does NOT have a touchscreen (woo hoo!), has a full, tangible, real QWERTY keyboard (woo hoo!), and a real, big boy 12-key number pad (woo hoo!).
Add to that 7.2 Mbps HSDPA data, GPS, 3.2-megapixel camera, microSD expansion (256MB onboard), 2.4-inch QVGA screen, and Windows Mobile 6.1 hidden underneath HTC’s very-pretty UI and you’ve got what’s shaping up to be a nice little phone.
A firm release date isn’t available other than “from September 2008.” That’s, like, next month, though. Full press release after the jump.
HTC EXPANDS MOBILE PHONE PORTFOLIO
WITH INTRODUCTION OF S740
HTC S740 Blends Sophisticated Style, Iconic Design and Impressive Functionality With A 12-key and QWERTY Keyboard for A Variety of Messaging
London, UK - August 26 2008 – HTC Corp, a global leader in mobile phone innovation and design, today announced the introduction of the HTC S740, a slim, compact, and stylish smartphone that provides the perfect combination of a traditional 12-key phone design with HTC’s signature sliding QWERTY keyboard for optimal messaging. The HTC S740 will be available across Europe from September 2008.
"Demand for high-performance, smart, mobile devices continues to see strong growth globally and HTC is well positioned to meet the varying needs of our diverse customer base," commented Dr. Florian Seiche, Vice President of HTC Europe. "The HTC S740 combines a powerful, premium phone with a full slide-out keypad in a compact and sleek form factor. Clearly, one size does not fit all and the S740 will play an important role in expanding our growing portfolio of devices."
The S740 is designed to offer the most flexible and efficient messaging experience on the market. From the design of its 12-key keypad (ideal for super fast one hand messaging) and full QWERTY keyboard (perfect for those who prefer a two handed messaging experience) both input capabilities ensure efficient and accurate typing, as well as support for POP3, IMAP and Exchange push email. Instant messaging (IM) and SMS can also be accessed through the familiar 12-key interface on the front of the phone.
The HTC S740 features the fastest mobile broadband capabilities with a maximum download speed of 7.2 Mbps, up to 18 times faster than 3G. This true mobile broadband experience allows users to leverage the mobile Internet in a variety of ways including browsing to a favourite website, using Google Maps to find a restaurant for lunch and catching up to the minute news, blog posts and video podcasts with the integrated RSS reader.
The S740 follows the sleek design of HTC’s hit consumer handset, the HTC Touch Diamond. This slim smartphone features the same polished black facetted back, a 2.4 inch QVGA display and slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
Key HTC S740 product specifications:
- Size: 116.3 x 43.4 x 16.3 mm
- Weight: 140g with battery
- Networks: WCDMA/HSDPA: 900/2100 MHz for EU and Asia
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
- Maximum speed: UL = 384 kbps; DL = 3.6/7.2 Mbps**
- Operating system: Windows Mobile® 6.1 Standard
- Display: 2.4-inch QVGA screen
- Camera: 3.2 megapixel with fixed focus
- Internal memory: 256 MB flash; 256 MB RAM
- Memory card: microSD™
- WLAN: 802.11b/g
- Bluetooth®: 2.0 with EDR
- GPS: GPS/AGPS
- Interface: HTC ExtUSB™ (mini-USB and audio jack in one; USB 2.0 High-Speed)
- Battery: 1000 mAh
- Talk time: WCDMA: Up to 320 minutes*** / GSM: Up to 380 minutes***
- Standby time: WCDMA: Up to 400 hours*** / GSM: Up to 280 hours***
- Special features: Sliding QWERTY keyboard, FM radio, Google Maps, RSS Hub
- Chipset: Qualcomm® MSM7225, 528 MHz
- Ends -
Note to editors
** Actual HSDPA maximum speed 3.6/7.2 Mbps depends on carrier’s network status
*** Subject to network and phone usage
Simon Judge (Mobile Phone Dev) — Janus
Janus Symbian Engine has just gone open source. Janus allows S60 Flash Lite applications to access phone features that aren’t part of Flash Lite. It does this by setting up a local http server which, in turn, accesses the OS.
Open sourcing will make this technique more attractive to companies who previously might not have wanted to rely on a closed, unknown implementation. It also presents some interesting opportunities to extend the http server to allow Flash Lite to access to further phone or 3rd party features.
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MobHappy (Buckley & Longino) — Visa Trial LBS
When our LBS marketing startup, ZagMe, went bust back in 2001, I spent quite a lot of time analysing why. The tendency in these circumstances is to move on to the next thing, without really learning the lessons. However, I know that one of the issues was that it was way ahead of its time and I didn’t wish to forget all the learning. I also didn’t want a bunch of entrepreneurs making the same mistakes all over again. Not that it hasn’t stopped quite a few in the last 7 years, as it’s hard to learn from others’ mistakes.
ZagMe (if you don’t know) sent special offers to consumers’ mobiles by sms when they were out shopping in a couple of UK malls. We recruited 85,000 people and send about 1500 campaigns, so it was neither trivial nor unsuccessful, in many ways. But there were some issues with the model, one of which was the necessity of recruiting consumers as well as retailers and merchants. For a startup, that’s a little like fighting a war on two fronts and one of the attractions of AdMob all these years later was that we partner with others to get the traffic and focus on the tech and adsales.
In the White Paper I subsequently wrote about the lessons of plucky, pioneering ZagMe (email me for a free copy, if you haven’t read it), one of the better models I identified for this type of activity was for credit card companies:
Credit and credit card providers (both generic and store specific) would be advised to look at the potential of this channel too. Again, they already have relationships with their merchants and a remit to increase spending in those merchants with their products.
The ability, for instance, to target a store card owner with a specific offer in that store, provided the purchase is made with their card, is highly attractive. In addition, a credit-based purchase is more of an impulse-based one and that means goods and services with higher transaction values can be offered.
Fast forward to today and it seems Visa are trialling exactly the same idea, with participating brands like with brands including Macy’s, Marriott, Old Navy, Papa John’s Pizza and Circle K.
I hope they’ve read my White Paper, because it’ll save them a whole bunch of teething problems.
Blue Flavor — Business Communication Throwdown #1: Email
It’s important to take serious stock in the idea that e-mail has replaced the phone, singing telegrams, and in-person meetings as our primary form of business (and general) communication. Let it sink in: 75% of our lives consist of human email machines talking to one another via non-human email machines. Thinking of this makes me feel like we should treat email with nearly the same respect we do face-to-face interactions.
In what I hope will be a three-part series, I’m going to talk about what makes for good — or bad — communication between businesspeople doing business. For now, I’ll start with email, and talk a little about how (I think) it can best be used in a business context. Later, I’ll address spec docs and meetings.
The Problem with E-mail
Bonking on email communication usually involves two errors: length and non-actionability. Most often, the worst emails are extremely long, involved, and luxuriously nuanced. Other times, they consist of unintentionally vicious and offensive one-liners. In both cases, “bad” emails are unclear, and non-actionable — they don’t help further understanding, move a project along, or make people feel calm.
You Are Not My Spammer
It’s important to remember that on the other end of your email is a human. You are also a human, and that recognition should shimmer through your written exchanges. To help you be more human and impart actionable, helpful information, I recommend the following:
- Keep it short and simple: Limiting the length of your emails will help you focus on providing clear, actionable directions. It will also help you avoid over-explaining yourself, which can sometimes set the wrong tone. Mike Davidson says his snappy policy of limiting all emails to five sentences or less has worked great.
- But not too short: Unless you only need to say “Great, thanks!”, try to avoid those vicious one-liners. Be sure you succinctly provide as much info as is necessary to enable your email’s recipient to understand what you’re driving at.
-
Consider tone: You don’t have to obsess over how your writing comes across, but it is important to think about your tone, especially when dealing with clients or managing projects. A thoughtless email that inadvertently offends someone can momentarily derail a project (at worst) or simply cause some unnecessary awkwardness in the project management process.
- Re-read what you’ve written: It’s easy to rattle off bunch of knee-jerk emails and forget to edit them when you’re busy, but re-reading your writing is a really good idea. Even for seemingly unimportant emails (and especially for important ones like project updates), re-reading will save you lots of time in the long run.
- Grammar matters: Good grammar, spelling, and punctuation play a big role in sounding like a bright, competent professional. They also play a big role in clear written communication.
The Bottomline
Email is one of the most important ways we do business, and should be treated with a lot of tlc. Good email exchanges impart actionable, helpful information that is emotionally neutral, succinct, and friendly. Next up: spec docs.
Carnival of the Mobilists — Carnival of the Mobilists #138
This week the Carnival has come home to where it was started in October 2005, where its founder and Papa Midway Master