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Monday, May 17, 2010

Carnival of the Mobilists #224

Mark Bridge writes:

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #224. If you’re a regular visitor to The Fonecast and have no idea what the Carnival is, this is a summary of the week’s best blogging about all things mobile. It travels the internet, alighting at a different mobile-related website every week. If you’re a regular visitor to the Carnival and have no idea what The Fonecast is, we produce a weekly podcast for the UK mobile industry (and also can’t resist some online news reporting and opinion-offering).

Right, introductions over, it’s time to delve into this week’s writing. Google’s been hitting the headlines quite a bit in the last few days, most recently with an official admission that selling mobile phones wasn’t really its thing. Ahead of that announcement, Carl Martin of Mobsessed explained why he thought Google's Nexus One 'superphone' had failed.

And it’s not all good news for some of the industry’s other giants. Over at TamsS60 Symbian blog, Tam Hanna suggested that neither Apple nor Nokia cares about application developers.

So let’s get a bit of better news. At Mobyaffiliates, James Coops has been describing the potential of ‘pay per call’ or ‘click to call’ mobile advertising – which seems to be taking off as the market matures.

Continuing with the evolution of the mobile web, Peggy Anne Salz has been talking to Steve Ives of Taptu about a new report that says the growth of touch-optimised mobile web sites is outpacing the growth of mobile applications. It’s now estimated there’ll be over one million touch-friendly mobile sites by the end of the year. You’ll find a podcast of her conversation and a summary of Taptu’s research at MSearchGroove.

So… does there really need to be an app for everything?  A very good question – and one that’s answered by Antoine RJ Wright in his blog post Widgets or Applications.

Slightly off-topic, I’d like to offer a quick hat-tip to Smart Mobs for bringing the 2010 Lift Conference to my attention. These meetings “explore the social implications of new technologies” and are about anticipating the future. Admittedly the content isn’t all specifically mobile-related but some of the video clips are definitely worth watching when you have a few minutes.

That future could well be a world where smartphones work together to solve complex problems, as C. Enrique Ortiz suggests in his post The mobile handset as a platform for solving complex computational problems. The possibilities for combining social or location data on a large scale are almost limitless… although, at the moment, coverage and battery life are not.

Also looking into the future - and the recent past - is Chetan Sharma, who has a quarterly update on the US wireless data market for Q1 2010 (up 22% year-on-year) as well as predicting mobile data trends for the next few months.

Finally, I’ll return to Google. With the Google/Admob deal still being scrutinised by law-makers in the United States, Ajit Jaokar has come to Google’s defence in a post entitled Beware the horse buggy carriage owners' view on innovation. He argues that the FTC should approve the deal between Google and Admob. I’ll keep my opinion to myself on this one… but, because I love a good analogy and a persuasive argument, I’m naming Ajit’s blog as my ‘Post of the week’. (I also gave it bonus points for the horse-related Google ads served on the page when I visited!)

That’s all for this week. Next week’s Carnival will be held at an as-yet-undisclosed location, rather like a warehouse party from the late 1980s. Keep an eye on the CotM Twitter feed or mobili.st for more details.

And, of course, feel free to download our latest podcast at TheFonecast.com – grab it from our RSS feed or find it on iTunes – where you’ll hear me, Iain Graham and James Rosewell talking about pretty much everything relevant to the UK mobile phone industry. This week, from the sound of things, that’s going to include the results of the Interphone health study.

Carnival of the Mobilists

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Opinion Articles

A Sure Signal from Vodafone

Mark Bridge writes:

Today I've been using my mobile phone at home. For many people that’s not an unusual thing to do – but it is for me because, around here, coverage indoors isn’t particularly good. Downstairs it’s previously been non-existent. But this morning everything changed.

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Physician uses cell phones to bring health care to the poor

Natalia Ardanza of voanews.com writes:

In Africa there is another use for mobile phones. Public Health workers in Kenya are now using mobile phones to gather health information from patients in remote areas and upload it to the internet for instant analysis at distant centers. And it is all happening thanks to Dr Joel Selanikio.

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Making dumb touchscreen phones was a smart move

Mark Bridge writes:

I remember a report from last year that said ‘non-smart’ touchscreen handsets – generally those without a popular operating system – would be bad news for mobile operators.

Conventional touchscreen smartphones tended to result in higher-than-average ARPU thanks to their early-adopting tech-loving users, their web-friendly browsers, their email programs, their app-friendly operating systems and their fast 3G connectivity. However, dumber touchscreen devices – those with a manufacturer’s own proprietary OS and perhaps a clumsier browser – could generate 23% less ARPU than smarter phones. So, if touchscreen dumbphones weren’t good for networks… and weren’t really good for consumers either… manufacturers wouldn’t really bother with them. Right?

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"Hello Nexus One" I say...

James Rosewell writes:

Mark’s been encouraging me to write an opinion piece on the Nexus One for the last few days and I’m finally putting fingers to keyboard to share my experiences. It’s taken so long because this phone has so many features. On a positive note I could go into details about the gorgeous screen, the Android Marketplace that will out-sell Apple’s over the next 18 months, the built-in satellite navigation service and the speedy processor that makes everything run smoothly in real time. Or on a less positive note, the touch screen keyboard that sucks (think carefully about this if you’re a heavy texter or emailer, it’s even worse than the original iPhone), the lack of ActiveSync for Calendars and Tasks, no support for WMA music files or the clunky zoom functions on the web browser.

However I’m going to focus on voice dictation. Nexus One is the first phone I’ve used with this feature.

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The Amazon Kindle prepares to fight the Apple iPhone and Tablet

Mark Bridge writes:

Here’s a curious thing. Firstly, Amazon creates the Kindle. It starts selling the Kindle in the USA with a mobile deal that lets users download electronic books and newspapers wherever they are. Then it starts selling the Kindle to us in the UK, although – hang on a moment – it’s not talking about a UK mobile deal. Instead it still seems to be ‘roaming’ from the AT&T network. Next comes the larger-screen Kindle DX – also roaming away when it reaches our shores. And now Amazon is talking about third-party downloadable applications for the Kindle. Yes, a mobile device with downloadable apps. Hold that thought; I’ll be returning to it.

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