Jason Delport's Mobile Observations

Samsung

2009-11-11T11:44:11Z

Samsung continue to amaze me. I have often mentioned how impressed I am at the astounding variety of devices they are able to deliver to the market each year (way more than any other manufacturer). Currently they support numerous operating systems (Windows Mobile, their own proprietary feature phone OS, Android, Symbian and LiMo) and two application runtimes (W3C compliant web Widgets and Java ME). They also just announced their own OS called Bada. And, of course, then there's the ever growing market share.

What I would really like to know is how they manage all of this internally... I know the company is divided up into organisations (you can figure these out from the meta data in their UA Profile documents) but that still doesn't explain the seeming easy with which they are able to knock out devices with top notch hardware and software on such a regular basis. I'm sure Samsung are a famous technical management case study in the making.

Android Devices

2009-11-09T11:42:38Z

These are all the Android devices we have captured on our provisioning platform. Not bad after only one year!

The Death of the 12 Key Input Paradigm on Mobile Devices

2009-10-21T12:23:37Z

For years I looked at the US mobile phone industry and wondered about it's fascination with having QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones. I thought that because the US was behind Europe in regards to mobile technology, I'm talking 5 years ago here, that maybe US mobile users just didn't yet understand the benefits of the 12 key input paradigm that was/is dominant in Europe. How wrong I was!

I have had a QWERTY keyboard on my G1 for almost a year now and I won't ever go back to the 12 key input paradigm. It's pretty much dead to me. As phones have become more powerful, better connected and we need to input more data more often the 12 key input paradigm becomes a disadvantage as it's just not conducive to this type of usage. Future mobile devices must take this into account if they are too succeed. Last week I went and had a look at the Motorola DEXT/CLIQ and although it has a full QWERTY hardware keyboard I didn't like the keypad ergonomics and rejected the device immediately. Data input has become that important to me!

And I'm still not sure about whether I want to own a device that has only got a software keyboard. I get along just fine with my iPod Touch software keyboard (especially when using my thumbs in landscape mode) but ultimately I'm quicker and feel more comfortable with a hardware keypad. Either way the current 12 key input paradigm is dead because future mobile devices will need to allow users to input data as efficiently as possible.

Android Crapware

2009-10-12T13:52:56Z

Here it comes... a mountain of pre-installed crapware on Android devices! Motorola have announced a range of "signature" applications for their first Android devices.

Motorola, and all the other device manufacturers, are excluded from any control over, or profits from, the Android Market which puts them in a very precarious position at the bottom of a very competitive hardware food chain. To overcome this lack of control the manufactures are adding a software user interface layer on top of the underlying Android OS (Motorola's Blur, HTC's Sense, Samsung's TouchWiz and Sony Ericsson's Rachael).

We're told this is to benefit the consumer with a better user experience than competing products (software differentiation). That may certainly be part of the consideration for doing it but it's not their primary raison d'�tre. None of these companies want to be 'just another hardware company' because they know that's ultimately a very dangerous place to be (hardware commodification) so they are building these user interface layers in an attempt to move themselves into more of a service delivery role.

I can completely understand why the device manufactures would want to do this but I have a sneaking suspicion that ultimately this strategy isn't going to work for them. On pre-installed desktop computers with proprietary operating systems the manufacture can supply customised installation disks so that even if the user re-installs the OS they still get their craplets installed along with the vanilla OS. Android, on the other hand, is an open source operating system and we already see modders like Cyanogen offering easy to install high performance vanilla builds of the latest Android OS. The next few years is going to be a hard time for device manufactures as they try to find a place for themselves in the new food chain and ultimately it may be the consumer who suffers.

The Snoop: Newest Features

2009-10-02T14:28:42Z

I'm going to put out a new iteration of my Android Twitter application this weekend. It includes a redesigned User screen and the ability to see a user's friends and followers for the first time. Account features coming next.

It's About Control

2009-09-28T15:00:34Z

I was reading Tom Hume's account of the Over The Air event and this quote jumped out at me.

"When I asked how Google get away with not doing this (comparing in my head the publish-instantly process the Android Marketplace offers to the proud proclamation from a Vodafone gentleman earlier that they could launch apps in 10 days), the answer James gave was customer support costs: that the operator is the one fielding this particular bugbear, and who needs to cover themselves."

I just don't buy the "customer support costs" argument at all. The first argument against self-certification was that it would result in an endless plague of viruses and malware. That, of course, didn't come to pass and so the argument was refined and has become a little bit more subtle but at the end of the day its still equally lacking in logic.

A prominent 'Terms and Conditions' / 'No Support' warning notice on the application store would make users aware that the network operator wasn't responsible for the applications in the store or the consequences of downloading them. I also think the costs of testing all these applications must be pretty huge and must surely be equivalent to, or more than, any support costs associated with helping users who have installed dodgy applications (and separate from the costs of helping users with certified / sanctioned applications). And anyway, most users can install software onto their phones without going via a walled market place. I'm pretty certain a proper cost-benefit analysis would favour a less rigorously controlled mobile application market place.

Deciding what applications appear in application market places is about maintaining control of the network, of the device, of the developer and of the user. I really wish the network operators would admit this instead of giving us silly excuses and then maybe we could start to trust them.

Change is in the Air

2009-09-28T11:50:25Z

GigaOm has some great stats about the Q2 mobile sales figures for Western Europe. I can see this change happening on a daily basis... friends who originally considered the iPhone "a [insert derogatory adjective here] phone" are now treating it with a lot less scepticism as it spreads beyond the alpha users who are usually first to embrace new technologies.

And now with the iPhone hitting Orange in the UK (and therefore T-Mobile also as a result of the merger?) I believe that this acceptance will spread even more widely and users, in general, will become a lot more aware of differences between handsets (features, application support, browser, usability & interface) and actively seek out more user friendly / high end devices like the iPhone. Interesting times ahead!

The Twitter Snoop: Next Steps

2009-09-28T10:48:04Z

I added a new feature to my Android Twitter application last week. In the list of trends the user can now long click a trend name which launches a dialog that allows the user to search the mobile versions of Google and Wikipedia.

Over the weekend I was thinking about ways of extending the application in new and unique ways that separated my application from the incumbents like Twidroid and TwitterRide. One possibility is to add an encryption feature as I did with my first Android application. Whatever way I choose to extend the application it's definitely going to involve the new Twitter account features that are about to be introduced.

Full Ecosystems beat Autonomous Execution Environments?

2009-09-14T14:03:59Z

Sprint have recently announced that they will be implementing Qualcomm's BREW on some of their mobile devices. Sprint were one of the few CDMA based network operators to choose Java ME over BREW and even went so far as to invest heavily in their own Java application execution platform so this is a surprise move. In my eyes this is another nail in the coffin of Java ME in its current configuration.

While BREW has many shortcomings compared to Java ME there is one factor which really distinguishes it and that is the fact that it provides an entire end-to-end architecture with a built in application distribution mechanism (aka "application store"). At the moment it seems that solitary application execution environments just can't complete with an full end-to-end infrastructure. These ecosystems whose features include an SDK, application execution environment, search and discovery mechanism, robust deployment and provisioning solution, payment mechanisms, fragmentation management and administration are far more appealing to network operators than investing in relatively autonomous 3rd party application execution environments like Flash Lite, Java ME, .net CF, Python etc.

Basically if I was a JVM vendor I would be working hard to extend the on device Java Application Manager to become a sophisticated application distribution environment which includes the requisite backend infrastructure necessary to offer a full ecosystem. This would also provide large software vendors like Aromasoft, Aplix and Esmertec with new revenue streams beyond simply selling JVMs. Thoughts?

Update: I wrote something similar to this at the start of the year.

The Twitter Snoop

2009-09-10T16:40:36Z

I've deployed my Twitter application to the Android market (UK only at the moment) with the name 'The Twitter Snoop'. Check it out!

Sony Ericsson Flash Lite UI Components

2009-09-07T12:01:10Z

Sony Ericsson's Project Capuchin doesn't get that much attention from the developer community but I think it's an interesting initiative. It combines the underlying power of Java ME with the front end flexibility of Flash. There are plenty of Java ME GUI frameworks out there these days but they still require the interface to be built by Java programmers which is problematic for a number of reasons.

Project Capuchin is mandated across all new SE feature phones so it looks like it's a fairly stable application execution environment. They even provide a full set of UI components (recently updated) to help interface designers get started. The only real problem with this project is that it's specific to Sony Ericsson devices which is very limiting in terms of reach and relevance in a time when Sony Ericsson's fortunes are on the decline.

Kinetic Scrolling in Java ME

2009-09-04T15:42:25Z

Recently Steve had to write a list component with kinetic scrolling for Java ME (J2ME) touch screen devices. The results are pretty good!