The iPhone 3G - UK Edition @ Mobile Messaging 2.0

Mobile 2.0: Addicted to LBS @ Mobile Messaging 2.0

Two Tribes or One World @ Mobile Web Summit Blog

Yell Maps vs Google Maps @ Mobile Web Summit Blog

Developing Suitable Billing Models for Mobile Web 2.0 @ Mobile Web Summit Blog

Most of the morning was spent building the chassis for Ewans mad-but-strangely-brilliant-but-still-crazy Social Media Flight Simulator. I’ve been Moblogging the building process over at moblog:UK and if you head over there you can see the plane take shape from bits of wood to the finished product. Test flights are being conducted as I type this and starting at 7:45 this evening the team will be embarking on a round the world flight.

You can keep tabs on where we’re flying and what activities are happening around the project at the official Blog. There is also a live stream on there so you can watch us if you really want to. I’ll update again through the afternoon, evening and into tomorrow so check back both here and at the other links posted above. Now, what can I find to do next?

The Mobile Web 2.0 Summit takes place next week at the Mayfair Hotel in London. I’ll be at the event on both days courtesy of moblog:UK and Osney Media, so if you’re going to be there drop me an email or leave a comment.

Ahead of next weeks event the irrepressible Alfie Dennen, co-founder of moblog:UK and all round nice guy, has set up Mobile Web Summit Blog where various Mobile Bloggers have been contributing their thoughts on what Mobile Web 2.0 is all about.

There have already been some great posts over the last couple of days and the conversation really has started in the comments. This morning my contribution of Mobile Web thoughts went up - What The iPhone Can Teach Us About Mobile Web 2.0.

So what do you think Mobile Web 2.0 is? What was Mobile Web 1.0? What is the future of the Mobile Web? Head over to the Mobile Web Summit Blog to read the posts and join the conversation.

The Carnival of the Mobilists is halfway through its third year and it comes as no surprise that it’s still going strong after 125 editions. The Mobile Industry has been very lucky to have a huge amount of talented people who are passionate about the industry and share that enthusiasm online. COTM has proven to be a great tool in bringing that passion together and helping spread the word across the Internet.

So here we are at #126 and there is no shortage of excellent entries again this week. I’d like to kick things off with two great posts that recap recent industry events

Over at Wap Review, Dennis fills us in on what happened at the Google I/O event in San Fransisco. He’s put together some great notes covering the Goggle Gears and Android news as well as how good Google are at food.

From San Fransisco we head south to San Diego and the Future in Review 2008. While not strictly a Mobile event, you can’t ignore the topic when discussing the future. Chetan Sharma has been good enough to recap the event over at Always On Real-Time Access for those of us that missed it.

Back to the here and now or more precisely, “Where am I now”. Andrew Grill has taken a look at the latest version of Nokia Maps, particularly the new My Location feature. So how does Nokia Maps now compare against Google Maps and what’s next for Operator independent location? Find out at London Calling.

LBS is a weekly staple for COTM and so is Mobile Web. I’ve worked in the Mobile Industry for a few years now and one thing that we’ve been lacking in the past is statistics. James at the mjelly Blog tackles that issue with a fantastic post that collects different Mobile Web stats sources from Admob to Opera and m:metrics. A must read for anyone interested in the Mobile Web.

Staying with the Mobile Web, Steven Hoober has been thinking about his ideal Mobile Browser. He touches on some great ideas about what the Browsing experience truly is and what it’s lacking. More importantly what can we learn from these short-comings and how can we apply this to the Mobile Web experience? Find out at the always informative Little Springs Design Blog.

And now for the obligatory iPhone post, something I think we’ll be seeing a lot of this month. Dimitris Mavrakis has been anticipating the impending release of an updated, 3G version of the Jesus-Phone and has concentrated on how Apples revenue model has evolved and how it might effect the rest of the industry. Read all about it over at VisionMobile and join the discussion in the comments.

Another great place to get involved in discussions is over at Communities Dominate Brands where the comments are usually lively and insightful. This week Tommi Ahonen discusses the Asian Mobile Ecosystem using some interesting figures from the latest Telcom Asia edition. The Asia/Pac region consists of over 40% of the worlds mobile users so it’s difficult to ignore.

Elsewhere this week Richard Smith talks about the possibility of producing a Mobile Blog in audio format at Mobscure. Peggy Anne Salz takes an in-depth look at Veveo, the Mobile Video Search tool, at MsearchGroove. And to finish things off Sachendra Yadav thinks about some Mobile Social Networking scenarios at TMUM.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Carnival of the Mobilists. All that’s left to do is to announce the Post of the Week – Steven Hoobers piece on Mobile Browsers is my choice but it was pretty tough as there were a few excellent posts. Next week the Carnival rolls into Wap Review with Dennis taking over the hosting duties. Thanks for stopping by.

If you’d like to submit an article for the next edition all you have to do is email it in before Friday. Further instructions can be found at http://mobili.st

However last week a few things finally clicked in place and while I’m still in the process of making some big decisions there’s a few things I’d like to announce.

I am now Mobile Web Evangelist @ Volantis

A very big change at work. After spending just over 2 years as a Mobile Device Technology Engineer, first as a team member and then as team leader, I’ve changed track and have become an Evangelist. The change was a very natural one as my role at Volantis had slowly evolved over the last 18 months and the Mobile Web Evangelist job was the natural next step.

I’ve officially held the title for the last 5 weeks but I probably started doing the job a few weeks before that and had been covering aspects of it for the last year. As part of the role I have taken control of the Volantis Community blog, so head over there to keep up-to-date with my thoughts on the Mobile Web.

I have joined the team at Mobile Messaging 2.0

Not such a big change but a welcome one. Starting this week I’ll be one of the team of bloggers contributing to the MM2 blog and I look forward to joining the conversation they have started there. From a personal perspective it’s nice to be recognised as a blogger and asked to join an industry group blog, especially one that has had some great contributors past and present.

The future of tarekesber.com
For a while now I’ve been thinking about making this blog less mobile-focused but until a few weeks ago whenever I felt like blogging, mobile was all that came to mind. However I now have 2 other places to post my thoughts on the mobile industry so I think this change in focus will start to happen. While I’ll still be posting about Mobile on this site (because it’s connected to me alone and would be useful for posts which might not be suitable for Volantis or MM2), I won’t be limiting myself to that subject.

To keep all my online presences linked together I’ll be doing a weekly post linking to the work I’ve done on MM2 and the Volantis blog. I’ll also incorporate my Twitter updates into the site somewhere as I’ve found I really use it as a blogging substitute these days. I have also resurrected my Moblog at mobloguk so I’ll look to incorporate those images here as well instead of the Flickr stream I use today.

So please bare with me as I play with the site and get into the routine of blogging in three places. I’m hoping there won’t be another Hiatus on here for quite a while.

At the end of last week a couple of people on Twitter were reminiscing about their old Psion devices so I decided to pull an old Revo Plus from my box of devices. The Revo Plus (A whopping 16MB of RAM over the 8MB Revo) was one of my favourite devices from the late 90s and it was truly a fantastic device.

However I’m not going to rave about the old Psion software or the old Psion user-experience (as many have done). What really struck me last week is just how fantastic the Revo form factor was. The folding device had a brilliant spring mechanism to unfold the device so that both the screen and the keyboard were at the perfect angle. The keyboard was also brilliant with enough feedback on key-presses to make it useful for touch-typing (though perhaps a little cramped).

Compared to the N810 form factor it’s a masterpiece of design. I struggle to make use of the N810s keyboard as it just feels fiddly and typing is pretty slow. In fact it’s so bad that I prefer to use the on-screen thumb-board when I don’t have my Bluetooth keyboard. This is especially telling when you use the N810 on a desk, propped up with the built-in stand. the keyboard is totally useless and you have to pick the thing up to enter text.

The only tweak that the Revo form-factor would need is a way of making it’s screen accessible for one-handed use. This could be as simple as sliding the screen back down the keyboard once it has been folded out like the original Revo. HTC have come close to emulating what I’ve described but both devices, the HTC-Shift and HTC-Advantage, were just too large and had the misfortune of running software built by Microsoft.

So I think I’ve decided on my dream device: A Maemo device with a tweaked Psion Revo form-factor. I wouldn’t even care if it was missing a GSM chip slot. Hard part over, now to get in contact with Nokia and get them to build the thing…

Christopher Penns idea of “Arrive Smarter” by making sure you carry useful audio and video content when you travel got me motivated to see what sort of content was out there for Mobile developers and enthusiasts. We’re lucky enough to have free access to loads of free educational content through podcasts and videocasts and these days most of us carry technology around with us that can play these. So what is out there for the people interested in Mobile?

Surprisingly the picking were pretty thin. There are a bunch of good Mobile Podcasts which are run by fan sites and the like but these are usually news and opinion about the latest handsets rather than about technology and development. I also found a couple of relevant Podcasts whose production had clearly been given up. Here are the few interesting Podcasts that I found:

Nokia Tech Talks:- A good group of talks produced by Nokia and covering a wide range of Mobile-related topics from WiMax to NFC (Near-Field Communication)

Google Tech Talks:- Keeping up to date with the internal Tech Talks that Googlers get access to. Covers a wide variety of Tech topics so search for ‘Mobile’ you aren’t interested in anything else

Voices of S60:- Another Nokia production this time dedicated to the Symbian S60 smartphone platform. Covering all aspects of S60 from Developing for the platform to covering the latest applications.

MobileMondayLondon:- A group of recordings from MobileMondayLondon sessions up until June ‘07 when they stopped recording them. There are a lot of gems in these archives so worth a listen.

Channel9:- Videos and Podcasts tagged ‘Windows Mobile’ on Microsofts Developer Network Discussion Forums. All content is specific to WinMo but still manages to be pretty interesting.

Google Developer Podcast:- Another offering from Google which again is not dedicated to Mobile but does contain a lot of relevant content. No search feature here so subscribe and download the episodes that sound intriguing.

IT Conversations:- This one is a bit of a cheat as it has hardly any Mobile related content. I throw it in here because the service has so many excellent talks to enjoy. Again subscribe and download whatever sounds interesting, you won’t be disappointed.

So that’s the best I could find out there, which is unfortunate. I was expecting to find a few more podcasts related to developing for various platforms like S60, WinMo and even the iPhone. I was also disappointed that there wasn’t anything out there dedicated to the Mobile Web. So perhaps we’re looking at a gap in the market when it comes to content dedicated to Mobile Technology. Until it’s filled, enjoy the above resources and let me know if you find any more and I’ll add them to this list

So last night Jaiku tells me “Mowser is Dead” with a link to Russell Beatties latest blog post. A year after it was first made public Mowser shut it’s doors. The service will remain live for now but development has stopped and there is no guarantee that it’ll be up in the future.

Mowsers demise is news in itself, but it seems Russ didn’t want to leave without a parting gift to the Mobile Community. “The Mobile Web is Dead” is the best way to generally summarise the points he makes in Mowsers farewell post, and it seems to have had the effect I think he was hoping for.

Just as the iPhone got people talking about the future of Mobile, Russells bold proclamation has got everyone talking about the future of the Mobile Web. Some agree with him, many don’t but the numbers don’t matter because the conversation has just been jump-started again.

Already I’ve been seeing loads of Tweets about the Mobile Web, most of the posts I’ve linked to have active debates going on in their comments and people who might not have normally cared are starting to take notice.

So thanks Russell for giving the conversation a good kick. I’ll miss Mowser, especially as it powered the mobile version of this blog. Russ and Mike are both fantastic, talented guys and I have no doubt that they’ll both land on their feet (and if you’ve got any opportunities available, get in contact with them). Mike is sorting out the Mowser fire-sale so if you’re interested in the technology behind the service, get in contact with him.