Mobile Web

Some cast iron confirmation at last that the BlackBerry Storm will be here on Vodafone from the first week of next month. The information's come direct from the horse's mouth via T3 who've been chatting with RIM over in the States.

Android Central got their mechanical pincers on a fresh new T-Mobile Android G1 un-boxing today, and what's the first thing they go and do? Measure it up against an iPhone 3G, of course.

I've been watching, with interest, developers create new applications for the iPhone. Owning one myself - and being knowledgeable in JavaScript - I've been wondering what options there were for creating downloadable JavaScript applications or the iPhone. In doing some research I found a number of solutions, some simpler than others, some requiring more knowledge of Objective-C than others. Before looking at the options I should note that given the requirements of the platform if you're really serious about getting in to iPhone development you should learn Objective-C. None of the options appear to provide the full range of functionality that a normally-written application would.

This diagram shows how Java source code, XML files, and other resources are compiled and packaged into an Android package file. The resulting .apk file is actually a JAR file, you can see its content by typing jar -tvf MyApp.apk.

While Samsung recently released a couple of very successful Windows Mobile Professional touchscreen smartphones, Windows Mobile Italy got the word that the Korean electronic giant is now working on a new Windows Mobile Standard smartphone, the Samsung GT-C6620. While details are pretty sketchy at the moment, it's said that the Samsung GT-C6620 will feature Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard and sports an inbuilt QWERTY thumb keyboard with a similar form factor to the Samsung SGH-i600/BlackJack.

We can look forward to at least one other Android-based mobile phone hitting the market, although not from one of the big makers.

A few weeks ago we released a version of the Flickr site tailored specifically for the iPhone. Developing this site was very different from any other project I've worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow cellular connections.

The first smartphone powered by Google's open source Android operating system - the G1 - was in one sense a big success even before it went on sale this week through Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA mobile unit. According to some reports, 1.5m T-Mobile G1 handsets were preordered by buyers eager to get hold of a device and an operating system that promise to deliver another boost to the consumer smartphone market. It goes on sale in the UK shortly.

For Google, mobile is critical to its information-centric business - which is why it has big ambitions for getting the OS on as many devices as it can.

Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Yet relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/mpayments use. Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective "adoption" or "impact" research. Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community. The paper identifies three crosscutting themes from the broader literature-amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multidimensional definition of trust-each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.

Sony Ericsson is not tying its Xperia premium handset brand to Windows Mobile despite being satisfied with the platform, the product manager for the first Xperia phone has said.

Unveiling The Japanese Mobile Market

There are two interface interface elements of typical mobile user interfaces that does the heavy lifting. That is the Text Input Field and the List. I thought I'd share with you some of the usability considerations that is going into Text Input Fields at mBricks. The keypad is well suited to number entry, but ill suited to text entry. Entering text on a mobile phone is hard, and people tend to avoid it if they can. The less text input you have, the better. But you can't avoid it all together. Text input fields are suitable for plain text, numbers and passwords. For entering specific data types like date, time, number ranges etc. you should not use a text input field. Instead use Multi-field Input or a selection widget like a Calendar.

Analysys said that most of the growth will not happen until after 2010, when the technical and market environment for mobile media and entertainment is expected to improve.

Over at mBricks my colleagues have put a lot of work into the device database (we work with WURFL data and contribute back as well as we can). I took the opportunity to take a closer look at screen size trends. The data I have covers about 400 different device models sold from 2005 to today.

The Apple iPhone is easily the most publicized new mobile device in recent memory. But despite all the discussion about the product, there's relatively little hard information available to the public on its impact. How is it being used? What effect is it having on customers and on the technology industry?