Tablets at my local Staples

I happened to be in my local Staples the other night, and noted down the plethora of tablets they had on display:

Samsung Galaxy 10.1
Mororola Xoom
Acer 10"
Dell Streak 7"
Blackberry Playbook

There were a couple of readers sneaking in as well:
Kindle
Nook

Seems like just yesterday this category didn't even exist.

Mobile Website Usability

Ok, you’ve gone to the trouble of sniffing my browser to see I’m coming from a smartphone. You’ve spent good money building a mobile site or experience separate from your full web site. That’s great and I commend you. However, if what I need isn’t present in the feature set or content of the mobile view, and you don’t provide a way for me to view your full site, then all that money was wasted, sorry. Take a look at Google or Facebook (which allow you to switch back and forth).

SPB TV – a working IPTV mobile solution?

http://tv.spb.com
http://www.spb.com/pocketpc-software/tv/
http://www.spb.com/android-software/tv/
http://www.spb.com/iphone-software/tv/
http://www.spb.com/blackberry-software/tv/
http://www.spb.com/symbian-software/tv/
http://www.spb.com/webos-software/tv/

http://www.spb.com/press/pressreleases/2010/spb-tv-reaches-the-2-million-users-milestone-and-comes-to-ipads.html

As a long-time Windows Mobile fan I’m familiar with SPB. They were one of two or three suites of software that really made Windows Mobile useful.

They created this SPB TV for Windows Mobile about the time that I transitioned away to the iPhone, so I never did more than play with it a little. I remember being unimpressed with the channel selection.

However they have parlayed this into something pretty amazing, a cross-platform mobile IPTV solution, if I understand things right.

They have Windows Mobile, iPhone (/iPad), Android, Blackberry, WebOS, and Symbian clients! There’s a WAP version available for other mobile platforms. They have 2 million users now, and over 150 channels.

Even though the clients appear to be free on most platforms, you only get a couple of channels to try out. There’s actually a roughly $10 charge as best I can tell, to get full functionality and content. However there are no recurring subscription fees, instead there are ads.

I’m just getting started in trying it out, so I can’t comment much on quality yet. On Android over wifi I only seem to get a minute or two before the video dies or buffers, but that may not be an app problem.

As I understand they are working on carrier agreements as well, which could play heavily into the long-term viability of the solution.

Apple, Google, Microsoft leverage vertical mobile-cloud integration

The 3-horse smartphone race is on. Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Windows Phone are duking it out for market share and mindshare. They each are amazing advances in their own way, and have plenty of features in common and differentiators as well.

One of the cool features of the latest generation of smartphones that has really resonated with people because of it’s utility and ease of use, is backend cloud integration, which has practically replaced the old clunky desktop pim (personal information management – contacts/calendar/tasks) sync functionality. Apple has the MobileMe platform, Google has all their cloud web services that have blossomed from Gmail, and Microsoft has their Live services.

What is it going to take to pull ahead in the next leg of the race? Something big. As I mentioned this vertical cloud integration to backend web services is something big. They all have it. And each one also allows a certain amount of limited capability for other vendors’ services as well. For instance I don’t have MobileMe, and instead use Nuevasync to sync contacts and calendars with Google’s backend over IMAP and Exchange.

But what none of them have, is great integration no matter what the backend platform. So if you are a Google services customer, but you want to use Windows phone, you are penalized with reduced functionality and convenience. If you are a MobileMe customer who wants to try an Android phone, you’re not going to get the full experience. And you can get your Live mail on the iPhone, but you’re going to have pay a 3rd party or hack to get your contacts or calendar.

Now we can easily guess why these 3 companies would want to tie smartphone users to their web pim offerings. These backend services are very sticky. If you got Hotmail a decade ago, you’re probably still using it, and naturally your contacts and calendar ended up in Live. Gmail customers use Google Contacts and Calendar, and Reader, etc. MobileMe has plenty of loyal diehard fans, even though Apple charges $100/yr for what the other services give away. People change cell companies all the time, as evidenced by the “churn” statistics we always hear about. But if these companies can get us hooked onto their services, we are much more likely to stay with their phone platform, because of the extra integration features.

I think the next leader though, is going to have to be welcoming to customers of other web services, rather than penalizing. In the same way as Google has garnered  massive gains lately by supporting multiple carriers and multiple equipment vendors, the big 3 need to equally support multiple backend services well. Or perhaps even offer ala carte – email from Hotmail, contacts from Google, calendar from MobileMe, etc.

(As a footnote I’d like to pre-respond to the guaranteed-to-come accusation that I’ve mistakenly left Palm or Blackberry or Symbian out of the race. Yes it’s just my opinion, and I’ll be glad to change it when I feel it’s warranted.)

Skype on Verizon

 

• http://www.pcworld.com/article/189450/verizon_users_to_get_skype_in_late_march.html
• http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/16/verizon-to-allow-unlimited-skype-calling-over-3g-starting-next-m/
• http://gigaom.com/2010/02/16/skype-verizon-iphone/
• http://gigaom.com/2010/02/19/skype-verizon-deal-more-details/
• http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/draft/2010-02-21

I don’t get it. One thing I don’t see mentioned here but is mentioned on VZW’s site is that there is a $35 one time fee involved? Why would I pay that to get Skype when it’s not really Skype? The calls are going over VZW’s voice network, not the data network. The whole thing seems highly suspicious to me, not like the iPhone Skype deal which is cool – I can use Skype when I have wifi, which is really neat in places where I have wifi but not ATT service, such as, oh, I dunno, my house!

Disney World Mobile Apps and Sites

After research, I’ve purchased two apps for this year’s trip to Disney World.

One is eTicket, for the iPhone, which has been created by two of the key Disney World websites, WDWInfo and Disboards.

The other is “Walt Disney World Maps Box Set UPinPoint LLC” for Android, which basically is just a box set of the UPinPoint maps I already have for the iPhone. They are great, lots of info and GPS enabled, very similar to the handout you get at the gate of each park, but with a little dot to show where you are, and lots of pop-up info.

I still have some more research to do on mobile websites, but here is one I expect to depend on a lot:

Touring Plans - Lines
http://m.touringplans.com   

 

Google is now a cell-phone vendor

https://www.google.com/phone/choose?locale=en_US&s7e=

With the advent of the Nexus, Google now sells it’s own (and other’s) cellphones from it’s website.

Twit.tv / MediaFly app – iPhone versus Droid

I enjoy listening to Leo LaPorte’s tech podcasts (http://twit.tv). With his growth the last year he is looking to expand beyond iTunes distribution, and also make the leap from audio to video (not to mention making the leap from the internet to your TV via the Roku player).

So he has teamed up with MediaFly (http://mediafly.com) to distribute for him. The hows and whys are more complicated than I want to get into here.

I used to listen to the podcasts in the Zune software on my laptop when home, and on my Zune player when out (via the generic RSS feed functionality built into Zune).

Now there are MediaFly “apps” for both the iPhone and the Droid for “accessing” (streaming/downloading) the podcasts. I am using them both, and I can’t help comparing and contrasting.

Let me cut to the chase.. they both are very young, but right now the Droid app is more useful to me. Let me soften that by saying I realize how fortunate we are to be living in an age when we see advances like this – streaming and downloading mobile audio and video without having to sync. MediaFly is getting this attention because they are breaking ground, and we are the winners either way.

Both apps have drawbacks around the GUI, with the iPhone one being very busy-looking, with mystery pauses in navigation, and controls that don’t act like standard iPhone controls.

The Droid app is very touchy – over and over I lose where I am or exit the app altogether just in handling the cell phone normally.

There are a couple of issues they have in common – for instance the inability to move around in the media. I often want to back up 30 seconds or one minute in an hour-long audio or video, and that is impossible with these clients, where the Zune made it dead-simple. They need to add buttons to the slider already present. Also, if you exit the clients, most likely they will not remember the media you were playing, where you were in it, etc.

Now for my reasons for preferring the Android client at the moment - (1) Twit video – android app has it, iPhone app does not, and (2)the GUI is a little cleaner.

Actually to really make this fair I should download the full beta Android client, because the one I have is just for the Twit network of shows.

MediaFly - http://mediafly.com/

iPhone app - http://www.mediafly.com/DigitalLifestyle#SelectedDevice

Android app - http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mediafly-android-video-twit-zzBt.aspx

Level Mobile Playing Field?

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html

This is in reference to Google Apps (the rebranding of Google's products for your own domain). In this documentation the iPhone and Blackberry are referenced explicitly - however Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian somehow avoid being mentioned by name.

Another post on Windows Mobile

I want to emphasize that it is not one of these things that is pushing me over the edge finally this week, it is all 4 taken together.

First take the iphone. Yes it sucks in a million ways that will never be fixed. But the fact that Apple walked in and stole the show with a device that made everyone who ever used a pda slobber, with no multi-year ramp-up, is just amazing. Look at Microsoft with the Zune - basically the same circumstance in a different market. Did they walk into the mature mp3 player market and stand the thing on it's head? No way. The Zune is nice - I hate iPods (buggy) and iTunes (slow in Windows), and have 3 Zunes and use the Zune software to play music and download podcasts. But it's no iPhone. It's merely a good copy of the current state of the market.

Secondly, the latest videos of the first shipping Android phone, the ones where the Android team points out their favorite features, are awesome. I totally can't believe this is a cooperative open venture, and they put together a phone that leapfrogs everything else available in the industry except perhaps the iphone, in like a year. Yes I know it was seeded by other work, but c'mon - imagine the number of meetings they had to have. Imagine That alone was a decade gone I figured. I didn't expect it to do anything but barely turn on and make a phone call. But it rocks. This is the first thing ever that makes me want to take on Java.

Third, I have to admit I was shaken by the sad news that my current Windows Mobile phone, the Samsung SCH-i760, which in my opinion is the only WM phone on the market that comes close to getting it right in terms of feature set (except for the need to use two hands on the keyboard), and which took so long to get through Vzw's testing process, and which just got WM 6.1, has been yanked from sale by Verizon Wireless. Supposedly there is a software issue, but I predict it will never be back. And that means a shrinking pool of people interested in the phone, working on fixes or add-ons, influencing vendors, and providing help in the forums. It's stillborn now. Ugh.

Finally, we have the announcement from Microsoft, that Windows Mobile 7 will be delayed. And the rumor that it is due to internal bickering about whether to scrap and start over, or try to continue with the WM platform. Microsoft folks! You just threw away the most important platform for perhaps the next two decades. Idiots! You stole the market from Palm and had it sewn up, to do with what you would. And you sat and did nothing for years and years. No innovation. Barely rev'd the platform, adding the minimum of stability and ease of use. You deserve to lose this, and it may cost you everything. I am so frustrated, because I have waited every day of each one of those years for you to get off your butt and kick butt.

In conclusion, I will be buying an iPhone, and probably an Android phone, as soon as possible. That will annoy me for many reasons, mostly because while I think Verizon Wireless sucks (they are always part of the problem rather than part of the solution) they clearly suck the best. But there too, I think as a consumer they had my business to lose. Why isn't it a Vzw iPhone, or Vzw Android phone? Oh well. The bottom line is the platform is moving forward (read innovation), which is all I care about. Market forces (including me the consumer) will leave the also-rans in the dust where they will be forgotten.

Windows Mobile 7 delayed

http://windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthurrott/article/articleid/100384/amid-internal-turmoil-microsoft-delays-windows-mobile-7.html

Paul Thurrott confirms yesterday's rumors that Windows Mobile 7 is delayed. Pair this with the bad news about the i760 yesterday, and the iPhone and Android start to look like good bets to pown the mobile world. In my opinion, Windows Mobile 7 should have already have been in my hand! Now it could easily be 3 years before they deliver me last year's technology. That so sucks.

i760 recalled

http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/samsung-sch-i760/117465-can-t-find-i760-verizon-site.html

http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=37877

It appears the beloved Samsung SCH-i760 has been recalled (removed from their list of phones on sale) by Verizon Wireless, due to some kind of software problem related to connections. Now I don't have a problem with connections, but getting this news on the same day as seeing all the videos on the Google Android T-Mobile G1 is quite deflating. Perhaps Microsoft is throwing away the mobile race, and it will iPhone versus Android. Sure looks that way..