android – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

Here Be Morons

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend. U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence. You … Continue reading “Here Be Morons”

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend.

U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence.

You can interpret these results in several ways. My own recollection of using Symbian was that every aspect of it, from specially optimised mobile sites to expensive apps was that there were ads everywhere. It was an advertisers dream – companies would let you put ads on every screen, cluttering an already ugly interface and squeezing out the actual content.

The Symbian Foundation didn’t really encourage anything better and it is really confusing that a company like Nokia would bet the farm on something so primitive and evidently so unsuited to modern markets.

But I guess the reality is much simpler. When you’ve got iPhones, Android, Palm and Blackberry out there, staying on Symbian just indicates a lack of awareness. People still on Symbian in 2010 are morons.

Google attempting to stem Android fragmentation

John Gruber writes: Google has been iterating quickly, but the problem is that carriers aren’t interested in any updates at all for phones they’ve already sold. The carriers have learned nothing from the iPhone, or, maybe they just don’t care about Android as a platform. They don’t care because they didn’t have to pay for … Continue reading “Google attempting to stem Android fragmentation”

John Gruber writes:

Google has been iterating quickly, but the problem is that carriers aren’t interested in any updates at all for phones they’ve already sold. The carriers have learned nothing from the iPhone, or, maybe they just don’t care about Android as a platform.

They don’t care because they didn’t have to pay for it. They’ve got low commitment to the platform, low loyalty to the OS vendor and now reckon they can switch between Symbian, Windows Mobile/Phone and Android at will (not to forget whatever hell Nokia is about to consign maemo to).

He continues:

So, in the end, OS version fragmentation may be less of a problem for Android users — two years from now. Current Android users, except for Nexus One owners, are shit out of luck. Hope you like Android 1.6 if that’s what your phone shipped with.

To be honest, this isn’t a tremendously big problem. Android has bigger fish to fry than satisfying a few early adopters, a large percentage of which either got the phone for free or went Android because it didn’t have an Apple on it.

Apple is not competing fairly…

For the last three years, the tech world has been agog with mobile, mobile, mobile. Apple with the release of the iPhone kicked a hole in the market and then occupied that hole. While many pundits point to Nokia shipping more smartphones and the upstart Android gaining market share, these pundits ignore the rampant fragmentation in both the Nokia- and pre-Nokia Symbian operating system market and the growing fragmentation in the Android market. Nokia needs to kill off the notion they are doing well in this market – there’s no great success in being the master of a dying market of consumers who don’t buy anything. Symbian was economically inactive in apps beforehand and it’s just floundering now. They need to set better standards – look to their N900 handheld as the future. And Google needs to focus on Android fragmentation as a priority – we’ve seen this on Linux before but the differences in hardware, software versions and carrier ‘additions’ is creating a mess of a single unified idea.

Sadly though for both of these companies, Apple is not competing fairly. While Nokia and Google among others scramble to regain mindshare in the smartphone market, Apple has surreptitiously started to hack out a niche for themselves in the portable gaming market. The console gaming market is wholly owned by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but until recently the portable market was solely occupied by Nintendo and Sony. While Microsoft will be releasing a compelling product linked to their Windows Phone products, Apple has already carved a niche in the portable gaming market – see this report from Flurry.

You can see that Apple now commands more portable gaming market share than Sony (and anecdotal evidence suggests that games with other handhelds are just carrying their iPhones for the quick portable gaming fix).

And in two weeks, iPad will cause another bloodbath.

Web share factoids…

Idiots ahoy at Electronista Google’s mobile and desktop web browsers had their best performance ever in December, NetApplications says in its latest study. Although Android still trails the iPhone in absolute share of the web with just 0.05 percent versus Apple’s 0.44 percent, it grew a much faster 54.8 percent versus just 20.1 percent for … Continue reading “Web share factoids…”

Idiots ahoy at Electronista

Google’s mobile and desktop web browsers had their best performance ever in December, NetApplications says in its latest study. Although Android still trails the iPhone in absolute share of the web with just 0.05 percent versus Apple’s 0.44 percent, it grew a much faster 54.8 percent versus just 20.1 percent for Apple’s platform. The BlackBerry too had a better month at 22.2 percent growth while the only major platforms below them are Symbian (19 percent growth) and Java ME (15.6 percent).

Let’s keep the numbers simple and examine these factoids.

Let’s say that for every 0.01% of absolute web share, it equals 1 million devices. That puts Apple at 44 million and Android at 5 million. Apple’s iPhone OS devices are sitting around the 50 million mark so that’s not a bad estimate.

Android’s web use grew 54.8% whereas Apple only grew 20.1%. So Androids web browsing share grew 54% to the current level (of 0.05%) and iPhone’s share grew 20% to the current level (of 0.44%). So using the figures above (for devices), we’re guessing that Android sold about 1.75 million devices. And Apple sold about 8 million. In the same period.

That’s great growth, Android. Not.

All of these numbers are bollocks anyway. I reckon Android phone browse more than most due to the usability of the web combined with the lack of decent native apps. It’s therefore my opinion that even though this article is overstating Android considerably, it’s probably doubly overstated.

Ten Apps I Want…

Ten Apps that I’d like to see on the iPhone. I’m also suggesting names for these. To be honest, I’d like to pull together a team to build them but that seems to be a lot more difficult than I’d hoped. If anyone wants to call me and work with me to pull together funding, … Continue reading “Ten Apps I Want…”

MeetFreak/TrendSeek
Helps people find each other by abusing Twitter trends and trying to suck Location Data in there. This is a lot easier now that Twitter is supporting GeoTags. So, let us see a map of trends? People are talking about #RED, where are they talking about it? Let us see every tweet with the Trend on a map that we can see. Then you’re more likely to be able to congregate with people
Multitool
Uses the five tabs along the bottom to give you a view of
1) IMAP account
2) Web Browser
3) Twitter
4) Mapper
5) Converter/Calculator
Redirects all http:// and mailto: seen inside the app, to the app and not outside so doesn’t launch Safari or Mail. A lot of this is kinda redundant when we have decent clients for much of this inside Safari. But some offline caching is a big deal for those of us who tend not to be inside the city centres where you can get decent 3G.

Verifriend, Reputato
This is an online reputation profiler. Yes, it’s going to be a popularity contest but essentially it all depends on trust. Adding your rating to someone is not something to be done lightly. In some ways it needs to be a trust engine – and it can be as simple as giving a trust rating to a new friend based on the trust ratings that others have provided. There needs to be some sort of anonymity (maybe like the reviews process on iTunes you only get a rating when a certain number of reviews have been processed) but unlike FaceBook it should provide that extra level of security.

Director
Allows me to text directions to someone who asks me on the street. In plain text. Or Bluetooth them. Or even just email them. Or something. Or magic them straight into their brain. Any of these things would be fine. Just so I don’t have to try to explain the directions to someone.
REDACTED
This one was so good, someone asked me to take it down. 🙂 Suffice to say it was AR related.
Tweet16
Twitter lists are all very well but they don’t solve th problem I have. I follow about 1000 people but there’s probably less than 150 or so (that magic Dunbar number) whom I regularly interact with. There’s probably only 10% of those whom I really want to pay attention to. I’d like a Twitter client that shows me my timeline, my mentions, my DMs and finally, my Tweet16 – 16 people from whom I see all of their public messages rather than not seeing the ones who are at people I don’t follow.
Plannity
So, I fill in all of this information into my calendar and that includes times and dates and, most crucially, locations of my meetings. Why hasn’t there been a social app that runs via Exchange/Outlook, on iPhone, iCal and other formats which takes this location information, munges it up with my social network and allows me to see when I can grab lunch with friends or when I’m in the same town as someone I like. I think that Tripit is meant to do this and today I read about Plancast which promises to do something about this. But this is a hot topic, guys. Location is the big thing for 2009/2010.
Echelon (or TwitterBug)
I mentioned this a week ago – a cool idea for Twitter and other social networks which again uses location. So – get this – all of your messages are geotagged, or if not now, a lot of them will be. So, Echelon ‘listens’ in for anything said in an area rather than things said about trends or by your friends. The default set is seeing tweets which are in your immediate area – the killer part though is being able to drop a ‘bug’ (for bug, read ‘pin’) on a map and be able to sample the Tweets going through that area and the surrounding radius. So, in effect, you’ve dropped a Twitter Bug somewhere and you’re able to listen in. The Freemium version could monitor one location, the PayFor version could monitor several. ( ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK-USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States)

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
Perfect for the Sandbagger or Spook among us, this is a recently published book derived from an official manual. As most of them are small pictorial sessions, they’re ripe for viewing on the iPhone, turning the iPhone into the ultimate tradecraft manual. You can see clips from the book on Gizmodo. So scan it, make it searchable so you can quickly flick through and find the perfect tradecraft for the perfect moment.
Pollenator
For public debates, a simple push notification which opens the app and gives you a simple couple of choices accompanied with text, audio or video. Push one, it’s recorded (with time, place, ID, IMEI and whatever other data you have collected and after a certain amount of time, the poll times out. Poll answers should be “Yes”, “No” or “Whatever”. If you choose to ignore or “Whatever” it, then you’re counted as an abstention. I’d love to see this app running and see visualisations of what it could bring in terms of demographics, location and other meta data. I sat with Stuart and Phil (and with PJ on the end of a Skype call) one evening and we mocked up some stuff for this based on Stuarts idea of “Pirates versus Ninjas”. But the actual implementation could have led to entirely other applications.

Polls widget from Google Wave

I’d love to see all of these on my iPhone. Id love to talk more about these apps to people who are interested. I’d love even more to be involved in the group/company/whatever that was going to make some of these.

Please comment if they inspired you or if you’re working on something similar.

XCake Belfast November

XCake, the local developer group for folk who use XCode had an interesting meeting last night. It was held in the very impressive University of Ulster Belfast campus and was catered for with cake and traybakes by Digital Circle. The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA … Continue reading “XCake Belfast November”

The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA Reference model for interoperability of network services for telecommunications operators. That’s the long way of saying it’s an easy way for developers to get access to call control, SMS and location services from cell networks. We had three clever folk (Seamus, Richard and Michael) from Aepona who very ably demonstrated the services and answered developer questions. More usefully, however, they were asking the developers about their opinions regarding the use of SOAP and JSON. This is all above me – but it was entertaining to hear the opinions (which were essentially: making XML for SOAP isn’t an issue for most developers but JSON is lighter and simpler).

After that we had a short discussion about our future meeting with Translink, the developments we’ve had with accessing their data and the renewed enthusiasm considering that the Ordnance Survey in Great Britain is opening up it’s 1:10000 map dataset to the public. I hope you’ll join me in encouraging the Ordnance Survey in Northern Ireland to do the same. For what it’s worth, we also have our baleful eye cast in the direction of the Postcodes held by the Royal Mail. At the end of the day if there was government money (our taxes) used to pay for datasets, then I’m determined not to pay for them again.

And we finished with a discussion of future events:

An Intro to InterfaceBuilder
NimbleKit, PhoneGap and Titanium: do they do what they say or is it all bollocks?
Developing for iPhone without InterfaceBuilder
Unit Testing for iPhone

We’re kinda unaware of other developer-related events in Belfast but we did mention that Monday night is Demo Night at MobileMondayBelfast.

Location-aware OpenGov & Crowdsourced Data

I’ve been reading a lot about OpenStreetMap because, for many reasons, travel is something that I’m intending to do a lot more of. Using your Maps app on your SmartPhone when in a foreign country is just a license for your carrier to print money. When you consider the amount of data transmitted it’s evident … Continue reading “Location-aware OpenGov & Crowdsourced Data”

I’ve been reading a lot about OpenStreetMap because, for many reasons, travel is something that I’m intending to do a lot more of.

Using your Maps app on your SmartPhone when in a foreign country is just a license for your carrier to print money. When you consider the amount of data transmitted it’s evident that until roaming costs are brought under control. there’s no sense in using online maps when travelling. Which kinda defeats the purpose.

So, OpenStreetMap, if you download the maps (something that you cannot do with Google Maps) seems to be a much more sensible proposition especially now that storage on SmartPhones is getting to the point that this becomes practical.

So, is a map enough?

Of course it is. But where things become interesting is when you combine them with other sources of data. Such as the newly opened data we’re getting out of OpenDataNI or some of the data which is available from NISRA (though the latter seems all embedded in PDF and not raw data at all).

This sort of ‘real life’ data is of immense interest, if people realise they can ask for it.

What about a location-aware app that:

stays open and records one set of location data every minute. What’s the interest there? It tells you where the fast and slow bits of the roads system are. Collate this data with a hundred other users across the province (never mind any other country) and you’ll generate an instant map of where the traffic snarl-ups are. Make it so that you can shift through the data according to time of day and you’ve got the basics of a route planner that will help you see traffic trends ahead. That’s much more useful than having someone sit and count cars all day at a junction.
stays open and records any bumps and jolts in the roads system using the built in accelerometer that comes with every new SmartPhone. Built in a threshold value and send any data that exceeds this up to the server. You’ll have to take into account the driver hitting the kerb or the iPhone dropping out of it’s holder but those should be outlying data points – what you’ll get is a bump map (or more accurately, a pothole map) of the province. So you can either avoid those roads or ask your local politician why this has gotten so bad and not been fixed.
permits the average citizen to report civil issues such as vandalism, broken kerbstones, potholes, non-functional streetmaps, illegal dumping or other civic issues. They take a photo, maybe add an audio report or text tag and the data is sent up to a server. Combine them into a map and look for which councils have the most issues. Offer the data to the councils to help them find the issues that plague them. Keep a report open on which councils respond better.
listens for keywords that a driver may shout. And we can see which parts of the road and which times of the day frustrate the most drivers. Yes, it’s a simplistic measure of Road Rage but a relatively cathartic one. Maybe the DoE Roads Service can focus on those areas with the most reports and see what they can do to alleviate it. It’s not always going to be other drivers.
gives you some advance warning of roadworks? There must be a database of this somewhere within the Roads Service – the question is how to get that data. And have the app do it’s own reporting so we can crowdsource what data we can’t get from official sources. I’d certainly be interested in seeing the difference between reported roadworks and planned roadworks – I’d expect there to be none?
tells you where the nearest taxi is and gives you an indication of it’s availability. All Taxi companies install GPS units in their taxis – we just want to know who is available and close so we can get a taxi quick. On the taxi front, why is there not an easy lookup for the new Taxi plates so we can type in the taxi number (or God forbid, photograph it) and be quickly given back the Registration plate it belongs to along with a photo of the taxi driver meant to be driving it.

That would give me heaps more confidence in the system. I don’t want to know his name, how many kids he has or whether he’s got a Microbiology degree – I just want to know if he’s who he says he is. Anyone can stick up a coloured plate.
tells you where your nearest bus stop is and tells you where the next bus to that stop is, where it’s going and it’s estimated time of arrival. Every bus has a GPS sender in it so we know the data is available. And we’d need access to the timetables as well. It would mean having useful data on when we’d need to leave the office to get a certain bus whether that bus is delayed or whether we should run for the train instead. Whether or not this be expanded to include reporting of cleanliness or vandalism or even just reporting exactly how late the bus was is up for debate.
gives you the approximate location of the flight your gran is on so you can choose not to wait in the expensive car park and go have a coffee somewhere that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Tie that in with the flights timetables and we’re laughing. (Today we were picking a friend up from Belfast City Airport. And the flight was diverted to the International. BCA did not know. It landed safely. BCA did not know. In fact, they had no information at all on what it was doing.)
shows you examples of urban archaeology. There are thousands of pictures out there showing what the city looked like ten years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago. Why not use a street map to provide a ‘historical Street View’ so we can see what buildings used to look like, what traffic used to pass here and view landmarks which have long since disappeared.
provides a glimpse into the future. I think there’s real potential for architects and city planners to get out of their micro-models and into the real world and use these devices to help visualise what buildings will look like in situ. I’d reckon if that had been done down near the Waterfront, we’d not see the Waterfront hidden by architecture that comes from the breeze block era. It’s a beautiful building. Surrounded by horrors.
shows you all of the tourism events happening today in a visual form. Drag a slider or swipe over to 11 am and see what’s on where. Drag again to 2:30 and see what’s going on there. Community groups and Tourism agencies should be all over this.

The information context we need on all of this is location and time. Without both of these, there’s not enough context to make them truly useful.

We’d need everyone in every country to be using apps like this so there’s definitely an Export potential and a method of getting the information in there. These sorts of apps would be incredibly suitable for the “Mobile Apps Challenge” that is being organised by Digital Circle and Momentum, details of which will be forthcoming once sponsors are confirmed.

All of this becomes extremely exciting when you start looking at the apps which are driving AR to the top of the Hype Curve but even without AR, this is useful stuff.

T-JAM football? Tesco API?

He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola He say I know you, you know me One thing I can tell you is you got to be free Come together right now over me Tesco’s new API reminded me of these lyrics from “Come Together” by the Beatles, … Continue reading “T-JAM football? Tesco API?”

He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

Tesco’s new API reminded me of these lyrics from “Come Together” by the Beatles, mostly because of their future event, TJAM, where developers get their grubby mitts on Tesco’s new API.

From InternetRetailing.com:

Tesco is trialling an API which will allow third-party developers to hook into the supermarket’s databases to develop new ways of selling Tesco merchandise. Developers will be able to join an affiliate scheme and take a commision on sales for the lifetime of the applications they generate.

In an email to the 150 developers who have already registered to try out Tesco.com’s API, Nick Lansley, Tesco’s head of R&D, said “A great new Tesco.com Grocery API is coming which will offer extended facilities and faster performance, enable you to obtain an affiliate income from the customers who use your application, and find out what customers are asking for at our T-Jam event coming soon.”

T-Jam is an innovation day, to be held in London on 5 August, which will allow invited developers to work with other Tesco customers and creative thinkers to drive ideas and innovation, and then go on to play a part in developing those ideas and making them a success.

Anyone interested in attending T-Jam can find out more about how to get an invitation here.

I predict that there’ll be twenty apps allowing you to shop from your iPhone, five from your Android phone and two from your S60.

Would that be a bad thing? I found Tesco Online Shopping to be a curious, invasive process which involved me emptying boxes of groceries speedily so that the delivery guy could just take them and go. I wasn’t sure about the protocol really.

There’s no denying that Tesco Online Shopping seems to be a hit. This API, in including not only buying and checkout facilities but also nutritional information, product favourites and deals in a RESTful web service – not to mention commission.

Tie it into your ‘diet app’ and automatically order foods which are recommended while blocking those which are not. Provide a version of the Tesco store which only shows foods for the gluten-intolerant or observing cultural rituals. Even just being able to automate the delivery of staples from a good, easy to use interface might be enough; for example, a parent might want to make sure that her teenagers are well stocked while she’s off on holiday. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be built into a barcode scanner app so you can order the same pasta meal you just enjoyed and schedule it for delivery next week for Pasta Night!

The most important thing is start the conversation. It’s no longer who will be first to release an API for their consumer good service but rather why hasn’t Company X released an API for their service?

Experience and Attention

Matt Gemmell writes about the complaints about the iPhone NDA, DRM and requirements for certificates. Youâ€™re talking about Linux, for christâ€™s sake. What the hell is wrong with you? If thatâ€™s your bag, sod off and install SUSE on your brick and have fun writing your own GPLâ€™d Bluetooth stack. Weâ€™ll all still be here, … Continue reading “Experience and Attention”

Matt Gemmell writes about the complaints about the iPhone NDA, DRM and requirements for certificates.

Youâ€™re talking about Linux, for christâ€™s sake. What the hell is wrong with you?

If thatâ€™s your bag, sod off and install SUSE on your brick and have fun writing your own GPLâ€™d Bluetooth stack. Weâ€™ll all still be here, using our teeny-tiny touchscreen motherfucking sex-phone which is actually going to still be around and commercially viable in 2 yearâ€™s time. With AppleCare

This is definitely how I feel about the iPhone when related to OpenMoko and the LiMo linux-based phones though I’m somewhat more confident about the Android efforts. While I think Android will have it’s own job cut out for it by entering a marketplace already hard-fought with Nokia’s Symbian, Windows Mobile and Apple’s iPhone (I suppose we can add Palm in there? Maybe?).

Android brings with it a glut of software. Some will be good, some will be bad. What’s missing from the Android solution seems to be a viable ‘business plan’ other than making money from advertising. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again – I’m the only altruist I trust and Google, with their massive advertising network, is not going to be giving an operating system away free. They care about making sure that as the web goes mobile, they own the sidewalk.

The fact remains, however, if you want handset ‘freedom’ then develop for Android or Symbian. But you take your risks when you do that, like anyone else. We don’t know how that market will play out, whether there will be a market for non-free software at all. And being paid in ‘eyeballs’ doesn’t ring right to me.

By ‘market, of course, I mean ‘money’.

The market for web apps seems to be all about ‘attention’. It’s whether you can keep someone’s eyeballs focussed on the screen long enough to provide them with some advertising to look at. Looking at web based applications, I have to still wonder about the business plans and I fear the lonegvity of any business plan that relies on advertising. On the other hand, I can see people paying to avoid advertising, whether that’s to a service/software provider (a la Twitterific) or to a company which will block advertising using proxy/blacklist/DNS hacks.

In contrast, I would hope the market for mobile software (exemplified by the iPhone) seems to be in ‘experience’. I chose my Twitter client for the iPhone based on experience: Twitterific and Twittelator just didn’t cut it for me and Twinkle provides the right amount of access to my tweets with the added advantage of seeing everyone ‘nearby’.

I’ll for the experience and it takes hard work to create an app that provides experience rather than one that just demands attention.

Android.

The G1 (aka HTC Dream) is out and there’s a lot about it. The Dream is a sleek competitor to the iPhone weighing only 20% more and being only 30% thicker. The shape of the phone makes typing on the physical keys a little awkward but you’ll soon learn new muscle memory to get around … Continue reading “Android.”

The G1 also only comes with a 1 GB memory card so once bought you’re going to have to supplement it’s internal memory with a different card. It supports up to 8 GB cards so you’ll not be plagued with trying to fill a 16 GB phone like you are with the high end iPhone.

In terms of software, you can download some apps from Google’s Android Market which is an analogue to Apple’s App Store though you can be assured that it won’t have the same annoying constraints that have kept the App Store free of low utility apps. At the moment, due to the e-commerce section being unavailable, the applications downloaded will be free but we’re assured this will change in the near future. This is useful because the music player is very basic and there’s no built-in video player so replacements for these apps make the Android Market necessary rather than a nice addition.

Similarly the web browser and photos applications are much more basic than their iPhone comparison but we’re not to consider the 18 months notice that Google had on “how to build a cool mobile phone OS” as wasted.

Android also eschews common proprietary email systems such as Exchange in favour of promoting Google’s own Gmail, Calendar and Contacts services so you’ll be saved from having to configure non-Google services on this device at least until someone else develops a mail program for the operating system.

Like the iPhone, the G1 doesn’t record video or have a complete bluetooth stack which means less features or need for accessories.

Where others, like Walt Mossberg, might consider the G1 to be “less polished and complete than the iPhone“, Gizmodo considers the interface to be “a bit dated and mixed“.

That’s gotta be good, right?

P.S. It does copy/paste.

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