Mobile – Page 16 – ɔimoɈɒ

Android Fans think Android FTW! Obviously.

One of the AndroidGuys speculates on whether Apple rushed out the iPhone 3G in an attempt to pre-empt Android: “Iâ€™m going to make a prediction; Apple will find themselves in the unenviable position of fighting for market share. Yes, I know that everyone compares phones to the iPhone and its touch screen interface. A year … Continue reading “Android Fans think Android FTW! Obviously.”

One of the AndroidGuys speculates on whether Apple rushed out the iPhone 3G in an attempt to pre-empt Android:

“Iâ€™m going to make a prediction; Apple will find themselves in the unenviable position of fighting for market share. Yes, I know that everyone compares phones to the iPhone and its touch screen interface. A year from now, there will be touch versions of Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. Apple will be handcuffed by the fact that they only offer one model and one aesthetic. Android and the other players will be available in many shapes and sizes.”

The rest of the discussion turns into the ‘things which are missing that Android phones will likely be built with’.

The article reads like the AndroidGuys are actually watching their chosen platform spin down the plughole.

It. Is. Not. About. The. Features. Dummy.

Apple has already been fighting for market share against SonyEricsson, Motorola (maybe not so hard a fight), Nokia, RIM, LG and every other maker of every other handset. If a phone does email and internet, then it’s competing. And Apple has the advantage of 6 million handsets out there currently and likely another 10 million by year end. I don’t think that’s an unlikely prediction. It’s now available in 70 countries, nearly everyone who had an iPhone will be getting a cheap upgrade (or free in my case).

AndroidGuys continue:

I hate to break it to the Apple fanboys, but there will be more powerful Android devices coming and likely in the same price point, if not lower.

Spoken like a true fanboi.

The problem with a platform that hasn’t released any hardware to the public is that hardware specifications will always be changing and every new innovation that comes from companies who actually innovate in this space is going to be copied for use in Android (or at least it will be added in a bullet point marketing exercise). So there’s a feature creep, a slide where the hardware gets improved more and more and expectations change constantly. Not all features will be supported by all phones.

What AndroidGuy misses is that Apple is very comfortable with being both the underdog and the 800lb gorilla in a market. They’re doing okay with that ‘Mac thing’ with only a 8% market share (or whatever it is these days) and they’re also doing fine with that ‘iPod thing’ which gives them a 72% market share in that market. What percentage of the phone market do you think Apple is aiming for?

And considering the recent price drops for the iPhone and the consideration that everyone and his cousin will be buying one, why would anyone buy an Android phone until there’s a considerable market for them? Case in point:

I’m getting a free iPhone 3G when the darned thing is released. My existing iPhone will be converted to Pay As You Go and probably given to a family member. Apple will have doubled their market share in my household and this is something that is being repeated multiple times in my circle of friends and colleagues. The exception being the people who are keeping their iPhones as development devices which is already a tiny percentage of the overall market (registered developers are in the hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions of iPhone users out there).

When Android hits the market, it will be faced with Windows Mobile 7, RIM’s new Blackberry devices and Apple’s iPhone/iPod juggernaut. And maybe something new from Palm. Or not. Their developers will be fighting a marketing battle against all of these new innovative handsets and with very little to differentiate them (oh, it’s free? Yeah, big deal).

I do hope they love a challenge.

HSDPA coverage in NI

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide. The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The … Continue reading “HSDPA coverage in NI”

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide.

The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The current EDGE-based iPhone can do one or the other; that is you can’t start browsing the web on your phone while you’re using it for a telephone call. Yes, this is a real need!

What does this mean for speeds? Rumour has it that O2’s implementation has a theoretical peak of 3.6 Mbps (about 400 kilobytes per second) but their mobilebroadband USB modem package, which also uses HSDPA, tops out at 1.8 Mbps. That’s not quite as impressive but then again, beats the pants off EDGE. O2 also specifically prohibit streaming and VoIP applications over their 3G network.

O2’s roaming charges for data aren’t too bad these days. For countries in Europe it’s Â£3 per megabyte and outside of that, Â£6 per megabyte. Considering that since October 2007 I’ve consumed less than 1 gigabyte of data, I’m not worried about the additional charges for roaming while I’m on holiday for two weeks in August.

I’m going to pop into an O2 store later this week – have a go at their 3G demo machine and ask some questions. Last time I tried a 3G demo machine was in the Three (3) shop in Castlecourt and my iPhone beat Windows on 3G for rendering a web site – so you can imagine how slow the 3G was. Not very impressive. Now…O2’s infrastructure provides Three (3)’s 2G network and a little birdie told me that Orange provide the backbone for their 3G network so the 3G performance I noted may not be indicative.

If you’re in Belfast, say, around QUB, you’re going to do okay.

but coverage gets very patchy outside of the town centre in Bangor (where I live). In fact, my house is right in the middle of one of the big white areas there so I’m going to have to rely on WiFi or (god forbid) dialling down to EDGE or GPRS.

and where my parents live in Lisburn is just … barren. For what it’s worth, they live about 200 metres away from that green B101 label in the centre of the map. It doesn’t look like they’re going to be enjoying HSDPA speeds any time soon!

and I’m thankful that Mac-Sys Ltd will give you their WiFi password if you ask them nicely because coverage in Newtownabbey really depends. As soon as you start seeing grass, the coverage simply ends.

The saving grace is that O2’s mobile broadband contract also covers the Cloud hotspots (which there are quite a few of these days) and the iPhone contract will also cover BT OpenZone hotspots from July 11th (give or take a few days). Pretty soon, we’ll have wireless everywhere.

So, go on, pop along to O2’s network maps for HSDPA and post your area coverage. Drop me a link or a pingback so we can see what’s happening!

Entitlementards…

The BBC News weighs in on the iPhone 3G release but the more interesting opinions are in the comments. Vish of London writes: “After Apple’s arrogant and blase behaviour over their flaws in the Safari browser, I am going to stick with Nokia. At least their platform is secure and they have decades of experience … Continue reading “Entitlementards…”

The BBC News weighs in on the iPhone 3G release but the more interesting opinions are in the comments.

Vish of London writes:

“After Apple’s arrogant and blase behaviour over their flaws in the Safari browser, I am going to stick with Nokia. At least their platform is secure and they have decades of experience of designing excellent phones and operating systems.”

Yeah….except that they don’t design their own operating system but rather license it from Symbian. And they don’t design their own browser, they use Webkit in the S60 series….which is the rendering engine behind Safari and would therefore have the same flaws. And their operating system construction is going so well that they just bought Trolltech. Why? Not to get a better browser because, whatayaknow, Trolltech uses WebKit too.

It’s exactly this sort of muddled factoids that mean people stick with Microsoft. And you know what – as long as hackers see Windows as low hanging fruit, it makes life easier for the rest of us.

Sherif Kadry, Houston, TX demands to be known as an entitlement bitch!

“This is absolutely disgusting, I had to dish out about $399 for the iPhone 1.0. I got a sub-par phone which incidentally I had to replace two times because of quality control issues at Apple. Now they release a 3G version that is substantially cheaper, I am more anti-Apple than ever.”

Oh noes! Sherif had to dish out all that money for the iPhone. Someone forced him. This is unpossible!

Yeah, it sucks that stuff gets cheaper but that’s what happens, especially when you buy a 1.0 product that changes the world.

WWDC Keynote highlights

There were two things shown during the WWDC Keynote today. The first was new software. This software will be available to everyone who has an iPhone, new or old in July and available to iPod ouch users for $9.95 (which will probably be about Â£7.99 in the UK). The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G … Continue reading “WWDC Keynote highlights”

The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G was announced. It’s pretty much the same device – it has two differences however.

There’s a 3G radio in there allowing access to the UMTS/HSDPA networks. This will step down to GSM/EDGE if 3G is not available which provides a decent fallback. One big advantage of the 3G radio is that it can be used at the same time as taking a call – something that has proved to be an iPhone annoyance – you can’t browse the web while on the telephone! HSDPA supports download speeds from 0.9 Mbps to 14.4 Mbps so until we get more information, it’s going to be anyone’s guess.

The second hardware difference is GPS. Gone is the ‘yeah, you’re somewhere in this town’ and now it’ll pinpoint you right down to your street position and follow you around. That’s what a GPS is for. It’s not going to read instructions to you so it’s not like your Tom-Tom but on the plus side I’m not going to have to buy maps for every inch of the planet if I go travelling.

Let’s face it – unless you’re a real geek, you’re likely going to be happy with current iPhone hardware and won’t need the iPhone 3G at all. You’ll just be able to take advantage of the hundreds of new apps that will be available for free (and for pay), you’ll get the new calculator, better attachment support (now it does iWork documents, Word, Excel and Powerpoint!), the new integration with ‘mobileme’ and other stuff they thought wasn’t interesting enough to cover in a keynote.

Apple said they had already sold 6 million iPhones in the first year while only being released in half a dozen countries. They’re going to be launching in 60 countries….and the price is down to $199 (Â£120 or so) for the 8 Gb version (the version I paid Â£269 (over $500!) for.

Price is likely the biggest sticking point with the iPhone. Not so any more.

Steve Jobs wanted to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. He sold 6 million at the old price in 1 year. Do you think he’ll sell 4 million more at the new price? Yeah, obvious huh?

Apple to trump Nintendo in Gaming?

The short answer is:No. Touch Arcade writes: Apple Poised to Snatch the Crown from Nintendo™ DS Combine this seamless distribution model with beefy gaming hardware, a CPU that’s over six times the combined clockspeed of the DS’s processors (and nearly twice the clockspeed of the PSPs) and a screen with 50% more area than that … Continue reading “Apple to trump Nintendo in Gaming?”

The short answer is:No.

Touch Arcade writes:
Apple Poised to Snatch the Crown from Nintendo™ DS

Combine this seamless distribution model with beefy gaming hardware, a CPU that’s over six times the combined clockspeed of the DS’s processors (and nearly twice the clockspeed of the PSPs) and a screen with 50% more area than that of the DSs dual screens combined and you’ve got a winner, right?

I’d have thought by now that people, especially people who follow Apple, would have realised that specifications do not a success make. How many times has the iPod bucked the trend and beaten other players soundly even though it sports relatively meagre specifications?

Apple has kitted out the iPhone to compete with other smartphones and, perhaps to a lesser degree, subnotebooks. I certainly find it a lot more pleasurable to type on my iPhone than on my eeePC laptop keyboard. And yes, there will be a heap of games released for this new platform, but you have to ask yourself – is it truly a gaming platform – the answer is simply No.

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.

Work in progress

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it … Continue reading “Work in progress”

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it at lunchtime when I’m away from the oppression at $BIG_COMPANY (where music players have now been banned because they’re ‘not professional’ – it’s fun working through a problem when there are people talking loudly in every direction – really aids the concentration.)

Anyway, the SDK release.

This is, to be honest, much sooner than I expected and I think there must be quite a few happy people around who are loading apps onto their phones and enjoying the novelty. I’ve been fighting for some time at lunch just to try Interface Builder but something has always come up for the last 7 days. It’s frustrating and when I mention the frustration, the helpful response is ‘Well, if it mattered to you, you’d find time.” Brilliant.

I don’t know what sample code will work on the iPhone with the latest beta and I don’t know whether or not it’s safe to load my iPhone with the beta firmware and still want to use it as a phone. And there’s no way to check because Apple still have an NDA on all discussion on the technical aspects of the SDK and firmware.

As this is very much still a learning experience for me, it’s slow and boring. I’ve kinda decided to strike out and work on something else in order to maybe build some momentum. I would like a cashflow-type application for the iPhone.

As you can see, it’s a work in progress.

Twinkle: a location-aware Twitter client.

Twinkle is the first iPhone product I’m looking forward to. Though it’s Twitter-based and could be opened to being a blogging client, it has the essentials – support for the camera support for conversations support for locations! Looking forward to June! Related posts: Nokia N800 versus iPod touch I want email everywhere Location Location Location … Continue reading “Twinkle: a location-aware Twitter client.”

Twinkle is the first iPhone product I’m looking forward to. Though it’s Twitter-based and could be opened to being a blogging client, it has the essentials –

support for the camera
support for conversations
support for locations!

Looking forward to June!

Thirty percent of everything

Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them. How much would you pay for: a) no need to set up a web shopping cart b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting c) greatly reduced need for marketing … Continue reading “Thirty percent of everything”

Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them.

How much would you pay for:
a) no need to set up a web shopping cart
b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting
c) greatly reduced need for marketing
d) reduced need to ‘package’ an app
e) listing on a web store that will be in front of about 7 million customers at launch.

Apple wants thirty percent (though they’ll host your free app for free). For this thirty percent, they’ll approve, list, maintain a reviews database, process payments and send you the income monthly.

Some people think this smacks of greed but I’d counter that it smacks of reality. If you’ve spent a lot of time working in software but not in the retail side then you have probably very little experience of the costs. We are agreed that Apple is a publicly traded corporation and therefore needs to turn a profit. We’re going to have to agree that the App Store will be a hot trick for software distribution.

So let’s look at the competition. Who else hosts software for download like this?

The obvious candidate is Handango.

From Electronista:

Small developers who sell less than $250,000 in gross revenue will see exactly half of their income stripped from each sale — up from 40 percent, Handango reportedly says. More profitable firms will see even more money siphoned away, with all businesses selling between $250,000 and $1 million supplying 60 percent of their revenue and all larger outlets conceding 70 percent. The notice will be made public within a few days and should see the new distribution agreement take effect by March 15th, the alleged source indicates.

Handango makes Apple’s 30% seem like a bargain.

On the other hand, Mobihand gives developers 80%. What do we get for that extra 10%? I’m guessing we get placement on the device itself. Mobihand claims to have the lowest rates in the industry for application hosting.

MobiHand will pay to Content Provider 80% of Net Receipts occurring at www.mobihand.com and 60% of Net Receipts at all other channels.

So, Mobihand will charge you 20-40% of the cost of your software for hosting the sale depending on how and where they bought it.

Even at 30%, Apple’s deal is no strings, no nonsense and is going to have the advantage that every piece of software you see there will work on your iPhone.

And it’s shitloads better than Handango.

For iPhone but not Mac?

For years it’s been a pain getting Macs to talk to Exchange servers because more often than not the Exchange servers are managed by some pencilneck IT guy with a pressed shirt and a lifetime subscription to “Ballmer – Candid Photos of Everyone’s Favourite Microsoft Exec”. As a result it was hard to convince them to make the little changes necessary to get a Mac talking IMAP to an Exchange server, changes which wouldn’t affect anything. And more frustrating, I had to do it “blindfolded” in most cases because they wouldn’t let ME do it and I had to explain the “how” over the phone. Is it any wonder I have a low opinion of Microsoft Certified weenies.

Apple has announced iPhone OSX 2.0, new firmware available this coming June which will include Microsoft’s ActiveSync software to allow the Mac to talk to the Exchange Server directly. While we all laud this, the one caveat is that two friends of mine have now expressed annoyance because in their experience, ActiveSync is a bollocks (and let’s face it, Microsoft isn’t in the business of enabling third parties to connect to their servers, quite the opposite).

ActiveSync never was mooted for the Mac, but now we see it being released for iPhones within the next four months. That’s interesting from several points of view. There are few corporations planning wholesale replacement of their Windows clients with Mac clients but there must be a significant number of companies ready to buy thousands and thousands of iPhones in order to deploy smartphones in the field or to help the removal of RIM’s Blackberry which has a stranglehold on Mobile corporate email at the moment.

Apple must reckon that their future is in iPhones.