Wed 26 May 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Android
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This is just amazing. There will $100 android tablets on the market soon. Digital photo frame makers and GPS device manufacturers – watch out. Your days are counted.
What happens when tablets are even cheaper maybe as low cost as a paperback book? What new products will emerge?
Popularity: 2% [?]
Thu 4 Mar 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under App stores
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Have you seen the movie? No, but I’ve read the iPad.
Writing a book is hard work and selling it is equally difficult. That’s why publishers were invented.
But something is happening in the book business and the change is driven by mobile web tablets: books are going digital.
While the Amazon Kindle is a great product, it’s also very limited. No, the mobile web tablet from Apple, iPad, is what will bring ebooks to the masses. In fact, this is already happening on that smaller web tablet from Apple, the iPhone.
Books will most likely be sold just like any other application as part of the One Billion Apps App Store, which is basically an app store for every digital content item you can think of, way beyond the current scope of about 150’000 apps.
No one is building exactly this, yet, but the pieces of the puzzle are coming together. We’re moving towards a world where you will use the phone to buy digital content of any kind. We’re seeing it in MoSyncs’ cross platform app stores, we’re seeing it in how books outnumber games on the iPhone and we’re seeing it in initiatives such as Creations from Sony Ericsson. (Updated: an adult app store. Another example.)
The One Billion Apps App Store is coming.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Thu 4 Mar 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Telecom Market
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Distimo is a dutch analytics company focusing on mobile app stores. In their Mobile World Congress presentation they present the latest trends and numbers from the app store world.
One of the things they highlight is that cross platform development is that cross platform development is on the rise with developers targeting more than one platform. Should be good news for companies and tools such as PhoneGap and MoSync. The latter recently announced plans for a cross platform app store.
The race is on.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Sat 6 Feb 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Android
[2] Comments
I bought a new phone to replace my old Android Developer Phone that I bought right after it was released more than a year ago.
One year with Android has at least convinced me of one thing: this is a very good mobile OS. I was sceptical when Google announced the Open Handset Alliance but now I’m convinced that Apple and Google both share the future of mobile at the expense of the “traditional” mobile operating system vendors.
So, when considering a new phone there were basically only two options: iPhone or Android. The number of Android devices is growing rapidly and there’s concern for device fragmentation. It’s interesting to see how Android is basically growing in to become the Windows 95 of the mobile world.
Anyhows… so I decided to buy a new phone after more than a year with the G1. The battery strength was getting worse and worse and the device started to feel painfully slow. I was first looking at the Nokia N900 web tablet-mobile phone-computer-thingy but Nokia just kept delaying it (hear this, my Finnish friends: if the original release, back in December 2009 would have been kept, I would have been a Nokia customer, mmkay?).
I ended up buying an Acer S100 Liquid. It has a Snapdragon CPU (fast!), 800×480 resolution (on a beautiful screen!), Android 1.6 (would have preferred 2.0 but an update should be coming) and a very limited set of extra add-ons to the OS (which in my world is a good thing). The one thing I’m missing is the QWERTY-keyboard but I’m getting used to the virtual on screen keyboard.
The price is hard to beat and possibly its best feature: you can buy it for 3400SEK inc VAT (about €330) in Sweden.
The camera is a 5 megapixel one that I haven’t used very much (I still carry around my Sony Ericsson G502 with its 2MP super fast camera – much more fun to take pictures with). One thing I noticed though is the color balance which is awful.
Video is 640×480 but I don’t use that very much.
If you’re looking for a no extra frills, work horse Android phone at a very competitive price, the Acer S100 Liquid is a perfect buy. I’m happy with my purchase.
Update: The reason for the poor whitebalance was that I hadn’t removed the little plastic cover sheet over the camera lens. Yes, I know, I suck at product reviews. 
Here’s a photo taken with the S100.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Fri 5 Feb 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Mobile Development
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I helped the guys over at MoSync (The Company Formerly Knows As Mobile Sorcery) put together this video showing an old Amiga game running on a few different mobile phones after being ported to the MoSync mobile platform. Yes, I’m somewhat biased, but I have to say I’m impressed by what you can do with their tool.
We made another video too, with another game that’s a bit better known.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Fri 29 Jan 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Apple
[2] Comments
Aah, what a beauty! Of course, coming from Apple, that’s what we expect. However, I can’t help but think when I see the keynote that not even Apple really knows how people are going to use this new device.
Here’s one use case I think I personally will find very attractive: note taking.
Currently there’s a killer tool for taking notes: pen & paper. This is an amazing invention. It’s cheap, requires no battery and is highly portable. Can the iPad beat it?
No. But it can complement it!
Just think about it: you have a setup like below with a case that contains a paper pad.
Add a camera (or an iPhone or any mobile phone with a camera and Bluetooth) to this and you can take pictures of your notes and almost instantaneously load them in to the iPad. Now you can email it, edit it and I’m pretty sure there will be some cool apps that pick out things like lines and boxes from your drawings so you can move them around.
Why is this better than a Netbook? Because of the touch UI. It will feel much more natural to use your hand to move your notes around than a mouse or a touchpad. Plus it’s smaller.
So, the iPad won’t replace your laptop, nor will it replace pen and paper. But it will improve both of them. It’s the perfect bridge between paper and digital.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tue 26 Jan 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Apple
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This has to be one of the most hyped anticipated product releases ever. In about 24 hours from now we will see what Apple has been building in there.
As the owner of a blog titled “The Mobile Web Tablet” I of course look forward to the release and believe it will be a success, but the facts are still that it’s an unproven market with no major hits thus far – the Kindle one possible exception.
The question is if there’s room for a device larger than a phone but smaller than a netbook and with no physical keyboard. Well, if anyone can do it, Apple can. In about 24 hours we’ll see.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Sun 3 Jan 2010
Posted by Erik Starck under Nokia
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The Nokia N900 mobile web tablet-that’s-also-a-phone has been hitting the stores after months of delay. Reviews are good and it seems like the speed of the device is what impresses the most. The downside is a somewhat clunky interface but an average linux geek should feel right at home. And honestly: can it get worse than S60?
Digital Versus writes:
Franck loved the fact that you can use the N900 as a terminal for getting inside the entrails of the phone (or how to make your life more complicated!) and the visual part of the interface. He regrets the lack of applications on Maemo.org, the fact that navigation isn’t always the most logical and that the keyboard is restricted to three lines (5 would have been preferable) “especially as you need to look up characters in the symbol bank that you often require for those famous “commands”".
The Linux-based Maemo 5 OS is the star of the show. This really is an advanced smartphone – it’s a genuine handheld computer. Maemo can run multiple tasks simultaneously, the web browser is outstanding and the interface looks smooth and polished, unlike the Symbian operating system usually employed by Nokia. Menu icons and fonts will be familiar to any Nokia users, but Maemo ups the ante with some nice screen transitions; when opening new windows and browsing though running applications, for example.
While the N900 seems to be a great device, the big question is of course if Nokia can keep up against Android and Apple with the Maemo OS. Not just UI- or feature-wise but also when it comes to the developer community and availability of applications.
Then we have the Google Chrome OS and the rumored Apple Web Tablet so Nokia is being attacked from many directions. Never the less, 2010 looks to be an interesting year for web tablets.
Popularity: 17% [?]