The Mobile Web Tablet

Capuchin monkey.

Sony Ericsson has announced Yet Another Mobile Platform:

Project Capuchin will provide developers with an intuitive tool to create applications with a cleaner user interface (UI) without sacrificing the strong, feature rich and widely deployed Java ME
infrastructure, including secure, well-developed content distribution. Project Capuchin’s bridging software will empower two distinct developer communities to leverage their respective expertises to create the next generation of highly engaging and immersive mobile content.

The GUI layer in MIDP2 is one of its biggest drawbacks, limited and full of bugs and incompatibilities. Merging Flash Lite as a GUI layer with the Java APIs as the underlying engine could be a brilliant move towards a new platform.

The question of course is: do we need yet another mobile platform?

Anyway, nice to see Sony Ericsson be at the forefront of the upcoming merger between the web and telecom from a technology perspective.

I guess the upcoming JavaOne sessions will be more telling than the press release. Go see Viktor Mårtensson talk about CHAPI (JSR211) if you’re there! Should be interesting.

Updated: Adobe is announcing a move towards a more open Flash, even removing the licensing fee for mobile devices.

This means that the Sony Ericsson feature phones will have a powerful and open development platform based on JavaME and Flash. Now, if they only could bring in the web browser and XHTML/Javascript in the mix…

Popularity: 11% [?]

I’ve finally done something I should have done a long time ago: I’ve moved this blog to a new web hosting service and fixed the URL so that it’s no longer softwaresweden.com/mobilewebtablet but www.mobilewebtablet.com.

Please update your links to this blog if you have any and they point to the softwaresweden.com URL. The URL to this blog is http://www.mobilewebtablet.com/ and nothing else.
Thanks!

If you have a blog about mobility and want to be part of the link roll, send me a message.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The mobile phone manufacturers are so busy competing against each other that they very well might be missing competitors coming from the side. Like for example full blown PCs that fit in your jacket pocket such as the Willcom D4 by Sharp. Based on the Intel Atom platform, the size (188x84x25.9mm) is not that much larger than a Playstation Portable (170x74x23 mm) or a Nokia N800 (144x75x13 mm) but it’s actually a PC running Windows Vista and a full QWERTY keyboard.

You can watch a video of the device here.

The smartphone of the future is a PC. Let’s call it mobile web tablet.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Sales for first quarter 2008:

• Motorola: 27.4 million devices.
• LG: 24.4 million devices.
• Sony Ericsson: 22.3 million devices

In a few months time the top five chart can be completely rewritten. I wonder if Motorola will even be in it!

What about Apple? Well, their target is 10 million iPhones sold by the end of the year. That’s about the same number that any of the three manufacturers above sell in one month. Impressive for a “new guy” but hardly a dent in the overall mobile phone industry.

Popularity: 5% [?]

In a few years time, every photo you take with any camera will be geotagged. What does that mean? The location of where you took the photo is embedded in the photo file. Now you can organise your pictures not just by time but also by place.

Nokia just released an update to their GPS-enabled Symbian phone N82 that enables geotagging in the photos taken with the camera. Expect the same from other manufacturers soon and I hope the old camera companies follow the competition from the mobile phone companies, otherwise there’s two reasons instead of one to choose a mobile phone camera over a “real” camera: connectivity and geotagging.

More on the upgrade here.

Popularity: 4% [?]