The star of the show will of course be the iPad 2. Some are saying that it will hit the stores almost immediately, something that all the Android 3.0 tablets are failing to do even months after their first appearance.

I’m quite happy with my iPad, even though I’m not using it as a note taking tool as I first thought, I’m not sure what would make me want to upgrade. A camera? Perhaps. That’s at least one of the features I’m almost sure to see tomorrow.

Some things they did “wrong”:

The name. You’re not supposed to give your phone a name. It’s supposed to be called a letter and a number. Yeah, the RAZR was cool, but that was it.

One device. You’re not supposed to have only one device. That’s madness! You should cover every possible segment of the market with various flavours of the same platform. In fact, you should use many platforms and OSes just to be “safe”.

Full post here.

According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% — far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience.

• 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.

My newly purchased Nokia N800 web tablet together with, a somewhat larger, Apple bluetooth keyboard became my setup for the day during the Hubbub-conference in Stockholm yesterday.

I tried live blogging during the presentations but gave up. Partly because I didn’t really get up to speed with the WordPress blogpost editor in the browser on the N800 and partly because the Jaiku backchannel for the conference consumed most of my attention.

All in all, the N800 + BT keyboard combo worked fine. I mistyped some Jaikus (like this one), but could take notes without problems.

So, what about the conference itself?

It was arranged by nuStart, describing themselves this way:

nuStart was established by aspiring entrepreneurs from the National University of Singapore (NUS) who are on a one year internship program in various start-up companies in Stockholm. The program is a collaboration between NUS and Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska h??gskolan, KTH).

The conference was free and open for everyone. It gave a good overview of Stockholm startups, especially the ones coming from KTH. Add to that industry insights from veterans such as Ola Ahlvarsson and Hjalmar Winblad and you get a pretty good mix of content.

A big thanks to all the Hubbub-people for arranging the conference. Pictures from the conference are here. More here.

First impression: a much better device than the Nokia 770, which was a typical 1.0 showing great promises but failing to live up to them. Can’t say that the N800 is a high performer but it’s certainly faster than the 770.

Also got myself an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard to use with the N800, my Macbook and whatever needs a keyboard and supports Bluetooth HID. Will try it out today at the Hubbub conference.

(I’m also considering buying the QNAP TS-209. This is a small linux machine whos primary purpose is storage, but it also has a MySQL-server, a web server and a few other goodies running on it. Together with my Macbook, that’s two linux devices that will make my life a Microsoft-free zone.

Linux might never conquer the desktop, but it might very well take over everything else.)

(source)

Another way of putting the stats:

• Opera Mini: massive growth.
• Opera: no growth.

In a couple of months time, Opera Mini might very well pass its bigger brother and place itself amongst the top 4 browsers on the net (including desktop browsers).

Amazing! Really.

Compare this to other mobile (and pre-installed) browsers such as Access Netfront with a 0.01% market share according to the same statistics and it becomes even more amazing.

Now, “0.39%” of web traffic might not sound too impressive to you, but if you ever have tried building an application for mass market mobile phones you know that it’s a huge effort even getting it to work on the devices out there.

Then you have to convince people to download and install it. If you’re lucky, the settings for internet access are correct in their phones. If you’re even more lucky, they manage to find the application in the menu system after it’s been downloaded and installed.

And, remember, the users already have a browser pre-installed on their phones. It’s a native application and supposed to be faster and better integrated to the device. Your browser can’t be equally good to the native browser, it has to be much better otherwise people don’t bother downloading it.

Then there’s the whole mobile browsing business, which hasn’t really taken off the way once predicted. First and foremost you have to convince people of the very idea that a web browser in your phone actually can be usable.

Well, Opera pulled it off.

Looking at the statistics, it seems like Opera Mini right now is the engine pulling the entire mobile web up to the domains of the desktop world.

Look at the September stats:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 77.86%
Firefox 14.88%
Safari 5.07%
Opera 0.87%
Netscape 0.72%
Opera Mini 0.39%

There’s not a mobile browser in sight, except for Mini (disclaimer: I don’t know the percentage of iPhone users in the Safari stats). The competitors are down at 0.01%-0.02%. If Minis growth continues, it will hit 1% within 6-9 months and become the number 4 browser.

There’s only one conclusion to draw: right now the mobile web is Opera Mini and Opera Mini is the mobile web.

Sorry, Russell, but that’s a fact.

Opera Mini is becoming so big it soon makes sense to develop web sites and applications targeted towards Mini as a platform. In fact, if you plan to take your web site mobile (and of course you plan to do that, you’d be crazy not to), Opera Mini is the platform to use to do that. As a bonus, it will work on the iPhone too.

Now, if only Opera could follow Apple and open up the browser for access to the phone hardware and underlying OS (via the J2ME APIs), that would make one heck of a platform for mobile development. (I’ve actually suggested this to Opera a couple of times, but the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Oh well, the last time was pre-iPhone so maybe they’re starting to get it now. JSR290 is the Java standardization attempt of basically the same thing. )

Interesting times to work with the mobile web. Maybe 2008 will be the year it really takes off. If it does, it will be much thanks to Opera Mini. Who said mobile java is just good for games?

Touch screen, nice GUI and a slick design: those are not the true innovations in the iPhone. The fact that it’s the manufacturer picking what operator will be allowed to sell their products. Now, that’s new.