Best hope for a true iPhone competitor: the HTC Touch HD?

I haven’t tried it yet, but this review sounds pretty promising. I still prefer the Nokia N95 as the best smallsize “phonecall only” and camera device. And now I use the HTC Fuze when I just need a small device thats great for email.

But I still love my iPhone and carry it almost always. Right now its still the best for web browsing and apps that need a largescreen but work OK without a dedicated Qwerty keyboard The HTC Touch HD makes it possible that a new device has a chance in these areas. It has a larger screen (3.8″) and 800 by 480 resolution (versus the iPhone’s 480×320). This is pretty significant. With that higher resolution it should be a much better browser experience by quite a margin. Also it sports a 5 megapixel camera (the 2 megapixel camera in the iPhone is a travesty in my opinion).

HTC seems to be on quite a roll. I can’t wait to get my hands on this device.

0 Comments | Posted by admin

Smartphone shipments rise 28%

As Canalys reports recently there are bright spots in the midst of otherwise bleak business news and projections. Smartphone shipments continue to rise at spectacular rates. 40 million units were shipped in the 3rd quarter of 2008. And smartphone OS fragmentation continues to grow. The iPhone vaulted into the number two position in terms of shipments, although in overall base it is still behind Nokia and Research in Motion. Lest you start to count out Windows Mobile, look at HTC’s numbers, more than doubling their market share in shipments over the last year. And their latest device, the HTC Fuze running Windows Mobile, would appear to be their strongest yet. Finally, though the Canalys report doesn’t mention this, the seeming laggards in shipment growth, RIM and Windows Mobile, are clearly still the strongest in US enterprise market share.

I have two observations for mobile app developers reading this:

* software for smartphones is indeed a burgeoning business

* at least for enterprise applications, there’s no clear single device operating system to target. Pick the installed base leader and you ignore the growing platforms.

Very curious how you application developers are going to attack this seeming dilemma. We’d love to see you try Rhomobile as one solution to the problem.

0 Comments | Posted by admin

The iPhone as the ultimate proofpoint for rich local mobile apps

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. One of the lesser observed phenomena in the midst of the overall phenomenal success of the iPhone is what it says about “rich local apps” on mobile versus “thin client web apps”.

Consider the following:

• the iPhone still has very small overall mobile phone market share
• it has a fantastic web browser, the best in the industry
• it has very fast 3G data connections

Presumably this would be enough to have developers targeting the iPhone with either dedicated web pages, or conditionally optimized websites. It has been predicted for years that thinclient mobile apps would surpass native applications in capabilities and marketshare, as networks got faster and mobile browsers got better. Surely the iPhone must be the “knee in the curve” when this would finally take off.

Instead developers are rushing to learn a decades old obscure programming language (Objective C in 2008?) to write native applications for the iPhone. And they are submitting their applications to the iPhone app store at a blistering rate. Steve Jobs remarks on it as the most amazing thing he’s seen in his years in the industry (presumably because he too was expecting more mobile web browser apps?). To me, this means, even moreso on other platforms with less optimal browsers, a bright future for native device optimized mobile applications.

0 Comments | Posted by admin

Proximity sensor control

I gave my initial impressions of the Google Mobile iPhone app last week before broke Daring Fireball broke the news that Google used the undocumented proximity sensor API. Specifically it detects if you’ve moved the phone and then put your face near the device to turn on voice recognition. All that you can do with the public APIs is determine whether proximity sensing is on and toggle its state on or off. No proximity detection is possible with public APIs. But of course proximity detection is a widely useful feature that could be creatively leveraged in many applications.

I’m not going to comment on whether this was a backdoor agreement with Google and Apple ahead of time or whether the publicity of the Google app in the New York Times led to Apple approving it. Ars Technica and CNet have already discussed that. What I would like to see is Apple moving to make more of the native capabilities available, including the proximity sensor. Other device manufacturers will be more open so this should only help make iPhone’s more attractive.

We are just a platform for developers to build their own applications. And on the iPhone this means that people compile their applications into one big binary. As you may know we provide the capability of accessing device capabilities with both tags (extensions to HTML) and Ruby calls. Should we provide such an extension to call the proximity API and leave it to our app developers to decide whether they want to embed such calls in their applications?

0 Comments | Posted by admin

The Blackberry Storm as an Information Appliance

Today the Blackberry Storm, Blackberry’s touchscreen answer to the iPhone, was released. I went to get one this morning at the Cupertino store and they were already out. But we should get them in next week, just after our forthcoming RIM Blackberry support in Rhomobile (coming Monday!)

CIO Magazine recently published a list of eight reasons why the Storm may be better than the iPhone. I would have guessed that this was for enterprise application usage given where it was published.

But let’s go through their list of things they think are relevant and better about the Storm.

1. stereo bluetooth capability – is this really relevant for enterprise usage?
2. removable battery – absolutely crucial if you’re going to rely on your smartphone as a tool for mission critical applications
3. expandable memory – we of course are huge believers in the value of synced data at Rhomobile. Still, I don’t see that 16GB on a highend iPhone getting filled up
4. digital camera and video – I’ve always believed that the 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone is a crime. But its video support that really opens up a new class of applications.
5. Storm works as tethered modem – absolutely relevant to many applications in many areas where Wifi is few and far between
6. tactile feedback – very important if you want to use the device for content creation and interactive applications. I am a fairly adept iPhone typer. But I immediately found the Storm’s keyboard more useful when I used it in the store
7. copy/paste – Also very important for using applications, especially when you’re on a device without a real keyboard
8. multitasking – If you’re really going to run applications that do useful work on the same device the assumption that you can only use one third party application at a time is just not reasonable. On this point I disagree with CIO Magazine’s conclusions.

While I’m an enthusiastic daily iPhone user, from early experimentation I think the Blackberry storm is a winner of a device for mobile enterprise applications. Makes me even more excited about our upcoming RIM Blackberry release on Monday,

0 Comments | Posted by admin

iPhone voice search

I love the new iPhone voice search, released yesterday by Google on the iPhone App Store. While the quality seems a bit shaky (I’ve gotten better results in TellMe searches myself), what’s even more exciting to me is how it will change smartphone users’ behavior. As people get accustomed to performing horizontal search (”Thai restaurant Cupertino”) from their iPhones, they’ll also want to use voice driven search for more vertical apps. For example, a mobile interface to CRM could say “accounts in Cupertino” to provide a set of customers in a location or “address of John Smith” to get driving directions on the fly. With toolkits such as TellMe and Nuance (and the appropriate easy to use platform, such capabilities should be able to perform far better in restricted problem domains. The key will be making it easy for mobile developers to add such capabilities to their apps without becoming experts in some voice recognition SDK. One more example of how a “mobile interface to an enterprise application” can provide powerful capabilities that the backend application doesn’t yet have. Stay tuned…

0 Comments | Posted by admin

NYTimes/ReadWriteWeb article about good mobile software

Here’s what ReadWriteWeb wrote yesterday (posted in the New York Times) about good mobile software.

Its so on point for what we’re doing at Rhomobile that its worth quoting at length. Its very clear that they could use something like the Rhomobile platform and the Rhodes app framework. These are very much inspired by Rails in many ways ironically enough since he is commenting on Basecamp which is of course the original Rails app. Here’s what Bernard Lunn has to say on good mobile software:

“Start With Mobile

My short-hand description is “like Basecamp but mobile native”. That is easy to say, but tough to implement for 4 reasons:

1. Mobile native user interface. Ideally 90% of my actions are on a mobile device with a tiny screen and keyboard. I will do the more complex configuration and housekeeping type work on a browser in the 10% of my time when I am working on a fully fledged laptop/desktop. Most developers spend 90% of their time creating on a laptop/desktop and only 10% communicating in the “real world”. For most of us, that ratio is different.

2. Offline syncing. Much of the time my mobile device is “off air”. Those are opportunities to catch up on To Do Lists, Objectives, Milestones and the other planning type activities. You can do these sitting on an airplane, train or waiting in line at Starbucks. Syncing your personal planning to your group communication tool (Basecamp or whatever) is an annoying extra step that is a time sink.

3. Any mobile device. I use a Blackberry. I like it, but I may get seduced by the iPhone or may have something totally different in the future. More to the point, I cannot possibly predict what devices my collaborators will have and the vast majority of mobile devices are neither Blackberry nor iPhone. Communication has to work at the lowest common denominator but the user interface has to be native. As a Blackberry user, I don’t care a hoot about the compromises the developer faces having to design for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. The same is true for people with other devices, iPhone users being the most vehement about native user interfaces.

0 Comments | Posted by admin

Mass market Qwerty smartphones?

Nokia announced the release of the E63 today. While in many ways not a big technical breakthrough, its a less powerful cousin of their excellent E71 smartphone, it does herald a couple significant development. From a feature standpoint the decision to have personal and professional “modes” is an opportunity for a lot of innovation in the user experience on smartphones. More significantly it signals a willingness of Nokia to push Qwerty devices and smartphones in general down to the massmarket consumer. Although the iPhone certainly was a big step in getting consumers phones which allow full Qwerty typing (albeit with a “soft keyboard”) , given the hundreds of millions of devices that Nokia ships every year, Nokia’s willingness to consistently target smartphones at consumers (and lower the pricepoints accordingly) could have an even larger impact on the prevalence and volume of smartphones.

0 Comments | Posted by admin

The rise of the touchscreen smartphones

Today’s release of the HTC Fuze rounds out the latest generation of touchscreen oriented smartphones, with entries now from Windows Mobile, Google Android, RIM (with the forthcoming Storm) and, of course, Apple. This is actually a pretty significant milestone. To me, what this means is that the idea of a touchscreen device that still has pretty reasonable typing capabilities is no longer just a niche curiosity. Every vendor offering smartphones now has them.

I believe that this will both drive the prevalence of smartphones that can retrieve, store, and create significant volumes information (from backend systems and creating them and modifying them on the device) will accelerate smartphone usage in the enterprise and also drive broader consumer usage of smartphones for more than just web and email.

The challenge of course for developers is how they create these applications, similar to the applications being released for just iPhone on the App Store for all of these other compelling device operating systems. Writing to four different operating systems in four different languages is of course not really a practical option. This is of course where Rhomobile comes in: write your app once using primarily HTML template to create your UI and it runs on all of these cool new phones.

1 Comments | Posted by admin