Carnival of the Mobilists

29 January 2007 by Rod McLaren

Hi folks and welcome. We’re proud to be hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week. It’s our first time, so be gentle. Loads of good posts this week, and a slight focus on marketing and markets…

Michael Mace skewers the assumption that there’s a single smartphone and mobile data market that users grow into. Instead he identifies three market segments, their typical users, and the devices that serve them. It’s a great post and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, so The shape of the smartphone and mobile data markets is post of the week. Thanks Mike.

Steve Litchfield’s From Barbie to the iPhone charts handset functionality against ease of use (hey Steve, I know it’s not Symbian but you could add BlackBerry near the Palm Tungsten) and discusses the likely impact of the Apple iPhone and Nokia N95 on other handset manufacturers. But he’s then reminded by an insistent daughter that desire can trump rationality where consumer electronics are concerned. And Justin Oberman explains this demographically: 18-to-24 age segment view cell phones as multi-functional accessories.

Xen Mendelsohn explains how mobile networks should promote their VAS services on the web. Staying with operators, Darla Mack is annoyed with Apple: Cingular users not in coverage area are out of luck on the iPhone, Apple says. Meanwhile, SymbianGuru asks whether unlocked handsets might free us from these exclusivity deals.

Dean Bubley’s Motion sensors – the next big thing in mobile phones? suggests that inertial sensors will allow operators and developers to offer “context services” (and if you’re a business interested in context-rich social/humane services, you should be talking to our friends at Schulze and Webb).

Mihai Preda explains how midlet signing works, what the Java Verified programme is, and the structural reasons why it hasn’t had more success to date.

Jim Paterson charts the past, present and future for mobile games. One of his wishes for the future is to see generative music in mobile games, which immediately reminded me of Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS Lite, in which generative music is the game.

Patrick Altoft has a summary of recent patents in mobile which illustrates how innovation works: many people try many things, and even though most of them fail, some fail very interestingly.

Dennis at WapReview surveys FunForMobile, a mobile social software site that doesn’t skimp on the mobile part . I’d like to see some usage numbers on these siloed mobile social sites: how do they compare to mobile tools which connect to third-party web services?, eg Shozu for Flickr. Also reviewed: C. Enrique Ortiz compares the the Palm and J2ME versions of Google Maps mobile.

I like Anders Borg’s list of the underlying characteristics of the perfect mobile service, but wonder whether successful services have necessarily embraced messy real world contraints of marketing, technology, etc.

Thread of the week over at Forum Oxford bats local based services to and fro – Motorola Provides New Phone-Based Navigation and Location-Based Services and Products – it’s good though you’ll need to be registered at Forum Oxford to read that one.

Our own effort this week was a misty-eyed lament for the BlackBerry 7730 – and a rose-spectacled dream of reviving it for enterprise applications – perhaps I was imaging Mike Mace’s info pad.

Some more gems, in brief: Ajit Jaokar suggests that the Apple iPhone might encourage imitators to push UIs that use mobile ajax. Smartmobs has this interesting data point: increased wireless penetration has a positive effect upon GDP. David Beers unpicks the tangled commercial backstory of the name rights to “Palm” in The rebirth of the Palm OS brand. Russell Buckley announces that AdMob has served a billion adverts. Paul Walsh reports on Vodafone’s open(ish) community portal. And Paul Golding salutes the GSM data transport designers and engineers.

OK, we’re done. Thanks very much to all the contributors – their posts have fired us up. Onward!

Next week the carnival visits Wireless World Japan [hmm, I’m not sure where yet, will let you all know. I’d like to see Dean Bubley do it at some point.] – see you there.

1. This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists introduced me to another interesting new mobile themed blog, Mobbu. First time host Rod McLaren did a super job of putting the Carnival together. There are a number of very interesting items in the Carnival this week.

   
   — Dennis    30 January 2007, 05:49    #

2. Great job Rod!!!

   
   — Darla    30 January 2007, 18:17    #

3. Thanks Darla, Dennis! It was fun.

   I want to see the Carnival cover more stories on mobile in enterprises (in addition to its excellent coverage of consumer and technology), so will be trying to write more in that direction.

   
   — Rod McLaren    30 January 2007, 19:36    #

4. nice job and some great news tips this week! Hey Darla, maybe you should think about t-mobile at some point… AT&T (and their properties) will always prove to be a dissapointment ;0)

   
   — glenn    31 January 2007, 20:29    #

5. Thanks Rod for the mention. Great post!

   
   — Paul Golding    6 February 2007, 10:48    #

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