Mobitrends

I got the opportunity to play with a WP7.5 phone a few days ago, and was pretty amazed by its progress.

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!

Adobe has just posted on their official blog about their backing out of flash plugin on mobile. Here’s basically what they’re saying:

This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video.

Adobe has been trying really hard with Flash for mobile since almost 10 years… unsuccessfully. Since the first version on Symbian to the latest plugin on Android phones it’s become clear that the market fragmentation, the cost to port and maintain the plugin on all those platforms and the fact that the adaptation of content is not really as good as it should lead to a really small market share… definitely not wort the investment apparently ! (Especially since the iPhone will remove out of reach for Adobe).

Recently they acquired  Nitobi the editors of Phonegap. Phonegap is in my opinion the absolute best solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications nowadays – and that’s what we are using for Diveboard. It provides deep device integration while relying on the power of html5/css (and the render engine of the built-in web browsers) to ensure and easy development and port of the applications. This is definitely good enough for many applications, although it will never be as good as native, the TCO of a Phonegap mobile app is way lower than that of a native cocoa app – plus it relies on skill that web developers already have.

Kudos to Adobe for their clear-sight analysis of the situation – must have been an complicated decision internally!

From the official Google Blog:Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demo ofGoogle Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We’re field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.


Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

Yesterday, Google announced the “Android Open Accessory Toolkit” and this announce got me really excited.

Source : Nielsen

I’ve been pretty critical about Nokia’s software over the past few years. In my opinion their last decent smartphone was the N95 an since then they did not release anything decent on the market – mostly because of their slowness to move to a touch-based HMI and the 20th century look of the Symbian UI.Likewise, Windows mobile has been causing pain to their users for too long a time. Never found anyone happy with their Windows Mobile 6 phones… While Windows Phone 7 may be engaging, Microsoft is still missing an iconic phone to actually mark the minds, just as the Nexus or Droids are for Android.

On top of that Microsoft maps is widely inferior to Nokia’s Navteq, and we know that one of the few features that kept Nokia phones alive is the Maps application.

This deal comes up as expected for some time now since Elop joined Nokia, and is leveraging on all the strong assets of each company to build what could be incredibly strong synergies. Nokia is loosing a lot though, since they basically publicly admit they failed at innovating on the software side, but they will gain the ability to build what can become the Windows Phone’s flagship device thus reinforcing the brand. On top of that this will enable Nokia to enter the North American market which they failed until now.
I imagine how the engineers at Nokia must feel about this deal – yet it’s probably the best thing that happened to Nokia over the past 5 years.

The big looser here is Blackberry since their OS is now the most old-fashioned of the pack…
 

Starbucks is rolling out in the US their “Starbucks card” mobile app. The app is an e-wallet tied to your starbucks account and enabling you to pay your caramel macchiato by snapping a 2D barcode printed by the cashier.

Funny enough I had the same idea some time ago since it’s clearly a very time to market way to provide mobile payment with ease (especially since NFC won’t be mainstream before a while). But I found this patent filled by a French guy in Accenture (US2009240626A1) which exactly covers this method… I’d be interested to know how they are evading this obvious IP infringement. Maybe they actually paid Accenture to use the patent but I really doubt anyone would want to pay for that, especially since it’s more of a buzz feature than an actual improvement of the POS workflow. Indeed I’m pretty sure paying with that application is longer than swiping a card, but it may help if you leave home and forgot your purse… which is a really marginal use-case.

UPDATE : Seems I misread the application description (and since it’s US only I could not test it) – the app is actually just a digital version of your fidelity card and shows up a barcode when required to be scanned and to debit your e-wallet of the amount of the order. Actually nothing new under the sun, except the fact that you can recharge your e-wallet from that same app. Fairly disappointing.

Patent 2d code bar scannign for mobile payment

The latest update of google goggles for Android brings in… sudoku solving ! The video below demonstrates the feature … not far from last week’s “Big Bang Theory” where Leonard & buddies making an app to solve differential equations !