Mobitrends

I love android phones. Their integration with Google is simply fantastic. They do a much better work in integrating with Gmail than my iPhone does and the Gtalk app is just incredible, it lets me chat on the go seamlessly (and there is nothing like this experience on iPhones… ). The OS itself is OK, it’s young and rapidly evolving into something more consumer-friendly, it’s far from being as polished as iOS. The apps portfolio available through the android market is getting better everyday now even featuring the iOS blockbusters and Epic’s UTEngine games.

SO basically if I were to sum up the unique selling points of android it’s Gmail/Google Integration and the Android market … only those are not Android features, they are Google phones features. The core OS being OpenSource, any device manufacturer can take the OS and port it to their device, but they won’t get any of the Google applications (no market access, no gmail….). Yet they can write on their datasheet and on billboards and shout to the world “my device runs Android”.

With even more fragmentation coming to the device market with the new tablets announced at CES today (for instance Lenovo’s LePad) the fact that the Android brand, which is one of the key brand values end-users will be relying on, does not actually mean anything and does not reflect the end-users expectations is pretty scary.

The fact that there are so many flavors on Android not featured by google even created market opportunities for Amazon or getjar to provide third-party apps marketplace, which sounds a bit like an oddity when you look at how integrated the iOS experience is. I remember last summer at GDC how developers were complaining that 70% of the users of android could not buy their product (non-availability of billing in their countries, non-google-approved devices…) and that was a huge issue that is actually stopping developers to target Android. Angry Birds even totally gave up the paying model to only put a free version + ads since it seems to be the only realistic way today.

I think it’s important to create brands to differentiate the core OS (which nobody really cares abouts, it’s no better/worse than Bada, WebOS or any other) to the set of tools that create the value of the platform and basically let you know that the device will have access to all the cool resources of the Android world.

Mobile devices are small computers, that’s now granted. For years now some companies have foreseen that those devices will be target to security threats (F-Secure launched its first Mobile AV for Symbian in 2004 (and was well demoed with the Skull Virus – see pic to the side). Now quite a few players have joined the race with traditional security providers like AVG (through the purchase of DroidSecurity), McAffee (trhough the purchase of tenCube) and new independent players such as Lookout.

The threats have evolved also, we can now see that with the devices being sandboxed, the risk is not so much to get your phone infested with a virus replicating itself in every file than to have a malicious software access your personal data to replicate on your friend’s phones or pass unauthorized calls to premium phone numbers.

Main mobile threats :

• Malicious apps : unauthorized phone calls / text messages, access to private data. Unfortunately most devices and OSes aren’t AV friendly and won’t grant privileges to a software to exit its sandbox to analyze software for threats signatures. Thus AVs are only limited to application reputation to identify potential threats…
• Phishing : on a mobile device it’s even harder to distinct a forged copy of a website from it original self (now link preview, limited graphics…). Same goes with the emails where there is less info than in regular email clients to preview links
• SMS Spam : “someone sent you a voicemail, call and dial #123# to listen to it” : this kind of SMS Spam is tough to monitor and prevent
• Theft : stealing a mobile phone (or just loosing it) can be very easy  : many vendor have anti-theft / lock & wipe features to prevent that. Not to mention the backup that will prevent your files from being lost !

Lookout has recently announced it has passed the 1M user mark, but I’m pretty sure the market is still at its infancy. The OS manufacturers and Phone vendors were targets for very few attacks, but now that a few major Smartphones platforms have emerged such as Android and iOS, this creates a critical mass which makes it worth it for hackers to invest and start looking for breaches. And there’s no doubt they *will* find breaches (proof is hackers keep on jailbreaking every new iOS version as it gets released).

… Maybe ! At least there are a few signs that are intriguing. Facetime only working with WiFi, no on-board WAN module on ANY Macbook… I really wonder if the day Macs will come with on-board WAN it won’t be with an Apple worldwide data-plan. Actually it makes sense – apple is a digital company where data connectivity is at the heart of most of their recent products. They have reached a worlwide critical mass of users and know their adoption rate, they own the hardware and can control its behavior and model it – maybe they are the only one actually able to build a real MVNO operator focusing on data connectivity.

Just a tought but that would actually make sense (or at least make users scream !! ). Below a screenshot showing that you can now call a mobile from your Mac (if the mobile is WiFi connected) and do a Facetime session – pretty wild !

I attended the Windows Phone 7 competition today at Microsoft France and it was a really interesting experience.

It was the first time I actually witnessed Steve Ballmer live – the guy is such a show man ! Energy and passion are just fusing out of him.
The panel of judges was something too, including Marc Simoncini, Xavier Niel and Jacques-Antoine Granjon.

The applications were imho pretty dull though : let’s face it there was nothing new there. The tower defense game who won the competition was a nice realization but just like the others it’s an over-used concept. The only obvious thing is that just as usual when a new platform is launching it’s an opportunity for new players in a given field to join the battle. In the case of the iPhone some who went that road actually became quite huge (think tap-tap revolution vs Guitar Hero).

Nevertheless I think this application perfectly demonstrated THE killer feature of WP7 : the common gaming platforms between PC, XBOX, and WP7. The Xbox is on of the best product ever made by Microsoft. XNA is a simple (and almost free) development language that lets you build games that will run on all those platforms, thus you can expect WP7 to really surf the gaming wave. With numerous game studios familiar with the platform (although not using so much XNA except for indies) this open up a real opportunity for convergence and seamless multiplayer gaming within the Microsoft ecosystem, all with very little investment to adapt contents from one platform to another.

Can’t wait to see what this platform becomes (and to actually hold a phone running WP7).

Apple just bought Swedish startup Polar Rose which basically makes facial recognition software for mobile phones as demoed in the video embedded below.
As creepy as it sounds, this feature is amazing and feels so much easier than bump to connect with someone. The other very interesting thing is that Apple is Buying Out Eurpean Startups !!! This is the second example in just 2 months (first one brought the HDR feature to the new iOS 4.1).
I’d be really curious to see how they are going to integrate the technology and what the future of those engineers will be.
Polar Rose raised 6,1M$ and sold for 22M$ which is a nice ROI for technology in Europe and regardign the fact that I’m not sure they had any revenue yet.

Palm just announced on his blog that jQuery Mobile has been released.
Aside from Windows Mobile and Maemo (!?!?) All the modern platforms are supported as you can see in the chart below. We’ve seen how web apps can look gorgeous on the iPhone Safari browser, now all the mobile browsers get a leveled dynamic experience of the mobile web. It’s hard to anticipate just now if this is going to be a game-changer or simply a nice to have feature, and while many have envisioned that web-apps would prevail to native apps this certainly hasn’t been the case till now.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing news and for sure web developers will have to upgrade their mobile site to take full advantage of this new dynamics.

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery
to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the
major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI
framework.
Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing
work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular
platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview
detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart
showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

RIM’s consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones, dubbed Blackberry Protect, has just been officially announced. Rumored for months, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

The application is currently in limited beta trial and no date for General Availability has been communicated

Gotta love the idea idea – turn your todo list into quests and level up as you go through them. When GTD meets with RPG and Funware : “Epic Win” coming soon on the app store !

Grats to “comex” who is apparently getting somewhere in porting flash to iPad. He is basing his work on the libflashplayer.so made by Adbobe for Android, and indeed since both are ARM devices, with a lot of hacking around he got it right !

A couple of charts I found worthy to share excerpted from Vision Mobile’s “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond” study which you should definitely read (it’s free – sponsored by Telefonica).