Mobitrends

This week Mobile Backup and Android gets all the hype,

• WaveSecure is one of the 3 winners of the Android challenge 2 with its application enabling remote location, lock, backup and wipe of your droid phone
• SugarSync introduces new APIs and an Android application to “sync folders between the SD card on your Android phone and your computers”

So why all the hype ? Answer is quite simple, your mobile is the placeholder of your mobile digital life, and your digital life having massively gone mobile since the iPhone shook up the market, that means a lot. Pictures, music, videos, contacts, calendars, emails, all those personal stuff on a very mobile platform, if you were to loose your device you might loose a lot of irreplaceable data and expose your life to third parties finding your phone. Being able to backup, lock, wipe and restore your phone has definitely a lot of value !

I’m playing again with DeviceAnywhere which I encountered first a couple years ago at Mobile World Congress. If you remember, Mobile Complete make appliances where they hook up a mobile, wire it to a computer and let you access this device from remote through a convenient application. One of the main advantage is that it lets you run QA tests on very heterogenous devices with various operators-related factory settings.
I must confess I’m pretty impressed by the amount of devices they are now supporting along with the number of native operator devices. Haven’t deeply looked at the pricing but it seems quite reasonable (couple bucks an hour) and totally worth the flexibility of the service.

Hilarious teaser from Verizon which will obviously be releasing Android-based phones in November.
Quite a good reminder to all those iPhone fans out there about why they are feeling frustrated with their device – used to be my case and then Android appeared !

Vodafone just introduced Vodafone360 service built on top of Vodafone People (formerly Zyb). With 360 Vodafone takes a global approach with a strong convergence between the phone experience and the web, merging social networks and handset contents in a very nice way.
The service will come first on the Samsung 360 H1 Vodafone which works on a LiMo platform (c’mon guys, why do u really need yet another linux platform… stop fragmenting even more the Mobile world… at least if that would mean no more closed SHP) and should be available as a download on other platforms (with limited functionalities I suspect, even OpenOS may not allow access to all the handset resources demonstrated in this video).

A few good ideas in this service, I tried it on my S60 Nokia but it only launched once and would not start up again …
Anyways this is clearly heading the right direction !

I love to see project going forward in the right direction. Quite a few people were skeptical about Android, I wasn’t, and every month since the first ADP1 Android device was released has proven me I’m right to believe in this OS as it has got one step closer to what the perfect mobile OS should be.
The latest 1.6 release brings a few novelties amongst which:

• Mutlitouch through “gesture API”
• Fine battery management (i.e. now you can track which process slow down your droid and are eating up the battery)
• Improved Android Market now getting closer to the best-in-class Apple appstore
• Quick serch on both local content and the Internet

All those come with dedicated APIs enabling apps to really take advantage of every new feature the OS is proposing. This is the kind of open approach I love and which will make Android a market leader. We’re now just missing the gorgeous piece of hardware that can compete with the iPhone in terms of design and we’ll get the next-gen mass market phone !

When you try to demo a mobile application to a large audience, this can really end up as a nightmare. When I started working in the Mobile Industry in 2004, the only good option back in the days was to use a camera hooked on top of your mobile along with an adequate lighting set to be able to capture a good view of the mobile and of you hitting the keys. The solutions was a bit bulky to transport though and far from being satisfactory.
Since I’m having those kind of issues again I tried to find solutions especially for Nokia S60 devices and while at that time the software solutions were totally non-satisfactory, apparently things have changed.
I bought for 25€ a license of “Remote Professional” from mobileways and the application runs unexpectedly well ! I know can demo the software right from the comfort of my laptop by just connecting it to a live S60 devices and share this on a big screen, thus avoiding the hassle of ono-to-one demos which are a pain when you have a large audience.

After announcing the end of their support for Pictures uploads, now it has become clear what Vodafone intends to be doing with Zyb by focusing on the social network address book side. My guess is that it shall become the RCS service around. If you missed that, RCS is for “Rich Communication Suite” and is a standard for IMS-based services for skype-like social contacts management (so many buzzwords one after another gotta mean something right ?).
Anyway check this video from the Zyb team to get a grasp of their new re-focus:. UPDATE : Vodafone removed all the videos…. so I’ll show you RCS instead I guess!

Nokia is a key player on the mobile industry, and yet when I look at its latest phones I still feel I’m holding a 2003 Nokia 6600. Even the icons on the menu look like they have been designed by a pixel artist with 16 colors. Let’s face it Symbian aged badly and while it has become an efficient factory to give a powerful OS at a very low cost, it’s no match for the new generation of Android or iPhone or even Blackberry OSes.
Thus Maemo ! Nokia recently bought Trolltech the company behind QT (mobile linux-based UIs) and is now preparing Maemo for its new upcoming phones, the upcoming N900 being the first one one the list. Below you can find a video of the UI in action and while I think it could still be polished a lot it’s already a nice upgrade from Symbian times.