Mobitrends

Daniel a former student of mine in entrepreneurship courses at Telecom Paris launched its first venture : it’s called “SlashWars” and is a location-based role playing game in a very funny environment and leveraging on the built-in accelerometer to let you slash your opponents (see the screencast video below). With his team they built a complete universe and the result is really amazing.
Kudos to them!
They submitted their work to the SFR JTD contest due last week, wish their good luck !

Just spotted a new Framewwork for J2ME development called LWUIT which seems to have recently reached a certain level of maturity. Basically it focuses on the UI providing a swing-like model and enables to create a single jar running on a lot of devices (which is handy if you need to go through the Java verified process) and is pretty groundbreaking compared to good old J2MEPolish which generates a couple jar/jad per targeted device… It features :

• Swing Like MVC (Model View Controller)
• Layouts
• PLAF (Pluggable Look And Feel) & Themes
• Fonts
• Touch Screen
• Animations & Transitions
• Rich widgets
• 3D Integration (Optional)
• Painters
• Modal Dialogs
• External Tools
• I18N/L10N
• SVG Integration (Optional)

It’s released under GPLv2 with Classpath Exception which basically makes it free to use!

Announced today, the i7500 will be the first Samsung Android phone in the market, with a release date set in June for most EU Operators. Its main features, apart from a splendid design are :

• 11.9-mm slim
• quad-band GSM, tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA (900/1700/2100MHz)
• 3.2-inch, 320 x 480 pixel AMOLED touchscreen
• WiFi, GPS
• 5 megapixel camera with Power LED
• 1,500mAh battery
• 8GB of storage (plus MicroSD expansion for up to 32GB more)
• standard 3.5mm heasdset jack

No real keyboard on that one but hey it looks gorgeous, and the AMOLED display (Active Matrix OLED) is supposedly ultra-sharp and very low-power – hopefully will give an autonomy boost to the smartphone. Can’t way…

That’s a milestone worth mentioning – starts giving some real weight to the user base.
The G1 was put on sale on October’08 and if you consider that T-Mobile is one of the smallest carrier in the US that’s quite an achievement. Add to that the developer phones (ADP1) and the derivatives of the G1 being sold recently by other operators such as Orange and you’ll get a pretty nice start for Android!

Some of you might have heard it from me but I’m back in the mobile business. As such got new toys to play with ! Over the last 6 months I used as a personal phone an iPhone then and HTC Android G1 (ADP1) and finally a Blackberry Bold and I wanted to share with you my views on those devices.

iPhone Pros:

• Amazing app store – totally game changing in the mobile world
• Multitouch is perfect for maps and web navigation
• Amazing games
• Support for word and pdf files preview

iPhone Cons:

• No Push email except with mobile Me
• Can’t type on the soft keyboard – useless…
• no bg process (coming in 3.0) and no IM … totally unacceptable to have to wait 2 years for this to come
• Camera is a joke (totally useless…)

Conclusion : can’t use iPhone as a productivity tool – an iPod Touch would probably better

Android g1 Pros:

• Splendid Gmail support (push)
• Applications are really nice and android market has a lot of potential
• Lots of apps can run simultaneously without harming the device performances
• the keyboard is amazing
• Has a compass, the streetview demo rocks thanks to that
• Decent 2D/3D performances (not too many games here though)
• Touchscreen & Trackball support

Android g1 Cons:

• Only one gmail account supported – to get the others you need download an email client that has limited GMail support and polls the network killing your battery
• no multitouch support
• What’s with the USB headset plug !? HTC get real ! Use jack !
• The plastics doesn’t seem really solid, seeing baby open/close the keyboard always tends to stress me
• No native support for neither office files nor PDF files
• my ADP1 is banned from accessing most marketplace applications – Google guys find a solution ! can’t ban developers from getting their own apps !!!

Conclusion : almost there ! A few more releases and a phone made with better materials would make my day !

Blackberry Bold Pros :

• The push email works flawlessly in multiple accounts – the BB backend server is doing a fantastic job
• Keyboard is fine (though smaller than G1′s)
• Device design is amazing – it really feels good when holding it
• GMail and Google Sync support works flawlessly
• Plenty of apps polling the network in parallel don’t kill the device performance and life-span
• Out of the box support for all office files ( and ppt files look great on this)

Blackberry Bold Cons :

• No touchscreen (feels weird)
• Third party applications look really old and badly designed – not up to the level of iPhone and Android
• Keyboard lock process is complicated and unnatural if you’re not using the holster – which thickens considerably the already thick device

Conclusion : Probably the best productivity tool yet – lets me spend the week end without turning on the laptop and yet keeping the needed responsiveness. Would have loved touchscreen though and some better third party apps…

Update: Apparently I was mistaken – it is a BlackBerry Storm, not an iPhone (man some people actually bought a Storm ? what’s th point in having a BB if there is no keyboard ?). Thanks Gabriel for putting this to my attention !

Fredcavazza had a demo of the HTC G2 this morning and did a couple of videos amongst which we can see the new streetview mode to be embedded in the next release of Android
Use of the gyroscope to move around the 3D rendering of the street is just stunning, can’t wait to get my G-Phone updated.

Update : My mistake it was already there ! just hidden in not-so-ergonomic menus…

Just saw this web page on Nokia’s own N-Gage site which gave ma good 5 minutes laugh. As you can say even Nokia has trouble supporting his own devices …
And the fact that an end-user is going to check his firmware version to see if he can use N-Gage is just a lot of fun to consider.
By the way I’ve tried using N-Gage for years and never got my mobile to let me create a username and connect to the service…

I’ve been nosing a bit in the mobile world again lately, and especially in the use of (mobile) games for brands, and working with a few communication agencies over that topic (gotta earn real money with stuff I know those days).
Mobile is a great opportunity for brands, and by targeting specific platforms such as the iPhone you can, if you are smart enough, create a real intimate binding with a community of users around your brand image. Yet, it’s important to understand the behaviors related to mobile apps usage, and as such the following slides (especially from slide 12 and above) are really insightful:

Finally managed to have latitude work on my Android phone this costed me a firmware update and a complete factory reset but now it’s working! Basically it’s built right into google maps 3.0 and it’s fairly easy to use : just add friends from your address book and latitude will share with them your position. When on your PC a widget lets you see where they are.
Nothing really groundbreaking here – Mobiluck has been doing the same for years now but still it’s nicely implemented and maybe it will be easier for Google to reach critical mass which is key for that kind of service in order to be fun and useful !