Mobitrends

Bit creepy, of bad taste, yet quite cleverly made… The app is powered by Bu.mb

Shopping from a mobile phone has always been a very theoretical exerience. Sounds like a good idea but nobody ever really managed to make a clean 360 experience from window licking to actually paying for goods.  Mobile phone may be used to give more info on a product but at the end the purchase was always done in-store or on the PC. Apple’s app-store made it real and mainstream for apps and now today they just released a mobile app version of their app-store. You can download it right here.

Since your Apple account already integrates your billing infos, the whole process is as seamless as it is on the app store or on the web, probably the first really compelling e-shopping experience on mobile to date !

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 !

Since OS 3.0 came through, one of the key features I was expecting was the ability to connect the iPhone/iPod TOuch to external local devices and use it as a stylish sexy controller. Yet, once again, it seems that Apple is failing on adding properly a new feature to his OS (follow my eyes, think Push notifications, copy/paste…).
I’ve been looking for the appropriate API entry points for months and yet apart from the unclead EAAccessory class and the Peer-to-Peer bluetooth gaming feature, nothing has shown up. Even more after digging the question it seems that the iPhone BT stack implementation is reduced to the absolute minimum.
A project, btstack, has been started to fill in this need, but it seems that this only work on jailbroken phones…
Yet who wouldn’t want to see this kind of apps pop in on the iPhone ?
This means that BT accessories will have to be made specially for the iPhone using probably CSR’s dev kit announced a few days ago. So new devices will probably start to pop up in the next 6 to 9 months, but let’s be honest, do I need to change my gadgets AGAIN to have them supported by the iPhone now ? This sounds like a bad joke…

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 !

Vuziz has announced yesterday that they are releasing an adaptor cable to connect their 3D eyewear glasses to the iPhone. This is really nice, but still lets me wonder when Vuzix will understand that the key factor of success for their devices is not supporting x numbers of hardware platforms but rather having games take advantage of them… and publishing an SDK is definitely not the way they will get any attention from the major game studios thus letting their devices remain cool geeky toys…

As I was booking a Taxi (yeah in France you do that, there’s no way to go on the street and just happen to find one…) just realized that taxisG7 (the leader in Paris) is now providing a cool iPhone webapp to book a Taxi. Can defintly be useful, too bad though it doesn’t take advantage of the built-in GPS. If you already have an account on their service, then go directly with your iPhone to www.taxisg7.fr/mobile. It’s really amusing to see non-tech industries getting into mobile apps (although Taxis have become pretty high tech over those years…). Can’t wait to be able to reserve a good baguette from the nearby bakery and be warned when it is just getting out of the oven – just baked baguettes are the best!