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.

(more…)

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

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 !

While the app stores have been marketed as a safe place by Apple since the very beginning, turns out they can become quite easily the haven of the new-age app piracy. The WSJ runs an article on the subject (thanks @gr for the link) where they give as an example a fake banking application sold 1,50USD on the Google app store.

Of course Apple has a very strict human-based approval process that should limit those malwares/spywares, but while the other app stores only react to notification, bottom line is the mobile app world is getting unsafe, and those articles definitely are raising awareness on this fact.

Even with all the human brain curation of the app store, it appears it’s far from perfect as explains the WSJ article “Consumers should be aware that iPhone security is far from perfect and that a piece of software downloaded from the App Store may still be harmful,” wrote software engineer Nicolas Seriot in a research paper detailing iPhone security holes that he presented at a computer security conference in February.

It’s probably time to secure that environment where apps and andvanced browser lead to the same threats that we’ve been taught to manage on the PC world, just as some visionaries such as F-Secure have foreseen for a couple of years already.

While the smartphone market is structuring around the big OSes that are iPhone, Android, RIM and Windows Mobile, one can wonder where the next powerful ideas will be coming from in terms of killer mobile applications. After the hype with casual games and the usual set of tools (better to-do list, better email client, better… , remotes…), and as the app stores are now super-filled, inventing and promoting relevant mobile application is far from being a breeze.

Yet, mobile apps is probably the most growing field in the computer world today. With all those feature-phones being converted into smartphones, this is the most growing space in the industry yet.

Below are a few themes worth thinking about that have yet to be addressed correctly:

• Convergence : Obviously our life is split between devices, and there even apple fails at offering a perfectly convergent experience (i.e. my iPhone doesn’t sync with 2 iTunes on 2 MACs even while they both are authorized on the same account). Ubiquitous data, ubiquitous usage… 1Password is an excellent example of how a great simple desktop app gets a mobile extension generating lots of value, same for Evernote.
• Productivity : there’s still plenty of space left in this area, all the vendors doing complicated stuf such as office doc editor which are totally not suited to mobile usage.
• Lifelog / LifeTracker : while there are tens of ways of sharing stuff from your mobile, I don’t feel satisfied with any as they all feel limited regarding the verbosity of the infos i want to share or the pertinence of the info I would like to see stored.
• Presence : Presence information is currently poorly used either in the core network or in the way events are being treated. Google Voice did an amazing first step (and they are way ahead rest of the world with this) yet there is still a long way to go before presence information is treated seamlessly and adds value to our live
• Books : Publishing is being reinvented through tactile interfaces, from interactive publishing to cross-media, there is loads to do there.
• Banking : I often wonder what Mint would be like on a cell-phone. Apart from the security issues, finances is a standard theme usually badly addressed. Update: As Jerome pointed out in the comments, the mobile payment is also something hot, but the ecosystem is a huge pain/mess to organize to see this happening.

There are probably lots of other themes that could be added for this list, so I’m open for contributions / ideas of use cases that need to be polished/enhanced / developed !

This booth tour of Imagination technology, the makers of the PowerVR chip that powers the Motorola Droid is fascinating. They announced that the chip they are currently designing and that will be found in mobile phones will provide “graphics comparable to the PlayStation 3 in three years”.

Apparently Verizon will be offering a Skype Option to their data plans for Skype use. Still “coming soon” on Verizon’s dedicated site.

Icrossing released a retty interesting map with the market share of mobile web browsers worldwide.
Dominic Parker from iconnect comments:

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.
Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.
Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.
Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

Also interesting to see that in southern america Nokia still rules, and I have no explanation for Opera’s domination in Nigeria… any thoughts ?

Despite the Foursquare / Gowalla hype, Mobile LBS really isn’t a new thing. But, it seems like this time are buying it ! Yet there’s nothing innovative in Foursquare’s service. The confidentiality issues remain, but apparently the fact that firing up the application lets you win mayorships or medals or points somewhat make things acceptable by those who have been criticizing previous LBS service.
Yet the market, fueled by local ads, is a completely new territory to address which may be as big as Google’s Adwords. As usual it’s chicken and egg, nobody really invested in building up local ad networks while there were no real source of traffic for such ads, apparently this is starting to change. It may be the time to start reconsidering the viability of Local Advertisements, which will have special needs in terms of salesforce and sales mechanism that are very different from legacy Internet-based advertisements.
In France, “PagesJaunes” may be on of the few ready for this challenge, with an ability to list and upsale services to local business.

is limited to 500Mb… and I keep breaking the limit faster and faster !