 |
 |
|
|
Mobility Platforms
I've just posted a blog on my personal site regarding the topic of Mobile Platforms. This space is heating up with many players vying to be the Windows of the Mobile world as the OS player including Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, LiMo, Brew, etc.. With the huge number of the devices that will profilerate (already at around 3.3 billion) and huge revenue opportunities this seems to be the next big battle ground.
Few new plays in this space recently:
- Android comes out with its first phone and first looks provides a very open platform for developers to extend functionality.
- Symbian taken over Nokia essentially rendering motorola and other handset manufacturers to choose their own course although
- they've said it will be open sourced.
- Heard recently about LiMo foundation to deliver low foot print Linux.
Was'SUP : The tooling story - Visual Studio or Eclipse; your choice, we support!!
Once upon a time the developers kingdom got split into two provinces, Visual Studio (Windows Platform) and Eclipse (Windows and every other platform) based on various factors like corporate IT decisions, deployment environment, language familiarity, etc. There were some other splinter provinces like (Netbeans, etc.) which continued to have a decent community but not large enough to cause any trouble.
(More...)
Was'SUP - No, I'm not that cool, it's still geek speak!!
You are going to hear a lot of this feeble attempt at humor from the resident geeks at Techwave (I guess we can exclude the marketing folks as they are pretty cool). If you have been attending the past few years of Techwave or visited Sybase home page or may be have attended any one of the presentations over the last few years, there has been a lot of chatter about Unwired Enterprise Platform.
(More...)
PocketBuilder Demos hit the streets!
Now that the latest EBF of PocketBuilder is available, I can say with pride that my PocketBuilder Demos have hit the street.
(More...)
The 3G iPhone Announcement – Still NO Native MMS
Let's talk about the iPhone some more. Over the last, almost 1 year, this little device has done a great deal for the mobile industry. Love it or hate it, it has had an impact. In less than one year, the iPhone has captured around 19% of the smartphone market and has done more than any other device to make mobile Internet browsing mainstream.
On June 9th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new 3G iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. This new incarnation of the iPhone will be available, starting on July 11th with AT&T in the USA. I won’t spend a lot of time here listing the new features, but I should note that the 3G iPhone STILL does not currently have a native MMS client. It is still missing things like copy & paste, Flash, Java, and video support – features that most of the other smartphones in the marketplace, support natively. I should point out that, thanks to the iPhone SDK, we should expect Sun to make available a Java Virtual Machine for the iPhone, sometime this summer. Additionally, we should expect Adobe to release Flash for the iPhone as well.
CNET provided live coverage of the 3G iPhone announcement along with details of 3rd party applications and the application developer’s toolkit. Another well-respected industry blog at Engadget gives a nice overview. Note all of the blogger comment complaints about lack of MMS.
There is now a 3rd party MMS client called “Swirly MMS” that is making some news in the blogspace. It is currently a very rough application(can only send, not receive) that one can download. Still, it is a start.
Recall from previous blogs; if I send an MMS to an iPhone user, the recipient will receive an SMS stating that they have an MMS to retrieve from an AT&T (and likely other operator) web site – a terrible user experience reminiscent of the old days when most handsets didn’t support native MMS. Hopefully, this will change
Despite the lack of true MMS on the iPhone, MMS traffic, in general, continues to grow organically and is now approaching 30% of the subscriber population sending at least 1 MMS per month in many markets.
TechWave Registration is now open!
Join us Aug. 4 – 8 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV... for the 10th Annual Sybase User Training and Solutions Conference.
(More...)
iPhone... part two
A few posts ago I wrote about how the iPhone (or full browsers on mobile phones) does not mean the end of mobile banking. And in that post I mentioned that I had some other reasons why mobile banking is different.
During the interim we've been interviewing candidates for a number of roles within Sybase 365, and with that post fresh in my mind, I thought I would ask the candidates the question iPhone vs. Mobile Banking. So here's some of the answers I got...
(More...)
New PocketBuilder Demos
I am finally adapting my PocketBuilder Demo applications, so they can be included in the PocketBuilder DVD.
(More...)
Coming soon - our 2008 mBanking Survey Report - sneak preview in Frankfurt next week
We finally completed our 2008 mBanking survey...
Last year we spoke to nearly 5,000 consumers across the globe on their opinions regarding mobile banking, so this year we looked to get a peer-based view. We interviewed banks about their plans for mobile banking services, and we got some very ineresting responses...
I'll be sharing some of the results here over the coming weeks, but if you are in Frankfurt next week, and would like to jump the queue and get a full copy of the report - here's what to do.
(More...)
CTIA 2008 - "The WiMAX Show"
After quite a bit of thought, I can still safely say that this conference had a definite “theme” about it and that was WiMAX. I think that a great deal of the heavy WiMAX presence was due to the WiMAX Forum’s strong promotion of the technology among companies at the conference. In fact, the forum provided a journey of sorts (called the “Walk of WiMAX” Tour), across almost 100 forum-member companies in the exhibition hall. The WiMAX Forum sponsored the WiMAX Lounge with live demonstrations of services in a strategically placed booth outside the main entrances to the exhibition halls in the convention center. I did see a nice demonstration of the capabilities that will be available, later this year, via Sprint’s XOMH service. So whether you needed antennas, WiMAX modems, consumer devices, USB dongles, base stations, testing/measurement instruments, or backhaul solutions for WiMAX, this was your show to attend.
I like WiMAX – and am looking forward to available deployments – with the new 700 MHz frequency bands, mostly allocated to AT&T and Verizon, the technology can certainly resolve some of the “last mile” issues – especially in more rural areas where broadband access is certainly hard to come by (e.g. see my previous blog on how I have to access the Internet). The WiMAX Forum even has a position paper on the new 700 MHz spectrum and WiMAX. The Forum suggests that by 2009, WiMAX will be 700 MHz band ready (right now, WiMAX is available for frequency bands between 2300 MHz and 3800 MHz). The bottom line is that a 700 MHz deployment of WiMAX in areas with lesser subscriber density can result in more broadband coverage and options, with fewer towers and larger cell sizes.
While WiMAX dominated the 4G technology, they were certainly not alone. An almost equal number of companies were demonstrating and promoting LTE (Long Term Evolution) equipment and services. LTE is seen as the 4G technology for most GSM and CDMA based networks, although I’m not sure how it would be in advancing fixed broadband around the world. LTE certainly has more nomadic capabilities (currently) than WiMAX.
As the industry slowly advances towards an more “open” IP-based mobile ecosystem, I do believe that we will finally start to see various services that will require more than just unfettered or unmanaged internet access. Of course, if the current 800-900 operators or so have it their way, they will never become just simple ISPs or “dump pipes” as they are sometimes called. Instead, there will even be more services that require some level of “management” – of things like dedicated bandwidth, latency thresholds, and of course, presence. The presence concept (or availability of a subscriber to accept one or more types of communications) will slowly expand from the Instant Messaging world of today to virtually all types of communications tomorrow. When most of the world is running 3G, 3.5G, and 4G data networks, I think you will start to see IMS begin to take hold to manage these capabilities.
But I digress – back to the show for a few more tidbits –
The handset vendors were all there in force. All except, Google (just like in Barcelona). I cannot understand WHY, why a company such as Google, who wants to play in this space; who has announced a major mobile platform (Android) does not have a strong presence – even just with information on their vision of the mobile ecosystem – and maybe some demonstrations of prototypes with Android. They could so be a popular and educational spot at this conference.
Microsoft announced Mobile Windows 6.1, which should be available soon and all 6.0 Mobile Windows users can upgrade. This will include a new Mobile Explorer browser with many features that look to me, to be very similar to Opera Mini.
Samsung, Nokia, LG and others all now have, what some to perceive as “iPhone killers” – still not much of an iPhone presence at the show, except for the AT&T booth. Touch screens are now definitely in vogue, as are fashion phones – the LG Prada, Samsung Giorgio Armani, Adidas and Bang and Olufsen, to name a few.
Finally, one of the more innovative products I saw at the show was a shoe (yes, a shoe) from a company called ID Conex. They create GPS and GSM enabled footwear, targeted for very specific vertical markets from military to care for the memory impaired.
With over 40,000 visitors and over 1100 exhibitors, this was truly a strong showing this year. Suffice it to say, there was little evidence of an economic downturn as this industry continually refreshes and expands.
|
|
|
|
