Betanews - Wireless

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: 'Nobody's going to be 100% open'

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:52:22 -0500

Over the last five years, Microsoft has undergone a gradual, but significant, shift in its public image, a shift toward interoperability and a willingness to play more fairly in competitive markets. At the same time, it remains a commercial software producer committed to the protection of its proprietary intellectual property.

Openness, as CEO Steve Ballmer explained to his company's Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2008, should not imply free. "Open source also implies free -- free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference," he told attendees at the time.

The picture Ballmer painted then was more black-and-white, where Microsoft will selectively venture into the black world of openness where necessary, but stay rooted within the white world of business that pays salaries and funds conferences. Last week during a press luncheon at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles, where Betanews and others were invited, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (the company's leading executive spokesperson now, after Ballmer) painted a more scalable picture of "openness" from Microsoft's vantage point, one which is more attainable by degrees.

What's 'open?'

"Well, we're all open and we're all not open," said Ozzie, in response to a statement repeated (at least) four times by TechCrunch reporter Steve Gillmor: "Android's open." Gillmor was pressing Ozzie and colleague Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools, to be more "open" about when and whether Silverlight will become interoperable among multiple smartphone platforms (the Silverlight video on iPhone announcement had not yet been made). Someone in the company giggled in response to Ozzie's remark like an extra on "Hee Haw"...it was probably me.

"I mean, nobody is going to be a hundred percent open," Ozzie continued. "Android's not 100% open, we won't be. There are things that are illegal that, if you have the ability to shut off, we're going to have to shut off. There are things that get in the way of your partner's business model. I may be wrong on this...but the way Google Voice hooks into the Droid, I think Verizon's still gets billed for calls...So Windows has a brand value of openness, meaning, we don't control what desktop apps people write. It's got a history of data openness; we don't look at the data that's sitting on your desktop. So I think as we move forward, the nature of what we do on phones that carry the Windows brand, will probably be more open than not. It's not like the Xbox, where Xbox, like the iPhone, is more of a managed ecosystem [that] is part of the business model."

Seated next to Ozzie was Moonlight developer Miguel de Icaza, who related his recent problems with Apple in working to port code from Moonlight (a Silverlight-compatible runtime for non-Windows platforms) from Mac OS X to the iPhone. Technically, there were few problems at all; but Apple made the decision (after the fact) that two of the APIs that de Icaza's team ported over, should not have been.

Are apps important on phone platforms?

LiveSide.net blogger Kip Kniskern followed up by asking Ozzie and Muglia why consumers should wrestle with the confusion over phone platforms at all -- specifically, why can't there be an App Store that's a single location that applies to every user? Ozzie interrupted by saying, "This isn't going to be a big deal for consumers anyway. It's not going to be at all.

"Let's just step back: There's a lot of confusion, I think, right now, about what's going on on the phones," he continued, "and I'll just give you a high-level perspective -- this is my perspective, I'm not 'right,' I may be wrong, it's a perspective: These are app phones -- what distinguishes them from everything else. We're now in an era where apps are the higher [element of importance], not just calls. And the apps that are on them, most of them -- I know there are exceptions, but most of them -- aren't deeply complex. A lot of them are apps that somebody paid a reasonable amount of money for some group to go port or implement. A lot of them are front-end companions to a Web service on the back end. I think, my assumption -- and I don't have any reason to believe that this is wrong -- is that once things settle out, and we all have app phones (Apple has an app phone, Google has an app phone, Microsoft has an app phone, BlackBerry/RIM has an app phone)...If there's a market there, all the apps that count will be ported. Every app that matters will be ported to every one of them, because if there's a set of users and it costs $50,000 of consulting time to have somebody port a little app, it's going to get ported. So I just don't think there's going to be significant differentiation at the app level.

"This is a big difference from the PC, Mac ecosystem in the past" Ozzie continued. "You cannot take the lessons that we learned in that era and apply them to the phone. It's a totally different world. If all you saw on the phone was Office -- something of that substance that took that many man-years to implement, and it was very nuanced -- then it would be different." Kniskern reminded Ozzie of the remaining problem with apps not being approved by the proprietors of app stores, especially Apple's. "But once the other app phones have a more lenient approval environment, then they change."

Next: Is Microsoft's cloud bigger than the law?

Is Microsoft's cloud bigger than the law?

As Microsoft and its competitors expand their cloud computing services, for the first time, entire computing platforms will commonly cross country's boundaries. There are laws governing interstate transport, even among members of the EU; and now, those laws will apply to computing systems just as though sovereign boundaries separated the CPU from RAM.

In recent dealings with issues of privacy, interoperability, and fairness as they pertain to certain governments around the world, it often seems -- at least to this reporter -- that it's difficult to know what the new ground rules are until the referee takes the field to declare the first out-of-bounds penalty. This is an observation I raised with Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia: How does Microsoft plan, going forward, to communicate with governments what its plans are, without tightening the boundaries for itself?

"There's no single answer to that question," Muglia responded. "What we have is, we are engaged in conversations with governments all around the world, and when I talk about the cloud being nascent and emerging, this is an example of emerging characteristics of the cloud: understanding how it will exist in the regulatory environment, in all of the different countries and geographies that it has to work in. So as we begin to bring services out to businesses and users within a given geography, we have to, we have to operate in the legal context that's established by the government agency. There's complexities in some parts of the world where you get into issues about privacy and government control over access to information, and things like that. Those are just things you have to understand how to operate in, and what sort of steps you need to take.

"So we're engaging with them," he continued. "And I think we're all learning a bit together. I don't think the laws will exist the same way today -- ten years from now, I think they'll have changed, they'll have evolved. You had the concern that they will get tighter; that probably will happen, in some cases, and in other cases they will probably get looser. As people see that government restrictions prevent prosperity within their country as organizations and individuals aren't able to do some of the things they might want to do, if some of those restrictions weren't there."

Ray Ozzie picked it up from there: "The best analogy I've been able to come up with is, late '80s, early '90s, there were a lot of crypto export issues. There was a real disconnect between what we were trying to do as a technology industry, and what customers wanted to do, and the regulations. And right now, there are some things that don't make sense to technologists. Like the fact that you cannot have a copy of this kind of data -- whether it's health data, or whatever -- on the other side of a border, for a citizen of a given country. Almost as though encryption doesn't exist, in terms of, where should the keys be versus where should the data be? And there was a big lag in terms of getting the regulations changed over time, and we really don't regard it as much of a problem as an industry any more, for the most part.

"The big difference between cloud computing and crypto -- and the reason I'm optimistic that things will change sooner -- is that governments themselves want to use cloud computing. There are some really significant economic issues related to people within governments building massive data centers where they maybe shouldn't, maybe they don't need to, and so I'm optimistic that some of these things will have a lot more [progress]...The pragmatic need to embrace cloud computing themselves will put them in a situation where they might go, 'Okay, there is this economic benefit; now I understand what these people are talking about.'"

Safari on iPhone gets competition from a $1 browser app

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:59:08 -0500

By Paul Hartsock, MacNewsWorld

If you search for "browser" in the App Store, you'll get dozens of applications, each purporting to be an alternative to the iPhone and iPod touch's built-in Safari browser. In a sense, they are alternatives, since they look different and might have a few unique features. But they're really all Safari underneath -- Apple will only approve browsers that are basically built with Safari guts using a reworked user interface.

On the down side, this means we won't be seeing alternative browsers from the likes of Mozilla or Opera any time soon, and there's no official challenger to Safari in terms of speed or compatibility with various Web standards.

On the plus side, since they're all Safari at heart, all these browsers should be just as able to navigate the Web at large as Safari itself, and considering how poorly some other mobile browsers do that, that's not a very painful limitation. Safari tackles most non-Flash pages just fine, and any site specifically optimized to work on mobile Safari should work on these alternate browsers in terms of audio, video, interaction, etc.

So what's in an interface? Some Safari alternatives can be pretty gimmicky, but one called "Full Browser" makes a few simple and sensible improvements that bring more of a desktop feel to the iPhone.

More space, more functions

Full Browser earns its name not just by giving you a few more features common to full desktop browsers, but also by sweeping all its control panels off the screen and giving you a full-framed image of the page you're looking at. With just 3.5 inches of screen to work with, every last bit of surface area counts. If you don't really need to know things like time, network availability and battery life, and you don't need a set of navigation controls at the bottom, FullBrowser will take those away and let you see slightly more of the Web page you're on. Tapping a very small shaded region at the bottom of the screen pulls up the control.

Along the top of the control panel, you get the familiar URL bar, a Google search bar (it stays Google even if your Safari search default is Yahoo), and a menu button. The drop-down menu gives you options like clearing cookies, mailing a link, editing your bookmarks and opening a link in Safari proper. The second row of top control panel buttons contains your tabs. These are arranged much in the same way desktop tabs are laid out -- hit "+" to open a new one, press "x" to get rid of the one you're on, and swipe left and right to move through them if you have a lot open.

Along the bottom, you have controls for searching the page for a word, calling up a grid layout for all the tabs you have open, adding the site you're on as a bookmark, forward/back/reload, and hiding the control panel for a full-screen page view.

Text search found

For me, Full Browser's biggest benefit is its text search capability. This is something I use all the time on a desktop browser, and I miss it when using mobile Safari. The way it works here is similar to the way it works in Firefox.

It's pretty subjective, but I also like the tabbing system in Full Browser better than Safari's sort-of playing-card system of keeping several pages open. FB's just reminds me more of a regular browser, and I seem to be able to navigate it faster.

Another nice feature Full Browser has is Hot Spots. You can assign the corners of the screen to perform a specific function (like scroll to top, show all tabs, text search, etc.) when you tap them as you view a page in full-screen mode. If that sounds like it'd get in the way, you can turn it off.

Finally, there's Speed Dial, a function that will show you a grid of your bookmarked pages when you open the browser. Like Hot Spots, this can be deactivated.

Odd quirks

Despite FB's virtues, some weird behaviors popped up.

When I held the phone in landscape mode and hit the bottom bar to see the control panel, it comes up displayed horizontally across the screen, as expected. But when I touched the URL bar to input an address, the virtual keypad sometimes comes up sideways, in portrait mode. Not exactly hard to fix that yourself, though -- just try again, or, I dunno, turn the thing sideways.

In addition, it seemed as though the bottom bar wouldn't work on a few occasions. It wasn't often, but no bottom bar means no controls, so you're pretty much stuck. The bar's also sort of small, so if you have sausage fingers it's easy to miss it and instead click a link lying near it.

I also get a strange error whenever I accessed online media like video or audio: "Operation could not be completed (WebkitErrorDomain error 204)." After I hit "OK," the media played just fine. This message does not come up when I access the same media through Safari.

Bottom line

When it first arrived in 2007, Safari on iPhone made every other smartphone browser in the world look hideous by comparison, and though it's changed only a little since then, it still easily holds its own.

Safari's features are still very basic compared to a desktop browser's, and that's probably always going to be the case, considering that a phone is just too small to do everything a desktop does. Although Full Browser hits a hiccup now and then, and although it certainly doesn't have all the functions of a real full desktop browser, things like text search and a familiar tab layout make it well worth a buck.

Originally published on MacNewsWorld

Nokia's N900 arrives in U.S., bodes the death of Symbian on N-series phones

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:56:33 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Nokia's intriguing N900 "pocket computer" has officially launched in the United States. The device, a smartphone that evolved out of Nokia's Mobile Internet Device (MID) family, signifies a new era for the Finnish mobile tech leader.

Vice President of Nokia retail sales, Alessandro Lamanna summed it up in a prepared statement today: "Consumers from every segment of the population are looking for more out of their mobile device - more power, more ability, more connectivity." So in order to deliver these results, Nokia paired the 600MHz TI OMAP 3430 chipset with the Linux-based Maemo platform, and locked it up inside a 3G phone with a 3.5" touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard.

According to one report, Nokia said that by 2012, Maemo will have fully replaced Symbian as the operating system powering its top-end N-series devices. The N900, according to this report, marks the beginning of this transition because it is targeted at the enthusiast and developer crowd who will grow the Maemo ecosystem before it starts being marketed to the mainstream consumer. By then, Symbian will then be relegated to the mass market E- and X-Series devices.

We've sent an inquiry to Nokia to find out how true this report actually is, because it could have a significant impact on the smartphone market in the long term as Linux-based platforms are poised to dominate the mobile sector.

And if there was any doubt as to whom the N900 and Maemo appeals to, check out this video:

The Nokia N900 is available for $649 through Nokia's flagship stores in New York and Chicago, and on the Web at nokiausa.com and Amazon.com. It is compatible with AT&T's and T-Mobile's networks in the United States.

Apple's house rules won't be the death of app development

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:11:50 -0500

By Chris Maxcer, MacNewsWorld

So Facebook developer Joe Hewitt tweets that he's ditching the super-popular Facebook iPhone app, and TechCrunch, clearly sensing there's more to the story here, reaches out to learn why.

"My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies," Hewitt told TechCrunch. "I respect their right to manage their platform however they want; however, I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer."

Hewitt's decision, of course, has sparked a mini firestorm over the so-called tyrannical Apple, with critics asserting it has a terrible App Store approval process, despite the approval of more than 100,000 apps so far. Hundreds of comments later, there's the notion that Android is a better, more open platform, and if key developers move to Android from Apple, then "it's over" -- this last bit from none other than Robert Scoble on the TechCrunch comment board.

Really?

I know a nurse with a jailbroken iPhone that can play a game where a monkey urinates into a moving toilet. I know a grandmother who uses her iPhone to check the price of wheat. Both owners can easily get what they want from their iPhone. I have a hard time imagining any set of applications so compelling and only available on an Android-based phone -- but not on an iPhone -- that would get them to switch over to an Android phone. What if the nurse lost the ability to jailbreak the iPhone and play the monkey bathroom game? Based on what I know about the nurse, I doubt there'd be too many tears shed.

Still, there will be a few million people willing to switch and try new things, no doubt about it. But there'll be millions more quite happy with the 100,000 apps they have available.

Moving on to the real noise

I've run into more than a few developers in my life, and two traits stand out: First, the best have a sort of focused brilliance. They are indubitably intelligent and capable of looking at foreign languages (a.k.a., "code") and understanding how funky characters and spacing relates to hardware, software and user-generated events. Let's not dismiss this lightly. It's one thing to learn to speak a foreign language like Spanish, and it's an entirely other thing to write a novel in Spanish.

Developers are pretty much doing the equivalent of writing novels in foreign languages. It's hard work, takes time, and often enough they become emotionally invested in their efforts. In 2007, TechCrunch, by the way, called Joe Hewitt an "iPhone God," and he seems to be pretty well-respected and talented.

And the second trait?

They tend to like things their way, and they tend to get irritated when people with power over them expect something that's not congruent with what they want. Kind of Like You and Me

So the developers I've run into -- which is an infinitesimally small percentage of all developers in the world, mind you -- are a lot like you and me when it comes to their second trait. We're just not nearly as smart.

Let's break down the two sentences from Hewitt above. He is "philosophically opposed" to the existence of Apple's review process. Sounds like a guy who doesn't like anyone peeking over his shoulder and ultimately deciding what gets to fly. Fair enough. Writers have editors. Sometimes the editors get it wrong. Most often, they get it right, and sometimes their criticism makes the product much better. If they get it wrong too often, writers can walk away. And sometimes they outright reject the work of a writer.

Being opposed to a review process is a personal thing. Let's not confuse this with a so-called "failed" Apple App Store policy.

As reported, Hewitt then added that "gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer." Ouch. No one on the outside likes a gatekeeper, but "infesting the lives"? Right on -- I don't like it when anyone screws up my brilliance. I once built a fence in my back yard, and before I could even begin building it, I had to go to my city, draft some specs, and get a permit. There's a retaining wall near one portion of the fence. Because there's a tiny possibility that some idiot might trespass through my backyard and climb my fence and leap without looking, I had to build a much shorter-than-planned, see-through fence.

My point? This stuff is part of the cost of living with other people.

Stupid? You bet -- until some guy is chased by police through my backyard, leaps the big fence I originally wanted, and breaks his back on the other side. Lawsuit ensues, and I lose my house. Look, there's money on the table for Apple, but I guarantee that Apple, which lives in the lawsuit-happy state of California, isn't interested in losing its house at 1 Infinite Loop.

Here there be monsters

What about when there is no walled garden? (Sure, Facebook is a walled Web garden, but let's not get petty here.) Anyone with a jailbroken iPhone get Rickrolled recently? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. (OK, I'll admit it, I Rickroll myself at least once a year just to remind myself how to jump into a chain link fence and bounce back looking cool. I might need that someday.)

But for jailbroken iPhones, there are real problems for those who haven't changed their default root passwords. A new hacker tool identified as "iPhone/Privacy.A" by Intego can compromise an iPhone by letting a hacker silently copy user data, including e-mail, contacts, SMSes, calendars, photos, music files, videos, as well as any data recorded by any iPhone app.

But that's just for open jailbroken iPhones.

For regular iPhones, how about the class action lawsuit filed by Michael Turner against Storm8 (PDF available here) over the alleged "practice of accessing, collecting and transmitting without notice or consent the wireless telephone numbers of iPhone users who download Storm8's games to their iPhones via Apple's App Store."

If true, well, ouch. This is a fairly benign violation, but an app could easily act as the gateway to identity theft and real monetary damage for consumers. Apple missed this one, but as a consumer, I like the idea of Apple vetting some apps.

Let me say that again: I like that Apple is vetting the apps.

I don't believe that Apple always makes good decisions. I think Apple makes mistakes. But I also think that great, fantastic apps will find a home, if not with Apple, then elsewhere. This is how it is with great novels. If the writer is persistent and the work is truly fantastic, it'll find a publisher. Same goes for some movies. And what about monetary success Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales and acclaim? There's a bit of cosmic luck involved. Sorry -- it's the way the world works, and I don't see it changing any time soon. Cosmic luck.

Meanwhile, Apple is a distributor

If you're a distributor, you get to the make the rules.

Every day around the world, distributors and retail stores -- which are just like the App Store -- are rejecting products. Someone is making choices at the distribution level every single day. Those decisions are made behind closed doors, and they involve money as well as esoteric on-the-spot choices.

Here's an example: A guy creates a new hammer. He takes the hammer to Home Depot because he wants Home Depot to sell the hammer for him. Home Depot looks at the hammer. It's got good balance. They whack a few nails with it, but on the last whack, a shard of metal flies off the hammer and strikes the tester in the eye. Oops. Poor quality metal. Hammer is rejected. Is the process open and clear? Probably not. Am I glad that Home Depot rejected the hammer? You bet. I trust the Home Depot brand to do these sorts of things, and I expect them to sell quality hammers. Just one example.

But the hammer guy doesn't give up. Maybe he upgrades the quality of metal in the hammer, then goes to Lowe's. The gatekeepers at Lowe's look at the hammer, see that it's a nice hammer, but hey, it's essentially the same as an existing hammer that Lowe's already sells. Sure, it has a hole at the end of the handle where a person could string a lanyard, but everything else, the size, weight, ergonomics -- basically the same as the Lowe's signature hammer. Sorry, hammer dude, Lowe's is going to reject your hammer.

You see how this goes in the real world? The Apple App Store isn't any different.

The only difference is that the people working through, avoiding, or using the App Store -- developers, hackers, and consumers -- all live in a Web world where it's easy to complain about it.

Speaking of complaints, I've got one: How come Wal-Mart sells the "low-end" Hanes underwear while Target sells the "high-end" Hanes underwear? Oxymorons aside, the low-end Hanes has a thinner rubbery waistband, while the high-end Hanes underwear has a wider, more cloth-covered waistband with a sharper Hanes logo graphic and better thread density. Same manufacturer, but Wal-Mart only sells the lesser quality version.

What gives?

Obviously, someone at Wal-Mart thinks that all Wal-Mart shoppers want the cheap Hanes underwear. I shop at Wal-mart, but I want the better Hanes underwear -- can't get it at Wal-Nart! So I go to Target to get my underwear. Should I be angry that Wal-Nart is selling the crappy underwear? Am I claiming there's a fundamental problem with the Wal-Mart decision process?

Is Wal-Mart going to fail because their gatekeepers are choosing to sell lower-quality underwear?

Nah. I still spend plenty of money at Wal-Mart. I go to Wal-Mart for what Wal-Mart is good for. I go elsewhere to get what others do well. None of this is going to make or break the iPhone. If anything, a flawed iPhone App Store approval process will ultimately result in more choice and better apps -- for everyone, on the iPhone and on Android or Windows Mobile or RIM, Palm, and even Samsung's new mobile operating system.

Apple is looking to protect itself, and Apple is looking to maximize profit. Those are clear and clean efforts. I might not like them, but I trust them. Steve Jobs wants to sell us quality products at a price. Steve Jobs sells. There's nothing underhanded about this. It's not even evil.

At least it's clear.

There's really only one way it's going to change. Developers need to create astounding applications that don't run on the iPhone. A lot of them. Of course, how many developers with astounding applications really want to avoid the iPhone App Store marketplace? Right. How many successful novelists won't allow their books to be sold by Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble?

Hewitt might be one of these guys who can succeed on his own. He told TechCrunch he wants to focus on open Web applications to "make the Web the best mobile platform available" rather than support a system that requires middlemen. It's a noble cause. I like the idea.

I just think we're a long long way from anything iPhone App Store being "over."

Originally published on MacNewsWorld

Windows Marketplace for Mobile launches on WinMo 6.0 and 6.1

Tim Conneally — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:16:23 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Windows Marketplace for Mobile launched exclusively with Windows Mobile 6.5 in October, and unified the vast Windows Mobile application ecosystem under a single umbrella.

Prior to launch, Microsoft announced that users running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 would eventually have access to the new app marketplace, but did not provide a specific date.

That date, it would appear, is today.

Following up on last week's addition of the Web-based Marketplace, the Windows Mobile team has unveiled support for all Windows Mobile 6.0+ devices. To get the Marketplace app, users can point their mobile browser to mp.windowsphone.com to start downloading.

We're in the process of checking it out now, and we'll let you know how it goes. If you've already gotten your hands on it, let us know what you think!

Current Status: Up and running, initial selection for Windows Mobile 6.0 devices is decent (I only count 84 apps), app profile pages port nicely down to the smaller screen.

Samsung releases another Android: where will it fit in with Bada approaching?

Tim Conneally — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:41:45 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Samsung today officially announced the long-rumored Galaxy Spica (i5700,) the company's fourth Android smartphone and sequel to its Galaxy handset from early 2009.

Like the original Samsung Galaxy, this 3.2" touchscreen smartphone is not likely to hit the American market, and will be released in select markets in Europe and Asia. This 3.6Mbps HSDPA 3G device is equipped with the basic Google-friendly Android 1.5 distro, a 3 Megapixel camera, and an 800MHz application processor. It's actually considerably less feature-rich than the Behold 2 which came to T-Mobile in October.

While there is relatively little to say about this device, it will be important to watch Samsung's Android and Windows Mobile releases as it works toward the release of its first version of Bada, the company's own open smartphone platform which will ultimately come to replace Symbian.

Dell's first smartphone aids the Android onslaught

Tim Conneally — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:46:25 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Now that it's finally been launched in at least some parts of the world today, Dell is working to keep its new Mini 3 smartphone device closely associated with Dell's computers, calling it "The world's most compact Dell" directly on its packaging.

"Our entry into the smartphone category is a logical extension of Dell's consumer product evolution over the past two years," Ron Garriques, President of Dell Global Consumer Group said in a prepared statement today. "We are developing smaller and smarter mobile products that enable our customers to take their Internet experience out of the home and do the things they want to do whenever and wherever they want."

This is a wise marketing decision by Dell, as its brand is associated with fully powered computers and not mobile phones. So this approach makes it appear as if Dell isn't trying something radically different, it's just shrinking what it has already perfected into a small package.

Further, the mental link consumers draw to computers can be beneficial when marketing "smart" devices.

The Dell Mini 3 is a 3.5" capacitive touchscreen device, and will be first available in China and Brazil. Dell has shown off the device in a number of places this year, but has stayed mostly silent about it in the English speaking world.

Today, the company confirmed the Mini 3's release, but added it will announce with each carrier individually.

In China, Dell's Mini 3 is one of China Mobile's first "OPhones," a line of smartphones running a custom Android build called Open Mobile System (OMS). Though it will be available to the largest mobile subscriber base in the world (China Mobile has 500 million customers), it is rumored to be without 3G connectivity.

Before the end of the year, America Movil subsidiary Claro will bring the Dell Mini 3 to Brazil. That version will also be Android-based, but it will have a different interface from China Mobile's and it will also support 3G.

This is only the first of many announcements about mobile devices expected to come from Dell. The company has contracts to bring its new smartphones to Vodafone in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, AT&T and Verizon in the US, M1 and Starhub in Singapore, and Maxis in Malaysia. Dates and details of each launch remain undisclosed.

We reached out to Dell today to ask just how much consumers outside of China and Brazil should pay attention to such launches. A spokesman for the company reiterated that this is a global strategy, and that the launches will be up to the carriers, but also that the importance of China Mobile shouldn't be understated.

After all, the carrier's subscriber base is greater than the entire population of the United States.

FLO TV launches pocketable, smartphone-like TVs

Tim Conneally — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:10:04 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Chipmaker Qualcomm's mobile broadcast television subsidiary FLO TV has officially launched its PTV 350 personal television at retail today.

This is the smartphone-sized device that Qualcomm and hardware maker HTC unveiled in October. Like many of HTC's smartphones, the FLO TV PTV 350 includes a 3.5" capacitive touchscreen, built-in stereo speakers, and a battery which can support 5 hours of continuous mobile broadcast viewing.

FLO TV service is available 24 hours a day and includes programming from Adult Swim Mobile, CBS Mobile, CNBC, Comedy Central, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, MTV, NBC 2Go, and Nickelodeon. Video streams are 320 x 240 QVGA at 15-30 frames per second. Coverage is still mostly concentrated around urban areas, and states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine have no service yet.

The FLO TV Personal Television is available today for $249 through Amazon.com and Best Buy.com, and includes six months of free service to entice customers into checking it out. Of course, in order to receive that free half-year, users must sign a contract which incurs a monthly charge between $8.99 and $15.00.

The iTunes App Store at 100,000: Can we stop counting, already?

Carmi Levy — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:46:25 -0500

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

Ever since Apple launched its App Store barely 16 months ago, we've paid a lot of attention -- indeed, too much -- to the number of applications it contains. As the App Store crossed the 100,000 title barrier last week, it occurred to me that the bigger this number gets, the less it actually means.

I get that Apple has won the sheer-number sweepstakes. I appreciate that no other mobile storefront can even come close. I also understand how broad software availability (in terms of sheer numbers as well as ease of acquisition) has helped fuel the growth of the iPhone/iPod touch universe. I just think we attach way too much importance to this single figure, and it distorts our ability to understand ultimate value to end users and developers alike.

So many titles, not enough room

Never mind that no one person could ever assess, let alone install and use, anything approaching a broad cross-section of this ever expanding library. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of these titles are near-dormant, gathering dust while the masses pay attention to newer, higher-profile offerings. Forget that this number is bloated by countless apps that replicate bodily functions, play visual party tricks, and otherwise consume time that could be productively spent...I don't know, composing e-mails to your mother.

Does the world really need fifty different ways to display the time? Or forty-five weather forecasting apps or a couple of hundred alarm clocks? At what point does the sheer size of the library become so large that successive additions become meaningless? I accept that there's a certain value in choice -- that in a tiny library, users would be ill-served by a product category with only a couple of feature-limited, badly integrated choices. A larger playground increases the size of the app-specific talent pool and ensures someone looking for an alarm clock will eventually find what he or she needs.

But there's choice and there's choice. When neighborhood supermarkets replaced the corner store, we all benefitted from greater choice and more competitive pricing. Economies of scale will do that, as stores that buy in larger quantities have greater buying power than those with smaller inventories. But as plain old supermarkets were supplanted by big-box megastores, we ended up with too much of a good thing. A thirty-minute cruise through the aisles easily doubled or tripled as many of us got lost in the cavernous new temples of conspicuous consumption. We'd stand in front of the ketchup shelves, unable to decide between the ten brands, fifteen different sizes, and packaging combinations, and even colors...remember green and purple? We'd end up with more than we needed, or stuff we hadn't intended on buying in the first place.

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Lost in the wilderness

Apple's App Store has gone well beyond the big-box stage. Shopping there isn't the focused, quick and direct process it once was, and by the time most of us are done loading up on new code, we inevitably end up with stuff we didn't want or need in the first place. Worse for Apple, it can't simply build a bigger building to house all its new inventory. Computer and iPhone screens aren't getting bigger, and new and existing titles find themselves fighting for an ever dimmer slice of virtual storefront for consumers' increasingly ADHD-infused attention.

It hurts developers as well as consumers. We wrestle with the challenge of finding what we want without pulling our hair out in the process, while developers simply try to avoid getting lost in the ever growing ocean of offerings -- assuming, of course, that they can get past Apple's app approval process to get into that ocean in the first place.

I hesitate to blame Apple, as it's simply riding the wave of the most buzzworthy mobile device to hit consumers' radar since Ford's Model T. As long as we're content to measure the iPhone platform's worth by the number of available apps, Apple is perfectly content to trumpet each major milestone, and absolutely justified in doing so. For a company that has long prided itself on simple, easily understood methods for users, nothing's easier to articulate than a big number that dwarfs all competitors, and keeps getting bigger on a seemingly exponential path.

Even if, from where I sit, it's an ultimately meaningless number, it remains a marketer's dream, so don't expect Apple to stop flogging it.

New ways to measure

Still, it leaves the door open for measures of value that reflect actual utility. Google's Android platform may sport a software library that's an order of magnitude smaller than Apple's, but Google doesn't live in the same download-and-use universe that Apple does. Its core strength lies in its expanding universe of increasingly integrated Web-based services. And successive generations of its mobile platform will reflect this shifting reality, especially as 3G wipes GSM and CDMA off the map, and 4G-based technologies like LTE move into the mainstream.

It may seem laughable now given AT&T's and other carriers' troubles with network coverage of any kind, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, mobile bandwidth will be so abundant that the same paradigms of always-on Web services that we take for granted on our conventional laptops and desktops will seamlessly apply to our smartphones as well. And the download-and-use metaphor will fade.

So although the size of Google's library currently places it in a firm second place in the mobile online store rankings and gives it a fair degree of street cred, I doubt Google hangs on the daily figures as much as Apple does given the sea change that will fundamentally change how we get work (and play) done on mobile devices.

For now, though, we still measure our devices by the number of apps available for download, and we continue to focus on quantity when handicapping the various platforms against each other. As mobile infrastructure matures and consumers improve their ability to assess the value proposition of a platform's complete feature set -- and not just its simple library size -- simply having the biggest of anything may no longer be enough to sustain interest. Bigger, after all, isn't always better.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile now available in browser, iTunes' App Store still not

Tim Conneally — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:48:22 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Sure, Apple created the most popular and well-stocked mobile app store in the market, but does Apple provide a Web-based interface to it? No. Through Apple's official channels, you can only browse the store's contents in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod Touch.

There is an unofficial site hosted on Google App Engine which provides roughly the same experience Apple provides in iTunes, but it lacks search functionality, and if you try to download something, it launches the iTunes installer.

To prevent this problem, Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the app store for Windows Phones, launched a Web-based storefront yesterday. Users can now go to marketplace.windowsphone.com to browse, search, buy, and download Windows Mobile apps from within their browser.

When users select an application from the site, it's put a the download queue which will immediately run the next time the Marketplace client is run on the user's mobile device.

"Marketplace has been extremely active and I couldn't be happier with the reactions from both developers and customers," Microsoft's senior director of mobile services, Todd Brix said. "We've been open for just over one month and already we can see that there's demand for an application marketplace that doesn't compromise on quality or experience."

Out of the many app stores put up in the last year, only a few storefronts have been brought to the Web browser. The Web-based Android Market, for example, provides a weak overview of what is available instead of an actual database of the more than 10,000 Android apps available. Users cannot buy directly from the official Web interface, either.

The Web interface for BlackBerry App World, however, has a substantial catalog which can be browsed, and apps can be sent as emailed links to the user's device.

Facebook for iPhone developer goes from Apple supporter to 'I quit!' in 3 months

Tim Conneally — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:30:28 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

If you're an iPhone user with a Facebook account, chances are good that you have Facebook for iPhone. In fact, it has roughly 17.3 million users, or about 28% of the 60 million users accessing Facebook on a mobile device.

One of the developers who worked on that app is Joe Hewitt, who today tweeted: "Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

He's not just leaving the Facebook project, but abandoning the iPhone altogether.

Hewitt told TechCrunch today that he quit the project because of Apple's strict approval and management policies in the iTunes App Store.

He said: "My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer."

This is quite a turn of events, considering Hewitt's last blog entry in August said: "No matter how annoyed I get, I will not stop developing for Apple's platforms or using Apple's products as long as they continue to produce the best stuff on the market. I never forget how deeply Apple cares about making their users happy, and that counts more than how they treat their developers. Besides, when I have a problem with a friend, I don't threaten to boycott our friendship until they change, so I'm not going to do that to Apple either."

The developer he's handed the app over to is Owen Yamauchi, a Facebook software developer and former Apple engineer.

The Samsung Intrepid: A nice phone, if you can accept Windows Mobile

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:27:48 -0500

By John P. Mello, Jr., TechNewsWorld

Business users whose lives revolve around their mobile phones won't be disappointed with Samsung's Intrepid smartphone. The handset, which uses Sprint's 3G network (EV-DO Rev.A) domestically and also connects to 3G networks abroad, is packed with features aimed at the pinstripe crowd.

Intrepid (USD$149.99, excluding taxes, with two-year service agreements, $50 instant savings and $100 mail-in rebate) runs under the latest version of Microsoft's cellphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional.

One improvement in this edition of Windows Mobile is a customizable Today screen. It displays frequently used features, the arrival of new text and e-mail messages, missed calls, and calendar appointments. You can also dial calls from the keyboard when that screen is displayed. Typing numbers from the keyboard ordinarily requires the use of the "Fn" key. That would make keyboard dialing very awkward. In Today mode, though, numbers can be dialed without using Fn.

Built for road warriors

Intrepid is designed for power-hungry business users. It has Microsoft Office Mobile for editing Word and Excel files and viewing PowerPoint presentations. Email is handled through Windows Mobile e-mail. Other features include stereo Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, microSD card support, and easy access to social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, as well as instant messaging and threaded text messaging.

The unit is a one-piece mobile phone along the lines of the Palm Pixi or Treo Pro.

On the unit's front is a QWERTY keyboard and 2.5-inch display. Between the keyboard and display are controls for starting and ending calls, accessing the Windows Mobile operating system, navigating around the screen and giving the OK to perform a function. In addition, there are two "soft" keys which change function from task to task.

Comfortable keyboard

The phone's 320-by-240 pixel display is sharp and bright, but text in smaller fonts is difficult to read. Items displayed in the screen can be manipulated via touch or a telescoping stylus that is conveniently stored in the side of the phone. The addition of the stylus is a necessary one since some of the icons on the screen are so small, poking them with a finger can very difficult. Generally, the display is responsive to tapping by digit or stylus -- although less so compared to something like an iPhone or iPod touch -- but from time to time multiple jabs are necessary.

The QWERTY keyboard is comfortable to use for thumb typists. Because the keys are rounded slightly, they can be securely pressed without accidentally hitting an adjacent key. Some of the keys do double duty on the keyboard. These secondary functions appear as red characters above the QWERTY ones and can be accessed via an Fn key. The typography for the secondary characters is very small and largely difficult to see.

Designed for convenient use

On the left side of the Intrepid is the volume control and charger. On the right side of the unit are the power and camera buttons and the compartment for the stylus. At the back of the unit is the lens for its 3.2-megapixel camera, a speaker and a reflective button. The button can be used to frame self-portraits or arms-length shots. On top of the phone is a jack for a headphones.

As sophisticated as the Intrepid is, it's designed for convenient use. Need to make a call? Press the green talk button. A telephone keypad pops up on the screen. You can start poking in numbers or use screen icons to access your address book or a log of recent calls. If you start punching in numbers, as you do so, the phone automatically checks the address book and call logs for the digits and dynamically displays corresponding matches on the screen. This technique greatly speeds up the process of making a call.

When you've found the number you're looking for, you can poke an onscreen send button to make your connection. Once connected, more buttons appear that allow you to turn your speaker on or off, access your call log, make a note about the call or mute the phone. The speaker button is especially opportune because it eliminates the need to hunt for the speaker control when you're making a call.

Office in a pocket

Both still images and video can be captured with the Intrepid. Its 3.2 megapixel still camera produces images in four sizes from 640-by-480 to 3,048-by-1,536 pixels and has a number of advanced features for a phone cam. For instance, shots can be over- or under-exposed with exposure compensation. Multiple images can be garnered rapidly in continuous capture mode. It even has smile recognition, where the camera won't fire its shutter until it detects the subject smiling.

The phone's video camera also has exposure compensation. It has three video qualities -- high, normal and economy -- in two sizes (320-by-240 and 176-by-144 pixels) as well as a variety of white balance settings (auto, tungsten, fluorescent, daylight and cloudy), metering choices (center weighted, spot and matrix) and special effects (black and white, sepia, aqua and negative).

The Samsung Intrepid is stuffed with features that enable a businessperson to carry around an office in her or her pocket. However, although the latest version of Microsoft Mobile is improved over previous editions, it still lacks the intuitiveness of its newer competitors. It feels like a desktop operating system downsized uncomfortably to run on a small screen. That kind of compromise, however, may be irrelevant to Windows shops looking for some robust hardware that gives their users a familiar interface on both their big and little screen devices.

Originally published on TechNewsWorld

Nokia's 'limited number' of recalled chargers exceeds 14 million

Tim Conneally — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:22:25 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Leading mobile phone maker Nokia today announced a recall of three types of Nokia-branded phone charger which were found to be a shock hazard.

The chargers were manufactured by Chinese mobile phone component firm BYD International Electronic Company this year. Nokia today said that the plastic covers of these chargers could come loose and open up to expose the internal components which could shock the user if handled improperly. Nokia said it was not aware of any injuries or incidents related to these chargers.

Nokia is offering a free replacement to affected units, which carry the model numbers AC-3U, AC-3E, or AC-4U. Since these were all made within the last six months, if you purchased a Nokia charger before June 15, 2009, you are not impacted by this recall.

Nokia has not detailed the breadth of this recall, saying in the recall statement that only "a limited number" of chargers are affected. In Nokia's blog, the company was equally vague, noting that it's only "a limited number of chargers manufactured over a short period available in a select number of countries."

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has not yet issued a warning for consumers in the United States, which would indicate exactly how many units were affected in the US, if at all. Several sources have reported that the recall encompasses 14 million units, but that has not been officially declared by Nokia.

We contacted the company this morning to confirm this number and find out which devices shipped with these adapters, but the company has not yet responded.

The iPhone's China syndrome: Sales of 5,000 and climbing

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:30:32 -0500

By Richard Adhikari, MacNewsWorld

The iPhone went on sale last week in China, and it landed more or less with a thud. Cupertino's carrier partner in that country, China Unicom, announced on Tuesday that only 5,000 customers had purchased the phone thus far. At this rate, the handset may have trouble meeting sales expectations. China Unicom had pledged to sell 1 million iPhones per year.

Price could be one deterrent -- the iPhone starts at around the equivalent of USD$730. Add in monthly subscriber fees, and you're soon looking at a rather pricey phone in a country where the average income of urban workers in 2008 was less than $4,300.

Another problem could be the wide choice of devices available to the Chinese consumer. In addition to cheaper gray-market iPhone sales -- which Kevin Wang, director of China research at iSuppli, had pegged at about 1 million units per year -- the iPhone has to contend with a number of competitors. These range from Nokia phones, which dominate the market, to iPhone knockoffs to Android phones.

"It's most likely a combination of all these factors," Brian Marshall, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech, told MacNewsWorld. However, he's optimistic that things will pick up for the iPhone. "Over time, I think the iPhone scales nicely in China," Marshall said. "I think China Unicom's figure of 1 million iPhone sales a year is conservative."

Still, Apple may need to do something about price. It had a similar experience with the iPhone in India, according to BusinessWeek. The iPhone was launched in India in August of 2008, and by April 2009, total sales were reportedly less than 20,000. As is possibly the case in China, price and competition from an entrenched market leader -- Nokia again -- are making things difficult for the iPhone in India.

Taking care of business

On the enterprise front, the iPhone seems to be making some headway.

For one thing, Medallia, which helps companies track interactions with customers in near real-time, has announced an iPhone app for what it calls "enterprise feedback management". This lets users access, monitor and respond in real-time to customer feedback across all channels, including social media.

"More and more of our customers' employees are using the iPhone at work," Amy Pressman, Medallia's president and chief financial officer, told MacNewsWorld. These users range from vice presidents to managers of individual hotels and retail stores to front line staff.

Medallia's announcement follows in the footsteps of IBM. In October, Big Blue announced that Lotus Domino 8.5.1 would natively support the iPhone.

With more than 100,000 apps now in the app store, why are these apps important to investors? Because these are meat-and-potatoes apps that will be heavily used for business-critical purposes, and their use may spur more iPhone sales.

Also, the iTunes App Store and the iPhone will gain credibility as more enterprises pick up iPhone apps, opening up another new market for Apple. "We have found that our iPhone-using enterprise customers are more interested in applications beyond email than our customers who use other smartphones," Pressman said.

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Killing off Kindle?

Meanwhile, as has been widely expected, more and more iPhone owners are using the devices as e-readers, according to research by Flurry. Flurry offers analytics, deployment and monetization tools for mobile app developers.

In September, apps categorized as "books" on the App Store outnumbered those designated as "games" for the first time, Flurry found. In October, one out of every five new iPhone apps launched was a book. Flurry's survey sampled more than 2,500 apps, 40 million consumers and four platforms -- the iPhone and the iPod touch, the BlackBerry platform, JavaME, and Android.

Whether or not sales of Amazon's Kindle e-reader will be affected by people using the iPhone as an e-reader has yet to be seen. However, with Amazon stating that holiday sales of the Kindle might set new records, it could be that the iPhone might ride another new wave of demand and see a further boost in sales.

Apple will remain strong, said Broadpoint AmTech's Marshall. He's sticking with his price target of $235 a share.

Originally published on MacNewsWorld

Verizon Wireless launches new Android, Chocolate, and ruggedized phones

Jacqueline Emigh — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:07:17 -0500

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

In New York City today, Verizon Wireless rolled out new additions to its expanding Android and LG Chocolate phone families, while also delivering sneak previews of a new, consumer-friendly ruggedized phone called the Casio G'zOne Brigade (shown above).

Like its previously announced top-of-the-line Android phone, known simply as the Droid, the less expensive Droid Eris will be available for the first time in Verizon stores tomorrow -- which is also when pricing will be revealed.

Verizon hasn't yet set pricing or an availability date for the Brigade, but sales of the Push to Talk phone from Casio will start some time over the next few weeks, said Kris Dunlap, Verizon's Push to Talk product manager, during a demo at a press event in Manhattan.

In keeping with its lower price point, the Droid Eris has a lower resolution HVGA display in comparison to the Droid's WVGA screen, and a slower processor running at 528 MHz.

More significantly, the Eris currently runs Android 1.5, in comparison to the higher-end phone's GPS-enabled Android 2.0. That means it won't be able to handle Google's turn-by-turn voice navigation until a 2.0 upgrade becomes available for the phone, officials said at the event.

Both Verizon Android phones, though, will come with the same Google applications suite and Verizon's Visual Voicemail, and both will allow downloads from the 10,000+ applications in Google's online App store.

Unlike the Droid, which is made by Motorola, the Droid Eris is manufactured by HTC. The Eris is similar in form factor to HTC's Hero, a phone offered by Sprint, but it's slightly thinner.

In another demo at the event, Lauren Southwick, a Verizon marketing manager, showed an app called Join the Band running on the Chocolate Touch. Verizon's new touch-enabled Chocolate phone is strongly focused on music playback, with features that include an FM tuner, the ability to sync music from the phone to a PC, and a music player for MP3, WMA, and unprotected AAC and AAC+, for example. You can use a special button on the phone to upload photos taken with a built-in 3.2 megapixel camera to social networking sites like Facebook.

In Join the Band, you can play along with any song you choose on a virtual drum set or piano keyboard. I thought the piano did a fine job when I banged out "Chopsticks" on it.

The Chocolate Touch's video-capable camera can take four types of shots: Normal, Panorama, Intelligent, and Facial Makeover. Southwick sent a Panorama shot she took at the event to one of my e-mail addresses.

Verizon's upcoming Brigade, on the other hand, is the third in a series of ruggedized and water-resistant phones targeted not just at people who work out-of-doors, but at those who like to bike, camp out, fish, and do other outdoor hobbies in their spare time. Like the other two recent tough phones, it meets 810F military specifications for conditions such as vibration, humidity, fog, and low and high temperature storage, Dunlap said.

Verizon hasn't readied a spec sheet yet on the Brigade. But the new horizontal clamshell device -- which will be available to all Verizon Wireless users, not just Push to Talk customers -- will be the first ruggedized phone from Verizon to come with a hard QWERTY keyboard.

Dunlap also pointed to its large display, estimating that the Brigade's screen is about the same size as that of Verizon's Voyager. The Brigade will come with a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, video capture, and LED light.

The Chocolate Touch and Brigade phones also support Verizon's V Cast video and music services and VZ Navigator turn-by-turn navigation, while the two Droid phones from Verizon do not. Chocolate Touch will be available from VZW starting tomorrow for $79.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate.