Your Mobile: Your Communications Hub

How you use your mobile to communicate is about to change radically. Gone are the days of just phone calls, sms and patchy video. The latest generation of mobile devices allow you to keep up to date with your friends on Facebook and Twitter, centralising all your communication in one place.

However, this presents its own set of challenges:

1. * How do you triage your contacts? Not all contacts are created equal;
2. * How do you consolidate your contacts across different services (Facebook, Twitter, even Xbox Live)? and;
3. * How do you synchronise and manage all of this communication with your contacts when this is now in the cloud?

No one seems to have cracked this yet. Motorola have MOTOBLUR to centralise all your communications. They will even back up the communications stream for you. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will integrate your Facebook contacts and your friends on Xbox Live. Unfortunately both cripple you with this all or nothing approach.

Hopefully, in the not too distance future we will start to see some smarts in how our mobiles manage our contacts and communication. Learning about those we contact most frequently, automatically matching the different personas of our friends across different services and prioritising the messages we are most interested in at any given point in time.

iPad Rendering Bug

Has anyone with an iPad seen this rendering bug? It is most prominent in Safari, particularly when 3G network connectivity is poor and I am browsing between pages.

The iPhone 4 Debacle

By now you will be aware of the reported problems with the iPhone 4 and its flawed antenna design. You know the one, where you hold the phone a certain way and the signal strength drops a couple of bars. Apple’s admission of the problem wasn’t great but reporting of the issues also left a lot to be desired.

Now Spencer Webb of AntennaSys Inc. provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the problem. Yes it is real. Yes using a bumper with your iPhone 4 helps. Yes the iPhone 3G suffers a similar problem without the external antenna design.

Read the full analysis and explanation of the testing methodology here.

The Apple App Store - Is this really the long tail?

With 15,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, I have to ask, “Is this really the long tail?”. The marketing department at Apple would have us believe that the App Store provides iPhone users with a myriad of applications to suit your every specific need. But is there really a need for 50 different task management applications? I think that iPhone customers would benefit from two or three best of breed applications for managing tasks instead.

So is the current App Store ecosystem in the best interest of consumers and developers? It is undoubtedly a great selling point for Apple and it is definitely easier to buy, download and install an iPhone application than a Windows Mobile application. However, Apple may have has set the barrier to entry too low for iPhone developers. Today the most popular iPhone applications will bubble to the top, but what will happen in the future? Will the next great iPhone application remain undiscovered among the noise of 100,000 lesser applications?

iPhone OS 3.0 Shines

Apple unveiled iPhone OS 3.0 on Tuesday, addressing many of the short-comings iPhone users have had to suffer with in earlier versions of the OS. The most important feature – Cut & Paste – is now there, as is MMS support provided you have a 3G phone.

Apple has also included enhancements that will support the iTunes Store ecosystem including an API that allows developers to handle the purchase of content and services from the iTunes Store. They have scaled up their Push Notification service, allowing an iPhone to receive an application notification even when the application isn’t running. The Push Notification service is centralised meaning that all iPhone applications connect to the same set of notification servers. Apple’s rationale for adopting this architecture is that it eliminates the need to maintain applications running in the background which can significantly reduce standby battery life.

Interestingly, today’s smartphones seem to be just catching up to where the Japanese were with their i-mode service in 2002.

Other iPhone OS 3.0 features include Bluetooth peer-to-peer connectivity to support gaming between phones; inclusion of the Google Mobile Maps service; access to iPod hardware accessories and access to the iPod library.

Many of these feature will also be supported on the iPod Touch.

One of the most import aspects of this OS release is that is will be made available to all existing iPhone customers for free.

Microsoft My Phone & Live Mesh

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced a new free service called My Phone. Currently in beta, this service allows you to back up your mobile phone data to a password protected web site. Check out the Windows Mobile Team Blog for more details.

When I first saw My Phone, the first thing I thought about was Microsoft’s Live Mesh service. This is where Microsoft is light years ahead of the competition - including Google.

Cloud computing services such as Microsoft's Live Mesh allow you to sync and share your data between devices as well as access your data from anywhere using the power of the Internet. Live Mesh also allows you to remotely control the desktop of any device from anywhere.

At the moment Live Mesh only supports devices with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X but Windows Mobile support is coming soon. If you access the Live Mesh beta, you get access to 5GB of storage to get you started.

Windows Mobile 6.5 fails to impress

Yesterday, Microsoft presented a first look at the next version of its Window Mobile Operating System (OS) – Windows Mobile 6.5 – at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This version of the OS is due for release towards the the end of this year and will be the last Windows Mobile 6 release before Windows Mobile 7.

Although there have been some efforts to improve the usability of the user interface, initial feedback is that new honeycomb interface is too little, too late. What has many people baffled is how can HTC and Sony-Ericsson do such a good job of improving the usability experience on Windows Mobile 6.1 while Microsoft seems to still be behind the times with Windows 6.5.
I suspect one of the problems is that Microsoft needs to support a user interface that works on a wide variety of devices with different screen resolutions and form factors. Hence they must cater for the lowest common denominator. HTC and Sony-Ericsson on the other hand can build a fantastic user experience around their latest smartphones with state-of-the-art screens and features.

I think Microsoft should consider decoupling the user interface from the operating system, allowing each smartphone manufacturer to optimise the user interface experience for their specific smartphone. This may lead to inconsistencies in user experience, but hey, isn't that what we have had with WM 5, WM 6 and now WM 6.5?