Mobile Concerns

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.

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.

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.

Today I tried using the Microsoft Tag Beta with a Dopod smartphone. For those who don’t know, a Microsoft Tag is like a barcode that you can capture with your mobile phone’s camera and have the Tag Reader software on your phone decode. A Microsoft Tag supports different types of content such as URLs, vCards, Phone Numbers and Text.

The image above is an example of a tag. Click on it to view the the full-size image and then try capturing the image on your mobile with the Tag Reader installed. I had to try it a couple of times as the image needs to be in the centre of the view finder, but otherwise it worked seamlessly.

Anyone with a Windows Live ID can sign-in and create tags. The process is simple and done online. You can then render your tag in a variety of formats.

A Microsoft Tag is a similar to Nokia’s Mobile Code (seen to the left). I haven’t tried installing a Mobile Code Reader for my smartphone yet, but there are several available.

The benefits of using the Microsoft Tags include:

• The ability to categorise different tags;
• Define Start and End dates for your tags and;
• Online reporting on how often each tag has been scanned.

These features will undoubtedly be of interest to businesses that need to analyse the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that make use of Microsoft Tags.

Google's Android mobile operating system (used to power the HTC G1 smartphone), is vulnerable to a security exploit. The exploit was discovered by ISE (Independent Security Evaluators), an independent consulting firm focused on improving system security. The vulnerability has come about through Google's use of an unpatched version of an open source software library in Android. The impact of the vulnerability is that users of Android's web browser could visit a malicious web page, giving the attacker access to information available to the browser including cookies and passwords. Technical details of the vulnerability will not be made available until a patch for the exploit becomes available.

In an interview with the Mercury News, HTC CEO - Peter Chou - forecasts that HTC will sell more than 600,000 of the Android powered G1 smartphones. He predicts that within 5 years, the percentage of mobile devices that are smartphones will increase from the current 15% to 40-50%.

Time to get your latest smartphone software application out there.

Following Apple's 4th quarter report, Steve Jobs has said that iPhone 3G sales have eclipsed Blackberry sales for the most recent quarter, making Apple the no. 3 mobile phone vendor. Whether Apple can sustain this growth in coming quarters remains to be seen but there is no doubt the iPhone 3G is this year's "must have" device.

Speaking in Sydney (Australia), Kaspersky Labs founder Eugene Kaspersky says that he has seen smartphone software being written in developing countries, that is designed specifically to increase call costs for the end user. Hopefully not a market readers of this blog will want to get into. What I found most disturbing was that he says it is the telecommunications providers in these countries who are paying to have this software written.

Fortunately, a lack of understanding about writing software for the popular mobile platforms has stemmed the proliferation of malicious smartphone software, though he expects this to change in coming years. I am sure he is right.

BTW, Kaspersky Labs sells AV protection products for both Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones.

There are reports that Orange in the UK has suspended shipments of the Blackberry Bold to customers due to problems with the device's software. I don't want to focus on RIM specifically, but rather explore the issue of software reliability on mobile devices. Why should creating software for mobile be any more challenging than for the desktop or the enterprise? I believe there are four factors at play here:

The current crop of devices and their operating systems are still severely limited in their ability to manage scarce resources (processor, memory, threads);

Applications for mobile are typically integrated very closely with other applications on the device such as PIM;

Mobile devices can connect using a variety of protocols. Not only do they connect to the Internet but they also support voice, sms and mms and;

Mobile applications may make use of device hardware such as cameras and GPS, that can vary across device makes and models.

These four factors increase the complexity of writing software for mobile and these are the issues mobile operating system makers should focus on to simplify the work for mobile application developers.