MWC · That stands for Mobile World Congress; it happens in early spring in Barcelona, and it’s mammoth; something like 75,000 people show up to wheel and deal.They’re wheeling and dealing for big bucks; the mobile industry is huge and for four days almost everyone is here. I’ve got no inside information on the nature of the deals the telcos make, with handset makers and antenna engineers and backhaul builders. But here’s where they make ’em; almost every booth has “executive meeting rooms”, and one of the eight huge halls is nothing but hospitality suites and meetings ...
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A or A? · When ordinary non-geek people find out I’m in the biz, I often hear “I’m going to dump the dumbphone and get something slick. Should I get an Apple or an Android?” ...
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Handset Love · The press loves tablets. New-media theorists love tablets. The hardware makers love tablets. Tablets might become the default “Personal Computers”. But in 2012, my heart is still with handsets ...
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Data Pricing Sanity Maybe? · I’m hearing refreshing outbursts of sanity recently on mobile-data pricing (and puzzlingly, grumbling from people I normally agree with). Usage-based data pricing is inevitable. Just because the rumblings are coming from phone companies doesn’t mean they’re wrong ...
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[18 comments]
Who Gets the Mobile Money? · The people who build the phones, the people who run the networks, or the people who make mobile interesting by writing the great apps? ...
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[24 comments]
Billions of Apps · There was some noise earlier this week about Android Market having downloaded ten billion apps, and (more interesting) the rate going up to the point where it’s now a billion a month ...
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Piracy · I’d like to draw your attention to The huge success of an AppStore failure by Luís Fonseca of GAMEized. It’s the sad story of a mobile-game developer running into the reality that there’s a lot of pirated software out there. I think the obvious conclusions are wrong, mostly ...
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[12 comments]
Mobile Platform Count · What’s the right number? Of software platforms I mean, for devices which are real Internet citizens. At the moment, the volume players are iOS and Android. Microsoft and HP/Palm and RIM would each like to be the third, and one of them might succeed; conceivably more than one. Would that be good? ...
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Between Stones · I’ve been enjoying the reviews of the iPad 2, which seems a fine piece of work. Also smiling at the homilies on the irrelevance and hopelessness of competing products; a particularly good example is The iPad 2 Rant ...
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Making Money in Mobile · Depending how you measure it, the mobile platform may already be the widest path from the software developer to the ordinary person. It’s for sure the fastest-growing. So presumably there’s serious software money to be made. But how, exactly? ...
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Year-end View of the Mobile Market · It’s that time of year; looks backward and forward are expected. In point of fact this is a lousy time to be prognosticating about the mobile space, because we’re only days from CES and weeks from MWC, both of which will have tons of announcements, some of which might even be game-changers ...
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[37 comments]
Phones and Soldiers · I found myself nodding my head reading Jon Oltsik’s Apple and Google Make the Department of Defense Jump Through Hoops for Mobile Device Security, a story that broke Thursday. Summary: US spies and soldiers, just like everyone else, want to carry iPhones and Androids. The Department of Defense (DoD) wants them to be secure. But DoD is frustrated because they’re having trouble getting Apple and Google to prioritize their needs ...
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Phone Marketing · On Friday, in our newspaper there was a glossy eight-page flyer from Bell Canada, one of Canada’s big three telephone companies; it’s a very mainstream outfit that nobody would ever accuse of being on the leading or any other edge. I found its contents instructive, and suspect that similar things are showing up in weekend papers around the world ...
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First-Person Shooter · So, I’m sitting with Mike Pegg here at our Google DevFest venue in Buenos Aires (by the way, in the Puerto Madero campus of the Universidad Católica Argentina, which is a lovely place). This guy who’s attending the event walks up to us and says in a pained voice “Damn, Apple just called and told me they’d taken my app down. This is awful!” ...
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Nazis in a Teapot · Last Thursday evening Michael Gartenberg, who’s a smart analyst, and blogger, tweeted that he’d searched for “Jewish” in Android Market and came up with some Nazi trash. Sure enough, he was right. The moron who was selling a “Hitler theme” and other related junk had used “jewish” and “jews” as keywords. Mind you, this crap was like five screens down, you really had to be working to see it ...
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Galaxy · That’s what Samsung is calling their Android phones, the latest wave of which is getting reviewed all over the place. I’ve seen a few of ’em at Android HQ, and no doubt about it, they’re nice; but so are the other recent Androids. What I’m astounded by is Samsung’s marketing virtuosity; they’ve managed to line up every big mobile telecom I’ve ever heard of, all over the world, to carry one of these devices. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it from any handset maker. I wonder how it’s done?
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Cheap Unlocked Phones · I have an unlocked Nexus One with a pre-release of Android 2.2 “Froyo”, and I have a T-Mobile mobile data plan from Google; I imagine that, like most big companies, we get a pretty good deal on it. As of now, I’m never paying for Internet in a hotel or airport again ...
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Indie Android Interview · I was doing “Office Hours” at Google I/O, and this guy walked up with a question and we got to talking. His name is Derek James of Polyclef Software; he comes from a different planet from the one this Web guy has been living in, one where Psychology Ph.D. candidates build actual real businesses, starting part-time, via single-handed mobile-device programming. I did an email interview with him ...
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Windy · Canada has long been a telephone oligopoly: Rogers, Telus, and Bell Canada; Canadians generally feel that prices are high and service only so-so. Now we’ve got a new mobile player, Wind Mobile. I signed up as soon as they got to Vancouver, at least in part for reasons of ideology; competition is a good thing. So far, Wind looks like a good thing too ...
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Mobile Gold · Today I read Rob Scoble’s lucid and forceful Smartphone competition; it clarified a growing internal buzz I’ve been feeling as I experiment with Android and follow the news. We are, right now in early 2009, sliding into the golden age of mobile technology and business ...
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