Archive for May, 2006

The info for the June 2006 Silicon Valley Mobile Monday is up. The topic is handset hardware, in particular info about what hardware is out there right now. Not just out there in the market, but out in people’s hands and being used. After picking the topic a few weeks ago it’s come up a few times with different groups of people looking to do some work on mobile projects. There’s definitely interest in the topic, but I suspect the people who it’ll be most valuable to are the ones who aren’t already involved in mobility. So if you know folks looking to do something mobile related who need help establishing a baseline model of the environment definitely point them our way.

I’ve been waiting for a while to see the FIFA stuff, which was rumoured to be very mobile-friendly. So when Christian posted about the FIFA site being up I headed over there and poked around for a while. Great site! And I think the cup is going to be big in the US this year. I’ve heard a lot more people talking about it and seen much more advertising than I have in previous years.

When I put the fifa.com URL into the native browser on my 6680 I got a very nice looking mobile layout. So of course I started digging to see what they were doing on the site itself. Bringing up source on the FIFA.com site yeilded no hints though. No mobile stylesheet, so I assumed it must be keyed off the user agent (a-la WURFL or something similar). I changed the user agent returned by firefox to “Nokia6680/1.0 (2.04.15) SymbianOS/8.0 Series60/2.6 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1″, same as that returned by my phone. Here are some simple instructions for changing the user agent in Firefox for anyone who wants to fool around some. That did it, I got the layout I expected when I pulled up the page with the agent sent as if I were a Nokia phone.

This is something I really see as an ongoing problem in mobile web development. A lot of the knowledge about how to make something work on the mobile web is now walled off in server logic instead of laid bare for everyone to see and share. For most applications there’s application logic that lives on the server side and ends up somewhat walled off (although that doesn’t have to be, Ning is working to reverse even that). But the presentation side was always something that lived fundamentally in a “visible source” environment. That’s part of what made it work, and I think part of the reason it continues to progess the way it does. Unfortunately the mobile side doesn’t seem to be benefitting from the intrinsic transparency. Making a good mobile website currently really demands a technique like this be used. The more this stuff stays closed off the more I think we’re going to see fragmentation and competition within the segment. Is there a good way to make a functional mobile site and at the same time put all that presentation logic out for all to see?

I’m in the middle of a trip to the east coast of the US. Normally I bring my phone and my laptop with me, and because I’m normally just wandering around visiting family I’m never too far from my laptop. But this time I have some additional running around to do, so I brought the 770 with me to try it out “in the field” so to speak. Granted my usage patterns aren’t quite what you see out of most normal people, but I was just curious about how using it would work out. Here’s a couple of things I didn’t necessarily expect:

• Normally I’m walking around Palo Alto and the rest of the Bay Area, so I’m not surprized when there are a dozen access points in a typical scan. However I’m finding a lot of Wifi coverage even outside of the Bay Area. A real lot.
• The hardcore mobile people always crap all over Wifi as an alternative access mechanism because it doesn’t work everywhere. They just can’t picture people wandering around and searching out an access point when they need to do something. Maybe that’s true if the company is footing the bill and you feel it necessary to have them pay every cent possible to increase your comfort and effeciency during your business trip. But for those who don’t feel compelled to throw 5 to 10% of their income at data services month after month, the TCO of a wifi device as compared to a cellular device could be worth the inconvience. Think teenagers and young adults. And then think PSP and Nintendo DS. And then, if you’re working in mobile and some kind of little tingle doesn’t go off saying that “there could be something interesting going on there”, think about the 770 release with Google Talk. If there’s still no tingle go and get your head checked, there’s something wrong with your Spidey Sense.
• It’s more convenient to check my email infrequently from a more capable device than it is to check it all the time from my handset. With even my 6680, which has been a great device overall, sometimes when I see an important email come in the reaction is “damn, I can’t reply to that from this, I’m going to have to write a decent amount and it would take forever.” And of course I conclude I need to get back to my laptop ASAP and reply. Which distracts me until I find my laptop. With the 770 around I can just take a few extra minutes and write a decent reply if I need to. And searching through my back emails to pull together multiple threads into a serious response isn’t an impossible pain. The 770 is filling a hole for me here. Not one that I expect everyone will have, but for me it works out great in that role.
• It’s actually not a pain to carry in the front pocket of my jeans. When I saw the thing I thought the only place for it was on the endtable or in a backpack. But it’s not bad to lug around at all. Better than carrying around a PSP even, and tons of folks do that. I still think the cover is misdesigned, but I now realize why it’s there.

I’m sure there are plenty of cases for which the 770 is a poor match, but I’m pretty happy in using it for this trip. I wanted to like it though, so it’s certainly possible I’m focusing on the positive and leaving out a lot of negative. But I think the positive is a real positive and not just some illusion of my bias.

Something I haven’t really seen yet are the applications that tie in well with D-BUS, the interapplication messaging framework in Maemo that allows for things like the homescreen pulling together info from multiple apps. Given the way I’ve ended up using the device (semi-connected, pulling it out during existing downtimes to checkup on mostly my email) it would be nice to have a configurable homescreen instead that pulled together a few different apps that would update once I connected. Really though, I think that would be a nice to have and not a necessary given what I’ve been using the device for so far.

When we had the Mobile Monday session on FlashLite and SVG one of the questions I had for folks was bundling. If I have users who want to use my app, but don’t currently have FlashLite support on their handset, can I give them an easy to install bundle of FL with my app? The general take was “Sure, I bet Adobe would be interested in getting Flash out there, so if there’s no way to do that I bet they would be interested.” Well apparently that isn’t the case. Marco has been hunting around for a bundling option with no luck.

Personally I think that’s really stupid. I’m sure Adobe is using their weight to go straight after the handset manufacturers and carriers to get clients on the devices. But I think we’ve seen enough junk pushed out into mobile through the virtue of one big company convincing another set of big companies to do something. Can’t we put out a technology and see it propogate because it works and people want to use it? Is the process so broken that the only way it can change it through a tool provider strongarming their way onto the deck?