Mobile

So I’ve just moved house and I’m without Internet. It seems I have to pay a total of £384 ($729 USD) for the priviledge this year. Unbelievably only £120 of this is for 16mb no-monthly-limit broadband from Sky, but the rest is on an obscene £124 activation cost to get a BT line set up in this place (I was told it has been 7 years since one was active), the rest is line rental for said line from BT. So that’s all going to take at least a month, because living in a town of several hundred thousand people counts as being “in the sticks” when compared with London, and they just don’t make enough phone engineers… ...

The other week I picked up an ASUS eeePC Linux based laptop from, believe or not, Toys ‘R’ Us, for an incredible £220 GBP ($429 USD). I have recently started commuting to London on the train with around a 40 minute journey time, so for me this was a purchase that would save my sanity and hopefully my (considerably more costly) MacBook Pro from being stolen. It’s small enough to have on one knee so don’t worry about a table and I’m currently using it to surf, code in Ruby, read books and watch videos. ...

That means iTunes’ current model will be due for some drastic changes, no more downloading things “to keep”. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought all our media consumption (music, video, insert-other-media-here) would be entirely subscription based in the near future. I gave a definite YES in response. This is something I’ve had on my mind a few years, and personally I’m of the opinion the only viable solution to the increasingly complex problem of content management and ownership -whilst maintaining the rights of artists and authors- is to consume all of our content as the result of a subscription to a media conglomerate or third party broker. ...

A popular thread on the Flash Lite mailing list right now is entitled: “Does Flashlite have a future with mobile devices?“. This is very alarming, but a very just question with all things considered… In 2005 I started writing Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED). This came about very soon after Flash Lite 1.1 was released, and writing continued right up until the release of Flash Lite 2.1 (we made sure we waited to include it). Before I give my thoughts on Flash Lite and its future, I should probably explain that in the last year I’ve pretty much taken a back seat in the Flash Lite community, and there are many reasons for that. The reality is my attention span is very short and I’ve been too busy keeping up developing prototypes and commercial sites and applications with every new technology, including Flex 2, Papervision3D, Silverlight, WPF and AIR. There are other reasons, but more on that later. ...

A press release from Nokia today states: “Flash Video will be integrated with the Web Browser for S60 … This allows people to view on the go Flash-enabled Web sites and Flash Video, such as YouTube” Nothing new to many of you, as it’s no doubt the inclusion of Flash Lite 3 that facilitates this. But it’s nice to see continued commitment to including Flash Lite in future revisions of their software.

Opera have just released beta 2 of their Opera Mini 4 mobile browser. Considered by many the best mobile browser out there. They’ve also published an article on the dev center on designing sites for mobile. There is also a video of Opera Mini 4 in action. Download the beta here. View the article here. Play with a live simulator here.

There was a time when Nokia was the style icon in the mobile industry, the 3210 widely considered one of the best phones of all time (I can’t substantiate that claim), it was good looking, worked flawlessly and was as tough as old boots (if I remember it was also the first with Snake). In particular the foray into smartphones has left them looking a little bit… purely functional, leaving the Samsungs and the LGs to take the crown for best looking in the last few years. ...

Here’s a fantastic execution of an idea for mobile, using Flash Lite. For those up and coming Asian businessmen without a PA of their own, BreakDesign (makers of Dawn of the Fly) have created a digital PA that has a calendar, finds bars, taxis and other information. I’m a big fan of giving a consumer something useful and then branding it. As opposed to giving a consumer something that does something associated with the brand (brand self-love I think they call it). In this case they hit the old golden “sweet spot” and did both. Some brands lend themselves to this naturally, such as Nike with Nike+, sometimes its harder to create something of real value. ...

No one can really doubt the success of MTV up until now. People like music videos. But I’m left confused when I look at music videos being sold for download on mobile devices such as phones and iPods, and sold at a premium. Watching music videos on TV is something I only do if I’m doing something else at the same time and just want some background (I don’t say background “noise” because I think it’s safe enough to say many people now look for background sound and video at the same time, strange as it may sound). As for actually spending money and downloading a music video to my phone or iPod, with those tiny little screens and in the case of mobile phones, horrible sound quality- is surely the worst possible way you could watch a music video? ...

I’m a big fan of Nokia’s smartphones and have stuck to them for my last 3 handsets because I love that I don’t have any compatibility issues with files, programs or syncing to Outlook et al, they just work flawlessly. But I’ve been dissappointed that they just keep getting bigger and bigger (and slower!), so I almost decided to switch to Sony Ericsson as a result, no-one wants a slow chunk of silicon in their pocket. ...