In the February 2010 Update: S40 support, bug fixes to improve client performance, and minor feature enhancements: Facebook – Upload photos to selected albumFacebook – Timestamp improvementTwitter – Direct message Twitter – Post with LocationTwitter – View  profile of people you are following and posted tweetsTwitter – View own profile and posted tweetsTwitter – Mark as FavoriteLearn more and download: Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta...

[Where's Google's Android going? Guest blogger Ben Hookway uncovers the race for low cost Android taking place behind the scenes of the mobile industry, and how this may change the face of Android as we know it] Low cost Android devices have been forming a large part of R&D activity for some time now. Behind the scenes of the mobile industry all major players – including semiconductor vendors, software vendors, software services companies, ODMs, OEMs, and network operators – are putting considerable resources into rolling out low cost Android phones. It’s a silent revolution in the making that, once set in motion, should see Android shipments lift off from the single-digit millions. So how low is ‘low cost’? Reports of $75-$110 reference designs are emerging from Asi...

I bought a new phone to replace my old Android Developer Phone that I bought right after it was released more than a year ago. One year with Android has at least convinced me of one thing: this is a very good mobile OS. I was sceptical when Google announced the Open Handset Alliance but now I’m convinced that Apple and Google both share the future of mobile at the expense of the “traditional” mobile operating system vendors. So, when considering a new phone there were basically only two options: iPhone or Android. The number of Android devices is growing rapidly and there’s concern for device fragmentation. It’s interesting to see how Android is basically growing in to become the Windows 95 of the mobile world. Anyhows… so I decided to buy a new phone ...

This month is the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where the mobile industry gathers to present its latest innovations and the coolest new gadgets. As you may know, our CEO Eric Schmidt will be one of the keynote speakers this year, and we recently announced a special Android Developer Lab, as part of App Planet. In addition, I'm excited to let you know that the AdSense for Mobile Applications team will also be on the ground and answering questions. So if you're going too, keep an eye out for us!AdSense for Mobile Applications, which launched in beta last summer, allows you to place targeted text and image on your apps. The developer toolkit makes it easy to integrate the ads, and you can also filter out ads that you don't want to appear. We'll be hosting two informal sessions - ...

A short while ago, I wrote how there’s a huge potential market for a fully featured cross-platform application generator. What tools that are available, are either functionally incomplete or don’t support many platforms. However, this doesn’t mean they can’t be used to write certain types of application. One requirement I am increasing getting is from small/self publishers and brands who want to publish information (usually on the iPhone) without actually interacting with any phone specific features. This can, of course, be done on the web without an application but you lose the discoverability that’s provided by an app store. However, some might argue that, with 140,000+ apps, iPhone apps have also lost the ability to be easily discovered. Coi...

Our friend Peggy Ann Salz's blog msearchgroove has been named amongst the top 50 blogs by konector magazine. Congratulations to Peggy! Well deserved. Her post is HERE ...

One of the major trends I'm seeing at the moment is that of mobile network offload - typically "dumping" traffic onto WiFi or other networks to avoid congestion from mobile broadband.I'm expecting it to be a huge feature of this year's MWC / 3GSM in Barcelona.But at first sight the offload trend seems to be a confusing mish-mash of technologies and techniques, all designed to reduce the impact of bulk traffic on cellular networks, but applied in very different ways. I'm trying to start to categorise these various areas, and also work out how they are being prioritised.One important fact to note is that "congestion" is itself quite complex. It can be congested radio (RAN) networks in terms of downlink capacity, uplink capacity or signalling. It might be congestion in the backhaul from a cel...

The Feb 8th Mobile Monday is all about increasing app store sales, a topic that I’ve been personally paying a lot of attention to given the position that Chomp currently occupies in the environment. And guess what, I should actually be able to make it to the event this time! Woohoo! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get out to one, but thankfully getting Kate and Mario to help out has meant the events continue even when I’m plowed under. So drop by and thank the two of them if you come out to the event, and say thanks to our sponsors AdMob and Flurry. Should be a great conversation, hope to see you all there!...

Networks are at breaking point, says company providing alternative means for mobile devices to get online. Bear with me whilst I haphazardly tie this news item with another recent piece of fare, the iPad launch. Small speculations, loosely coupled. I'll bet that from a customers perspective the crappest bit of an iPhone - the bit that bugs you the most, that causes you the most grief and fails the most often - is the network. We read all sorts of complaints about AT&T in the US, and O2 have taken a bit of a hammering over here. That's understandable, in a way - no operator has an unblemished track record in customer service, and as the experience of a smart device improves, the networks increasingly fall into its shadow. Operators also get scant loyalty compared to the device manufacturer...

So Motorola invested in Scanbuy. SCHAUMBURG, Ill. and NEW YORK - February 2, 2010 - Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), through its strategic investment arm, Motorola Ventures, today announced an investment in Scanbuy, Inc., a leader in mobile barcode solutions. Motorola acted as lead investor and was joined by Masthead Venture Partners, Hudson Ventures and select private investors. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. This event says a whole lot about the importance of being product/customer-driven (i.e. Scanbuy) vs. being a patent troll (i.e. NeoMedia). [To NeoMedia: Told you guys, people (investors) dislike patent trolls and like real businesses - focus on real products that satisfy real customer needs] The NeoMedia investors I’m sure are going ballistic about their &...

I'm giving a talk on the ebook business at a publishing industry conference in New York in late February. I should have some spare time between sessions. If you're in New York and would like to chat during that week, please contact me here.My talk is about the many ways the ebook industry has failed in the past, but my real focus is on how to avoid those problems in the future. As you know if you've read this blog for a while, you know I am pretty passionate on this subject (link). With all the recent goings-on between Apple, Amazon, Macmillan, etc, we have a lot to discuss.Here's a synopsis of my talk. If you have any other ebook questions you'd like to see me cover in it, post a comment here.Check Out My Scars: Seven Lessons from the Failure of Ebooks in 2000, and What They Mean to t...

I have had the Nexus One for a few weeks now and while I love the operating system (Android 2.1) and the power of the device I think the industrial design is significantly flawed. Firstly, I hate fixed touch screen buttons without any proper physical mechanism to them. I hated them on the first LG Chocolate and I have hated them on every device since. I think they are a gimmick and a bad one at that. The user experience is appalling and the Nexus One is, unfortunately, no exception. I use my phones in landscape mode a lot and the fixed back button on the Nexus One is badly placed in this orientation (at the button where it is harder to get to with your thumb) but more importantly it is also not nearly sensitive enough. I often end up having to rotate the device to portrait mode simply to ...

Like every other techy out there, I also have an opinion about the newly launched iPad. I'm not going to wade in the minutia of various hardware or software decisions like the wonky micro SIM and the lack of SDCards or USB ports, nor the lack of background tasks or Flash support, or the pricing etc. Instead, I want to focus on the bigger picture, and came up with a couple thoughts I wanted to share. First, if you've read this blog before, you already know that I'm in love with the idea of tablets as the next generation of computing devices, so I was looking forward to Apple's announcement as much or more than anyone. In fact, I've been expecting a tablet from Apple for, oh, about 7 years now. No, really. I wrote this post back in 2003 - Urgh! Steve, we all want a Mac Tablet! - when Steve ...

Some people are questioning Maemo as an application development platform. I claim that it is one of Maemo's strong points going forward.We have always had a strong and productive maemo.org community that builds very interesting stuff. Their work has been available for more advanced Maemo users already for some time. I claim that the depth and coolness of those apps and compos beats almost any other mobile platform. Maemo is open and as a true computer OS it allows developers to create really nice applications, widgets, and extensions. If you want to experience them just open disabled repositories or go directly to maemo.org.And now, Ovi Store for Maemo applications has been open for a week or two. It is the official Nokia supported application store where developers can distribute their w...

We’ve been quite silent the past monthes, because one of the big project was the launch of our iPhone app, iWebwag! iWebwag is a full widget engine for iPhone, with a very powerfull RSS reader and sharing capacities trough email or Tweeter. Go to our app page description to have a nice overview of the features, but here are a few screen shot of this App. One of the cool feature is the “exposé mode”, where you see all your pages in a single view: This is a page view. Note that each widget can have different size, choosed by the user: And now the great news reader: ...

Packt Pub kindly sent me a copy of LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers to review. Anyone who was involved in professional Java ME development knows that one of the biggest challenges of Java ME development is to write appealing and consistent UI across various devices. For the past few years I found many Java ME UI frameworks on the web. Among those, LWUIT definitely is one on the top you should consider because: - It is backed by Sun - It is free and open source - It is still under active development. - It has a rich set of features and good development tool Another question you may ask is: is Java ME still relevant? For the past two years, the landscape of mobile development have been changed dramatically. With the introduction of iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS and computer grade Maemo OS (Li...

Some interesting news on Spinvox, a company who's MWC stand design I have always rated as top notch - after $100m funding, with 250 employees, they appear to be struggling to pay salaries. Instead, they seem to be offering employees share options instead of salaries - I am in all in favour of offering share options on top of wages, but instead? Can you eat options somehow?More worrying is the suggestion that the more big deals they get (having already got some huge ones with Telefonica), the more funding they need - which makes their voice recognition technlogy sound a little unscalable... read the comments and find out why: almost all of the recognition is done by humans, hence the need for such a headcount and lack of scalability / chance of profitability.Big confidence trick on the VCs...

Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days is only 6 weeks away... The event will be again held in Santa Clara, on January 21st and 22nd. The agenda is now fixed and it seems to contain a number of highly interesting talks and looks like one of my proposals was accepted as well (to provide the other end of the spectrum of presentation quality :-) I know what slides I am working on over the xmas break... ...