Mobile Mobile 2009

Enrique Ortiz has made some predictions on the mobile trend of 2009. I am not going to rewrite what he wrote on his blog, but I am going to digest it and make a note on the trend for us to think about it.

Sales

The sales of Smartphones is growing. Apple and HTC 's smartphone sales are growing, but Nokia 's is going down. Ortiz thinks it is because Nokia lack of touchscreen smartphone. May be or may be not? I think it is because of the bad user experience created by the buggy Symbain OS. However, Nokia is still the leading mobile phone supplier, till now.

OS

He mentioned Android will get lots of support from all kinds of network providers and device manufacturers. That means Android is somewhat has its advantage to grow faster in the future.

App Store

Learned from Apple, app store is fast distribution models. Google app store and BlackBerry app store will be another big things.

J2ME

Ortiz 's J2ME is going to MIDP3 or CDC + OSGi, or JavaFX. In my opinion, no matter how good J2ME is, it won't rule unless you have good distribution model for J2ME app to attract the developer. They just want to make money. For platform, developer is king. I wanna quote the words from the crazy Microsoft CEO Bellmer, "Developer, developer, developer, developer! Wow~"

Mobile Web

"The ideal of mobile web having access to local handset functionality won’t be fulfilled yet(to its fullest)", Ortiz wrote. Who wants it? I mean ... by ignoring the security issue, what are the use cases for mobile web having access to full functionality of handset? Well, this is just a question.

He wrote, "App stores will continue to have its huge effect on mobile apps and distribution. Due to the revenue and fast distribution models offered by iPhone and soon Android app stores, developers will first target such local applications (vs. mobile web). An even larger number of local/native applications will be created and distributed via app stores for Android and iPhone."

Thumbdive - Great iPhone Web App 2009 to bring your friends and family together

Make a Smilebox greeting

Mobile music and multimedia entertainment market

The mobile content business is still growing in the coming future. 34.8% subscribers in China who listen to music on their mobile phone which creates a big opportunity on mobile music content business in China.

Many large companies have already invested on the China mobile music and multimedia entertainment market. Access China, Melodeo, Sony BMG, Warner Music are working together to develop and distribute the mobile music and multimedia contents to wireless customers throughout China and other Asia Countries.

Survey from M:Metrics [Link]
Access China: [Link]
melodeo:[Link]

Mobile Advertising

Enpocket
www.enpocket.com
"Enpocket is a global leader in mobile advertising; providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world."



BLYK
about.blyk.com
"co-founded by CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä, former president of Nokia Corporation, and Antti Öhrling, Chairman and CEO of Contra Group"

AdMob
www.admob.com
"AdMob is the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace"

MOSH Mobile
www.moshmobile.com
MOSH provides free mobile service like unlimited free calls, unlimited text messages, surfing the web and ... free mobile contents like ringtone, wallpaper.

Google AdSense for Mobile

Google

"Google announced today the availability of AdSense™ for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile website content."

What is AdSense?
AdSense is a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. That means you can place the Google ads, which could be text only, on your blog or website to earn revenue.

AdSense for Mobile?
Very straight forward, you can place Google ads on your mobile websites. When mobile users click on the ads, you earn revenue from it.

The service will be available in the following countries soon:
US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

[more]

W3C tries to improve the user experience of the mobile web

Mobile Web Market
The number of mobile web users is growing rapidly. From the statistical report of CNNIC in 2007, the number of mobile web users in China is 44.3 millions. The largest mobile market in the world are China, US and Japan.

Mobile Web User
What mobile users really concern in browsing on a mobile website:

• Cost (always the first thing that users concern about)
  
• Easy way to look for the right information (consistent navigation method)
• readability of the website
  
• Time (get what they want in a short time)
• Having the same browsing experience on different mobile phone

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
W3C provides some basic guidelines for improving the user experience of the mobile web. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 is a mobile web standard that helps us to design and develop a good browsing experience to mobile users. It is like a guideline that telling you "do not do this, and do not do that", and "keeping it simple ... for user".




Read more:
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Tweet Tweet Tweet! Twitter Everywhere!

I believe Twitter will become a big thing in the coming future. Let me just give you a quick update on Twitter.

Twitter

Twitter is a mini-blog web service. It is very simple but addictive. Not like blog, you don’t need to have a topic and write a long paragraph. You can just say a sentence or two words telling people “what are you doing?”. The messages you post are stored in a timeline stream.

There are a lot of cool mashup applications of Twitter out there on the web, such as twittermap, twittervision, Twitticious, Twitter Planet, Twittercal … and more. Twitter now has a huge number of users and there are some competitors coming out like Jaiku, buboo, fanfou …

Jaiku

One of the biggest competitors is Jaiku. Jaiku is similar to Twitter but it has more features. I tried to use Jaiku on my PC and on my mobile phone but I don’t like to use it very much. Jaiku has developed a mobile application (Symbian) for Nokia S60 phones.
http://jaiku.com/
http://jaiku.com/mobile/s60/models

Mobile Apps for Twitter

Abiro Jitter
- very simple Java application for twitter
[More] [Download Page]

JTwitter
“jtwitter is a Java application that you install on your phone. It allows you to enter twitter updates using your phone without having to send SMS´s. It also allows you to view your timeline, friends timelines, public and featured timelines.”
[More] download from mobile: www.jtwitter.com/wap

Twitter widget for Widsets
- If you are Widsets user, you can download the twitter widget for your widset on your mobile phone.
[More] [Download Page]

Twibble
- a GPS enabled twitter client for the Nokia N95
[More]

Twitter Mobile page
http://m.twitter.com

more Twitter mobile apps:
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps