Here’s Part 1 of the Smartphone Obsession Series that I’m producing thanks to the support of mobile messaging giant, OpenMarket.

In this first episode, I talked with Alex Meisl, Chairman at mobile marketing specialists, Sponge Group. Alex is also joint-Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association so I thought it would be fascinating to get his viewpoints first.

Is there too much obsession with smartphones in the mobile marketing arena?

Why do companies jump straight for iPhone, even when they’re marketing products and services that really don’t appeal to iPhone users?

How much influence does the argument ‘but the Chairman’s got an iPhone’ have on the decision process?

What do you do when you want to reach everyone in the mobile channel, rather than just the smartphone users?

Have a watch and find out!

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He points out that the news isn’t yet confirmed from T-Mobile but that his source has been reliable in the past. Head over to his post to read all the pricing details.

If true, it’s not brilliant news for T-Mobile customers — the deals don’t appeal to be that competitive. But if you’re wedded to T-Mobile out of some weird and wonderful brand loyalty (and if you simply love using an online billing system built out of string and sellotape), then you too will shortly be able to enjoy the iPhone experience with them.

The Best Mobile Connected Device award went to Novatel‘s MiFi Intelligent Hotspot:

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The Best Music Service award went to Shazam:

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The Best Social Media award went to Flirtomatic:

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The Best Technology Innovation award went to Layar:

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Here’s a quick look at the pricing table:

The full pricing details are right here and you can pick up a device from the 24th of June (that’s next Thursday!)

Now then, if you’re a developer and you’re after an opportunity to a) show off your skills and b) make a bit of money, do take a look at the Samsung Bada Developer Challenge.

There’s a whopping 2.7 million dollars of cash waiting for you. The winning application (‘the champion’) will get $300,000. First prize get’s 100k, second gets 60k and third prize gets $40k. So not too shabby at all.

However there are also 10 spots for ‘special winners’ who will each receive 30k each. Nice.

But that’s not all — there are 56 device phase winning places who will each receive $8,000 each.

So, in total, there are 300 winning opportunities — every single one will receive a Samsung Wave phone too.

Given that the winning app for Vodafone’s 360 platform was a Flickr-based app, if you’re a half-decent developer with a bit of imagination, I reckon you could do very, very well with this competition. Another key point: Winners will receive favorable consideration for employment opportunities within Samsung. Very useful.

You don’t need a device to get started though. The first phase of the competition simply requires you to have created your application in the simulator.

More information here: Samsung Bada Developer Challenge

I am sat amongst the creme of the UK’s mobile developer talent. There is a significant amount of beards in evidence so I know I’m amongst the developer elite.

Right now, there’s a chap up on stage walking through the CustomListItem(); procedure and how that corresponds to a UI list item. This isn’t for the faint hearted but I am witnessing lots of people with their heads down furiously taking notes. I’m also seeing lots of pens hovering over lips, folk staring intently and hands supporting heads whilst developers stare intently. I would thus surmise that the presentations are being well received by the audience.

It’s a little bit lost on me, though. I can more or less understand what they’re discussing (being a bit of a PHP developer myself). But I’m not the target audience. As the questions at the end of the last section demonstrated, the developers here are seriously evaluating Samsung’s Bada and very much appreciating the in-depth technical briefings being delivered.

That’s not to say today is all geekery. No, we’ve had presentations outlining the substantial possibilities with Samsung Bada. We were, for example, reminded that Samsung sent 40 million touchscreen phones into the market last year.

Interestingly, Samsung aren’t aiming to compete directly with the existing smartphone platforms. Instead, they’re aiming to enlarge the existing market, moving feature phone users to smartphone users. I like the strategy, given that Samsung are one of the biggest manufacturers of phones we’d normally refer to as ‘feature’ class. One slide — which I’ll see if I can pick up — showed a pie chart with the 15-20% chunk assigned to Smartphones, the rest feature phones. The Samsung chap then modified the pie chart to show the smartphone segment enlarging to perhaps 40% — indicating where Samsung intends attracting its customer base from.

I found the image:

We were also reminded to consider Samsung at the macro level as one of the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturers.

Will we, then, be seeing Bada on tablets, netbooks and televisions? A question from the audience had the panel of Samsung executives in a mild panic. Could they confirm that Bada will appear on other platforms? One of the executives — after some considered whispering — made it clear that ‘today, we’re just talking about Bada Mobile’.

Interesting. So we’ll be seeing Bada elsewhere.

It’s very easy to forget Samsung’s market size, might and capabilities. Sitting in front of their evangelists and executives talking through the Bada OS in detail, and answering challenging questions from the audience confidently and swiftly, I am very much left with the viewpoint that Samsung is very, very serious about Bada and the platform is going to be very, very successful.

Now, there’s a lot that has to happen for that to happen — but if the audience here are a reliable barometer, there isn’t going to be any shortage of attention for the Bada platform from UK developers. We shall see.

Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.

Not good at all. Would you give up your mobile to save the honey bees?

That said, paying a tenner for the app is a little annoying. Unless That has bought me access to the site and service for a year. That would be ok. But paying just to have it on my iPad and then not being being able to login on the web… That would be annoying.

We shall see.

Published on my iPad.

Update: Here’s what I saw last night

This morning though, I saw this…

I clicked and got this message. Ah hah. Right. It’s a tenner for the month, roughly. Ok. I’ve paid in advance already by purchasing the app.

I registered and boom, here was the newspaper’s iPad edition:

The limitations became clear pretty quickly. I can’t DO anything with the content. I can’t send a link, tweet a link or talk about it virtually with anyone. For example, this is a pretty shocking piece of news that I wanted to comment upon to my friends.

I do like the fact that the whole thing is downloaded to the device so I don’t need connectivity to browse through. That’s good. I don’t like having to wait for the internet either.

I’m going to see how I get on and I’ll publish my thoughts soon.

Embedding — where your application or service is preinstalled by a handset manufacturer or mobile operator — is one of the oft-forgotten tactics to Getting Big Fast in the mobile marketplace.

For the lucky few, it really can be a phenomenal opportunity. So, it’s celebrations all round at Touchnote HQ — they’ve done a deal with Sony Ericsson to embed their photo-to-postcard service on the manufacturer’s Android and Symbian handsets.

TechCrunch broke the story this afternoon, pointing out that it’s a rather different embed deal than you normally come across. Often we see embed deals where the manufacturer effectively pays the developer for the privilege. Or it demands the ‘lite’ version free but then allows the developer to keep any upgrade revenues. In this case, both Touchnote and Sony Ericsson will share a split — so both parties benefit.

Don’t, therefore, be surprised to see Sony Ericsson touting the Touchnote facilities when the handsets hit the marketplace as they’ve both got skin in the game.

Having followed Touchnote for almost the entire length of their mobile strategy, I’m absolutely delighted for them. There’s a talented team there in the Camden office, all committed to delivering the best experience.

If you haven’t checked it out, you can find it on the Ovi Store (as Rafe Blandford did whilst we were at Helsinki Airport last week — I swear he had downloaded the app and sent his postcard inside 2 minutes!) and on the iPhone App Store (my preferred Touchnote UI platform).

Now: If you’re reading from a mobile operator or another handset manufacturer, I’m pretty sure Touchnote really wants to work with you and wants to have their service embedded/preinstalled/featured so you’ll both make a good amount of money. If you need a contact there, drop me a note and I’ll plug you in.

Nice one Touchnote!

Olivier is one of the chaps on my list to feature in my new video series, The Future of Voicemail. I was particularly interested to get Olivier’s take on the way ahead given the fact he was Chairman of Wanadoo during some of the company’s most interesting times in the industry. I wanted to get his insight into how voicemail should be managed. What’s fascinating is that his views — without any prompting and despite coming from totally different ends of the marketplace — appear to closely match those of Andy Munarriz, founder of HulloMail.

HulloMail, if you recall, helped me make the Future of Voicemail series a reality by agreeing to become sponsor. I’m going to be getting Andy on camera too so it’s going to be particularly illuminating to contrast them.

I won’t spoil it though. I’ve got to edit the video — but all things being equal, it should be up sometime next week as the first episode in the series.

Thank you for taking the time this morning, Olivier!

The Symbian Wild Ducks project is all about making a phone using the Symbian 3 platform and off-the-shelf components. The Wild Ducks team are busy working away on this. You can actually pop by and talk to them about it — and see how far they’ve got — every Tuesday and Thursday after 6pm at Symbian’s London HQ.

Check out the details. There’s free pizza too!

Hi Ewan,

How’s things? I hope you’re doing well. Hopefully you saw our welcome note to Apple on joining the mobile advertising market? Steve never responded or reciprocated which I found disappointing

The real reason I am writing is to tell you about a new piece of technology we’ve implemented for our advertisers called AdROIt. You may have seen the release last week? AdROIt is an advertiser analytics technology that provides cost-per-acquisition based performance tracking for actions like registration, travel itineraries, car test drive requests, mortgage quotes, etc. While this reporting piece is interesting, the main differentiation for AdROIt is how we leverage the data to automatically improve our ad serving to generate better quality leads. Early beta tests drove a 40% reduction in the cost per acquisition without sacrificing volume.

My pithy way to describe AdROIt? No dumb beacons! Many folks already have tracking solutions in place. Rather than creating thousands of reports that require manual work, AdROIt creates a performance feedback loop at a deeper level than CPC and automatically improves ad serving in real time. Basically its another data input for our self-learning network that improves performance for advertisers with every impression and every click. You will hear more about that over the next few months. Additional details are at www.InMobi.com/AdROIt.

Let me know when you’re back over on the West Coast and we’ll catch up properly.

Speak to you soon.

James

James, good to hear from you — thanks for writing. I should be back in the Valley in the not too distant future so let’s do a drink!

If you’ve been following Mobile Developer TV, you’ll remember James from the recent interview we did with him at Mobile World Congress.

I knew I had landed in Finland because the moment the plane touched down, a cacophony of Nokia text message beeps sounded across the cabin.

I’m here with Rafe Blandford, Founder and Editor in Chief of All About Symbian, the biggest Nokia/Symbian-related site on the planet. We didn’t manage to sit together on the plane on account of the gazillion Finnish folk heading back out of London late on a Sunday afternoon.

The middle-aged chap sitting next to me was not impressed at me using an iPhone. At all. So much so that he stared at me a few times, hoping, I suspect, to encourage me to put it away. We’d only just taken our seats and the announcements made it clear that using mobile devices at this point was perfectly acceptable. His wife joined in with the upset disapproving stare a few minutes later. I was busy working away on a presentation using the utterly fantastic Documents To Go Premium app (more about that in a dedicated Application Review newsletter this week).

Eventually the chap plucked up the courage to tell me, “You shouldn’t be using that.”

I wondered if I’d brought out my N86, if he’d have the same reaction.

I stared at him for a moment.

I then pointed to the fancy little Aeroplane icon on the top left of the device screen, explaining, “It’s on airplane mode.”

“Oh,” said the chap.

So I carried on using the iPhone until the plane taxied off.

I wonder if the Finns aren’t that impressed at the iPhone. I should have brought out my iPad to see what this chap and his scowling wife would have made of it.

Blandford had warned me. It seems bringing an iPhone or an iPad to Finland isn’t best practice. Everything including my N86 connects perfectly fine to the hotel’s free WiFi service. Everything, that is, apart from the iPhone and the iPad. Is it a conspiracy?

No. Just an incompatibility somewhere along the line. Should’ve brought my MiFi unit. Or perhaps I should turn my N86 into a hotspot. Trouble is, that’s running a 3UK SIM which, I suspect, will be positively ridiculous in terms of mobile data pricing. Just looked. It’s £1.25 per meg. But they’ll text you if you go over a 45 pound limit. Which is useful to know.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying five-bar mobile signal wherever I go, even at 70mph in the taxi.

They’re pretty good at mobile, the Finnish.

Back in London tomorrow evening.

Happy Monday!

I’ll be posting more on this shortly, but in the meantime, here’s the full release. If you’re into SIP and PBX services, do take some time to read.

Research In Motion Limited today announced BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System 5 (BlackBerry® MVS 5) with voice over Wi-Fi® calling. BlackBerry MVS 5 works with Cisco® Unified Communications Manager to provide a business user with the ability to use their regular desk phone number and extension from their BlackBerry® smartphone. With the new version 5, an employee will be able to use a single work phone number shared between their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone and make and receive enterprise calls on their BlackBerry smartphone over a Wi-Fi connection, adding to the existing capability available over cellular networks.

An increasingly mobile workforce and the growing number of employees working from home present challenges for businesses to keep their staff accessible through their work phone number and keep calling costs under control. With BlackBerry MVS 5, calls made through BlackBerry MVS are routed through the corporate phone system/Private Branch Exchange (PBX)*, which helps with adherence to company policies and enables potential savings on long-distance and international roaming charges. Employees also benefit from the convenience of a single work phone number shared between their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone. Employees can be more reachable through their work phone number and can even enjoy the convenience of extension dialing from their BlackBerry smartphone as well as the flexibility to move calls from their BlackBerry smartphone to their desk phone. It’s also easy to use since incoming calls ring simultaneously on the employee’s desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone and employees access BlackBerry MVS using the same phone interface that they are already familiar with on their BlackBerry smartphone.

“BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 effectively provides a wireless extension of the corporate phone system to allow voice over Wi-Fi calling at work, public hotspots and home. It presents a great opportunity for companies to enhance the productivity of employees who are often away from their desks or working from home, such as workers in construction, hospitality, sales and professional services,” said Alan Panezic, VP, Platform Product Management at Research In Motion. “This latest release enables businesses to better leverage their investment in the corporate phone system, adapt to the growing demand by employees for more flexible work arrangements, improve workforce productivity and save costs on long-distance and international roaming charges.”

RIM and Cisco have worked closely to integrate BlackBerry MVS 5 with Cisco Unified Communications Manager to deliver an enhanced user experience. The solution has been tested for interoperability and will be supported by both RIM and Cisco.

Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager, Unified Communications Business Unit at Cisco: “BlackBerry Mobile Voice System and Cisco Unified Communications Manager provide and extend Cisco’s IP telephony features to BlackBerry smartphone users at companies of any size. With an integrated Cisco Unified Wireless Network, our customers will be able to have highly secure voice over Wi-Fi experiences and high quality phone calls with their BlackBerry smartphones while roaming across the wireless network.”

Advanced IT features built into BlackBerry MVS 5 will help to provide controlled, managed and secure use of BlackBerry smartphones with the corporate phone system. Key features include:

* Wi-Fi network access controls to set which Wi-Fi networks employees can access
* Network preference settings with the option of prioritizing the use of Wi-Fi or cellular for making phone calls
* Authentication to help ensure that only authorized BlackBerry smartphones have access to the corporate phone system
* Incoming call filtering based on allowed and blocked caller lists

A new interoperability platform has also been added to BlackBerry MVS 5 to enable telecommunications companies to offer BlackBerry MVS 5 as part of their corporate phone system offerings. RIM is working with leading companies to make BlackBerry MVS available for a range of PBX systems.

BlackBerry MVS 5 is expected to be available later this year.

So the Pearl 3G hits the marketplace in the Summer of 2010. The Pearl range has been in need of a serious refresh for some time and I’m delighted to see that RIM stepped up and delivered. What’s interesting with the Pearl 3G is that it is supplied with two different types of keyboard (depending on your operator preference).

Here’s what the release says about the keyboard option:

The new BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone will be available in two models and several lustrous colors. The 9100 model features a 20-key condensed QWERTY keyboard and the 9105 model features a 14-key traditional phone keyboard. Both models include SureType® software that can complete words as the user types, making texting fast and accurate. The BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone is expected to launch with various carriers beginning in May.

I really do like the idea of the 14-key traditional keyboard. Given that roughly 75% of the planet uses a handset with this layout (a stat given by one of the RIM executives during the press conference) it makes a lot of sense to launch a device with this keyboard format. It also demonstrates that RIM is serious about expanding beyond the traditional BlackBerry markets.

Here are the key features:

- Elegant candybar design measuring 4.25″ x 1.96″ x 0.52″ (108mm x 50 mm x 13.3 mm) and weighing only 3.3 oz (93 grams)
- 624 Mhz processor with 256 MB Flash memory
- 360×400 sharp-resolution display (238 ppi)
- Optical trackpad that makes navigation fast and smooth, plus a comfortable keyboard that enables quick and accurate typing
- Media player for videos, pictures and music (music plays up to 30 hours), plus dedicated media keys integrated along top of the handset
- 3.2 MP camera with zoom, autofocus, flash and video recording-
- Built-in GPS for location-based applications such as BlackBerry® Maps, as well as photo geotagging
- Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) – first BlackBerry smartphone to support ‘n’
- microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 32 GB cards
- Premium phone features, including voice activated dialing, speakerphone and Bluetooth® (2.1) with support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including systems that support the emerging Bluetooth Message Access Profile standard) and other Bluetooth accessories
- Access to BlackBerry App World™, featuring a broad and growing catalog of mobile applications developed specifically for BlackBerry smartphones
- Support for BlackBerry® Media Sync for easily syncing photos as well as iTunes® and Windows Media® Player music with the smartphone–
- BlackBerry® OS 5
- Support for tri-band UMTS/HSDPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks
- Removable, rechargeable 1150 mAhr battery that provides approximately 5.5 hours of talk time on 3G networks

I should have hands-on with the device shortly.

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live

The series of Nokia Executive interviews have begun. This one is in an
open forum so we’re not filming it directly. Instead Rafe is going to
give us a breakdown to camera afterwards. Then we are off to the
meeting rooms to do the on-camera interviews.

There’s a heck of a lot of buzz and excitement around the Nokia and
Intel announcement if MeeGo.

Posted via email from MIR Live

Posted via email from MIR Live