This is a serious, serious problem for me.

Ultra serious.

Let me explain.

I have 12GB of email in my personal Google Apps account.

I have 7GB in my Mobile Industry Review Google Apps account.

I want quick, easy access to that mail. I love the fact that *anywhere* in the world, I can query my Google mail through the BlackBerry app really quickly. It’s a bit clunky because Google seems to have stopped evolving the app — but it gets the job done and I’ve found it highly reliable.

I also need to be able to easily, easily ‘manage’ my mail. The BlackBerry Gmail app is one of the *quickest* ways of managing my email. Much of the avalanche of email that comes in needs to be reviewed-n-archived (simply press ‘e’) or deleted (‘d’) or starred for follow-up (‘s’). I can get through my email SO quickly with these little keyboard commands.

Come November 22nd, however, I’ll need to lump it. Luckily I’ll still be able to *use* the app, since I’ve got it installed on all my BlackBerries. However Google are actively *removing* the app — that is, on November 23rd, you won’t be able to find it to install it.

It’s an interesting move.

Why are you doing this Google?

Of course, the key point is that they’d rather I do everything in the browser. Or on Android. Both are shite experiences. There is no Android hardware — NONE — worth looking at from a messaging/email standpoint. They’re all tinpot shit experiences for me. I need the BlackBerry UI. I need to be able to get shit done quickly using a decent physical keyboard — something that is beyond every Android device ever marketed to date.

And the browser? Don’t make me laugh.

Of course the fundamental problem here is the abomination that is Gmail support on BlackBerries. Google Sync works like a dream on every BlackBerry I’ve ever owned. The calendars and contacts all update beautifully. The email, however, is a nightmare. It certainly works. Just, deletes don’t seem to sync. Ever. It’s been winding me up something chronic for a long time. And, because deletes don’t sync, email begins to pile up on my device so that every few weeks I need to actually delete my Gmail account on the device and set it up again. Just so it becomes usable.

It’s a bit of a mess, frankly.

The solution?

Well, I’ve been looking for a decent solution for a while. I think the answer is definitely to stay on BlackBerry for my primary messaging experiences. I don’t think there’s anything better.

Google, on the other hand, by making this decision have seriously annoyed me. It’s a real inconvenience. I spend a lot of money with them on Google Apps accounts and don’t expect to be dicked around in this manner.

I’ve been quite enjoying using the ‘connector’ for Google Apps that makes it work natively like BES on my BlackBerry. The biggest issue I have is that I can’t search my 12GB & 7GB of email data easily this way. That’s why I have the Gmail App on the BlackBerry.

What a flipping annoyance.

I’m going to take another look at Office365 and their BES connectivity.

Meanwhile, beyond glaring at Google (and BlackBerry, for not sorting out their Gmail Plugin), do you have any suggestions?

Update: Ben Smith over at Wireless Worker has this perspective.

However, he got the iPhone to test. He obviously asked for a few recommendations.

I got my iPhone and proceeded to browse through the screens observing which ones I actually used. I thought this might be an interesting exercise for you to read. If time permits, it would be super if you could do the same in the comments as I’m sure I’ll discover some good apps that way.

Here’s my as-I-scrolled list — I’ve put iTunes links to every one:

- Evernote for keeping notes, files, WiFi passwords across multiple devices (not just computers)
- Kindle, from Amazon, to read my ebooks when I’m on-the-go
- Amazon Mobile, for buying stuff that comes to mind (e.g. shoelaces, batteries, etc)
- SocialCam, for shooting video and then sending that video out to Facebook/Twitter
- Posterous, for maintaining my own personal blog/blog for friends/family
- Google+ app is really, really good — you need to try ‘Huddle’
- Spotify, for audio on-demand (tenner a month)
- Find My iPhone, so I can locate the iPhone if it’s lost
- DropBox, obviously — have you got a dropbox account?
- LinkedIn is sometimes useful
- Osfoora, for twitter — my client of choice
- UK Train Times — national rail app, expensive but super useful. Really like ‘next train home’
- British Airways — so you don’t need to ever bother with paper boarding tickets ever again
- Instagram, for snapping cool looking photos.
- Hullomail, for visual voicemail because (so you can always access your voicemails via the app and in your gmail)
- ON Voicefeed is another visual voicemail app, it’s brilliant
- LogMeIn, for accessing your desktop remotely. I use this two or three times a day for getting files and controlling my home machines from wherever I am
- Skyfire — full desktop browsing experience
- Audioboo, for recording audio ‘thoughts’ and sticking them on twitter (also, iPadio)
- Qik Plus, for live broadcasting video straight from my phone
- MIR, the mobile industry review application (just a news feed) that I paid $400 to a chap called Pavel to make
- Shoeboxed, for taking photos of receipts and having somebody else type in the value, company, date etc. so the accountant can download it later on
- OpenTable for booking Gaucho Grill in 10 seconds
- Reeder is a really good Google Reader client
- SoundHound is a billion times better than Shazam — song identification (every time I’ve tried Shazam lately, I’ve got a ‘sorry, dunno’ reply! Hardly ever from SoundHound..
- Sky+, because sometimes — rarely — I want to record stuff from live TV
- Touchnote, for sending my digital photos as real postcards to granny every week. She loves it.
- WordPress, for maintaining the sites on-the-go
- PizzaExpress, because I can’t be bothered with the 60-second faff with the credit card machine. I always pay via PayPal with the app now.

There are plenty more applications I do use, but these ones are most definitely regulars.

What about you? I’d very much welcome a list from you of your *every day* apps. If you don’t have much time, stick down one or two apps in the comments?

- – - – -

First, I thought Google. Now, I think Microsoft.

I was reading recently about Skype functionality being built into the forthcoming Mango release on Windows Phone (WP) and I started thinking: who is now moving forwards fastest in this whole ecosystem race?

At the turn of the year, I was part of a research panel discussion around the near future of mobile. The NDA I signed on the evening prevents me from disclosing what treats we were party to, however, what I can share is some of the thoughts we went in with.

Each of us was asked to present our ideas around future mobile technologies. My pitch was around, funnily enough, ecosystems:

“We’re already seeing mobile operating systems appearing in car dashboards. Soon they’ll be in our fridges, on our televisions, built into our coffee tables.. and, when that happens, purchasing decisions will also be made based upon these ecosystems. If your main technology at home is Android-based and you’re coming to buy something new for your household, you’re more likely to keep within the ecosystem that you’re used to. Both from a UI perspective and also from a service interaction ideal.”

This was at the end of last year. Rewind a few years, back when I was working at a certain voice to text company, and Google was talking about launching their own voice-to-text product through Google Voice – “They’ve parked their tanks on our lawn, we must be doing something right”.

At that time I was thinking about the different pieces being put in place by the big G:

GMail, GTalk, Google Maps and now, Google Voice.

Communications + presences + location? I remember saying to a French Googler whom I knew at the time “Man! I can totally see where you guys are going! Amazing. Android will be the glue to pull it together aaaand.. when you align the stars, it’ll be perfect!” – he smiled and bowed his head, knowingly.

The communication ideal behind these nodes, if you will, for me seemed like a major background strategy that was slowing falling into place. Alas, here we are several years later and – even with the likes of [the yet to be proven] Google Plus – all of these services are still yet to fully link up properly. But these things take time.

Fast forward back today and this piece on Engadget highlighting Skype integration in Mango hits. My brain clicks into gear.

Xbox, Windows, Windows Phone, Hotmail [yeah, I said it] and now Maps – the pieces are all there. But the key part here for me is Xbox. The one thing everyone seems to be overlooking: Xbox. There are 53.6million of these machines worldwide – already sat under televisions. Of those, 66% are connected [or at least registered] online via Xbox Live. Include in that another 10million Kinects [the fastest selling peripheral of all time] and you have one hell of a home entertainment system / internet ecosystem.

The Kinect already had video calling before Skype was announced for Windows Phone. Skype is also rumoured to be bundled in the next Xbox update. I’m not saying video calling is the future, not by any stretch. But a true and proper unified communications plan for consumers is the next big step. [Facebook is nearly there, but isn't interested in home or mobile hardware].

Windows 7(.5/Mango/Tango/Rango/Bingo/Bango – delete where appropriate) also promises gaming integration, amazing applications [like the mind-blowingly awesome British Airways app we saw demo'd earlier this year] and well, I can’t help thinking that a sleeping giant has been stirred.

I used to think that Google would be the one pulling this stuff together – the faster, more agile of the huge players in the world. They still could be. They still might be.

All I’m saying is, don’t forget about Microsoft and above all, don’t ignore the Xbox. I genuinely think it’s a trump card that Microsoft is yet to play.

Whatley out.

First though, let me take a wee look back.

It’s been painful to watch Android.

There are some fundamentals that have been missing.

Ever since I picked up a “T-Mobile G1″, they’ve been winding me up quietly. The fact my G1 couldn’t limp into mid-morning without the battery going to red was something that astounded many Nokia executives I know. How could they put something like this out to market?

The camera? Abysmal.

The voice quality? Robotic.

The user experience? Limited.

The best way of running my G1 — if I actually wanted to use it for a full day — was to actually switch everything off.

And looking at my Nexus S, not much has changed. As long as you’re never more than 5 feet away from a USB charge point, you’re good. And if you look good pixelated, then — broadly speaking — Android cameras are definitely for you.

Literally, I feel the best about my Nexus S when it’s switched off. Because I know it’s not using any battery and that when I actually NEED to do something, I can switch it on, use it gloriously, then switch it off again. Or at least, set it to Airplane mode to make sure it only gently slurps on the battery.

The operating system has prompted a phenomenal sea change across the marketplace. Prompted it. There are some wonderful innovations. Google Maps is just delightful. Voice search and integration, wonderful. Sync just works. I think it’s fair to say that the G1 experience heralded the first proper mobile experience — you needed to sign-in with a Gmail account, BUT everything synchronised without you doing any thinking whatsoever. Just a username and password. Calendars, contacts, (“push”) email. This was when folk were still having to tell their Nokia what the time and date was during activation.

The democratisation of the smartphone, prompted by Google “giving away” Android has been super to watch. All of a sudden, consumers upgrading from a shit feature phone got themselves a shit smartphone.

The priority was Google.

There’s nothing wrong with that. They funded it all for commercial gain.

The priority was always search — Google Search — and revenue. Everything about the Android ‘experience’ was about the Google ecosystem. The heavy reliance on search.

It’s been a really nice ride, too. Along the way, millions have been lifted out of feature phone poverty with a wide array of $99-style smartphones.

I began to get rather frustrated by the total lack of consumer focus. Android, I remember remarking, “is not consumer ready.”

Consumers still use it. They still get on fine most of the time. There’s just so many rough edges almost everywhere I look.

The problem with Android is that, for the most part, I believe it won’t take much to persuade a current user to swap, especially if they’ve been left a wee bit disappointed by their existing Android device. This is the big Nokia/Microsoft bet: That they can deliver a better, integrated experience that seriously delights users, at all price points.

In recent years, the rather crazy notion of HTC having to pay license fees for what was supposed to be a ‘free’ operating system, has had quite a lot of people in manufacturers chattering. There’s been the odd pained face.

Updates aren’t fast.

Just look at Sony Ericsson: The company used a ton of resources to get it’s first generation devices out into market running (if memory serves) Android 1.9. Or was it 1.6? I can’t remember but it was shocking.

Consumers were greeted with a wall of silence. Can’t you just buy the device and be happy with it? The culture change that many manufacturers have had to bear has been extreme and rather expensive.

At the end of the day, manufacturers want to see lots of boxes going out the factory door, ideally with a healthy profit attached to each one.

It’s not just about the equipment folk though.

The operators have been watching the Android juggernaut with concern. They’ve been trying to play along where possible. Witness Vodafone’s nigh-on-ridiculous attempts at adding a ‘marketplace’ to a phone that already had one on the front screen by default. Vodafone’s abomination was hidden away on the 10th screen, safely insuring nobody would bother. Right or wrongly, the operators have been staring at Google’s profits and quietly panicking.

One rather large gaping hole with Android is the marketplace. Developer support is still a problem, however Google has arguably done one of the best jobs possible at retaining mindshare. The consumer experience is something else. Dare you download that free game? Or are you likely to end up having every one of your voice calls, SMS messages and emails routed to a mysterious server in China? Because nobody at Google ever bothered to offer a consumer-level ‘managed’ service on Android market?

I’m making sweeping statements, but run with me.

We got to an impasse in early summer where I began to sense a reality shift: Google was, I felt, losing ground. The patent wars have certainly created a lot of problems. I can’t, in all seriousness, go about making devices that are likely to be invalidated or rendered illegal by other players. And, wasn’t all this shit meant to be free? Why am I paying Microsoft? Why is Nokia getting lump-sum payments from Apple? Who’s suing who? And what do these patents mean? And, while I’m at it — what do the chaps at Microsoft and Nokia know that I don’t?

It’s these sorts of issues that I’ve been exploring with quite a few OEMs & operators across the months. They’ve been high-level kick-about conversations usually supported by a beer or two. They’ve got PwC and Accenture to help out during the day with lots of graphs.

Google needed to do something.

Pitted against iOS 5 and Windows Phone Mango, Android doesn’t look that good.

Oh it still delivers. Device specs are still going to be up there with the best of them. It just — Android needs to iterate really, really fast. Honeycomb was a monumental screw-up. I honestly couldn’t actually find the sodding applications folder on the XOOM. I had to actually switch into ‘techie’ to navigate.

Faced with the beautifully marketed iOS 5, now surely about to spread far and wide with some kind of Nano-style pricing strategy, and with highly excited, confident noises coming from Microsoft and Nokia, I could see a time where manufacturers actually begin reducing their Android production.

It’s taken perhaps 18 months or so for Android to really begin to dominate.

That’s easily attacked. It’s easily eroded. Indeed, when it’s not free, when there’s lots other partners with cash ready to rock and when there’s hundreds of operators out there ready to see Google get it’s wing clipped a little bit, the future for Android was less than certain.

Buying Motorola fixes that.

It guarantees at least one manufacturer — a big one in Android spheres — will retain the operating system. I wouldn’t expect Samsung or HTC to walk away from Android overnight — absolutely not. But I think it’s fair to say none of them are committed.

Name me an Android manufacturer who is committed?

Go on.

Name someone who absolutely positively would never look at Windows Phone. Or QNX. Or anything else. Can you guarantee HTC will always deliver Android devices? What about Samsung? The company’s doing very, very well with Android right now but it’s got (highly capable) Bada in the back pocket and it’s playing with Windows.

Everyone’s hedging their bets.

Today’s news helps change things.

Android is a permanent fixture.

Don’t read that sentence and think I’m being flippant. Yes it’s the planet’s largest smartphone operating system today, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll stay that way.

Guaranteeing that Motorola — one of the best known brands in the States — is on your side is rather useful.

Patents are certainly useful too.

Some of the utter shit I’ve been reading today has been laughable. One patent could generate a billion dollars. 1,000 patents could generate $500,000. Motorola certainly has a library of ‘em.

Google’s move is, I think, not just about patents.

The biggest benefit of the news is that, today, thousands of board directors will have dropped everything to dial into hastily arranged emergency direction meetings. Google buying Motorola is a turn-on-a-six-pence moment. All bets are off. Continents are shifting.

The Motorola acquisition has now prompted a lot more companies to look at the whole sector in a different way. Once Google’s done it, then it’s ok.

One senior operator executive I spoke to this evening likened the news to a very smart if rather blatant, bold chess move.

“We think they’ve done it 25% for the IP, 25% to assure a continued position for Android and 50% to unnerve the industry.”

I think there’s a bit of truth there.

The chest-beating is fantastic. It’s big, bold, direct. Android is safe[r]. The purchase will give comfort to the others who might have been thinking about adjusting their Android strategy into 2012/2013.

It also gets Google into the box-shifting business — rather unfamiliar territory.

Bring it on though. I’m looking forward to seeing what they can mutually deliver.

I’m most excited by the emergency board meetings though.

Make no mistake, right now there’s lots of plotting going on.

It gets a bit boring when things are steady-as-she-goes.

Patrick is off to pastures new — Google pastures, to be precise. He’s going to be taking a bit of time out then he joins the Googleplex as Marketing Director for Mobile Applications.

I’ve me the chap often at an array of conferences. He’s eloquent, informed and high passionate about mobile applications. So I think that’s an excellent hire for Google. I’m sure Patrick will relish the opportunity.

Every success Patrick!

You can read his blog entry here.

I’ve been using it this last week, and it’s not perfect, but not bad either. I was skeptical because of Google’s massive social fails in Buzz, Latitude, Wave and +1 (although to be fair +1 on its own is a fail, and starts to make sense in the greater context of Google+), but Google+ is at least usable in a way that the others weren’t.

Now let’s extrapolate out a little. Given that Google+ is usable, and that they give you notifications EVERY time you go to Google.com to search, let’s just say it’s going to be big. While it may not ever replace Facebook, it may be the Pepsi to its Coke. Now, Google already has a Google+ Android app (naturally), but they have also submitted an iOS app. I don’t think that it’s a huge leap of faith to assume that Google will start baking Google+ into future versions of Android at the OS level, so you don’t need to install a separate app.

Think about that for a second. Hundreds of millions of Android users will have a native social networking experience on their phones–their primary tool for communicating and socializing with friends. Mobile is key to the next generation of social networking, and Google potentially has a huge advantage.

Apple famously snubbed Facebook in favor of adding Twitter OS level integration in iOS 5, and as much as I love Twitter, it is a much more shallow social experience than Facebook or Google+. Picture sharing is done with links, photo-tagging is nonexistent, and conversations are disparate ping pong matches.

But once (if) Google+ gets traction and is on hundreds of millions of handsets at the OS level, I have a feeling that Apple and Facebook might kiss and make up really quickly. An Apple alliance with Facebook would make sense in the whole “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of way.

Whatever does happen down the road, Google+ is for real, and things are about to get interesting in the mobile social space.

I’m a Vodafone UK customer. I have opted-in to their special European data roaming deal that gives me 25mb of roaming data per day, in return for £2.

Now that’s cheap. Very cheap, when Vodafone will normally take £1 per megabyte from me without thinking.

Unfortunately, Vodafone’s Price Plan Cretins (known in the business as VPPC’s) decided that after this 25mb daily allowance, I will be billed an excruciating £1 per megabyte.

So they’ve almost got it working nicely. I suspect that the viewpoint from the VPPC committee is that 25mb should be enough for anyone to ‘use the internet on their phone’ in a given day.

My primary handset is a BlackBerry Bold 9780 (running 6.0 of RIM’s OS). RIM know what they’re doing in the context of mobile data compression technology. Sanyu Kiruluta from RIM’s EMEA Developer team made that perfectly clear when we put her on camera to discuss ‘the data capacity crunch’ a few months ago.

One of her key points:

“We tell developers: Only send the necessary data, only send it when necessary.”

This philosophy is, I believe, born of the fact that when RIM were starting out, data was a scare commodity. You had to make really good use of the available GPRS bandwidth. You had to allow for continual service interruptions and for poor network bandwidth. So RIM optimised the hell out of everything.

Let me highlight just how important this is for the mobile marketplace.

You see it is very, very easy to get rather frustrated with the mobile network operators for not delivering in today’s always-on culture. It’s really easy to get annoyed by the stupid battery consumption problems that almost any modern smartphone suffers from. I regularly explode at my network operator’s inability to deliver me service when I need it. I am continually banging the table (at industry roundtables) demanding a ‘boost button’ so that I can get prioritised data access services so that my connection will be faster, when I need it.

I really cannot stand sitting on the bus and watching my bandwidth from the cell seem to disappear almost immediately when the teenager sitting across from me flips open his bog-standard smartphone and starts streaming an HD Youtube video. For no apparent reason, other than he’s bored.

“That’s not an efficient use of the mobile network infrastructure,” I scream. To myself.

I remember being at an HP roundtable a while ago — years ago. One of the tech guys there wanted to illustrate just how fragile our mobile infrastructure was. He got four Nokia N95s, all on the same network. He then proceeded to make a video call between a pair of them. All was fine. The picture was excellent. He then got the other pair fired up and tried to connect them on their own video call. Everything went to shit. The original video call began to break. The new video call couldn’t show any video signal at all. I could virtually feel things breaking at the local cell tower. This was a few years ago.

Things are a little better now.

The mobile networks have invested substantially in shoring up their data capacity capabilities. It was o2 UK, if memory serves, that recently announced it was spending something like a million pounds a day building out it’s network in the wake of the meltdown caused by so many iPhones blindly shooting their data loads all over the place.

Just how bad is the data demand from a smartphone? Well, there are all sorts of facts and figures around that we could resort to. We could quote the ‘average’ smartphone data usage. We could argue or support Vodafone’s 25mb daily roaming limit — is this 25mb limit a perfect allocation of data for your average consumer? Quite possibly. I doubt my mother would use more than that in a given day.

But having set out the semi-interlinked points above, let’s get to the main point of today’s post: The flipping Google Nexus S.

I went out and spunked the cash on Samsung’s Nexus S. It was, I reasoned, about time I had a proper up-to-date Android phone. There are plenty of test ones around MIR Towers, but I thought I needed to have one to play with and experience.

I’ve been doing just that. Now and again I take the SIM card out of my BlackBerry and stick it into the Nexus.

I’ve not had much time to do anything to the Nexus, beyond setup my Gmail (3 accounts) and have a quick look around the phone. I’ve downloaded one or two apps from the Marketplace — and I’ve installed a beta version of Swype to replace the dire standard on-screen keyboard.

That’s the extent of the configuration.

The first flaw with the Nexus S is that, if you use it the way you’re meant to do, the battery hits 50% before you can type ‘mobileindustryreview’. My annoyance at this experience is only heightened by the helpful Android fanatics who feel obliged to point out that I’m, “doing it wrong.” I need to switch off real-time email delivery, apparently. That, “chews a lot of battery”, I’m told. Duh. And, “you should put your screen brightness down loads.” That is another genuine suggestion from a 35-year old IT expert I know.

Well, obviously. I only used to get through the day with my T-Mobile G1 Android phone by using one of those power saving apps that basically switched everything off, from the WiFi to the screen. It effectively bricked the device continually unless I specifically wanted to use it, at which point, the app would scream and scream as the battery dripped charge.

I refuse to do this with a £500 handset.

It is not the battery that’s the problem for me though.

Oh no.

It’s the sodding data use.

I’ve been coming to France for two days a week for the last three months. Vodafone’s 25mb for £2 days deal has been keeping me going. The moment I enter France and the BlackBerry selects a new network, I get the friendly ‘hello, you’ve got 25mb’ message from Vodafone.

And that’s all I get from Vodafone, despite giving the BlackBerry a good amount of data use throughout the day.

The Bold has four email accounts constantly being updated. Three Gmail accounts, one BlackBerry ‘Instant’ email account. The BlackBerry Twitter super-app is live and updating every 20 minutes. Google Maps is constantly monitoring my location. Smrtguard is pinging the server to keep an eye on my phone’s location (and doing a backup every evening). Google’s own Gmail app is always live and pinging. I use that to access my 20gig email archive as necessary across the day. BeReader updates regularly across the hour, keeping my Google Reader feed updated and ready for review. SmartWiFi sits in the background monitoring my cell location — when I get home or when I get to my hotel (where there’s a WiFi network), the app switches on my WiFi and begins routing all my traffic across that connection. Text messages are flying in and out. And BlackBerry Messenger typically runs read hot most days.

Now then, battery wise, the BlackBerry will typically last a full day. On some particularly heavy days, especially when I’m using the telephone portion of the device, the Bold will get to 11pm with about 20% battery. It’ll go a further few hours before the horrible RED battery display appears — then it really does need a charge.

The key point? I get full usage out of it.

But what about the data?

Well I don’t actually know. What I can tell you is that I never, ever get a message from Vodafone saying I’ve gone over 25mb in a given day, when I’m roaming. Never.

If I was sending copious amounts of photos, I suspect I could force my device to exceed the 25mb roaming limit, but my normal heavy usage never seems to break it.

Can you guess what happened with the Samsung Nexus S?

Yeah. It’s not good.

The Eurostar arrived out of the tunnel into France and the Nexus S switched on to the local French network. I got the familiar text from Vodafone letting me know I was now eating into my 25mb of allowance and that they’d charged me £2.

About an hour later, I arrived in Paris. I got into a taxi and as we pulled away, I got another text from Vodafone. I’d used up my 25mb allowance already and I was now burning £1 per meg.

I was astonished. I quickly checked Google Maps to see what route the taxi driver was taking. Boom: I got a text to let me know I’d blown £5.

And my Nexus S battery was down to 53%.

To be clear I’d hardly used the phone. It had been in my pocket since I’d entered France.

I was astonished.

This, then, is the difference between a BlackBerry and an Android device. I can only assume that the BlackBerry’s proprietary compression and communications layer is ridiculously efficient and that the Nexus S is behaving as though it’s connected to WiFi and sucking as much data as it wants.

Of course, I know the solution. I need to switch off the mail sync. I need to effectively prevent the Nexus from doing anything. Indeed switching off the data roaming capability would probably be the best way ahead — and then I could switch it on when I need to check my email. But goodness me I wonder if checking my email would actually end up using a few meg? If that means syncing contacts, calendars and mail, for all three accounts, every single time?

I suppose I could try using the mobile web to check my email when I’m abroad using the Nexus S. That would at least limit the data usage to a distinct refresh.

Goodness knows what it’s doing when I have it on in the UK? The Nexus S must be burning through 100mb a day just sitting there.

This is why I continue to use a BlackBerry.

No wonder the mobile networks are having problems coping with the ‘data crunch’. I wonder if operators concerned about increasing network demands should be heavily discounting BlackBerries for their subscribers to help keep the pain away.

Vic published this tweet with the hash-tag #feb11:

So, Nokia’s definitely not doing business with Google Android in the short term then, eh?

Depending on the configuration of the strategic announcements coming on Friday, Google should be a little/reasonably/highly concerned.

Meanwhile Vic also reports that tickets for the upcoming Google I/O event sold out within 59 minutes.

Team HTC-Columbia are currently whizzing through Stage 6 of the Tour de France bicycle race and right now, one of the riders, Maxime Monfort (age 27) is traveling at 36km/h and is delivering 241 Watts of power on top of a 102bpm heart rate.

How do I know this? Well his HTC Legend phone is using SRM and a modified version of the Android application, My Tracks, to deliver this information to the Google My Tracks Tour tracking portal in almost real time. Very neat indeed.

If you’re a racing fan, I think you’ll really enjoy watching the telemetry. And if you’re a serious cyclist like Adam from messaging firm, Esendex, and you’re an Android user, then you’ll probably want to get hold of My Tracks.

There’s more information on what they’re doing on http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/?p=18698

News in from Google’s VP of Engineering, Andy Rubin on Android’s growth:

Every day 160,000 Android-powered devices are activated — that’s nearly two devices every second, used for the first time by people from New York to New Zealand

160,000 x 30 days = 4.8m a month or just short of 58m a year.

Utterly stupendous.

This is what happens when Silicon Valley gets stuck in. This is why Android is ‘number two’ after iPhone in the mindsets of ‘everybody’.

It’s certainly not without issues. The increasing fragmentation along with slow or no reaction from Google to key developer concerns is winding up lots of people.

However, consumers are certainly adopting the platform in droves.

Good news for all those looking for Android 2.2 on their respective devices too:

To celebrate, we are open-sourcing the new 2.2 version of Android, which we call Froyo, to our partners who manufacture Android devices around the world. Customers will enjoy great new features and improved browser performance. And developers will benefit from new tools such as Android cloud-to-device messaging (which makes it easier for mobile applications to sync data).

I’m looking forward to seeing the mid-year feature and smartphone sales figures when they’re released soon. I wonder just how big a chunk Android will be.

What’s that?

You want to know if it’s allowed?

Well of course it’s allowed.

What about Google?

Well, they’re … they… they haven’t really said much about it. So when can we get you signed up?

What’s that? You want to know if Google approve of in-app carrier billing?

Why’s that a problem? Can’t you just, look just sign-up and wait and see?

What? What do you mean you can’t do business that way?

…

Such is the problem with having Google run it’s own mobile platform and not do it properly. I know a lot of companies who are keen to implement in-app billing, but four of them that I spoke to today will not be doing that any time soon because they simply don’t know if it’s ‘real’.

“It’s like a mirage,” said one leading mobile developer to me this afternoon, “We just don’t know if Google will allow it or change their mind in 2 months. We can’t do business like that.”

This is on the back of the rather exciting news that both Zongboku and Boku have announced in-app carrier billing for Android. Zong’s offering supports carrier billing in over 200 countries (reports TechCrunch). Zong’s got 179 carriers in 40+ countries including all the top one and two tiers in the US, (reports Moconews).

I’m pretty impressed with both offerings, I just hope that — at some point — we get a bit of clarity on whether Google well and truly allows in-app payments from other providers, or whether it will demand consumers continue to use it’s own Checkout system.

A little bit of clarity will see a lot of excitement from developers.

If you’re feeling brave, you can get started today with the Alpha Program from Boku.

Back at the beginning of this year, Google’s launch of the Nexus One sent shockwaves around the industry. Mobile operators were quaking in their boots. Quaking, I tell you. Not because of the Nexus One’s market leading features, no. But because of the manner in which Google decided to sell the device: Direct to the public via www.google.com/phone. It had the potential to completely change the game as I noted in my post, The new way to purchase your mobile phone.

How times change. I posted that on the 5th of January. Four months later, Google’s direct-to-customer plans were in tatters on the floor with their admission that they’d screwed it all up royally.

Representatives of mobile operators from across the planet were calling me with their concerns, wondering what I thought. They were panicking about the very clear danger of whole segments of their customer base migrating to a beautiful google.com/phone experience and simply treating their operator as a pipe. Dumb or not, the concept behind google.com/phone deliberately made the operator an also-ran semi-irrelevance in the transaction. How many consumers, drawn by the promise of the Nexus One and the ‘Google Experience’ would churn to deliver their loyalty first to Google and then second to the operator? It was a very real issue that had many in the industry frothing at the mouth with concern.

But then reality hit Google in the form of consumers wanting stuff. All of a sudden, Google — the multi-billion dollar giant that had never handled anything physical beyond hiring a really good Chef — was having to deal with screw-up after screw-up. Reader Patrick contributed to the short post I did on Friday explaining that, “A friend of mine in South Africa got his handset shipped to Serbia.”

Not good. It didn’t end there for Patrick. He’s got another friend in Singapore who had his Nexus One delivered by mistake to somewhere in Europe.

Not good at all.

What were Google thinking? When you sell someone a $600 handset, you do need to make sure it arrives. Ideally in the same country. At the same address as the billing statement too. I wonder if Google thought they’d sell 100 units in total and that they’d simply address the deliveries by hand and ship them using the Google UPS account?

The moment these kind of crazy stories began hitting the web, mobile operators around the planet began sleeping easier. One thing mobile operators can do is manage tens of millions of customers without breaking a sweat.

Google’s announcement last week closed the box on the google.com/phone endeavour so if you’d like to get hold of a Nexus One, the chances are, you’ll shortly be able to get the device from your favourite operator. You can pick one up right now free on a £35/month 2-year deal from Vodafone UK.

I’m disappointed that Google didn’t sort out the problems and stick to their original plan. The company has — you imagine — substantial resource at it’s fingertips to make sure this kind of thing could be done effectively. It would have been really interesting to see what kind of integration Google could have done with the mobile operators. Could I, for example, have been able to login to my google.com/phone account to check my minutes and change my price plan? Could I buy a ‘world account’ upgrade from Google for my Nexus One to give me unlimited global data usage for $150/month on top of my standard contract fees? It’d have really liked to have seen some dramatically cool innovation. Google, together with Apple, could really have changed the dynamic of the marketplace.

For now, though, it’s one less thing to worry about for the mobile operators.

What a shame, Google. What a real shame.

So, for example, if you’re typing the word ‘next’, you press ‘n’ and then all of a sudden, ‘e’ is displayed bigger, along with other letters that you’re probably going to want to use. Here’s a screenshot:

Letter enlarging makes the typing process a lot easier and means you don’t have to take extra special care with your typing. Let’s face it, typing on Android isn’t a glorious experience. I think ThickButtons could go a long way to making it a lot more comfortable.

The current version, 0.6, is free and available to download from the Android Market or at www.thickbuttons.com. I’m pleased to see that they’re also working on versions for other platforms too.

The ThickButtons team produced this rather swish video demonstrating the technology in use:

I think it’s definitely worth a download. Let me know how you get on?

The nice chaps at Mobile Entertainment magazine ran my ‘Fear The Googlepipe‘ opinion-piece yesterday morning. Did you catch it?

It’s based on a post I did a little while ago about the launch of the arrival of the Nexus One and what that could mean for your common-or-garden mobile operator. I say ‘based’, but the guys at Mobile Entertainment — proper media — have sprinkled some editorial dust and turned the original wail into a half decent looking piece. Thank you ME!

Here’s the first bit…

Well that was a day to remember. The day Google got stuck into mobile merchandising and nailed the mobile operator to the wall.

That’s it: thank you for coming, mobile operators! You did your best. But now you’ve been ‘owned’.

That’s it: thank you for coming, mobile operators! You did your best. But now you’ve been ‘owned’.

Well, maybe not yet. But do look out for the big G. With the Nexus One, Google has ushered in an entirely new way of buying a consumer handset: from its website in six clicks. Shit! Is it that simple?

Continue at Mobile Entertainment –>

Thank you to the delicious people who retweeted it — including the Infomob chaps, Mitcan, SLAMobile, Peggy Anne, Martin Wilson, Radek and MEF.

Although Google makes the Android mobile operating system, the search giant’s chief competitor, Yahoo, will be the default provider on AT&T’s first Android-powered handset, due to be released March 7.

Great.

Talk about fragmentation on the Android platform.

Yes, you bought a ‘Google Phone’. But, no, the reason your search isn’t that good is because Yahoo is powering it. Sorry, I mean Bing. Yahoo doesn’t actually do search any more. While Bing does have some very good qualities — it’s search results aren’t quite there yet.

But what the hell are AT&T’s executives thinking?

Apparently there is a ‘long-standing relationship’ between AT&T and Yahoo for search partnerships. And this means that they’ve decided to screw about with the inner-workings of the device and really piss off consumers at the same time.

This is precisely why mobile operators need to be shot. In a nice way, you understand.

Some executive from AT&T and some executive from Yahoo have got together. They’ve both gone for very expensive martinis (on expenses) and discussed each others’ aims and objectives. They’ve nodded along with each other, they’ve got to know each other, they’ve — dare I say it — bonded with each other. After a few more martinis, the Yahoo guy confesses that they’re completely irrelevant ‘in mobil’ (it’s important to do the accent).

Nodding along, the AT&T guy, chest swelling, explains, “Well, you know Pierce, I can help…Yes, another round of martinis please…”

Pierce — the Yahoo Guy — sits back, with a slight frown, “How, Giles?”

“Well Pierce, we have eighty-five million subscribers…”

Giles takes a moment. He just loves flopping his subscriber number out on the table for the lads to look at.

Giles continues, “We have eighty-FIVE million subscribers, I’m sure we could put a bit of traffic your way…”

You just know it. Something like that happened, at some point, between Yahoo and AT&T.

They hatched a plan.

They thought it would be ‘super-fantastic’ to change the default search.

It’ll get folk chattering. It’ll show we’re with-it. It’ll let AT&T pretend to have a bit of relevance for 20 seconds during the initial announcement. It’ll breathe useless life into the decomposing carcass that is Yahoo’s ‘mobil’ strategy.

Not once has anyone thought about delivering the best possible user experience. No — that was traded away as soon as possible. That’s the thing with mobile operators. If there’s an opportunity to screw things up, to do the wrong thing (or the slightly wrong, annoying thing), they will. Especially if there’s a shite small amount of potential revenue in it.

Witness, for example, the carrier-deck b0llocks strategies that permeated the globe for much of the last half-decade.

Ridiculous.

Absolutely 100% ridiculous.

Would AT&T please get back into’s it box and fix their shitter-than-shit data network?

Would Yahoo please just get bought by somebody and put out of it’s misery?

I thank you.

That’s it: Thank you for coming, mobile operators, thank you for coming. You did your best. But now you’ve been ‘owned’. Well.. not yet. But do look out for the big G.

With the Nexus One, Google has ushered in an entirely new way of buying a consumer handset: From their website in 6 clicks.

Shit!

Is it that simple? Yes.

You visit Google.com/phone and select your financing option. You either buy your phone outright, or you get it financed by a bankmobile operator that also supplies your voice and data connection.

If you’d like a Nexus One — Google’s newest device — they’re shipping right now. You buy it from Google. Not from your operator.

Your operator is an also-ran. The operator has been relegated to bit-part status in the new Google process. It’s like choosing whether you want to pay with MasterCard or Visa. It doesn’t make much difference. Indeed you can never remember if your Capital One is Visa or MasterCard… pull it out your wallet — oh, it’s Visa — right then, Visa it is.

It won’t be long until I’ll just pay Google. I mean, what is the sodding point messing around choosing operators when Google just sorts it out.

Yes, we’ve had decades and billions of marketing dollars spent making sure we ‘care’ what operator we select. But, again — like any commodity, the reality is there isn’t much difference between operators. Who do you buy your electricity from? In the UK, the market has been opened to competition so instead of one supplier for an area, you can actually choose to pay a whole array of different suppliers. Most people stick with what’s easiest.

When it comes to google.com/phone, that’s what a lot of consumers will do.

I think it’ll be a little while before consumers — the normobs, the Great Unwashed — descend on and begin relying upon Google.com/phone for their telecommunications needs.

You can see it happening though.

You can see the strategy.

If you, as an operator, are not on the Google.com/phone page, then you’ve got a problem. 100% of people buying through this mechanism will never, ever choose you.

And Vodafone’s done the European deal, it seems.

Soon you’ll be able to buy all manner of handsets through Google.com/phone. All through a nice slick 6-step interface and powered by your Google Checkout account.

There are pitfalls of course. Your average mobile operator is — by now — pretty good at dealing with fulfilment. If I phone 3 at 11am on Monday and arrange for a new handset, provided it’s in stock, it’ll be at my door by 9am on Tuesday. Operators also have the rest of the fulfilment stream managed reasonably well. How will Google handle returns? Can I phone Google and complain about lack of T-Mobile signal? Where does my relationship lie with the transaction?

The overriding issue with Google is that they don’t give a stuff about the mobile operator. The mobile operators are standing in Google’s way. Google’s focus is — as commented via the Gizmodo coverage of the live event today — mobile advertising revenue. They are making a small margin on unit sales, but, “making sure people get access to Google services and get online is their #1 priority.”

To put this in perspective, here’s another quote from today’s event:

People search the web 30x more on an Android phone than they do on a feature phone.

The concept is not surprising. A shitfeature phone is rubbish for searching online. Oh the browser can handle displaying Google, but when it comes to anything else — and in particular, browsing search results featuring Google Ads — the devices are useless.

The fact Google report 30x more searches is quite surprising. Yet I can believe that figure. And goodness me when you start counting the billions of dollars of mobile ad revenue to be had over the next 5-10 years, yeah… Google definitely needed to wade into the existing marketplace more or less hampered by the operators.

Putting Google as the search engine of choice on the operator portal has been useful, no doubt. But I can certainly understand this strategy. If anything it points to the commercial imperative Google feels as they analyse the growth and potential of the mobile world.

Fascinating times.

If you’d like to read Google’s viewpoint, the team over at the Official Google Blog have prepared an overview of today’s announcement. It really does make interesting reading, especially when you read between the lines. Here it is: Our new approach to buying a mobile phone.

Like most mobile geeks, I’m really enjoying all the Google Nexus One news; it’s starting to sound like a very nice device, and it’s obviously a very interesting move by Google. Seeing their vision of what a modern mobile device should be — and how far Google feel they can push their services into our pockets will be fascinating to see.

I’ve already pretty much decided that I’m going to give the Nexus One / HTC Passion — or whatever it ends up being called — a miss though. Not because I’m a total Apple fanboy, or because I’m one of those crazies worried about giving Google too much access to my data – I’m a very heavy user of all of Google’s services, and have been ever since I opened my first Gmail account back in 2005.

Why the reluctance then?  Android has many positives – mobile Gmail is great, Google Maps on Android is better than on iPhone, multitasking rocks and Android’s notification system is just plain brilliant.  But at the end of the day – from my experience (G1, HTC Magic and HTC Hero) – Android is actually a pretty sucky phone.

I think Ewan hit the nail on the head yesterday:

My biggest concern with Google is their apparent inability to bring anything to market that is actually ready for consumers to use. I’m talking, of course, about the perennial ‘beta’ labels that populate their technology. This beta policy makes a ton of sense — and I think the majority of geeks like me are thoroughly delighted to see the company make frequent updates to their services. I wonder, then, how they’re reacting to delivering a physical product that can’t be changed.

To say that the Android phone experience is a bit unpolished (even when tarted up by HTC) would be a massive complement; take the iPhone away from your ear to “press option 3 to speak to an advisor” and the screen lights up ready for use – easy!  Try the same trick with an HTC Hero and the screen will have locked.  Go to press the phones usual screen unlock key and you’ll often have killed the call.   It’s this kind of thoughtfulness that I think Android phones will always lack, mainly because Android devs don’t have a maniacal Steve Jobs standing over them yelling – “not good enough, do it again.”

The iPhone might have limitations — and the App approval process does appear to make some rather perverse decisions — but Apple’s rigid control of the platform undoubtedly makes it slicker.  We had to wait far too long for ‘copy and paste’ to appear, but when it did it was perfect.  Does any other device honestly have this feature implemented as well as the iPhone?

I’m also rather dubious about one of the Nexus One’s really big selling points — availability as a carrier unlocked device.  If this is true I really applaud the move, it could be a watershed moment for the telco industry, but I’m just not sure Google will be able to pull this off.  They don’t have consumer goods distribution experience; I suppose they could rely on HTC’s sales channels, but this would be a really big ask.   Google has previously given away unlocked Android devices to developers only, could they be dong the same with the Nexus One, planning to release the device to the public via one of the carriers (my money would be on T-Mobile)?

Then there is my final nagging doubt; good as the Nexus One may be, in my mind it’s really a second generation future mobile device (1st gen = iPhone, 2nd gen = iPhone 3G/3GS).   I’m sure it will stack up well against the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre etc, but really we’re still watching Android play catch-up.

I still predict that the really big mobile news of 2010 will be the major update Apple announces to the iPhone platform in June, so for the meantime I’m sticking with Apple.

The where-are-you question is very, very relevant in the context of business so I’ve been trying to solve that with the use of a Where Am I function on my personal site, Ewan.net.

I was previously using BlogLoc for this function… but it was getting a little bit annoying having to manually update every time I remembered.

So instead I’ve decided to try out Google’s Latitude facility. Latitude allows you to see the locations of your friends on a Google Map (either on your phone or online) and it works pretty well.

Recently the Google Latitude team announced that they’ve added a public ‘badge’ facility that you can place anywhere on the web to show off your current location. This definitely isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re a little bit suspicious or concerned about your privacy. But I like the concept myself and I thought it was worth a try. Google have been particularly direct with their warnings — which I heeded — so I haven’t displayed by actual street level GPS location. Instead I’ve displayed my general ‘city level’ location.

Here’s what it looks like on the blog:

Nifty.

If you’d like to do the same, get your Google Latitude Public Location Badge here.

Here are some quotes right off the press from some mobile developers. (I have removed names).

- “I’d like to know how much of my revenues they’ll demand.”

- “I like the ease of billing and the potential of micro-payments.”

- “I suspect they’ll take 30% just like Apple / Nokia etc. I hope it’s not more than that.”

- “It’s just another App store – we WILL develop for it, obviously, but only because I’m yet to see which store will capture the minds of consumers.”

- “I very much like the concept. Especially if one SDK works across a number of MNOs. That would be really cool.”

- “Is this too good to be true? It sure looks like it.”

- “If they were REALLY thinking of developers, they’d be finding a way to reduce the amount of work we need to do across the various mobile programming languages. Perhaps they are, I can’t quite work it out yet.”

- “Interesting, interesting… that’s all I have to say until you tell us more, Ewan.”

I’m aiming to have more information soon! If you’ve got a comment or opinion, drop me a note — ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv.

(I regularly tap up people for live reaction — if you’d like to be on that list, add me at ewanmacleod@gmail.com on Google Talk or ewanjmacleod on Skype.)

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Mobile Monday Silicon Valley was fantastic this evening. There was a huge turnout on an uncharacteristically rainy San Francisco evening for the Location-Aware app demo evening.

Skyhook Wireless kindly underwrote the bar and gave a pitch at the beginning of the series of presentations, outlining their rather excellent range of location services available to mobile developers. I managed to catch Skyhook’s Director of Marketing, Kate Imbach, on camera discussing the merits of their offering. Suffice to say if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate location based services (e.g. Find Me) into your app, definitely, definitely talk to Skyhook.

Here are the companies who presented:

• Crazymenu.com – Launched their iPhone (lunchtime) online restaurant discovery and ordering facility. I really liked their concept. I’m going to look for it in the iPhone app store.
• Cristdrive – Their application, Voilà, will simply and elegantly tell any of your online services where you are, right now. $0.99 in the app store.
• Retronyms – Couldn’t make it for some reason so Kate from Skyhook did her best with their presentation. They’ve got a rather interesting GPS game by the name of Seek ‘n Spell going live. Check their site.
• Wertago – Showed off their app offering city nightlife in the palm of your hand. Nice!
• Geoterrestrial – GPSToday, a comprehensive Windows Mobile application offering an array of GPS related services. If you’re into location services, definitely check out what they’ve created — amongst other features, it’ll sit in the background and continually tell folk where you are.
• HearPlanet – Dale Larson’s audio city guides deliver location information that really speaks to you. You can, as the site puts it, ‘leave those bulky tour books behind and let HearPlanet (iPhone) show you the way. Get it on the App Store. It’s the #2 rated Travel app at the moment and they’ve had almost 500k downloads so far.
• Life360 – Trades on fear. But in a good way. Their mobile (and desktop) services deliver you instant safety, security and peace of mind. I’m going to get this for my wife and I. Google Latitude helps show where we both are.. but I want more than that. I particularly like their ‘find your family in an emergency’ facilities.
• Carrrmatey by Lionebra –> Brought the house down. So much so that I filmed their pitch. I think the audience were really taken with the pirate theme. It’s a really smart utility that records where you left your car, reminds you to return at appointed times (for meters) and guides you back to your car — rather useful if you keep on forgetting where you parked.

I managed to get some good video interviews tonight — I was going to hold them back until we’ve launched with the nice new look and feel, but it’s al about content, right? I’m going to aim to get the first lot of videos up tomorrow morning.

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I’ve been using my Android G1 a lot since I arrived in America because, conveniently, my US T-Mobile sim works perfectly with it (even though it’s a UK device). I didn’t have to do any configuration since HTC thoughtfully included the T-Mobile US web settings on the device already.

So I’ve been taking pictures.

As you do in a city as nice and as varied as San Francisco.

I’d like to send them directly to Flickr. Since there’s no ShoZu service on Android at the moment (and I haven’t re-installed Pixelpipe yet) I thought I’d have a look around the Marketplace on Android.

Unlike others, I take it upon myself to buy as many applications as possible. I did a certain amount of evaluation on ‘Flickr Upload’ when I came across it. From memory it was $0.99. Or perhaps less.

I scrolled down to the comments.

On the 28th of April, ‘Matthew’ commented:

Works wonderfully. Well integrated.

.. and he gave it five stars.

I suspect Matthew is referring to the share option. When you take a photo on Android, there’s a button that pops up called ‘Share’. Click on that and you get the choice of sharing by Email, by Google Mail or — to Flickr (enabled by this application). Smart. I was warming to the concept.

I noted that it’s had between 100-500 downloads. Ok. Not a brilliant well-trodden path. I continued with the comment review.

On the 21st of April, ‘z0mbix’ commented:

Will not authorise with flickr on t-mobile/G1. Can’t get any reply from the developers em[ail]…

Er.

I’d gone off it right away.

The final comment on the app’s frontpage was a day before z0mbix’s one from Benjamin:

Exactly what I was looking for works perfectly

Hmmm.

Z0mbix’s comment put me right off. But I reasoned there must be a reason, maybe he/she didn’t know what they were doing? Afterall if Benjamin and Matthew each had a good experience, I should be ok?

Right?

As I walked out of the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco I spotted an advert I wanted to write about. I decided to download Flickr Upload there and then, configure it and get moving.

I paid the money, the app downloaded and within seconds I’d got to the main prompt, asking me to authorise my Flickr account to work with it. Fair enough.

I typed in my Yahoo account username and password and hit ‘login’.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

The screen went blank.

Er.

‘I’ve just paid a dollar for this,’ I thought, rather disappointed. I was experiencing the pain of fellow user, z0mbix.

I tried again. Maybe I typed my details wrong?

Again it failed. The app just sat on a blank screen like this:

Rubbish!

I ended up sending the photo to my email account and walked home, rather annoyed with myself.

I was annoyed because I thought I’d obviously got my Yahoo password wrong.

What self respecting developer would allow an application to go live — a chargeable application at that — which doesn’t actually work?

Then I reasoned that it must be a Yahoo screw-up and spent a good few blocks cursing them in my mind.

I got back to my desktop and immediately changed my Yahoo password to check I had it correct.

Again I tried authorising the app.

Nothing. Nada.

I’ve bought a dud.

I don’t know who is responsible. It COULD be Yahoo, entirely. But one assumes that the two other recent commenters on Android Marketplace aren’t lying and they got it to work.

I’ve tried a few times over the past few days to activate it to no avail.

So I looked up the developer online.

They’re called Macrospecs and they’re a privately-owned startup in the bay area.

Ah hah! They’ll have a GetSatisfaction page, right? Or a forum or something?

No.

Nothing!

It’s a one-page website and — ultra annoyingly — the ‘contact’ page goes straight through to their email address.

Confusingly there is absolutely no reference to the Flickr Upload application on their site.

I then had a look back on the Android Marketplace and saw that the ‘developer site’ is listed as FaceofMobile.com/Flickr. Ah hah!

No, hold your excitement.

This is the entire site:

Yup… it’s one page. It consists of three screenshots and a macrospecs logo, with no link. No contact details. No support option. Nothing.

In fairness to the developer, one wouldn’t expect that many support enquiries from an application that simply sends a photo to a Flickr account. It’s not rocket science and there’s hardly any failure points.

Except the authorisation process.

And, of course, macrospecs don’t control that, Yahoo do.

Tough luck for me and z0mbix, right? If it ain’t working, you can try contacting macrospecs but it’s rather clear they don’t want to know — and are not expecting to support any enquiries.

I hunted around and I found a support forum for macrospecs’ Face of Mobile application, a $1.99 Windows Mobile Facebook app.

I suppose I could try posting there.

But I’m not feeling very welcome — or smart for buying the app. Indeed I’ve paid a dollar for the privilege.

It’s perfectly fine for it to happen to me, I have a good understanding of the trials and tribulations of mobile development — but if this is the experience of your average consumer who’s just picked up a G1 or G2 and is expecting 100% friction-free total quality-assured service from the Android Marketplace, they’re not going to be at all impressed.

Like the ringtone marketplace a few years ago — you’ll pay once and if the experience sucks, you definitely won’t ever pay again.

What’s the right response?

Is this a FAIL on the part of the team at macrospecs? Is it a Yahoo FAIL?

Or is it an Android FAIL?

Would this have happened on an iPhone?

Latitude, if you’re not familiar with it, is an add-on to Google Maps that (amongst other features) overlays an avatar of your friends on Google Maps. So if you’re out-and-about you can see their location. Or if you’re on your desktop you can see a large Google Map of your friends.

Typically innovative, Google decided to take things to the next level. Wouldn’t it be neat that, if you had sufficient friends each with a T-Mobile G1 (for example), you could position them on the map to spell out a message.

Granted, you’d need to have quite a bit of spare time. But it’s doable, right?

Right.

The Google Latitude team stuck their money where their mouth is and had a bit of fun, thus:

That there is a screenshot of a Google Maps screen spelling out ‘Hi Mom’ across central San Francisco. Each little square you see is an avatar representing a physical Google team member with a phone standing in the corresponding physical location in San Francisco.

The enterprising chaps also made a video documenting the process of setting this up:

There is, I suspect, limited value in spelling out messages using your friends on Google Maps / Latitude. But it’s a super proof-of-concept for the technology.

And a reminder to get on Latitude.

Latitude, of course, isn’t yet available for the iPhone so that’s most of San Francisco ruled out. But for everyone back in Europe sporting your common-or-garden N-Series Nokia device, perhaps it’s time you and your friends spent this Saturday spelling out ‘Hello Your Majesty’ across a map of London.

(You’ll need about 10-12 friends per character.)

Of course AdMob are also hugely active in the application monetisation space with well over 1,000 iPhone applications carrying AdMob inventory. What’s good to know is that in many cases, AdMob is writing cheques (or ‘checks’) in excess of $10k+ to a lot of developers. (Indeed, some of the more popular apps are knocking back hundreds of thousands in AdMob revenue.)

So this evening’s event was both an introduction to AdMob’s iPhone related services, a panel discussion on the hot topic du jour (iPhone App Discoverability) as well as the opportunity for developers to network with each other.

The panel featured the following luminaries:

Mike Kerns, CEO, Citizen Sports (Sportacular)
Jonathan Zweig, CEO, Jirbo / Epic Tilt (ESPN Cameraman, many others)
Ben Lewis, Founder, TapJoy
Alan Wells, Zynga

Here’s a pic:

The always reliable and informed Richard Wong (far right in the blue shirt), General Partner of Accel Partners was moderator. If, by the way, you’ve come up with a genius mobile service, you should be talking with Richard. Right now. They’re hunting.

My evening began on the boulevards of San Mateo — a rather picturesque series of boutique shops and pizza restaurants (I think I walked by about 10 pizza outlets on the walk from the station). I used the always reliable Google Maps on my N95 8GB to navigate the 10 minute walk from station to venue. (In a show of solidarity I thought I should bring my UK iPhone to the event — but in an uncharacteristic effort to avoid being nailed for £7/meg in data from o2 UK, I’ve had it set to Airplane mode, so I’ve been using my TMO USA sim in my N95.)

I arrived about 15 minutes early so the Benjamin Franklin Hotel wasn’t quite ready. I spotted a chap standing outside with his iPhone and I theorised he might well be one of the 150 developers attending the event. I struck up a conversation. Turns out that the chap — Steffen Frost has been working with iPhone app development since May 2007. He came up with the concept 1st of May 2007 and had $100k+ seed funding within two weeks. Nice. His product? Carticipate. They’ve basically fixed car-trip-sharing by iPhone.

Here’s a pic I snapped of Steffen:

“Show me!” I said as he described the concept. Within seconds he was showing the functions. You can browse the trips already being made in your area and ask to ride-share. Or if you’re heading somewhere yourself, you can advertise your trip and see if anyone else wants to join you. Smart. They’ve had some substantial interest from a lot of big companies wanting to sanitise their employee commuting traffic (amongst other applications).

“What’s your next platform?” I asked Steffen, “After iPhone?”

“Android,” he replied. “How about Nokia?” I asked.

“Yeah, well…”

Suffice to say he was severely unimpressed by the current Nokia offering.

That wasn’t a unique viewpoint. I’ll come to that later.

The venue opened a few minutes later so Steffen and I popped in. Jeff from 148apps, (the iPhone review site) had written his Twitter ID on his label — so I promptly copied and began marching around the room thrusting my hand out and asking questions left, right and centre.

Goodness me it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. Obviously this was an iPhone developer meetup — but I was fascinated to see how insular, how wholly-iPhone the development community is here in Silicon Valley.

“What’s your next platform?” I asked another developer.

“Er… probably Android,” he replied, after a bit of thought.

“Right… and, after that?” I prompted.

“Well,…” he replied, the conversation trailing off to the point that we both stood there in silence for a few seconds.

I remembered myself and spluttered out “Blackberry?”

“Well…” he replied again. A nice way of saying no.

Ok.

“What about Ovi?” I asked. Hopeful. I was expecting either a venomous “GET OUT” or a knowing nod.

“Ovi? What’s that?” he looked at me confused.

“Er, the Nokia offering — their app store?”

He and his two colleagues who’d now joined us looked horrified. As though I’d taken their iPhone and nailed it to the wall.

“Nohhhkeeaaaa?” They asked. I’m sure their minds were drifting to the $29.99 bollocks-handsets they see on display in the mobile operator stores. The rubbish ones — the glorified mobile telephones complete with alarm clocks. (Think the Nokia 2100 series).

“Er LIKE NO,” said the chap’s colleague, as the other two nodded vigorously.

Interesting!

I thought I’d try out a killer stat on them.

“So 17m iPhones on the planet — Nokia reckons they’ll have the Ovi Store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010.” (I was paraphrasing — this is more or less accurate.)

Blank looks.

Nobody cares.

It’s a fascinating experience walking amongst these developers. They’re the cream of the cream. They’re the Stanford drop-outs (or not – “I did my first and second degrees at Stanford” said one chap”). They’re conditioned by the Silicon Valley mentality to think big, BIG BIG. This is where the innovation is. It’s easy to see why the Valley is the centre of everything.

At least it’s the centre of iPhone development.

There’s only so much you can do when you’re sat in a dark office in London waiting for the ‘your app has been accepted’ email from Apple. Compare that to one panelist’s throwaway comment, “We’re really tight with the Apple guys.”

And tight is good. Tight is the way ahead. Almost every chap I met has a friend-of-a-friend who works at Apple. Or knows a ‘guy’ at Google. Or whose dorm mate knocked out a $10k/day Chess app for the iPhone.

As I walked around the venue, I bumped into Omar, AdMob’s founder. I’m still ridiculously embarrassed — I haven’t got over sitting next to Omar in a dinner in San Francisco last September and asking him ‘what he did at AdMob’ only to find out he was the founder. OH THAT OMAR!

I found Omar in good spirits. He was on his way up to commence proceedings. It says a lot when the CEO and founder of AdMob took the time to pop along and introduce the event. He outlined his company’s commitment to mobile developers and platforms such as the iPhone before swiftly handing over to colleague Mike for a quick AdMob FAQ, namely:

Q: Can I monetise my app with AdMob?
A: Yes. Lots of people are already (1,000+ apps using AdMob).

Q: How much money can I make?
A: It’s very dependent on the application and it’s use case, but, for the sake of argument, assume $0.15 net revenue per customer.

The audience sat in silence, gobbling up the information as Mike delivered it. It was very smart to give some basic revenue examples. Some apps are clearly making a heck of a lot more than $0.15 per customer, but if you’re looking for a ready reckoner of what you might be able to achieve, having this information is really valuable.

Next? The panel. It would be fair to represent the panel as iPhone Developer Rockstars. They’re operating in the mythical space of more or less continual Top-50 App Store billing. As I sat taking in the panel debate I was mentally calculating just how many application downloads the four guys accounted for. If you’re looking for confirmation of rockstar status, witness this panelist quote:

“We worked out the other day that one of our applications has been played by our users for 2,000 man years so far,”

Shit.

Moderator Richard Wong did a super job of asking a series of pertinent questions to the panel around the issue of application discovery. Once you’ve got your app accepted, do you blow a load of money (on, for example, AdMob) to get your app discovered on the launch day? Or do you play a longer game? Can you really monetise with ads? (Yes).

One point I really liked was, I think, made by Ben Lewis of TapJoy. He explained that customers had emailed in saying they were finding it difficult getting above level 30 in one of their games. So they responded by making levels 30-40 easier. In doing so, they found that their ad-impressions flew off the charts. If you’re displaying ads at the end of levels, it makes sense to ensure that the majority of users can progress to an array of levels.

Panelist Ben caused me to rethink my stance on Apple’s micropayments. if you recall, Apple’s next OS version, 3.0, introduces the capacity to extract micropayments from consumers using your applications. Ben commented that whilst a 30% revenue share for the hosting of the App Store, credit card processing and so on was fair enough, taking the exact same share for micropayments ‘just wasn’t cricket’, as we say in Britain. The point being that Apple aren’t doing any more work, other than the transaction processing.

Now to the good stuff.

For months — possibly even years — I’ve been banging on about the iPhone platform finally unlocking the opportunity for developers. Not everyone has been agreeing with me. Indeed quite a few purists in Europe have continued to assert the apparent superiority of the Symbian/Nokia platform for development. And whilst there’s certainly an argument to be had there, it’s — fundamentally — all about money. And there’s a reason Silicon Valley is going nuts for mobile. (Where ‘mobile’ equals ‘iPhone’). It’s the 800 million iPhone downloads, 70% of which are revenue generating. It’s the fact that you can, theoretically, become a millionaire overnight by developing a successful iPhone application, even though there are only 17m iPhones in existence.

So having been a diehard make-it-easy-for-developers chap, it was rather exciting to be surrounded by a few hundred of the Valley’s iPhone geniuses.

Panel questions arrived. I’d already been mentally willing Richard to pick me when he eventually opened the panel up to audience questions.

“Right, any quest..” he began. I shot up my hand.

“Ewan!” he said.

“Hi, I’d like to ask you about…”

I was getting stuck in.

“Wait a moment Ewan, introduce yourself for the audience,” prompted Richard.

Ah. Yes.

I couldn’t wait to ask my question.

“Given that Nokia expects to have their Ovi store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010, are you looking to develop for that platform?”

The moment I mentioned ‘Nokia’ I could feel the audience bristle.

One of the chaps on the panel looked at me — that ‘what the fluck’ look.

“Er, no,” he said.

He passed the microphone.

“No,” said the next chap.

“Er, we’re thinking about it,” said another.

“Errrr NO,” said the next.

Geez.

I felt like a pariah as the panel began to dissect their reasoning. The path to cash is unclear. It’s a massively fragmented handset population. It’s not centrally controlled and beautiful like the App Store. The Ovi Store doesn’t appear to be that ‘easy’ to work with. The capabilities of the development platform are unknown (at least within the Valley)… and so on.

Judging by the response of the audience and the other developers I spoke to after the panel, the ambivalence to Nokia’s Ovi offering — and the offerings of the other manufacturers — is echoed across the Valley.

Blackberry was mentioned once or twice. Surprising, given the amount of Blackberries in use across the States. But when you consider that a whopping amount of devices are corporate devices that are locked to prevent downloads — and that Blackberry App World isn’t pre-installed as yet — you can see why it’s getting little attention from this community.

Another surprise was the lack of Windows Marketplace discussion. Yes this was an iPhone developer meetup but you’d expect — or at least I expected — most developers to be reasonably platform agnostic or at least looking at other possibilities. Out of the 150 developers there, a show of hands revealed only one chap who had worked on the Windows platform.

This will change. Effort is driven by monetisation. If Ovi, Blackberry and Windows Mobile deliver on their promise, I’m sure the majority will give them the time of day. But right now it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone and I don’t blame them.

James from mjelly here at Mobile Industry Review.

Sadly, this is the last chance for me to do a Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week post on this blog. Good luck to Ewan with the new business model and a massive thanks to him for letting me write this every week – max respects.  Thanks also to Krystal for uploading my early posts.   All is not lost – we’ll be continuing the series over at http://blog.mjelly.com

It was tough trying to decide which mobile site or app to cover for the last mobile 2.0 service of the week – Opera Mini has the most ratings on mjelly of all the downloadable apps, and mjoy is top on the mobile sites front.  So, rather than try and pick one I’m going to list all of the services we have covered over the last few months in case you missed any – listed by category – here it goes:

Communities

Mobamingle – the international version of Mobile Game Town – a Japanese mobile services with $200m in annual revenues

Peperonity – the original mobile 2.0 service and one of the biggest drivers of inventory on admob

Heysan – cool Silicon Valley mobile startup building a nice line in mobile virtual goods

Mocospace – US mobile social network with massive traction and generating big ad revenues

Flirtomatic – the world’s leading mobile dating site and top UK mobile startups

Mxit – South Africa’s massive mobile social networking platform

Media and content

Mippin – the world’s leading mobile news and web service – based in London UK

Cellufun – mobile games community

Search

Taptu – Cambridge-based mobile-focused search engine taking on Google

abphone – the French mobile vertical search engine

Browsers

UCWEB – the Chinese mobile browser that’s been downloaded 60m times

Communications and messaging

Dabr – the no.1 mobile twitter interface

ebuddy - mobile IM service downloaded 11m times

Nimbuzz – unified communication across Skype and IM

Mig33 – mobile voip and messaging app

Trutap – fantastic IM and content app that was unlucky with their investors

Fring – momo award winning VoiP and communications app

Not a bad list really – who would have imagined all of these new services even a few years ago when all mobile had going on was ringtone scams and a load of hype about “mobile TV”?

You can find all these mobile 2.0 services on mjelly which is a directory of mobile sites and free mobile software

Thanks again to Ewan and all at MIR

Have a read of this:

1 in 3 Australians will snoop in the phones of their partners (according to a Virgin Mobile survey).

60% of them do it when their partner is in the shower. 41% do it with their partner in view.

(quote from Tomi Ahonen’s presentation at Future of Mobile 2008.)

Principally I suspect the ‘snooping’ is looking at text messages and recent call lists.

Now if it’s that bad without sticking ‘location’ into the mix, how is it going to be when the masses take a look at Google Latitude?

How many relationships — business and personal — are about to get absolutely nailed by the fact that your friends and partners can *SEE* where you are. Or where you were?

Witness the following frequently used explanations that I often overhear:

Chap: I’m still in the office
Google Latitude: He’s over the other side of London. With friends Graham, Paul. And, er — if you check out that Kate girl’s blog, you’ll see her Latitude puts her within 100m of him.

Chap: I’m just at the shops buying you something in that underwear shop!
Google Latitude: He’s at PC World, about a mile away from any shops that might sell underwear.

Chap: (Text message) I’m just getting on the train.
Google Latitude: He hasn’t left the office.

Chap: NO? I’m not out with the guys. I’m just getting a sandwich then I’m on my way home.
Google Latitude: Before he switched me off, he was sitting next to ‘the guys’. And that bitch girl Kate was heading this year. That was an hour ago. That’s all I know, right?

Chap: Sorry boss, I’m stuck in the snow and I won’t be able to get into work.
Google Latitude: Rubbish! He’s at the leisure park near work — next to the cinema!

Teenager: I’m, er, just going to the shops to get a can of Coke. Back in 20.
Google Latitude: He’s round that Vicky-girl’s house again.

Teenager: Yeah I’m at school. So what, mum?
Google Latitude: He’s not in school. He’s not in the same town actually. Ask him how he got to the next town?

And so on.

Despite the fact that Latitude has bucketloads of privacy goodness, the use of this technology is going to take quite a while to get a hang of…