Posts Tagged ‘web’

Apple’s MobileMe - .Mac by any other name?

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Apple’s also introduced a companion service to go with the new 3G iPhone, called MobileMe - a cloud storage service that looks like a revamped version of its old .Mac product.

In short, MobileMe will give you remote access to your Mail, Contacts and Calendar, as well as photos and documents using a series of web based applications, whether you’re using accessing them through an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac or PC. All your personal content is kept centrally off in the ‘cloud’ (on the internet to you and me) so you can get hold of it just by going online. If you lose your phohe or laptop, or don’t happen to have it handy, you can just log in on another PC and all your goodies are right there in front of you.

US pricing is $99 a year, and you get 20GB of storage for that - double what .Mac provided. Apple isn’t the first company to sell this sort of cloud computing service but its relaunching it at a good time to capitalise on the wave of iPhone sign ups and pitching it rather neatly as ‘Exchange for the rest of us’. Without the iPhone, .Mac looked a little limp - every Mac/PC user knows by now to back up the contents of their machine - but with iPhone capabilities added in and the ability to recover the contents of the device if you lose it, suddenly MobileMe looks like it’s got legs.

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Posted in iPhone | Comments

The 10 most popular UK mobile sites are…

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Opera has been touting its latest research into the state of the mobile web and aside from pointing out that Opera Mini is now the most used mobile browser out there, it’s been taking a look at some of the content preferences for mobile surfers.

Here’s what the report says:

Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:
• Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
• Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
• Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
• Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

While none of the conclusions are surprising in themselves, it’s interesting to note that most of traffic is users going directly to a site, rather than via their operator’s content portal. Does this mean that the operator portal is set to die off in popularity in the same way the likes of Lycos and AOL portals did as the fixed web matured?

Opera’s report has also got some useful country-by-country comparisons. Here’s the UK section:

The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

1. www.facebook.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.live.com
4. www.bebo.com
5. www.mocospace.com
6. news.bbc.co.uk
7. uk.yahoo.com
8. www.itsmy.com
9. www.faceparty.com
10. www.ebay.co.uk

The full report’s here.

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Posted in Mobile Applications | Comments

Adobe makes web development free

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Adobe is making some serious moves into corralling the mobile development market. It’s just announced its latest plan for mobile domination, called the Open Screen Project, with a series of big-name partner like Cisco, Intel, LG, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, and the BBC all getting involved.

Adobe says the project is aimed at “enabling a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications” across all handsets and other devices, and allow all mobile programming to be updated over the air.

Here’s the nuts and bolts of what Adobe will do:

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Making it cheaper and easier for developers to write for a variety of mobile operating systems - what’s not to like?

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Posted in Mobile Development | Comments

China Mobile, Softbank, Voda team on widgets

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Vodafone has decided to team up with China Mobile and Japanese operator Softbank - formerly Vodafone’s Japanese arm - to create a new lab charged with developing new tech, services and applications.

Unsuprisingly, it’s web based services that will receive the bulk of the attention, including widgets that should be compatible with any handset or operating system.

The choice of partners looks to be interesting one - one operator from Japan, a country pretty much one of the most established and cutting edge in terms of mobile development and China, still a relatively new market but with lots of room from growth, and one all the established players have got their eye on. Hopefully there’ll be some intriguing applications coming out of this old mobile world-new mobile world collaboration - that is, if they can find something that appeal to users on low end handsets with slow connections equally well as speedy networks and high-end devices. After all, web browsing has proved far more popular for high end device - perhaps widgets will give operators a way to get in at the lower end.

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Posted in Mobile Services | Comments

Mobile web dead or just sleeping?

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Mowser was a browser that would take sites designed for the web and render them for mobiles, launched last year. I say was, because its founder, Russell Beattie has decided to pull the plug after struggling to find funding.

Aside from his debts, Beattie said on his blog that he decided to stop development on the browser because “I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence”.

But Beattie isn’t suggesting that people don’t want to use the mobile web *at all*, just they don’t want to use it when it feels so much worse than a PC browser. The solution to getting more web traffic, he says, is better devices and better browsers. Here here. Perhaps if every phone had a whizzy browser and a big screen, the mobile web would be used everywhere. But given we’re years off mid tier and low tier devices getting such capabilities, if they ever do, is there a way of encouraging mobile web take up in the meantime?

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Posted in Mobile Applications | Comments

Proof Apple iPhone users can’t get enough mobile content

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

A new survey has confirmed what most people have already been talking about anecdotally: that iPhone users are massive consumers of mobile web content. According to the latest bit of research from M:Metrics, 85 percent of iPhone users accessed news and information on their device during January, compared to the average of 58 percent for other smartphone users and 13.1 percent for the rest of mobile owners.

The data consumption spike also carried across to other services, with 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watching mobile TV or video, compared to 4.6 percent of the market average or 14.2 percent of smartphones; while 49.7 percent of iPhone owners accessed a social networking site in January, compared to 19.4 precent of smartphone owners and 4.2 percent of average mobile users.

So what’s driving the trend: it’s not the speedy network access, after all, so it’s either the huge screen or the slick interface. Either way, I suspect once carriers and content providers get wind of this, they’ll be pressurising other handset manufacturers to start moving in the same direction while keeping their fingers crossed for a spike in data consumption as a result.

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Posted in iPhone | Comments

Microsoft signs Adobe’s Flash Lite for Windows Mobiles

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

So, just weeks after Microsoft announced it was bringing Silverlight to Nokia mobiles, the software giant has gone and struck a deal with Adobe to bring rival rich media software Flash Lite to Windows Mobiles.

Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite “to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones”, says Adobe, and Adobe Reader LE software for PDF viewing for mobile devices.

Steve Jobs may have signaled he doesn’t much fancy Flash for the iPhone but it doesn’t look like Adobe is short of friends on this one - especially if it can persuade an archrival like Microsoft to use the technology on its own devices. I don’t think Microsoft will be feeling too bad about giving its competitor a push - after all, Flash is already on half a billion-odd devices. A few more Windows Mobiles won’t hurt.

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Posted in Mobile Applications | Comments

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