Carnival of the Mobilists #247: best mobile blogging of the past month

Mobile in the disaster zone
The horrifying earthquake/tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011, has spurred no shortage of mobile-related stories among journalists/bloggers. Of these, two mobile bloggers stand out:
At Wireless Watch Japan – well-known to anyone who follows mobile in Japan – Lawrence (Lars) Cosh-Ishii (also the founder of Mobile Monday Tokyo) writes two interesting and emotive reports: A week in the eye of the storm and Japan earthquake – 311 report.
At 3G Doctor, David Doherty takes a look at the big picture, with the very useful How mobile phones can help society manage major emergencies. While text-to-donate is playing an increasingly important role in disaster relief, the big picture is that mobile has a lot more to offer that is often overlooked. This is an on-going project and 3G Doctor invites contributions.
• Text your donation to Japan with this list of shortcodes.

Near-field-communications (NFC)
NFC, a.k.a. contactless payments, touch and go, wave and pay et cetera, has been all talk and trials, but no trousers for almost a decade, largely due to a lack of mass-market NFC-enabled handsets (everywhere but Japan). That, according to C. Enrique Ortiz at Mobility Weblog in Mobility 2011: The year of NFC is going to change. This informative guide isn’t your usual “will they, won’t they” article about Apple, Google or (more importantly) Nokia etc, nor is the guide just about mobile payments (which is only one bit of the NFC story). Other blogs in this series are also worth a read, see also: Mobility in 2011: Mobile apps, Web apps and tipping points.

Tablets versus smartphones
Contrary to expectations, in the long term the mobile tablet is more likely to threaten sales of the smartphone, rather than the laptop, according to Eric Chan in Mobile Slate and Business Week. In Size matters: tablets vs. smartphones, he argues – convincingly – that people buy a smartphone as multimedia device, rather than for making calls, and the tablet, with its bigger screen, does all that better… for calls, predicts Chan, people will use a feature phone.
Antoine RJ Wright shares Chan’s view that most people struggle to understand the raison d’être of tablet computers. The problem is people are waiting to be told why they need one, but the point, says Wright, is that tablets should be used for whatever purpose makes them useful for you. He, for example, uses a tablet for drawing/painting pictures, hence the analogy in: Not hard to understand, the iPad is a blank canvas.
For TV/movie junkies who just can’t get enough from the one screen, the tablet can play a supporting role. Steve Smith at Mobile Insider checks out the Disney complementary synchronized app that comes with the Blu-ray version of Bambi, in: Can an iPad make you cry? Well, yeah, if Bambi’s mom dies on it.

More big questions for smartphones
Francisco Kattan penned a thought-provoking piece on RIM, which calculates how much the BlackBerry manufacturer makes from both hardware and from messaging, and asks Should RIM be in the platform business or the messaging business? Meanwhile Jose Colucci at the Mobile Strategy Blog takes a good look at business smartphones (RIM’s traditional market) and asks – with the aid of a slideshow – How smart is your Smartphone?. He concludes: if there is no integration with the company’s back-end systems, smartphones will not be very smart at all.

Smart pipes
An inevitable consequence of the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices is the ever-increasing demand for data on mobile networks. In Revenue from content/app transport? Operators need to be part of solution, not part of the problem, Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless, explains why the mobile operators (along other infrastructure providers) would be unjustified and ill-advised to go head-to-head with rich-media content providers such as Google’s YouTube, Facebook or the BBC. Also see the related post on the UK ISPs code of practice on traffic management.

The mobile Web is the future
This was one of several conclusions from Aurélien Fonteneau at Life is Better ON, as he put together a Comprehensive digest of news from South by Southwest (SXSW) event last week in Texas.
Sticking with mobile Web, Eduardo Casais at Areppim offers an in-depth overview of the technology and thinking behind repurposing desktop Web content for the mobile Web and where it has gone wrong previously in Dimensions of content adaptation in the mobile Web.
Also pretty useful was Masabi’s Connecting the Dots: an Introduction to 2D Barcodes.

Thanks to all those bloggers who submitted to this month’s Carnival of the Mobilists, the quality was very high. The essential reads for this month are A week in the eye of the storm and How Mobile Phones can help society manage major emergencies.

• Previous Carnival of the mobilists #246 hosted by Mobile Slate
• Next Carnival of the Mobilists #248 hosted by @ WIP Connect
• Submit your best mobile blog to mobilists(at)googlemail.com to be considered for next month’s Carnival of the Mobilists.