It’s a baptism by fire for mobiThinking, stepping in at the last minute to host this, our first Carnival of the Mobilists. But it’s a pleasure and an education to read and share the best of the mobile blogs from the past week (or so).
The essence of the Carnival was summed up by an email from Tom Slee at Sybase alerting us to a piece by a student called Ben St. Pierre called Mobile Data Apocalypse. Tom says: “It’s under my name because it’s my blog, but Ben wrote the piece. I’d love it to find a wider audience through the Carnival.” Linking to excellent resources, this extremely useful piece tackles the potential issue of slow data traffic on mobile operator networks, caused by excessive mobile Internet usage by some customers. Ben suggests some possible remedies: education, ending unlimited data plans (oh no!), network improvement, femtocells and WiFi.
The turn of the year prompted plenty of looking back and some prophesying around mobile devices, smartphones particularly, and, refreshingly, it’s not all Apple and Google and it’s not all jubilation.
Not impressed that’s Antoine RJ Wright’s assessment of the latest smartphones e.g. Google/T-Mobile Nexus One and Nokia N900. There’s nothing wrong with the devices, he just objects to “incremental changes” being billed as “innovative”. Tam Hanna also notes that 2009 smartphone business was largely stagnant from an innovation point of view, thus making Palm look innovative by comparison. Tam gives his opinion on each key platform at TamsPalm; TamsBlackBerry; TamsPPC; TamsS60 and TamsIJungle.
A bloodbath for 2010: the smartphone market preview should maybe come with a health warning – it may raise some readers’ blood temperature, as Tomi Ahonen (never one to be swayed by hype) at Communities Dominate Brands takes a comprehensive look at the outlook for all cellphone manufacturers. Interestingly, a previous Tomi Ahonen piece is the starting point for David Doherty, 3G Doctor’s blog on The Nokia Decade, telling the story of the rise of the company that still dominates sales of mobile devices and smartphones with compelling pictures and graphs.
Concentrating on the impact of the launch of Google’s own-brand smartphone The Nexus One: of open mobile, chicken and egg, and turkeys, Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens takes an in-depth look at the impact of Google selling the phone direct as well as through operator partners. He examines the extent to which consumers choose type of handset, before operator and if manufacturers adopting Android are now turkeys.
In their Predictions for mobile developers, Thibaut Rouffineau and Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership cover all sorts from Android, BlackBerry and mobile marketing to security and identity. They also note that despite the proliferation of applications in 2009 the only truly interesting innovation involved Augmented Reality. Sticking with applications, in App Stores are so ‘1980s’, Mark Jaffe at Mobile Mandala, questions whether today’s App Stores are the best places for us to be downloading applications.
Meanwhile Judy Breck at Golden Swamp looks at how a tablet computer, such as Apple’s upcoming device, could be used in used in education with an informative video from textbook publishers. And at mobiThinking, last week, we pondered Why Apple is buying mobile ad network Quattro Wireless.
Thanks to Ernst Doku at Omio for hosting Carnival of the Mobilists #205. Next week’s Carnival will be hosted at Volker Hirsch at Volker on Mobile.
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