Nokia’s over-the-air synchronisation tool - Nokia Backup - has started to get some attention. Here’s a quick comparison to Apple’s announced OTA sync, MobileMe.

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There’s no question that Apple’s launch of the iPhone last year changed the handset market and raised the bar for mobile technology and interaction.

The big news Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco was of course CEO Steve Jobs’ announcement of a 3G version of the iPhone.

So, the speculation of many bloggers and news channels has been replaced by the hard facts of the iPhone release. US and UK customers will be able to get the new phone from July 11th. Callender Creates provide the need to know facts from the WWDC.

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I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.

What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ’smartphones’ as such. [Read more →]

Not long to go now - at 6pm UK time on Monday the new iPhone(s) will be revealed. I’ve already wondered about the hardware, but what lies ahead for the new software? Much functionality will be added through third party applications, but what can only Apple add, in the core of OS X iPhone?

What do we already know?

Leaks of the development builds have already shown that OS X iPhone 2.0 will include:

• Exchange support (inc. ActiveSync & remote wipe)
• geo-tagging of photos
• email mass delete
• full-screen Safari (effectively a widget platform)
• Bonjour (zero-configuration networking)
• playing of embedded YouTube video in web pages
• saving web images to the phone

…and probably some more bits that I’ve missed. This is all great. From a consumer perspective, there are a few important items that I would also like to see Apple nail in the new firmware.

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The lack of any iPhones for sale by Apple or its carrier partners, along with the daily torrent of press releases and rumours, all point to a new iPhone being announced at Steve’s Job’s keynote speech at WWDC on June 9th. Apple was panned by many for releasing a device whose hardware didn’t match up compared to other top-flight smartphones, and are sure to address some of these deficiencies. So what sort of phone are we likely to see there?

Without a doubt, 3G

With every other manufacturer having 3G phones on the market in June 2007, I never bought Job’s statement that it was “battery life” keeping 3G out of the first iPhone. This lack of connectivity speed is sure to be rectified. But, carrier annoucements indicate that Apple are moving from exclusive agreements, and vastly increasing the number of markets they will be selling into (including Japan and South Korea).

So they’re going for a worldwide release, but will they support more than just UMTS and HSDPA/HSUPA? Or Will Apple release multiple, localised versions of the iPhone? Maybe, but this doesn’t seem to me to fit with Apple’s way of doing things. Yet the alternative is to either only support certain types of 3G, or try and squeeze more radio hardware into the iPhone’s already large form factor. My guess is that - in keeping with Apple’s design philosophy - less is more, and that only UMTS/HSPA will be supported.

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It’s my first crack at hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists, so if you’re new around here, hello! There are just a few posts for the Carnival this week, but often, less is more. So for your reading pleasure I present:

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First up: James at mjelly asks “Is wholesale mobile data about to take off?”. Essentially, can the content provider pay the carriers for the data consumed by the end user? Coming soon after Vodafone’s annoucement of 500MB of free data for every contract customer, James nicely thinks around removing the barrier of cost, and whether carriers’ backend systems can even cope.

http://blog.mjelly.com/2008/05/first-example-1.html

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I’m reading MEX’s Manifesto at the moment, and I’d like to bring two of the agenda issues together and consider what Coverflow-style visual browsing could add.

First- “Content itself will be the interface of the future”. It talks of “…stripping away the confusion and clutter of traditional interface items…”.

Second - “Intelligent contact lists are the future centres of the user interface”.

It seems strange that mobile manufacturers are so eager to try out new hardware designs, but that software interfaces see so little innovation. The styling may change but essentially we’re still left with lists detailing your texts, email, music, contacts, etc. Notable exceptions are the ever-changing S60 multimedia interface and Coverflow on the iPhone.

Innovation in interface design should consider what users do with their device, in terms of the contexts in which they use them. I believe that the strong visual clues as allowed by Coverflow browsing could be extended to scenarios other than choosing music by album covers.

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It was sad to see the plugged pulled on Mowser, which was aimed at bringing the full web to mobile devices with less-capable browsers. I thought it was a great idea and well-executed, from someone who really gets mobile.

It did have problems to overcome though. For starters, many people don’t know that they can browse the full web (via Mowser or elsewhere) on their phone. And, if they do browse the web on their handheld, it’s probably using the amazing Opera Mini, which is an incredible (and low bandwidth) way to make the web usable on almost any phone.

But behind this is the gradual trend for mobile devices to sport very capable browsers. Symbian and the iPhone OS have great browsers built in, and can handle most web pages. So is there still a space for services that re-purpose content for mobile?

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Mobile trends and developments have been moving at very fast rate since the iPhone raised the bar, in terms of both the user experience and how the mobile device can be used in our busy everyday lives.

Back in the 90s, mobile development began with WAP sites consisting of a collection of “cards” making up a site. You were limited to wap images (*.wbmp) and very limited user client side interaction with the browser. See Wap Basics at W3C for more details.

Now, high profile sites that you can visit on browsers such as Symbian’s (Webkit-based) browser or iPhone’s Safari are based on current web standards used by desktop computers, and often written in XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language). However, we can now target for these handsets and for older phone models using the magic of CSS. The CSS file specifically targets mobile browsers, the CSS tells the browser how the layout and presentation is ordered.

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For the third time since its release, the iPhone has had a massive price cut. Following the recent price drops in Germany, today saw O2 and Carphone Warehouse knock £100 off the price of an 8GB iPhone. Plus, if bought through cash-back merchant Quidco with an O2 contract, the price drops to just £69!

Why is Apple’s unsubsidised uberphone suddenly so cheap?

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