Archives

November 29 2008

Best hope for a true iPhone competitor: the HTC Touch HD?

I haven’t tried it yet, but this review sounds pretty promising. I still prefer the Nokia N95 as the best smallsize “phonecall only” and camera device. And now I use the HTC Fuze when I just need a small device thats great for email. But I still love my iPhone and carry it almost always. [...]

November 28 2008

Smartphone shipments rise 28%

As Canalys reports recently there are bright spots in the midst of otherwise bleak business news and projections. Smartphone shipments continue to rise at spectacular rates. 40 million units were shipped in the 3rd quarter of 2008. And smartphone OS fragmentation continues to grow. The iPhone vaulted into the number two position in terms of [...]

November 27 2008

The iPhone as the ultimate proofpoint for rich local mobile apps

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. One of the lesser observed phenomena in the midst of the overall phenomenal success of the iPhone is what it says about “rich local apps” on mobile versus “thin client web apps”. Consider the following: the iPhone still has very small overall mobile phone market share it has a fantastic web browser, [...]

November 26 2008

Proximity sensor control

I gave my initial impressions of the Google Mobile iPhone app last week before broke Daring Fireball broke the news that Google used the undocumented proximity sensor API. Specifically it detects if you’ve moved the phone and then put your face near the device to turn on voice recognition. All that you can do with [...]

November 21 2008

The Blackberry Storm as an Information Appliance

Today the Blackberry Storm, Blackberry’s touchscreen answer to the iPhone, was released. I went to get one this morning at the Cupertino store and they were already out. But we should get them in next week, just after our forthcoming RIM Blackberry support in Rhomobile (coming Monday!) CIO Magazine recently published a list of eight [...]

November 18 2008

iPhone voice search

I love the new iPhone voice search, released yesterday by Google on the iPhone App Store. While the quality seems a bit shaky (I’ve gotten better results in TellMe searches myself), what’s even more exciting to me is how it will change smartphone users’ behavior. As people get accustomed to performing horizontal search (“Thai restaurant [...]

November 15 2008

NYTimes/ReadWriteWeb article about good mobile software

Here’s what ReadWriteWeb wrote yesterday (posted in the New York Times) about good mobile software. Its so on point for what we’re doing at Rhomobile that its worth quoting at length. Its very clear that they could use something like the Rhomobile platform and the Rhodes app framework. These are very much inspired by Rails [...]

November 12 2008

Mass market Qwerty smartphones?

Nokia announced the release of the E63 today. While in many ways not a big technical breakthrough, its a less powerful cousin of their excellent E71 smartphone, it does herald a couple significant development. From a feature standpoint the decision to have personal and professional “modes” is an opportunity for a lot of innovation in [...]

November 11 2008

The rise of the touchscreen smartphones

Today’s release of the HTC Fuze rounds out the latest generation of touchscreen oriented smartphones, with entries now from Windows Mobile, Google Android, RIM (with the forthcoming Storm) and, of course, Apple. This is actually a pretty significant milestone. To me, what this means is that the idea of a touchscreen device that still has [...]