The State of the Mobile App

The current state of Mobile applications are in a catch 22. Currently, there are so many platforms to design applications for the WebOS, the iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, WinMo, and Blackberry. Many of these OSes have their application stores. The Apple App store, is flooded with over 80,000 applications, how is one to find an app? This is state of emergency for the mobile application, how can it survive on a 3.5 inch screen when it does not pop up in a search result or in the Top 10 or 100 applications. In the Apple App store, developers have resorted to making multiple applications of the same application with slight variations, thus inflating the Apple App store. The Palm App Catalog, has come up with an innovative method of giving each App it own URL, with this URL an application can be distributed outside the App Catalog. Which is an innovative approach to solving this problem. Luckily, there are only 300 apps in the Palm catalog. Palm is the only manufacturer looking out for the developer.

The Future of Mobile Teleco

Just announced today, T-Mobile will start offering reduced plans with no contracts or no commitments. What is the catch now? They want you to a bring your old phone to them, and use it on their network. No longer are the days where carriers will provide a highly subsided phone in exchange for a one or two year commitment. Is this a new way the mobile / wireless industry is going, or is it just competition for the lowest rates, and how to survive in this economy.

What a week!

This is a gadget's boys week come true. So many gadgets released this week, as well reliable rumors. To start off the bat, Blackberry Bold 2 was announced this week. Windows 7 was made public, finally a version of Windows that deserves the hype. The Barnes and Nobles Nook was announced, I like their Web 2.0 naming approach, but ebook readers to me seem like luxury items. The Droid campaign got more intense with the Moto Droid leaks, and this device gives the HTC Touch Pro 2 a run for its money. Then there is Apple, the small company in Cupertino, CA with their their best quarter ever, and the new Magic mouse, which takes a step back from the multi-touch on the macbooks. They also had a silly product launch for the plastic unibody macbook, which is just silly.
Anyways, waiting for another week like this, will it be before CES?

The New Wave of Smartphones

It is very interesting to hear about the new wave of smartphone devices coming out this year. A majority of these phones run on Android or Windows. It is even more surprising to see a Manufacturers like HTC and Samsung to make multiple devices with roughly the same hardware, but loading different mobile operating systems like Windows Mobile, custom roms of Linux Mobile, and Android. HTC started making Windows phones, but has expanded to Android. Samsung makes phones using Linux Mobile, Windows, Android, and their own OS for their non-smartphones. Now Dell is coming into the game selling a phone running on Android. There is also ASUS/Garmin that is selling a phone that runs on Windows. Motorola is selling their DEXT with Android. The market is flooded with devices running on Windows Mobile and Android.

The next interesting point is all these phones are particular made in the same factory. All these manufacturers outsource their manufacturing to Foxconn or another company all located in the same city. It really doesn't matter which device you buy it is being built by the same people. Normally you could compare devices by saying it's a Dell and it's built in Texas, but that is no longer true (Dell just announced they are closing a manufacturing plant in NC).