Ubeee

Will anything change? No, it’s still a mess and developing won’t get simpler.

Do they think they gets a broader penetration? How?
Nokia and Sony Ericsson already you is. Apple won’t. Google won’t. HTC/Microsoft won’t. Who is left? Telcos who build their own phone? Maybe.

What will be next steps in mobile communications? That’s a question I tought about often in recent days and I believe it will be the fPhone.

What we can see right now, is the mergence of three principal drivers of today’s technology:

• Ubiquity (Everything everywhere)
• Platforms & Openness
• Socialization of services

Ubiquity

Ubiquitous computing is already reality. Maybe it does not yet offer the same capability as researchers pray for years now. But frankly, we can use our mobile phones everywhere. Most of them have a built in digital camera and other sensors. We carry around RFID tags for ticketing and have access to public WiFi everywhere. So, basically, in terms of communication we are already at a point where we can do everything everywhere.

Prices for mobile communication will fall and flatrate data plan will become standard.

Platforms & Openness

The iPhone and Google’s Android did and will change the mobile industry. Not only the devices but also how we communicate in general. The iPhone has a fancy UI and according to the specs, Android does not have to hide itself behind the other smartphones. But what they really offer is a platform and a eco-system. It is now very easy to build, distribute and maintain applications. Ever tried to update a J2ME app? How does your customer know that they need to download a new version?
A managed platform like the iPhone or Android offer can help to lower device fragmentation.
In addition, implementing rich web browsers in mobile devices (e.g. WebKit & Opera) also help to push mobile applications since the experience and interaction can be very well, the distribution is easy and the code is fully manageable by the developers. Everyone always has the newest version. This may not sound important but it definitely is. Also, developers may relay on open standards and (I know, it’s a dream) don’t have to worry how their page would look on a certain device.

Socialization of services

Isn’t it annoying? Every app gets a ’social’ update, where developer try to implement a social layer where their userbase is able to share everything. (I heard rumours, that the next version of minesweeper will have social networking capability implemented. ) The aim is to keep the customer on a website/using an application as long as possible and as often as possible “because his/her friends are their too”.

You may like all this features or not but they definitely changed the way you communicate and became very important. Think about how often you use facebook…

My prediction

My prediction is, that all this trends will continue, mix up and come together. What will be the result? Right, something I call the fPhone, the Facebook Phone. I don’t see the fPhone as a mobile phone with a facebook application implemented, no. What I believe we will see is a Phone which is a gateway to Facebook (or any other social network, it’s not important which one).  It is a Facebook clienet. All functionality will deeply be implemented into the systems.

• You will have an addressbook with presence information of your friends.
• You can send text messages instantly (like SMS but over HTTP)
• You can call someone using VoIP
• You can take a phot, upload it
• You will receive an activity feed of your friends about where they are and what they do etc

However, for me the most important feature is the addressbook:

• You are in control of your profile, its accuracy and can manage the privacy about who of your contact is able to see what of your profile.
• You will get profile changes of your friends directly on your device and your changes will be sent to your friends. So, if you decide to change your mobile phone number for any reason, you don’t have to inform your friends yourself cos they will get the changes instantly on their devices.

There are other benefits like you will be able to store all your communications on a server and have access to them from anywhere. If you log into your Facebook account with a PC will be able to see the messges you just sent from your moblie phone.

Perspective

When will we see such a device? Well, for sure I don’t know that. Anyway, I think at the moment only Facebook can succeed with such a product cos they have large userbase. But they have to work together with device manufacturers and operators. They could use Android as their platform but I’m not sure if Microsoft, who owns quite a bit of Facebook, would agree on that. So, probably this will take more time than I personaly like.

Oh, one question, why do you think facebook is looking for a Cisco IP Telephony Engineer? Internal communication or … ???
And the why is one of the key responsibilities of the Product Manager, Mobile “Define, implement, and iteratively develop both technology platforms and Facebook Applications for mobile, working in partnership with operators, the developer community, and in particular, device manufacturers“

Have you seen the demo of Johnny Lee using a Wii to for head tracking. He uses head location information to render view dependent images on the screen to create a 3D-like envrionment on a flat TV screen. It’s amazing! You can download the Source Code and play around yourself. We have just done that and it’s uber cool!

Today, Firefox 3 will be released into the wild. So far, over 1.5 million people have pledged to download Firefox 3. The aim is to set a Guiness World record for the most downloaded software within 24 hours. Good luck on that.

I recently saw a video showing a concept of a mobile Firefox UI. It is highly interesting and has some innovative fetures.
At the moment, only Opera and WebKit (N95, iPhone, Android) offer rich browsing experience on mobile devices. New competitors are always welcome!

“Google makes something likes 0.09$ every time a search is done on Google” says Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch. Can you believe this? How often do you click on Google Ads? I definitely don’t “pay” them as much as this.

For me, Gears on Mobile Devices has a huge potential. At the moment it is very difficult to develop and distribute mobile applications. Altough 3G is widely deployed, latency is quite annoying. Using web apps on mobile devices isn’t fun yet.

I played around with Gears on Pocket IE. Although PIE has some limitations, it works quite well.

However, the ‘bootstrap’ issue is a big problem for web apps. Users want their information all the time visible. They don’t want to lunch a browser and navigate to the site. Unfortunately, a sophisticated widges framework is not yet available (I bet it will be soon…).

As a proof of concept, I managed to get Gears running on the today screen! Even background synchronization is possible. See my YouTube video. It shows Navigation and receiving a new message.

What you think?

Welcome at Ubeee.com. This blog will cover trends in ubiquitous computing and the convergence of mobile communication and web technologies.