Dan’s Blog (2.0)

This is the 2nd time this year I’ve traveled through Madrid’s beautiful new airport. It’s still wowing me. For my trip to Oviedo to go to W3C Mobile Web Initiative meetings this week and speak at Fundamentos Web next week, the sting of having to transit through Madrid as opposed to taking a direct flight was greatly alleviated by knowing that I would be going through the new airport. It’s beautifully designed. It’s efficient. It’s well signed. It’s spacious. It’s comfortable. It’s modern. It’s usable. It puts Heathrow’s dark, cramped, grimy corridors to shame. When I first came through here, after having traveled through Madrid’s old airport many times in the past, I wondered if I had been delivered to the right city. It’s a great start to what will hopefully be a great trip.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:15 under Travel

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It’s been an exciting week in the blogosphere for the Mobile Web. First Barbara Ballard posts part 1 of an article on “What’s Wrong with the Mobile Web.” This is followed up on by both Andrea Trassati and Mike Rowehl and then Tom Hume picks up on those posts. With so many respected individuals piping up on this issue, I could hardly have stayed out of the fray…

Actually, I’ve been saying for some time what Barbara essentially is saying in her post: mobile-specific user experience is essential the growth of the Web on the mobile platform. My vision of the “One Web,” however, encompasses this idea through the notion of (ta da) “thematic consistency,” which has been articulated nicely by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group. Thematic consistency does not mean you have to have the same page displayed across different devices — it allows for different user experience across different devices but asserts that the same URI when viewed on different devices should provide thematically similar results (for example, the same news article or blog post).

So — even though I hold Barbara in very high regard, I disagree with the articulation of the “two camps.” From my perspective, the two camps might be closer to “the browser can do it all” vs. “the content authors need to do something too.” Clearly, I’m in the second camp: Web sites need to start factoring in Mobile users when they design and build their services, not as an after-thought. I think this is already happening. Take a look at PinPPL — here’s a site that’s designed to work well on the Blackberry browser and on desktop browsers. The site itself, a social network for Blackberry users, also exploits device capabilities by providing direct access to Blackberry PIN messaging from user profiles.

By the way, Barbara will be speaking at the next Mobile Monday London event here on October 2nd. Don’t miss it!

Meanwhile, BBC News ran a great article on the rise of the Mobile Web. I think this article does a great job of capturing the user attitude towards the mobile Web: they just want it to work. (This article also reinforces my view that cost transparency is a key issue when it comes to take up.)

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:20 under Blogs, Mobile Monday, Mobile Web

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The terms “Mobile 2.0″ and “Mobile Web 2.0″ are being thrown around these days quite a bit, but nobody has really put together a concise definition of what Mobile 2.0 is and how it differs from what has come before, such as exists for “Web 2.0″. Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish are doing a great job describing some aspects of “Mobile Web 2.0″ but I still think we are missing such a clear, consise definition. Well, I figured I’d take a stab at it.

For one, closed mobile application and services, available only through one operator, are Mobile 1.0. Mobile 2.0 applications and services are open and available to anyone to download, install and/or put to use via the mobile Web. In my mind, the Mobile Web is a big part of Mobile 2.0. Mobile 2.0 also builds on the ideas voiced by Tim O’Reilly and extends those to the Mobile platform and its capabilities. Here are some rough extensions of the O’Reilly Web 2.0 set of examples applied to Mobile 2.0:

SMS -> IM (e.g. Yahoo! messenger for mobile)
MMS -> Media sharing (e.g. ShoZu)
Operator Portals -> Mobile Web and Search
Operator chooses -> User chooses
Premium SMS billing -> Mobile stored value Accounts (e.g. Luup)
Java Games -> Embedded Applications (e.g. Blogger application)
Presence & Push-To-Talk -> Embedded VOIP applications
WAP sites -> .Mobi sites
WAP push -> RSS readers
Wallpaper -> Idle screen applications
Location services -> Google maps application
Time or volume-based pricing -> “All you can eat” data charging
Content consumption -> Content creation (e.g. mobile blogging)

In short, Mobile 2.0 takes the Mobile platform to where the Internet is today, and shows us how the mobile phone can become a first class citizen, or even a leading citizen, of the Web. What Mobile 2.0 does not mean, at least in my mind, is more sophisticated, but still essentially closed, mobile applications and services. Openness and user choice are essential components of Mobile 2.0.

Some of these ideas are controversial, I know, and some of them probably don’t go far enough. I’d appreciate your comments, additions, ideas on this topic. What does Mobile 2.0 consist of and what makes it different from what we have now?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:06 under Mobile Web, Mobility

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Just to underscore my previous post, here’s a quick picture I snapped this morning on my way to work. This was taken one-handed while carrying a cup of coffee, by the way. The close-focusing is great. You can’t argue with the color either (I switched to manual white balance). There’s nothing to stop this from being a really nice image. But if you take a closer look, you’ll see tons of compression artifacts and edge effects caused by excessive sharpening. These are even more apparent on the original 2048/1536 image. For comparison, take a look at this image I captured with my Canon S50. Now I realize that this is comparing apples and oranges to some degree, but I maintain the image quality of the N73 doesn’t have to be this bad. If at “high” quality, it were compressing less, the image output would much better looking.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:49 under Mobility

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Well, it’s been about two weeks since I wrote gushingly about the Nokia N73 on this page. Has the bloom come off the rose? Well - in some small ways, yes, and I will detail those here, but in the main I am still very impressed with this device.

My biggest pet peeve is picture quality. For a device that prominently displays the fact that it sports a “Carl Zeiss” lens and a 3.2 megapixel sensor, I would expect higher quality images. The problem seems to be in the software. Even at its highest image quality setting, the JPEG compression is jacked way up. A typical highest-quality image out of the phone comes in at around 500k. My old 2-megapixel Powershot S100 used to produce images around the same size, for comparison. Considering you can now buy 1GB cards for this thing, I think it ought to be possible to squeeze some higher quality photos out of it. The auto white balance is also pretty wonky. My sense is that the sharpening algorithm is also jacked way up but it’s kind of difficult to tell with all the compression artifacts in every picture. It also takes a while for the camera to get ready to take pictures and there is too long a delay between the time you depress the button and when the picture is actually taken - resulting in many missed shots, especially when your subjects are fast-moving children. Don’t get me wrong: for a camera phone, it is pushing the envelope. But Nokia really markets this phone as a digital camera as well as a phone and in my view it needs some tweaking in order to make good on this promise.

My second area of frustration is with the Bluetooth support. I had expected some improvement over the N70, but unfortunately I find it still craps out quite often. The only remedy is to go in to the control panel and turn Bluetooth off and on again. This usually fixes the problem, but when you’re trying to make or receive a call on the go, or connect to the Internet to quickly send/receive email, this can be very frustrating.

Both of these are software issues so they could potentially be addressed by firmware updates.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:38 under Mobility
Tags: cameraphone, N73, Nokia

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Is the N73 with Lifeblog the ultimate blogging device? As I write this, standing up on the Tube on my way home. I’m tempted to say ‘yes.’ It certainly provides a content creation environment where you can quickly jot down thoughts, and with the predictive text input, it’s not that painful, for short entries. It’s especially well suited to environments like this where pulling out a laptop is just not an option. Composing blog entries with both text and photos though is not as straight-forward as I’d like it to be. Likewise for inserting links or text involving lots of words not in the predictive dictionary. The PC counterpart application also is a bit bewildering as to its intended use. I’d rather have a great mobile-only app than a half-way there PC-mobile suite. What features would I most like to see? Well, the lifeblog app neatly collects all your messaging traffic and presents it in a neat timeline (presumably for you to draw on while blogging) but then presents no easy way for you

…and that’s where it stopped accepting input. Apparently, the Lifeblog text note object has a hard limit of 826 characters. So… we’re not there yet, but I honestly do see big potential. To finish these thoughts now that I’m sitting in front of my Powerbook, Lifeblog needs to make it easy for me to filter all of these messages and photos, and it needs to be easy to associate items together. Three images, for instance, might all belong together, along with a text note which incorporates comments received in 3 text messages. This all needs to be put together and uploaded as one chunk a the push of a button. Right now it looks like Lifeblog only supports fairly rudimentary photo blogging, but you can see the potential there. The interface is really slick. I eagerly await an upgrade.

And by the way, one of the comments to my earlier post on the N73 pointed me to some documentation on Flickr about how to post through them to Blogger from Lifeblog. Great, except it didn’t work and also it’s a hack. Maybe Google needs to get their act together and write a Blogger client for S60, but honestly I’d rather just have clients and services that work together using standard protocols and APIs.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:06 under Mobile Web, Mobility

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