MobileViews Blog

Using WpToGo app on a Motorola Droid to create and post this blog entry. The Droid keyboard is, unfortunately, not a good one. The “chin” to the right of the keyboard digs in to my palm making typing physically painful.

Sony Ericsson has a number of powerful smartphones like the Xperia X1 and W995a Walkman phone. However, we rarely see them in the U.S. because they are not sold through any of the large GSM wireless carriers (AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile USA). I spoke with Sony Electronics’ Product Manager for Unlocked Phone in the U.S., Steve Media, to learn more about these phones. You can see The Sony Ericsson unlocked phones available in the U.S. at the…

SonyStyle USA phone product page

This podcast is 32 minutes and 3 seconds long.

- You can listen to the podcast right now from your web browser by using the embedded player above.
- You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or this RSS feed.
- You can also point your smartphone’s browser at mobiletoday.podbean.com to listen to or download the MP3 file over the air to your phone.

I spoke with Nokia’s Ira Frimere (Portfolio Manager for North America) and Joseph Gallo (Communications Specialist) about Nokia smartphones (what else?) in this podcast. ZDNet/NokiaExpert.com’s Matt Miller was scheduled to join us but was unable to because of technical issues.

TechCrunch reports that…

BillShrink Brings Its Cost-Cutting Engine To The Gas Pump

At this point I bet you are saying, “Hey, what does this have to do with mobile technology?” Well, actually, this particular announcement does not. But, it gives me an excuse to point out that I interviewed BillShrink.com’s CEO Peter Pham last month. In that podcast (#17), I asked him how BillShrink.com could help people save money on mobile phone bills.

I spent the week in New York City participating in the ThinkMobile conference. It ended this afternoon. So, I decided to walk down to the Empire State Building and visit the 86th floor observation deck. The video above was recorded using a Canon PowerShot G9.

I discovered that neither my T-Mobile nor my AT&T Wireless phone could get a signal on one side of the building. However, both had 4 bars when I went around to the other side.

Just received an interesting email from AT&T Wireless. If you have a Starbucks gift card that you’ve registered for AT&T WiFi hotspot access at Starbucks locations, AT&T lets you buy phones or accessories from them with a $50 discount. Note that this excludes iPhones.

Start your day with wireless savings. Shop AT&T online and get up to $50 off the purchase of any cell phone or accessory (excludes iPhone).

You can learn more about registering your Starbucks card for free WiFi at:

http://www.starbucks.com/retail/wireless.asp

I thought LifeHacker’s article…

Android Versus iPhone 3.0: The Showdown

…would be just another item with providing a generic comparison of a few features. But, nope, anyone interested in a feature-by-feature comparison of the current iPhone 2.0 firmware features with the current Google Android features and the upcoming iPhone 3.0 features should take a look at the color coded matrix in the article where light-red/pink indicates missing features, a pale green indicates feature presence and a pale yellow includes availability with provisions. According to this scorecard the current iPhone 2.0 units are missing a lot of features, Android has over half of the features with a lot of provisions, and iPhone 3.0 is nearly all green. Nice matrix. Run over there to read it, then come back here

The area I live in lost power last night at 6:30pm. Power wasn’t restored until 3pm this afternoon (21.5 hours later).

My landline stayed up, of course. So, communications was not a huge problem. My neighbor’s cable TV provide voice phone went down right away (also “of course”).

T-Mobile data services stayed up for a little while (under an hour perhaps?) but went down and stayed down until after power was restored. Since all my Windows Mobile smartphones and the Nokia N96 I’m using at the moment are on that service (1 SIM card that moves from device to device), that left the iPhone on AT&T Wireless’ service.

I didn’t have a chance to recharge the iPhone before the power outage started. But, fortunately, I had a pretty good charge. I turned off WiFi (GPS & Bluetooth were already turned off) to conserve the battery’s charge. I only used the iPhone sparingly over the next 21.5 hours often setting it to flight mode to maximize battery life.

More in my MobileAppsToday blog on this topic later.

Hope this works

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Everything above the line above this sentence was created and sent from the ShoZu photo and video web service that claims to add value by being able to post media from mobile devices to numerous other media web services and blogs. It half-worked posting a photo from my iPod touch to this blog. But, the image doesn’t display at all here. It worked ok with Flickr, however. Check my MobileAppsToday.com blog for more details on the showdown with ShoZu.

Everyone probably knows about the Microsoft Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics.com site. But, did you know you can access its information AND videos on your smartphone too? Yep, head over to…

mobile.nbcolympics.com

I tested video playback on my iPod touch and found that it works fine. So, iPhone users will not be left out of the Olympics this summer.

Most web pages are designed to be viewed on a desktop or notebook computer. Looking at these pages on a small screen phone is like looking at a mountain range through a pinhole. It is not a good viewing experience. Some web site owners and designers now understand that many people look at their pages on-the-go on their phones and other small screen mobile devices. Unfortunately, there are tremendous differences between the various browsers on various devices.

My first web-enabled phone had a monochrome display that placed black characters on a green-ish tinted background like the green-screen CRTs from decades ago. It supported the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) which simply placed characters on the tiny screen and assumed your main input was a 12-key phone keypad. These days it is still considered the most basic format supported and you still see addresses like wap.ao.yahoo.com. It has the advantage of being lightning fast because it is usually text with little formatting. It also works on almost every mobile device running today.

Many of today’s so-called smartphones use mobile versions of familiar desktop browsers such as Internet Explorer and Opera. These smartphone browsers often are missing some of the functions of their desktop counterparts but can deliver a limited but still useful web experience if a website is designed for the mobile browsers limitations.

Finally, there are mobile browsers that deliver near desktop experience on a small screen. Opera Mobile and the Apple iPhone’s Safari deliver outstanding mobile web browsing experiences. However, as good as these browser are, the pinhole viewing effect still exists. Fortunately, some websites are now designed to identify the different mobile browser types and deliver optimized web pages for the different platforms. The USA Today newspaper online site is a good example. If you type usatoday.com in an iPhone (or iPod touch) Safari browser, it automatically redirects you to the iphone.usatoday.com site optimized to look and work best with an iPhone. Typing the same usatoday.com on a Windows Mobile smartphone, on the other hand, sends you to the simpler but still useful m.usatoday.com formatted for use with most of the web browsers used by smartphones using various mobile operating systems.

You can see two versions of the same USA Today web home page above. The screen on the left is the page formatted for an iPhone. The screen on the right is formatted for most mobile web browsers. This specific screen capture came from a Windows Mobile Professional Edition smartphone with a touch screen.

Incidentally, the one thing you rarely see is the ill-fated attempt to create mobile specific web domains ending in the .mobi name suffix. The common naming conventions for mobile friendly websites use prefixes such as wap. (wap.oa.yahoo.com), mobile. (mobile.msn.com), and m. (m.digg.com). Sites designed specifically for the iPhone sometimes use the prefix iphone. (iphone.usatoday.com). There are other variants such as a trailing /i path after the domain name (friendfeed.com/i). So, it can be a challenge to figure out what the correct mobile friendly webpage name is if the site does not auto-identify and redirect you to the correctly formatted site as USA Today does.

The good news though is that browsing from your phone or other small screen devices is on the radar of web site ownes and developers. And, it has resulted in a much improved web browsing experience when on the go.

Digg.com’s redesigned mobile site…

m.digg.com

…was launched today. It is supposed to render faster and provides more media type information.