All Things Mobile and Wireless
Received my Google Nexus One Android phone a few hours ago. The video sample above was transcoded (by Google) from the original 3gp file recorded on the Nexus One. The video sample below is a video recorded using the Qik for Android app.
Sorry for the difficult to see screen demo on the Droid. Brightness cranked up but still nearly impossible to see. But, I wanted to quickly put up some kind of demo of Google Goggles running on a Droid. So, here it is such as it is 
I posted two items over on my MobileAppsToday blog…
Google Sync (Beta) for iPhone & Windows Mobile: Think Before You Sync!
Microsoft MyPhone Service Free, But Not Comparable to Apple MobileMe
…that got me wondering if:
1. The Google Sync for iPhone & Windows Mobile made Outlook obsolete
2. If it made Microsoft’s MyPhone service obsolete before it even went live?
Microsoft stopped shipping Outlook with some lower-priced Microsoft Office bundles a while back. And, Windows Mobile smartphone hardware vendors stopped including Outlook with those phones around the same time. So, it is cheaper and easier to sync with Google Calendar and Contacts that with Outlook. And, since MyPhone is not out yet, people will probably try Google Sync.
I wonder how much of Google’s iPhone focused web-apps will work directly on Android based phones? In any case, Google Translate for iPhone looks great in my quick tests (with my limited knowledge of anything beyond English, and some would say, even there…). Just head over to…
…on your iPhone or iPod touch. It redirects you to google.com/m/translate. The first URL results in the desktop page if you try it on a Windows Mobile smartphone. The second, direct, URL just throws a WiMo smartphone to Google’s simplified mobile home page. Once again, Windows Mobile gets no web-love. Sigh. Glad I bought an iPod touch to see the cool stuff Windows Mobile users are missing out on.
You can read the announcement for this new iPhone web service on Google’s blog at…
I’m not a regular reader of the Google Docs Blog. So, this is a bit dated (from June 18).
One of the Google Docs team members bought an Eee PC, tried Google Docs on it, noted a few oddities, and now asks the public: What could we change in Docs to make the experience better on the smaller screen? Let us know by leaving a comment.
One sidenote: Google Docs and many AJAX-y sites don’t work well on the OLPC XO. My recollection is that the cursor disappears when typing in a Google Docs text window. I should fire up the XO and confirm that this is still the case.
Speaking of Google… They launched a new Google Groups area…
This web area is for general mobile technology discussion. But, of course, Google encourages discussion about their own mobile products like Maps and Gmail.
For years Palm OS users rightly criticized that Windows Mobile for needing far too many taps and scrolling to enter the simplest calendar event or contact information. Although it looks like Palm OS will join the ranks of Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3, and CP/M soon, the criticism is still valid. It is still a giant pain to enter contact information in Windows Mobile. And, don’t get me started on the effort needed to enter simple calendar event information that falls outside of the rigid structure of the Windows Mobile calendar. For example, let’s say you arrive somewhere at 4:34 pm and need to come back 1 hour later to feed the parking meter some coins. Count the number of steps to set that event. Yes, there are third party apps that you can add to your WiMo device. But, still, this is stuff that should be easy to do right out of the box.
If you want to get some people riled out, ask about setting calendar events for multiple time zones. For example, a person who lives in California sets a couple of local appointments for this week, a couple of appointments in New York the next, and Germany the week after that. It can get messy real fast unless you pay extreme attention to what you are doing with each appointment.
One of the things I’ve found myself doing for the past year is entering appointments and other calendar events in Google Calendar first because it is so much faster to type 2pm Attend meeting XYZ than enter something on my Smartphone or Pocket PC. Of course, I am usually at a full size keyboard when using Google Calender, so that is a huge bias. I haven’t looked how Google Android handles calendar and contacts entries. But, if it half as easy as Google Calendar, Windows Mobile is going to have a huge problem on its hands.
Microsoft needs to do two things. First, it needs to fix its Windows Live Calendar with its 20th century event entry form. Once it fixes it, it needs to be able to sync over the air with Windows Mobile devices.
Yesterday I said that Windows Mobile’s real competitor is Google Android. WiMo has already conceded defeat to Apple’s iPhone in the consumer space. Why? How? You and I, as individual consumers, have not been the target Windows Mobile customer since 2003. As soon as Microsoft’s marketing became phone-centric, the target customers became enterprises running Exchange Server and the mobile phone carriers. Microsoft’s recent purchase of Danger (the firm that sells the youth-consumer-centric Sidekick phone) muddies the picture even more. How are Windows Mobile and the Sidekick related? They sure don’t share the same operating system or run the same applications. They have completely different market focuses. This can only serve to confuse their marketing efforts going forward.
The big unanswered question is who is the market focus for the Google Android based phones? Unless it syncs with Exchange Server or Lotus Notes, it is not the enterprise (at least initially). Google’s multi-mode reference designs (touch and non-touch screen devices) may cause the same mind-share fragmentation that Windows Mobile’s touch and non-touch reference designs do. Given a variety of hardware vendors (again like Windows Mobile), it is hard to imagine that Google’s phone will directly compete or impact on iPhone sales. It will, however, have an advantage in the US by not being locked to a single mobile carrier (AT&T Wireless). My guess is that Google’s phone will take market share directly away from Windows Mobile and what is left of the Treo Palm OS based phones (are new Palm OS phones still around?). So, the follow-up question is: How much damage will the various Google Android phones cause to Windows Mobile smartphone sales? My guess is: A lot. If the Google-based phones are even half as easy to use as the iPhone, half-as compelling, and syncs reliably with the Google cloud services (calendar, contacts, mail, etc.), it will be a huge seller. Just imagine if Google adopts Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads and goes after ActiveSync/WMDC, the lack of media playlists, the slowness of going from app-to-app, and other WiMo weaknesses. It could get brutal in TV commercial-land.
Google announced Google Maps for Mobile 2.2 which adds bus and train information. However, it is not available for Windows Mobile devices yet. If you try to download it on a Windows Mobile device, you will get version 2.1. The blog item announcing 2.2 says that it is available for the Blackberry and many Java-based phones.
If we Windows Mobile users feel left out now, just wait until next week when the geeksphere is abuzz over all things iPhone which will also NOT work with Windows Mobile smartphones. Sigh.
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