Showing all entries from: January 2007
mobile, browsers
It’s just after 3:30 am here in Singapore and I’m headed to the airport soon to catch a 6:45 flight back to Tokyo. I’d be starting to rethink the “travel ain’t so bad after all” statement that I made the other day — except for the fact that I saw something here that made me remember one of the other not-so-bad things about traveling: It provides some nice surprises now and then.
One particular surprise of this visit came in the form of a TV commercial for Singtel’s mobile data services.
The commercial showed a woman standing in around in some public place outdoors in the city, obviously waiting for somebody who hadn’t shown up. The voice-over says something like, “So your date has stood you up and you’re standing around with nothing to do…” and something else implying the idea of “don’t let yourself get stuck in this situation”.
So then the commercial cuts to a scene that instead shows the same woman spending her stood-up-for-date waiting time productively: She’s now shown using a Nokia E61 — what’s more, what she’s doing on it is browsing the Web on it. And she’s shown not browsing a WAP site, but browsing a full Web site using what I guess is Nokia’s WebKit-based S60 browser. The implication from the voice-over and the images is that the value of the device is that it’ll let you get to any Web content you want, any where you want, any time you want (hey, that idea sounds familiar for some reason…).
That one commercial had the effect of raising my appreciation for Singtel about 1000 percent. I can’t say that I have seen (or even know of) any carrier in the world running TV commercials to encourage users to do browsing of the full Web from their mobile devices — but here’s hoping there will be more of them.
The E61 seems to be a very popular device in Singapore these days. My friend Lucian Teo has one, and I spotted a number of other users in the wild here.
By the way, the little Web-standards event that Lucian and I both spoke at went very well. Great presentation from Lucian, and some great questions from the audience. I’ll write up some more about it once I get back home.
I’m hoping I’ll get back to Singapore again soon. Hopefully my next visit will bring some even nicer surprises than the Singtel browse-the-full-Web-on-your-mobile commercial…
2007-01-17 ·
mobile
I’m posting this from the Harrod’s Cafe in the international terminal at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA). I’m on my way to speak at a first-ever Web Standards Conference at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, organized by Vyoma Kapur from Opera Software and Lucian Teo of Web Standards Group, Singapore.
I only have another 30 minutes before my flight for Singapore departs. But I wish I had longer, because KLIA is a great place to pass the time. Among other things, it has free Wifi (the essid for which is KLIA-WIFI, hence the title on this posting). Also musicians playing live in the terminal (will post a photo of that later). I’m really looking forward to stopping here again on my return trip. Travel ain’t so bad after all…
2007-01-14 ·
mobile, browsers
Cameron Moll’s take on the iPhone hype: Why iPhone won’t revolutionize the mobile web landscape. Below, his main points (which Cameron, being the keen-minded designer that he is, calls out with boldface run-in heads to make them easy to spot), and my comments on them.
- Content zooming isn’t new.
- Amen to that. As Cameron points out:
The technology to see an entire web page and zoom in/out — “adaptive zooming”, “mini-map navigation”, what have you — has existed, to my knowledge, for some time now (at least a year?). Additionally, Opera has been developing similar technology for non-desktop browsers, notably of late in the version for Nintendo Wii.
- Data costs will continue to plague subscribers
- Yep. And that’s not a problem the iPhone nor Apple nor any device manufacturer nor browser vendor can solve. The you-know-who-they-are entities who control such things are the only ones who can. And unless/until the data costs go down, doing anything more than casual mobile browsing on the iPhone or any other device is not yet economically feasible in a lot of places.
- Context is still king
- Cameron’s elaboration: “If iPhone isn’t GPS-enabled, that is to say it can tell where I’m at rather than typing in my location, it doesn’t radically alter the existing experience anyway.” Word.
- iPhone owners won’t be the typical mobile web user
- Right. Cameron points out: “India is outpacing all other countries in mobile subscriptions growth, but don’t expect them to be iPhone owners anytime soon”. So the iPhone is hardly going to change the world. Unless you’re one of the people who live in the San Francisco Bay or Silicon Valley area and you think that’s the extent of the known world.
2007-01-11 ·
mobile, browsers
Media reports about the iPhone note that it has Safari installed, but don’t provide any real details. I would guess that it must have a different UI than the Safari that runs on Mac machines, but I haven’t had time to watch the videos yet to see. I’m wondering what display-mode options it provides (if any) — something similar to the Nokia S60 browser’s “mini map”, or like Opera’s small-screen rendering or fit-to-width?
Update: OK, so it looks like it displays pages in the same layout as you’d see them in in a desktop browser, then uses some smart and slick zooming to let you focus in on whatever part of the page you want to view. As noted in some of the media reports, it’s much like the zooming features in Opera running on the Wii. Very much like.
Update: See the iPhone writeup over at the WapReview site.
Update: See Peter Harbeson’s This is my iEntry over at the S60 browser blog. Peter has the following to say about Apple’s claim about iPhone Safari being “the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device…”:
Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t you think that since our browser and Safari are pretty much the same thing…
2007-01-10 ·
mobile, browsers
Yahoo! has launched what looks to be a very clever search service, targeted for access from mobile devices. It’s called oneSearch and I suspect it’s something that they must have had a pretty smart team putting a truckload of work into designing, developing, and testing. You can find more information about it over at the Yahoo! search blog. Here’s a nutshell description:
With limited bandwidth, screen size and time, this service puts information all right in front of you without having to click on multiple links and then find your way back through a convoluted navigation process, as you might have to do on a more conventional mobile search service.
It’s also interesting to hear that Opera and Yahoo! have shaken hands on a deal to make Yahoo! “the exclusive provider of mobile search” on Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, “across more than 100 countries worldwide”. See the Opera press release and writeup over at webpronews site.
2007-01-09 ·
comments off
mobile
Ken Banks of kiwanja.net has announced that kiwanja.net has launched a new online database of projects around the world that are using mobile technologies for
social and environmental initiatives. Spread the word and contribute listings to it.
kiwanja.net has also created an online gallery of royalty-free
images related to mobile technologies. It’s free for anybody to
use, but especially intended for NGOs and non-profits who want
images to use in “brochures, general literature, websites or
project reports and proposals”.
2007-01-09 ·
comments off
browsers, standards
David Hyatt appears to have kept himself busy over the holidays by implementing support in WebKit for a couple of very nifty CSS features: first, some custom CSS properties for stroking text (that is, for adding outline effects to character glyphs), followed by support for the CSS3 box-shadow property.
Bonus feature: While you’re over at the Surfin’ Safari blog, make sure to also check out the video of KDE/KHTML developer-demigods Lars Knoll and George Staikos talking about KHTML and WebKit. If you’re a browser-technologies junkie, consider it a must-see.
2007-01-08 ·
mobile, browsers
David Storey gave me a heads-up about a review of a new version of the Nokia S60 browser that ships in “S60 3dEditionFeaturePack 1″.
2007-01-07 ·
comments off
