Ever since the announcement last year of the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia we’ve been waiting to see what the combination will produce. We get to see some real product over the next few days at CES in Las Vegas, and the hot topic is the Lumia 900, a Windows Phone 7 device that AT&T will have on their 4G LTE network.
Too large to be a phone; too small to be a tablet. Has Nokasoft just introduced another form factor, or is this just another black rectangle with a big price tag?
Last week, well over a billion apps were downloaded, according to results from Flurry. About 500 million downloaded in the US, 100 million in China and about 80 million in the UK. Just as everyone expected, Christmas was a big time for app downloads.
How many of these apps will still be in use next week? How many will be lost in the clutter of confusion that faces the nearly 4 million new Android users this holiday period? How many will need to be patched, or withdrawn, as users find problems?
Keeping an app visible, relevant and functioning correctly is a major challenge for any app developer, and is one that is less of a problem for Web-based solutions.
June has been an interesting month for Internet technology. We kicked off with the big IPv6 experiment, which thankfully seems to have been successful. IPv6 is available as standard in most personal computers, servers and recent network equipment. It’s not so prevalent in home routers, and it’s anyone’s guess how much support there is in mobile devices. Around the same time, Apple announced iCloud as somewhere to store your stuff. It would seem that Apple are getting a lot of traction with their technology and service announcements, though there are also some emerging trends to counter this, such as the growing adoption of HTML5 to create applications, as the recent Financial Times application demonstrates (see below). There’s still plenty of [click title to read more…]
Bandwagons seem to be increasingly popular. The latest surrounds the fact that Apple is intentionally slowing Web applications to make native applications from the App Store more appealing.
Only it’s not a fact.
First we had suggestions that Apple were slowing HTML5 in mobile Safari.
Citing a conversation with Apple, one developer told us earlier this week that the company did not intend to add all of Safari’s optimizations to the embedded web viewer. “Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality – even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform,” the developer said.
At home, a Gb of mobile data costs me €15. Over a period of two weeks while on vacation, a mere 13Mb cost a whopping €56! Roaming data charges are inexplicably heavy, and a serious deterrent to uptake of the mobile Web. Add to this the fact that many Web sites are ill-equipped to offer a good mobile experience (often delivering big pages with many unnecessary graphics) and it’s a wonder that anyone would bother using a mobile Web browser while on vacation.
But I did, partly because it’s the only time that I’m forced away from desktop (including laptop) facilities. The experience, apart from the cost, was mixed. Adaptation is not yet universal, so many of the Web sites [click title to read more…]