Archive for the 'Mobile Content' Category

How to fix your N95 in case of total death

Published
by
MarkD
on October 18, 2008
in , Devices and Mobile Content
. 5 Comments

Recently I moved house which involves the move of ISP and various accounts.  In total my ISP is taking 28 days to move my ADSL setup to another telephone exchange and set up the services that I use.  28 days of almost zero Internet.

So checking around I discovered JoikuSpot for my N95 which allows me to open a WIFI hotspot on my N95 and use the UTMS (3G) connection to get online.  It’s pretty awesome all round, I can use my corporate VPN, surf and email.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing with Vodafone, who seems to have poor UMTS coverage here.  I noticed very strange behaviour with various Internet sites, Facebook for example is delivered in the form of the mobile site.  Why would I want the mobile site on my Macbook??  Why are Vodafone making decisions about the content that I want to view?

JoikuSpot is pretty amazing kit, but I’m fully aware that it’s stretching the device beyond its design.  My N95 agreed that it was all too much and died.  No beeps or flashing lights, just sudden death.  After playing with the battery, charging for a while reset reset reset, nothing was working!

As a last ditch effort I called my good friend and resident know-it-all Steve Hartley (Adobe) who imparted this pretty weird how-to.

  1. Take the battery out
  2. Get a copper coin
  3. Press against the battery pins on the inside of the phone for 2 secs
  4. Replace battery and turn on

And voila, the phone powered back up!

Steve explained that Nokia devices hold a charge for the clock and certain states, even when they are apparently powered down.  Shorting the pins causes a full power down, and thus reset of the device.

So there you have it: How to fix your N95 in case of total death :-)

Adobe MAX Awards 2008

Published
by
MarkD
on August 2, 2008
in Conference, Industry News and Mobile Content
. 0 Comments

Adobe MAX 2008 is only a few months away and I hope that all of you find the time to attend in San Francisco, Milan or Tokyo.

As part of the event we host the MAX Awards ceremony and I’d like to extend the opportunity for you to nominate individuals or companies.  There is a specific category for “Mobility and Devices” and you can also select a region.

Nominations can be for applications, services and experiences that you have seen over the past year.

If you haven’t been to the MAX 2008 site, be sure to have a look at the fantastic sessions.

40% of European gamers have Flash Lite

Published
by
MarkD
on July 29, 2008
in Flash Lite and Mobile Content
. 7 Comments

An interesting article was posted today by Stuart Dredge at PockGamerz.biz today following an interview with Alistair Hill of M:Metrics.

Some key pieces of information from Alistair regarding the gaming market in Europe and the US:

  • 13.5m UK users are browsing and downloading applications
  • 25-34 year-old women are the largest group of mobile games buyers
  • 27% of Europeans have Flash Lite capable handsets (compared to 15.5 per cent in the US)
  • Nokia’s N70 is the most popular gaming device
  • 70% of people who were purchasing games were under the age of 35

Stuart and Alastair both point out that despite huge numbers of people playing games, there are not as many purchases.  This could indicate a number of issues, piracy is one but what’s most likely is that users are playing pre-installed games.

What is completely clear is that users are happy to play but are not quite as happy to pay.  That is a clear signal that advertising or brand endorsement within the content is a likely track for the future.

So what is the recipe for the *perfect* mobile game?

  • Event, advertising or brand funded
  • Casual puzzle game like Suduko or Tetris
  • Targeting female and male audiences
  • DRM protected
  • Easily accessible in a branded store
  • Social features built in, sharing, high scores, levels etc

Let’s look at the Google generation statement, “People know how to plug their mobile into their computer, and they know how to go to Google and type in ‘free mobile games’”.  We already know this to be true, last week I read a forum question from an end user (it happens!) who wanted to know why a screensaver wouldn’t work on their phone.

Rather than focus on the copyright issues what I was surprised/shocked by was the response when I told the user that it had been removed.

User Nokia5700: “How could i know it was from Sony Ericsson? At MOSH you can even find FIFA for phones.. I just love it so much ”

There are three statements above:

  • How could I know that it should be paid for?
  • Everything else is free, so why not this?
  • I would pay for it, given the opportunity.

iPod, iPhone and Touch users have been in training for years at the school of iTunes.  That’s the secret behind the AppStore, everyone already knew how to use it and EVERYONE was clear that there would be a price.

Ok, ok some are free I hear you.. but you get the point!

Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 Components

Published
by
MarkD
on July 19, 2008
in Devices, Flash Cast, Flash Lite and Mobile Content
. 1 Comment

n958gb.png

A few days ago our good friends at Forum Nokia released a basic set of components for Flash Lite 2.0 beginners.  They have included documentation and sample assets so that a user might change the look and feel for their own UI.  The memory requirements for the examples that I tried appear high for this level of functionality, but its a good start and they come with documentation.  Scott reminded me that Jesse Warden released a good component set for mobile devices some time ago called Shuriken, they are definately worth checking out.

With this is mind I dug around to find some other components that we have sitting around.  Happily our own Matt Snow from our Experience Design team was able to provide a set of Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 UI example components.  You can find them over in the example section, though as you might expect they are a little rough round the edges.

 GapperList  XDList  TileMenu

What will you get from them:

  • Discover how to create low memory yet rich components
  • List, Slider, Tile, NavModel and Gapper components for Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
  • Carousel, Menu, Story and scroll bars in Flash Lite 1.1
  • Key Handling for Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
  • Image Handling, loading and unloading etc (TileMenu)
  • Creating device UI and multi-screen applications (NavModel)

Unfortunately I don’t have time to polish these for installation and add documentation.  The majority of the components are extremely simple and not compiled so that you can freely edit them whilst retaining the size and memory benefits.  You can consider them free to use or change in your projects.

Future Thoughts

In time it would be great if these could be absorbed into a community effort to create components for mobile devices.  For that, I do have another set of mobile components and a mobile framework to hand that are more complex but unsupported.

Although extremely well documented and stable, the memory requirements from 1 year+ ago were such that it’s gathering dust.  We are now starting to see devices with the right levels of RAM (2mb+) and so it might be time to give it a go.

The following graphic is a basic RSS reader built in about 10 mins!

 FLIPRss

My question to you is:  If I was to hand these over, would you be willing to package, support and maintain them for everyone?

 

Mobile Internet usage stats from AdMob

Published
by
MarkD
on June 20, 2008
in Industry News and Mobile Content
. 0 Comments

  admob.png

In the PDF below Admob have provided a really quite detailed set of data broken down by country, OEM, operator and device.  They’ve also provided summaries for the top handsets accessing their ad network.

While the data is representative of users surfing the net it must also be orientated toward those countries using their services.  Still its very interesting and you can derive a lot of information pertaining to the types of devices that are now going online.

http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics?_cd=1

Most notable:

  • N70 still scoring highly in Spain and Italy
  • S40 scoring highly throughout
  • Symbian OS accounting for 85% of the UK market
  • 196,323,883 requests made in the UK alone

Check out the data..