Nokia's answer to iPhone - Tube

I am happy to see the detailed video review of Nokia's Tube (5800 XpressMusic) in Engadget.

Like everyone, i have been a loyal Nokia fan for years and off late, my skepticism on Nokia's smartphones was also clarified after I bought a Nokia E61. My E61 has been the best phone ever I had got till date. And Symbian s60 is the best OS ever.

Looking at the videos, I am sure Nokia's Tube will be a huge success, if not for touchscreen, but at least for the features packed in it and for usability sake.

You may refer to this link to read through the specifications of this phone.

Only foreground 3rd party apps on iPhone - Intentional or Design flaw?

I read this post in Techcrunch which discusses on iPhone's limitation to allow only foreground 3rd party applications. 3rd party applications are the ones developed using the iPhone SDK.

While the Mike thinks that this is an intended restriction owing to the limited memory and resources, I personally do not think thats the only reason. And I know why I am correct for some reasons ;).

I believe the restriction is more of a design flaw of the iPhone SDK. I believe that Apple engineers haven't yet figured out a way (or most probably did not have time to do so) a way to switch between the native applications and the 3rd party applications. You would need a robust layer which will take care of remembering the 3rd party applications' running context and bring back the UI when the application again comes to foreground. Also, there might be scenarios wherein what about happens if a native background application wakes up and wants to use the UI. In which case, how would the 3rd party application behave. Would it be able to yield the user interface for the native application.

Most of the above use cases need lot of thinking and through integration of it into the SDK layer. I am sure Apple would later release an updated SDK which will allow 3rd party applications to run in the back ground as well.

There may be a work-around for this problem. The 3rd party application developer can care of trapping/getting notification from the OS/platform for exiting its own context and then saving the relevant context information in the memory. The next time you launch the application, it can read the previously saved context and bring itself back to the state of previous execution. Its very similar to playing the brick game in your blackberry.

[Article imported from Mobile Computing Trends]

Is Sun getting desparate not to lose mobile JVM market?

After Apple announced last Thurday of its intention to release the long awaited SDK for iPhone*, Sun has unveiled its intention to port JVM onto the iPhone.

Its looks like Sun does not want to waste any time bringing the mobile version of JVM (J2ME) onto the iPhone. Obviously this sense of urgency should be due to the fact that iPhone provides a very good platform for mobile applications and also because of the impending threat from Google's Android. Sun should already feel frustrated by Google's clever coup of replacing Sun's JVM with their own.

The way I see the future is that Apple and Google may be in a direct collision course towards mobile dominance. And Sun may want to be present in one of the camps.

What also remains to be seen is how would Sun JVM affect Apple's business model of trying to sell iPhone applications through their iTunes store (App Store as it may be called). With the JVM present on the iPhone, would mobile application developers like to leverage it or will they rather choose to directly use iPhone SDK. With Apple bringing in restrictions on the development platform (only Mac can be used has the host to develop and debug iPhone applications), it gives a point of leverage for Sun.

And what about performance! iPhone SDK is already a layer on top of the native iPhone OS APIs. Now JVM would be one more layer on top of it. Will the java applications written for iPhone in future have the same performance as other platforms?

The war for a mobile computing platform is going to get interesting as days go by. Keep watching this blog to see how this unfolds.

Useful Links:
* You may be interested in reading this coverage of the iPhone SDK Press Release by Ryan Block of Engadget.
- You can also watch Apple's official video on the iPhone SDK Press Release here. Note: You need quicktime player.


[Article imported from Mobile Computing Trends]

Wonderful live coverage by Ryan Block - Apple's iPhone SDK Press Release

Man.. this guy (Ryan Block from Engadget) did a great job of covering live, the Apple iPhone SDK Press Release.

I was following his post very closely all along. Ryan did a great job of posting quotes from the folks on stage. And more importantly, it had relevant photos.

Ryan, if you did this all alone.. then I really admire you. I must agree.. live coverage over a blog is really a skill.

Silverlight vs Flash - War for mobile web dominance

Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flash) are trying desperately to push their respective technologies for developing RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Both seem to be taking this further ahead to mobile devices. Recently, Microsoft had signed a deal with Nokia to integrate Silverlight on Nokia's latest S60 based smart phones.

Adobe though having a dominance in the PC space must be doubly worried after Steve's comments on why Flash may not suited for iPhone.

I found this post from Robert Scoble providing interesting insight on why Apple may feel that Flash is not good for iPhone. More than the article, I found the user comments more intreseting.

Also, it got clear to me from the user comments that Apple was trying to port Flash 8 (and not Flash Lite - stripped down version) onto the iPhone.

Best Read on "The Making of iPhone"

One of my friends has shared an interesting article in his Google Reader. The shared post was that of a Slashdot user who was pointing to this article in Wired - The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew up the wireless industry.

If was like reading a very short book on "The Making of iPhone". Very informative and very motivating.

The article talks about how iPhone was concieved by Jobs and how they struggled to make it into a reality.

What makes you browsing experience in iPhone and Nokia N/E series phones great ?

You should thank Webkit, the open source web browser engine*, for the wonderful browsing experience.

This what the Webkit home page has to say:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60's S60 WebKit development.

Apart from Apple (as the Safari web browser in their Mac OS X, iPhone and iPod Touch) and Nokia (in their N and E series of phones), Google has also included Webkit as the default web browsing engine in its recently released Android platform for mobile devices.

In his post, Bob Cringely reasons as to why Webkit is such a strategic project for Apple and why it would also be the driver for the rumoured iTablet (you find my previous post questioning as to whether Apple's PDA would click or not ?).

You may also find it interesting to read this post by Om Malik about Webkit's rise to popularity. Gives you a quick round up of where webkit stands compared to its competition.

Webkit is still evolving (but fast) and has a long way to go before winning hearts of hardcore Opera Mini fans like myself :). Read this post in Wap Review to know why Opera Mini 4.0 is better than Webkit on a Nokia (and I completely agree with that).

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Web Browser Engine - This is the piece of software which downloads the html web page from the address specified by you, processes it and renders it back on the screen of the display device. The screen could be anything from your PC Monitor to an iPhone's touch screen.

Top Tech Trends - Internet video, Apple products, Gaming consoles

The Yahoo! Top Technology Trends of 2007 gives an interesting view of products and services the users were searching for in the net in 2007.

Internet Video service YouTube leads the list of top technology trends. YouTube has become more of monopoly when it comes to internet video. Clear evidence that internet video is coming to be the most preferred form of watching content. Personally, I've starting watching lot of videos on YouTube, especially after I got a better broadband connection. As I mentioning in my previous post, on-demand viewing is the way to go in future.

An other interesting trend to notice this year was that, Apple with its products iPhone, iPod and iTunes (media download service) was all over the news. A total dominance in the news landscape. Steve does know how to generate buzz about any new product he introduces.

Also, point to note is that iPod is still more popular trend compared to iPhone. Also, iPod is the only media player in the top 10. Below Google trends show (blue indicates iPod and red for Zune) that iPod is far ahead in terms of popularity compared to Microsoft's Zune. Microsoft had introduce second generation Zune. Would have to wait and watch if they can ever make a dent in iPod's market share.


And last but not the least, 2007 was also a big year for gaming consoles. Nitendo's Wii, after its release in December 2006, was an instant hit. In fact, Wii has been selling more consoles in the first few months than what Xbox and PS2 took to sell it over a year. Nintendo made a huge come back after having been overshodowed by Sony and Microsoft for many years. But Nitendo is also having a problem with the current demand. Its supply-chain is unable to meet the demand which could become a huge problem over a period of time (a big booster for Sony's PS3 :)). Read this article from WSJ to understand the problem.

Sony launched its 3rd generation console - PlayStation3 (PS3) - November of 2006. While Sony lost ground to Wii in the initial months to Wii, recently it has overtaken Wii in terms of Sales in Japan.

Xbox 360 had a first comer advantage as it got released almost a year ahead of Wii and PS3. But it is never able to match the sales figure of Wii and PS3. But recently Xbox 360 was in news for one of the bestselling game series - Halo 3. Xbox 360 has been adding new features like the ability to download videos and games.

(I personally am a serious gamer and have a Playstation2 at home. But I have not tried any of the new consoles. So whatever I have mentioned above is from news and videos that I have been tracking on the net.)

Also, on the list are Facebook, the most happening Social Networking service and Wikipedia, the online reference for almost every topic in the world.

Will the Apple PDA click!!

When the Apply iPhone became a phenomena, It was quite obvious to me that they would eventually come up with a iPod which was similar looking to iPhone (with the multi-touch screen). It happened and then iPod Touch was introduced recently.

I was thinking as to why would Apple stop with that and why would they not extend it as a mobile computer/handheld. So now we get to hear rumours about Apple's coming up with their PDA :).

But as I think deeper.. would I be interested in a Apple PDA as a standalone device. Why would I buy an apple PDA if the PDA like functionalities could be clubbed with mobile phone capabilities as in iPhone.

When the world is moving towards convergence, would a strategy to diverge work out?. My instinct says NO. But probably the business/market analyst at Apple can better explain.