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Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings

Random musings on technology, mobility, usability, social media, the Web and other cool stuff

Carnival of the Mobilists #150Yesterday

Head over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists at Mippin Blog for some of the finest in mobile blogging. Couple of the interesting topics covered this week: Femtocells, mobile broadband, mobile app stores and my own entry on the big shift to touchscreen and how it’ll impact the regular keypad.

   Tagged: blogging, carnival, femtocells, Mobile, mobile app store, touchscreen   

Firefox brings its biggest strength to its mobile browser… ExtensionsNovember 10

The great thing about extensions is that they allow you to customize your browsing experience to suit your particular needs. What it really brings to the table for the browser is an ecosystem of developers and users around it, giving it an edge which is extremely difficult to counter. This is what made it the biggest strength that Firefox had over Internet Explorer.

Fennec Logo

Now we’ve seen with the success of Firefox and iPhone App Store how important an ecosystem really is to a product. And now, Firefox brings it’s biggest strength to mobile with Fennec (mobile version of Firefox).

The first extension to be released for Fennec is URL Fixer, a handy tool that corrects typos in URLs typed in the address bar.

Just as in PC, extensions will be a killer feature for Fennec. This is bad news for current players in the market because you can counter Tabbed Browsing, Search Integration, Spell Checking, Session Restore, RSS Feeds blah, blah, blah etc; but it’s very difficult to counter an ecosystem. And that too a real big one, because Fennec wil

Touch screen on mobiles is the new black, but will it overshadow the keypadNovember 2

 

iPhone’s success has sent all the handset manufacturer’s scurrying to come up with a touch screen device of their own. We have seen touch screen devices being launched by all major players, even RIM which is mostly in the enterprise segment has come up with one. This makes good short-term commercial sense, but I wonder if it points to a trend that’ll overshadow the keypad.

Touch screen definitely has it’s advantages, you save space for the keyboard (which takes up a large percentage of the device area), you can change the complete interface for each app and provide the necessary keys and buttons only, you can save weight and due to no keyboard there are no mechanical wear parts.

That said, let’s look at iPhone’s keypad for a second, it’s not really what we were hoping for. It is so harder and longer to develop a response from the iPhone.. you keep wanting “k” but it gives “i” or some key closer to the letter and this goes for any letter. Doing the same thing on the Blackberry, however, is a breeze.

As Dr Buxton puts it: “Everything is b

Carnival of the Mobilists 145October 18

This week’s carnival is up at mjelly. Head over there for this week’s best in mobile blogging.

   Tagged: blogging, carnival, Mobile   

A look at Nokia’s Comes with MusicOctober 8

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

Comes With Music is a newly launched Nokia service which includes music from the top record companies with its handsets for a flat upfront fee. It’s Nokia’s attempt to slowly get into the Apple-dominated music business. It includes unlimited downloads for a year from all four major labels accounting to about 4 million songs. After the end of the first year, users can keep all the music they’ve downloaded and continue to update their collection with a la carte purchases.

This is a paradigm shift, because it’s the first time in the mobile phone industry that you pay a flat fee upfront and forget about the cost of downloading and listening to music. This type of cost transparency is extremely important to promote usage of a service because if people don’t know how much it’ll cost them they won’t use it, however if they know the cost clearly, they are willing to pay. This has been proven by the boom in mobile web usage after flat-rate data plans were introduced.

The handsets with the service are priced well below the iPhone. This is aimed at users who consider iPhone too expensive, mainly targeting teenagers.

Anssi Vanjoki,