JAJAH Development Blog

Cell phones are amazing, in the way it changed our lives completely, and how it rapidly transformed from a symbol of status owned only by a handful of people to a device owned by almost half of the world population with over 3.3 active cell phone as of today.

“Over 30% of South Korean students send 100 text messages a day”.

"The First Cell Phone Came Out in 1983"

"Just under two-thirds of cell phone users use the backlight as a flashlight"

These and some other fun facts about cell phones can be found here

For a long time now, there is a try to incorporate artificial smells into our computing experience, this field has known lots of ups and downs, but was never really solidified into a consumer product. There is a new try from NTT that enables mobile phones to receive smelly massages: More info

It is said that by 2013, 31 percent of all mobile phones will be smart phones, and by then, a smart phone might be almost like a full blown PC. In the meanwhile it seems like everyone is trying to push their feet into the blooming mobile phone market. We’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in this area, lots of promises that hasn’t been fulfilled. In fact only since the arrival of the iPhone, surfing the web become reasonable on a mobile phone.

I refer to RIA, not just as rich applications that runs inside the mobile Internet browser, but, also as reach applications that are easier and consistent to develop, that runs across platforms and more important across devices. This has been the main hurdle, beside the low performance issues, to develop for mobile phone and devices. The resources needed to port a mobile application to run on multiple devices is enormous. There got to be a better way to develop applications and games for the mobile phones, something as approachable as web development. I’ve heard lately that the "Developer is King" these days it’s more like the Web Developer is king.

I will summarize in this text the current leading technologies in the area.

 

Adobe Flash and Flash Lite

Flash Lite is the first RIA technology to run on mobile phones (since 2003), since then it has shipped pre-installed on more then . It is safe to say that, Flash runs on mobile phones, but, it is always a subset and always with some limitations. The  best thing about Flash Lite and Flash in general is that it’s easy to develop highly interactive applications, and the promise of - develop once deploy everywhere, is currently the closest to reality with it.

The Flash Lite player isn’t exactly the same as the full Flash player we use inside our desktop’s browser. The current version of the full Flash Player is v9, Flash Lite is similar in capabilities to older versions. The Flash Player is backward compatible.

Flash Lite 1.1 - Similar to Flash 4 - Simple games, screen-savers and animations.

Flash Lite 2.1 - Similar to Flash 7 - Small games and applications, much more advanced Object Oriented programming.

Flash Lite 3 - Similar to Flash 8 - Richer games, Youtube, live video and audio e.g., justin.tv, pandora.

Take a look at Flash Lite 3 in action

Pocket PC and Windows Mobile were supported by Flash and Flash Lite for a long time already. It’s been used also to enrich WM applications UI. Flash can be integrated inside a .NET Compact Framework 2.0 application to rapidly create rich UI. Microsoft recently announced they’ll support

Flash can be found, to some extent, on other type of devices, e.g., the cool Chumby runs Flash Lite 3, sony PSP runs Flash 7.

There are already some mobile devices that run the full version of Flash 9, e.g., Nokia N810

that are pre-installed with Flash-Lite 1 - 3

 

Microsoft SilverLight

Microsoft has finally realized that a development platform isn’t necessary an OS, it saw how Flash is becoming just that, and want to join (take over) the party with its SilveLight. SL is a rich environment targeted to work inside the browser and across desktop platforms as well as on mobile phones and devices.

The first SilverLight release 1.0, was mainly intended for PR. It lacks any impressive capabilities beside good support for video. With the upcoming SilverLight 2.0, which is currently released as beta 1, we’ll have the chance to really estimate it’s powers and if it can compete with Flash. SL 2.0  looks very powerful, as it supports a respectable subset of the CLR (Dot.Net runtime), rich UI framework and all kind of other goodies.

As for SilverLight on the mobile, there was a great buzz recently when Nokia announced  it’s going to support SilverLIght on it’s S60 and some S40 mobile phones. it is not clear yet what will be the limitation of the runtime on these devices only that it’ll "initially" support only SL 1.0, which means logic written in JavaScript and no CLR.

Windows Mobile will support SilverLight 1.0 as well from the middle of 2008.

SilverLight looks very promising, but it’s still a premature technology, especially for mobile devices. I wouldn’t fire my Visual Studio to develop a mobile SilverLight app, just yet.

Visitmix.com has some cool

 

Apple iPhone:

Although the iPhone isn’t exactly an ubiquitous platform and holds only 0.14 percent of the mobile phone share. It is still the most buzzfull mobile device ever. Creating your software to run on the iPhone and leveraging it’s dreamy features like the Multi-Touch and the accelerometer can lead to tons of PR and even some paying users.

The iPhone has redefined the way we interact with a mobile phone and lifted it to a all new level. Apple recently released the iPhone SDK but still keep it very restrictive. Hopefully Apple won’t repeat her history of dismissing 3rd parties, an act that we all know hurt her greatly in the past.

I’m a little tired of the iPhone and Flash affair already, this is the story in short: To the amazement of many, the iPhone was released without any kind of Flash support. The two most common assumptions were that Flash is too slow for the iPhone or that Apple is pissed over Adobe for some obscured reason. Lately Steve Jobs bashed on the Flash Player performance on the iPhone, Adobe replied and there were others. After the release of the iPhone SDK, Adobe’s CEO announced they will develop a Flash Player version for the iPhone. Hours later, Adobe clarified that it won’t be that easy to develop a decent version of the Flash player, only with the iPhone SDK and without Apple co-op. Now it seems that we won’t get Flash on the iPhone , at least until the next buzz alert.

It was a similar scenario for Sun’s Java, first they said they’re going to put Java on the iPhone only to realize later it’s not feasible under current restrictions. Don’t wait for SilverLIght to appear on the iPhone anytime soon, either.

Apple probably wants to push her own iPhone RIA platform, and insist to remain a sealed garden with a lot of restrictions to third party applications developed by their new SDK.

 

Google Android

Google has realized the need for a standardization on the mobile jungle, and came out with it’s , a platform designed to give the power to the developer.

Here is a good explanation of the Android platform and what it can do for you.

Demonstration of Android power.

Currently there’s not many Android smart-phones, but, with the dedication of google we’ll surly see some more soon.

 

Sun JavaFX Mobile

Sun, the inventor of Java and "Develop once deploy Everywhere" concept, don’t want to lose its mobile presence with j2ME and is porting Java’s richer sister, JavaFX,  to the mobile phone as well.

JavaFX Mobile

 

Trolltech QT

Trolltech the creator of QT - Cross Platform rich development platform, has been recently bought by Nokia and can be seriously considered as a player in the RIA mobile world.

 

Conclusion

For now, we can still use excuses like incompatibility and lake of an appropriate platform to continue and create dull mobile application but it’s going to change very soon.

Pantech has revealed some of it’s concept phones that might reach stores in 2010. I’m not sure if these phones will become reality eventually, it were designed by the Korean University students, and indeed it looks somewhat like a student project, but still interesting.

Check it out.

Nokia Research Center, along with the Cambridge Nanoscience Center, think they know how we’ll use our mobile device in the future. If I have to summerize the user experience of this concept phone it’ll be - insane usability and flexibility (insane in a good way).

This beautiful animation, demo the concept:

It is very easy to accuse concept project like this to be very unrealistic, and it’s frequently being compared to the concept device and technologies that were presented in the 50th. The predictions back then were mainly about that every house will be completely automatic, managed by humanoid robots, and we’ll all be driving flying cars. Even though this concept mobile device is not intended for production in the near future, it is said that some of its features might find their way into high-end devices in the coming 7 years.

I truly believe that the concept creations of today, including this one, are much more realistic, based on real technologies, and not just the creator imagination like in the 50th. I remember that only few years ago, I saw a concept video about bizar looking cellphones that can do video calls. Can you imagine?

For more info, images, and the above video in higher quality, go here.

I write this blog entry some 10688m above a place called Yakaterinburg , flying back from Tokyo. This is my third visit to Japan in the past few months, working with our Japanese partners. A lot has been said and written about technology in Asia, and particularly in Japan. "Everyone" knows that Japanese like gadgets, but in my short visits I’ve gained some more insights into Mobile technology in Japan that makes me admire the Japanese way of thinking. A quick comment before I start, one thing which fascinated me in Japan, and I’m quite aware that this could be just my personal conditioned experiences, is that influences of tradition are more "felt" in Japan than other places I visited. While Japan is clearly far off from the Samurai days, I could still sense some of the culture and history in contemporarily Japan. Unlike places where the cultural roots seems to have faded. 

Back to technology, here are some things I picked up:

Mobile Devices are bulkier than the small, round edges devices I’m used to (I am a big fan of Nokia) : Devices in Japan tend to be big, mostly because of screen size (see below). That took me by surprise, I always thought that Japanese customers prefer small devices.

• Mobile TV - Japanese devices have the capability to receive TV broadcasts. To do that, relevant devices are equipped with a special antenna. People actually site down in trains and watch TV broadcasts.  Quality is very good. Apparently Location Based Services are also underway meaning that users receive certain local broadcasts when located in certain areas such as a community TV and others (there are some other interesting applications, but let’s leave it at that).
• There’s an interesting feature to Mobile TV - and that’s connectivity to web based information. When I was in CES earlier this year, I saw all these science fiction home TVs where one day you might be able to browse the web while watching TV (side note: why do all these demo use cases always converge to watching "Sex and the City?"). While it may still be science fiction on home usage in the US, it’s a reality in Mobile TV in Japan. That’s really cool, you can see special links under the Mobile TV screen or relevant web based tickers.
• I’m not sure why people would want to watch TV on their mobiles, on the other hand  I hardly watch TV at all (just too many things to do in real life), so I’m probably not the target customer. But fact is that this technology is commercially available in Japan makes them in my mind way more advanced than Western mobile users. I also think that Mobile Advertisement will likely to pick this up. Current Ad solutions I saw are not targeted, there’s an interesting market opportunity there in my mind.
• Mobile Data connections in Japan are far more advanced than we be found in Europe and certainly the US. HSDPA of 7.2Mb is nearly five times faster than in my home country (it’s also different frequency), not to mention hardly any packet drops (and I checked…). I also found it interesting that WiFi networks are not as common as they are in the West, seems as if people rely much more on mobile data networks than wireless devices. This really caught me by surprise.
• SMS / Text Messaging is uncommon in Japan, I saw large portion of the people in the Tokyo underground fiddle around with the mobile devices either playing, or writing messages, at first I was sure they are SMSing, but they are not - they are sending and receiving emails. While push-email in the West is mostly used by business people, in Japan everybody send and receive emails to their mobile phones. Always wired society.
• While Japan is governed by huge corporations, I found the underlying VoIP infrastructure already deployed by Telcos quite advanced as well as VoIP capabilities I did not see anywhere else. Since dealing with large, heavy corporations I expected them to be some what laid-back when it comes to VoIP, I was wrong. But for obvious business confidentiality issues I can’t elaborate.

If you do get a chance - try visiting Japan. It’s not all about technology, the people are very welcoming, food is great, culture is interesting, service is superb and there are some great hiking places in the mountains (wish I could do more of that).

Till next time

Amichay

Hi there! My name is Tzahi Efrati and I’m manager of mobile & tools development here at JAJAH. The mobile market has changed dramatically over the last years and continues to present new functionality every so often.

Over the last 6 month, two major events happened concerning the mobile industry. The first is of course the release of Apple’s iPhone. What I like most about this phone, besides its functionality is the one-touch-screen-fits-all approach. The user is not constrained to physical keypad and buttons. The phone enable the application to present the user interaction of their choice. I’d imagine that somewhere in the near future, iPhone 2.0 will enable the user itself to choose the UI he/she wishes to use. For example, left-handed people could choose the layout of game controls according to their needs.

The second major event is Google’s announcement of of the Android, the open software stack for mobile devices. The announcement, although not backed-up by actual phone models had already caused fundamental change of hearts with major operators like Verizon and AT&T. These two giants has declared their intention to open up their cell phone network.

Although it still remains to be seen the concrete implications of these announcements, one thing is clear. Mobile phones are becoming more and more a “one size fits all” machines. It already started with the introduction of camera and music players to the phones. The iPhone and android present a notion of having a device that can do almost everything. Want to hear your favorite song? Go to the iPod on your device and finger-scroll your way. Interested in checking how much your stock did lat night? open up the stock widget. Care to change the layout of the phone software? use your mobile browser to find and download the latest calling application.

Still, a couple of questions rise from this “all-you-can-swallow” wonder machines. “Can we handle it?” and “do we really care?”. Talk to your parents and your friends and I’m sure most of them will tell you that all they want is a simple device to make calls and send SMS. Anything else just complicates. Let’s face it, even technophiles, who take their cereals with a GigaOm.com on the side don’t master the entire functionality of their gadgets or the latest cool addition to their Firefox browser (so 2006).

I’m not sure that even teenagers who has more virtual friends on facebook than actual homosapien could master so much technology in one device or even care to use it. What do you think? is it just the beginning? should we expect mobile devices in the near future to be even more featured-pack? Or perhaps, this will cause the exact opposite. People will become so antagonized that they’ll stick to their old mint-condition 2G phones?