Yesterday, a non-work friend asked me why there isn’t one programming language that covers all phones. They thought that it would have been in everyone’s interest to have a standard way of programming phones.
I explained how phone OEM and network operator selfish self-interest has resulted in the situation where each has tried to differentiate their […]

I have seen too many mobile projects fail because they run out of money due to what I call ‘release phobia’ - the inability to release a completed application and instead continually re-engineer it to make it better.
Release phobia usually, but not always, occurs on the server as opposed to phone side. Toward the end […]

I have been asked a few times now how it’s possible for an individual to develop for mobile when phones and tariffs are so expensive. This problem is particularly pertinent to multi-platform development.
The obvious answer is to charge enough for your application or to your end customer to cover phone costs. As an indication, about […]

Chetan Sharma has an interesting free report on the untapped mobile data opportunity (pdf).
The report focusses on how network operators can concentrate on new brands, affordable data plan pricing and killer user experiences to create new categories of devices and data services plans to increase the number of subscribers consuming data.
The interesting part of myself […]

I sometimes think there are so many mobile applications and services that we have reached a point of information overload. If you were to subscribe to say, twitter/facebook then add in the many services such as travel, weather, stocks and news, it soon becomes apparent that there isn’t any user attention-span remaining for extra or […]

Sometimes I experience the frustrations of being a mobile phone consumer rather than those of being a phone software developer.
As I mainly work from home I don’t tend to drive that much. When I do, I am of the ‘old school’, in that I just let the phone ring and don’t answer […]

I am getting an increasing number of enquiries regarding development of applications for the Droid? Not Android, specifically the Motorola Droid. Most of the people who have asked this are non-tech people who have heard of or used the Motorola Droid but are probably less aware of Android.
This has surprised me. I didn’t think a […]