BREW 2008, SAN DIEGO – Adobe and Qualcomm announced Flash would be fully integrated into the BREW Mobile Platform. The news was the latest in a string of great announcements about the platform that are taking the BREW and the Flash Lite communities by surprise. Last week’s announcement came on the heels of some great developments on the Flash front with Sony Ericsson announcing all its future handsets will be Flash enabled and with Adobe’s announcement that licensing the Flash player will be free (meaning other handset makers are likely to follow).
Qualcomm and Adobe are partnering to create, or rather revamp, Qualcomm’s BREW Mobile Platform. For an Adobe perspective Read Bill Perry’s overview on his FlashDevices blog. Technically, BREW already was a mobile platform to begin with, but in the wake of the iPhone and possible Android disruptions, it’s not surprising this has been in the works. These companies are looking for partners to create platforms and alliances to ensure their competitive edge. Could this mean that we will see AIR mobile (Adobe Integrated Runtime) soon? And if so, will it cooperate with this new BREW Mobile Platform?
The Adobe Flash Lite player has been available as a BREW application (BREW engineers call it an extension) for almost 2 years — but in its current state, it allows Flash Lite applications to run only as siloed downloads (for games, screen savers, visual ringtones, etc.). There was no good way to use Flash Lite for anything other than tiny apps, unless you had the full support of Adobe in helping you write a custom player for your platform of choice. In addition, it was clear Adobe did not have plans to port Flash Lite 3 to the BREW platform as a BREW app.
Fast forward to now… Continue Reading »
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Check out TODAY, a free downloadable application for Symbian phones that collects usage data and creates visualizations based on that information.
From the application designers/developers:
TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.
It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique.
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Check out Information Design Patterns, a site developed by Christian Behrens as part of his Master thesis, The Form of Facts and Figures. This is absolutely the last word in “the development of a design pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design.”
This type of visual presentation of information starts to get really interesting when you extend them with interactivity and connect them with data.
PICTURED LEFT TO RIGHT: Scatterplot, Simple Pie Chart, Multiset Bar Chart, Stacked Bar Chart, Stacked Area Chart, Tree Diagram, Relation Circle, Isometric Bar Chart, Sankey Diagram
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Mobile marketers have a few kinks to iron out before they reach the delicate symbiosis between the marketer and the marketplace.
Burger King has announced a new mobile game. Users can play for a monthly fee of $2.99 — about the price of fries and a Coke.
So, there are two sides to put the mayo in dissecting Burger King’s rationale here.
First, let’s say the target user is a Burger King fan. She likes the kitschy enamel King from the TV ads as much as she likes BK’s juicy flame-broiled taste. But, is she enough of a fan to pay $2.99 a month to play the Burger King game on her handset?
From another angle, let’s say the target user is just a really avid casual gamer. But, of the games she could select, is she attracted to branded games of this nature; games where you have to “remember how to make a Whopper” and have to “squirt ketchup through the air while navigating through a BK restaurant?”
The jury is out on this one for me. I know we’ll continue to see experimentation with co-branded marketing campaigns, banner ads, branded content, “pay walls”, etc. I just wasn’t prepared for someone to suggest that users would like to pay recurring monthly fees for branded experiences; especially coming out of the fast food category.
Read the Press Release
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Convergence is sometimes viewed as the consolidation of multiple technologies towards a singular über-device. I prefer to view convergence as the tendency of technologies, as they grow in complexity and scope, to overlap and consolidate functions. Convergence is a trend wherein devices and functions take on commonly shared traits, but this doesn’t mean that this trend ultimately ends with a single, multi-functional mega-device, no matter how cool and ‘mad scientist’ that might sound. Product mobility, technical innovation, component obsolescence, and proprietary ownership of certain functions are among the many forces that will ensure we continue to interact with ecosystems of related and overlapping devices rather than a single device with every function built in.
But, convergence as a concept illustrates how interaction design for devices is changing. As our devices advance, they are often consolidating functions previously reserved for separate devices. Examples of this can be seen in most modern devices, from mobile phones (which serve as PDAs, calculators, mini-computers, and portable game consoles as well as communication devices) to Media Center PCs (which serve as DVR, stereo music player, and digital picture frame as well as a standard personal computer).
With all this in mind, I’m offering up 7 considerations to use when designing interactions for converged devices.
Continue Reading »
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Adobe’s investor relations call this week discussed the question of Flash for Apple’s iPhone. Get the inside information from Adobe’s Flash evangelist, Bill Perry.
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
I’m discovering more and more that it’s not the user experience groups within the carriers and handset manufacturers that we need to convince about a new interface innovation; it’s the chipset manufacturers. While the vision and promise of a given UI might grease the necessary wheels of approvals to get an innovation to market, it rarely arrives without a degree of compromise.
Take the Sony XPERIA X1. In this highly-polished pitch video, the UI shucks and jives with all the agility of motion graphics at their finest. And sure, it works. For a UI that relies on a simple 3-view switcher to differentiate, it does make for a unique mobile experience. It certainly is more interesting than a lot of phone UIs out there. However, the actual device experience does lack in the speed department. The experience becomes even more painful when navigating the arched carousel, as demonstrated in this video.
Are companies hoping simple-minded consumers won’t notice these details? Unfortunately, in this example, an interesting UI transition has now become something that many users can’t help but notice — and wait for — every time they switch modes. Despite the fact that this is largely driven by the processor’s ability to push the objects around screen, this is the very stuff that perpetuates the stereotype that visual designers are all about gratuitous graphics at the cost of UI efficiency.
Sony XPERIA, marketing video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay7RMHcUuGQ
Sony XPERIA, hands-on at 3GSM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuo9CAZCbIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wU5eiMR57s
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Symbian seems to be in the first stage of grief over Android, Google’s new operating system for mobile. From an article by the BBC: “Google’s dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market, a senior executive at Symbian has said.”
From the Symbian exec:
“About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched.
“It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.”
And two paragraphs later:
“Meanwhile, the head of Nokia in the UK said the firm was in discussions with Google about using the platform.”
Read the BBC News article.
Link via Slashdot.
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
The tectonic plates under Earth’s crust are moving very slowly all the time. Yet, we only notice them when enough tension builds up and there’s an earthquake. (Yes, I’m in California, and yes we had a 5.3 the other day.) The analogy applies to the dynamic you get in the mobile industry where there’s progress being made all the time, but where it’s easy to just wish it happened sooner. The trend is moving toward openness and toward user choice, but we don’t feel it until someone makes a big announcement like Google’s this week.
The shift is happening, and thankfully it’s happening faster than plate tectonics. Apple’s iPhone launch was a big deal, proving that a device manufacturer can play first fiddle in the US mobile industry (and AT&T isn’t complaining that 40% of iPhone buyers are new subscribers) and more importantly, proving that a device’s user experience can lead every part of the conversation; within the industry and with consumers.
Google’s announcement feels like a corollary to Apple’s. It adds evidence that a non-carrier can wrangle support from across the mobile industry (handset and chip OEMs, carriers, platform developers) to create an open platform.
Google’s announcement has interesting possibilities. What will device manufacturers come up with if they don’t have to pay Microsoft (or anybody else) for their OS? What will the carriers create if they didn’t have to pick from the pros and cons of the various OSs, but if they had the ability to write their own branded UI for a line of devices? What will the third party application developers be able to do with a more open, internet-powered approach (as is starting to happen on the Apple front, but that’s another debate.) What will content providers create for users if Google can prove an ad-subsidized mobile model will work?
Someday we’ll all look back and remember how cute Google was when it was just a little rainbow logo search field staring at you from a blank page.
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Mobile phones based on Google’s software are not expected to be available until the second half of next year. They will be manufactured by a variety of handset companies, including HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung and be available in the United States through T-Mobile and Sprint.
The phones will also be available through the world’s largest mobile operator, China Telecom, with 332 million subscribers in China, and the leading carriers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, as well as T-Mobile in Germany, Telecom Italia in Italy and Telefónica in Spain.
link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/technology/05cnd-gphone.html?hp
Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.
