Between Brackets

After a lot of speculation Google finally announced its own Android phone today, the Nexus One. Yet another Android phone, and this time from the Android makers themselves. Especially this last point is not unimportant, since it displays that Google considers Android and mobile phones to be important and that it will use its considerable powers to provide more and more useful apps for the Android platform. The Android platform grows a bit bigger with this announcement.

Seems that the only Smart Phone platform that didn’t grow the second half of this year in the states is the WinMo platform. This is according to a survey from ComScore.

The good news is that the smartphone market keeps on growing and that we’ll see more feature rich phones. This will drive the adoption of mobile internet, which we think is a good thing

Nokia may well have the intention of selling off its handset business according to this article.

The iPhone (almost?) de-throwned Nokia as the most profitable handset manufacturer. But an even greater threat may be the Android phones.

Maybe the maemo OS may bring new live to the company (Symbian really is dated now). And then again, maybe Nokia does need to transform itself as IBM did a couple of decades ago.

Great times ahead.

While Apple tries to make its Developers more happy with their reviewing processes by providing the current approval status, there are people that see (expect?) the move by app developers from Apple towards Android to really start now.

Meanwhile, Nokia has introduced its new N900 with yet another mobile OS called Maemo, and now Samsung joins the crowd with again another mobile OS called Bada.

Although this clearly shows manufacturers think there is a lot of business to be done in the app space, developers increasingly find themselves in a situation that is even worse than that of developing mobile web applications: please create separate app for every popular device.

There’s a lot going on in the app space at the moment.

I’ve often used Shazam (the phone app to identify music) on my Android phone. But on my primary phone the Nokia N85 (a phone they made back in the days the animals still spoke) the service was not available.

Browsing the Ovi market last week I saw that shazam was now also available for Symbian. I immediately downloaded it and tested it.

It’s a great service. It doesn’t recognize some of the local music, letting you know this in a fun way:

Nothing found (don't hum! )

But other than that the mainstream music is no problem to the service:

Yes, recognized!

We recently had a marker-based augmented reality application developed for Android.

It is promising. There’s still a performance issue, but overall it is pretty cool. It should work on any Android phone (1.5 or higher)

See what it looks like:

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="untitled.swf" width="400" height="300" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]

When the marker is not completely visible to the camera, the 3D figure disappears. And the marker recognition is still pretty processor intensive, which makes it a bit of a jerky experience at times, but it works and that’s what counts, right?

According to a poll among 147 executives in the mobile industry, N-Gage is a dodo and jME is on its way out (even if this is an April’s fool joke, it is clear that N-Gage and jME are in trouble and are loosing ground fast to new contenders).

The new stars at the gaming firmament are -tatataah-: iPhone and Android.

It is clear that Nokia has to address the -lack of an- App Store phenomenon asap. They must make it super easy to buy and install games. Furthermore, they need to make sure consumers can re-install and play their games on any of their Nokia devices (now a game is bound to a specific device and when you buy a new phone, you need to buy and install all your games all over again)

The iPhone proved that people do want to access the internet when the experience is fun and easy and now accounts for 50% of mobile internet traffic in the US.

But now the Android is starting to show up in the statistics. According to AdMob stats already 5% of all mobile internet usage in US comes from Android handsets.

These figures are from AdMob and they don’t include traffic to sites that don’t serve AdMob ads… But they are an indication.

I still don’t understand why the people at Apple didn’t include the copy-paste fnuctionality in the iPhone (it’s wish #3 on pleasefixtheiphone.com). I love the wink the Android Developers made about it, by posting the Youtube movie Android Peeks – copy & paste.

But will this extra feature (and many others) be enough?