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As we all know, Adobe and Apple aren’t best buddies, so Flash isn’t appearing on the iPhone/iPad any time soon. In fact, probably never. Therefore, with Flash being the king of video on the web, there’s only one option for showing video in the browser to iPhone and iPad users: HTML5 video. YouTube and some of the other big video services are rapidly moving to HTML5 video on the web anyway, despite it’s fairly limited browser support. The effort is worth it though as it makes the task of preparing and delivering video on the web much easier once Flash is out of the loop, and supporting the iPhone and iPad (and other mobile devices) should be standard practice, not an occasional extra. There’s an excellent tutorial at Dive Into HTML 5, though for the finer intricacies you’ll also want to head to the Apple Developer reference on HTML5 video. Oh, and to save you some head scratching, if you think you’ve done everything required but it still isn’t working on the iPhone, make sure you’re using BASELINE encoding. The iPhone is much more picky about this than the iPad.

Whilst iPhone, Android and other rich devices continually raise the bar for the high-end mobile experience, it would be easy to overlook the persistent innovation and advance in low-end technologies such as SMS. Common have delivered a number of services which have relied heavily on SMS and we’ve usually been delighted with the “honesty” of the user engagement when any perceived technology barriers are removed and the user is able to focus purely on the content.

Similarly, although mobile applications are extending the reach of mobile services in some areas, mobile access to the internet continues to go from strength to strength. You only have to use the Guardian or BBC mobile sites once or twice and it’s immediately apparent that a carefully optimised mobile internet experience can be easy to use, well presented and allow you to find the content you want quickly. HP have just launched a service which aims to extend mobile access to the internet even further. It’s suggested that the service will primarily benefit developing countries where 3G and data access is limited or prohibitively expensive, by allowing users to “query” the internet using SMS. If the experience and the results are good enough though there’s no reason why this “retrieve a snippet of the internet” approach might not be just as successful everywhere.

Not a blog title I ever expected to write but I love the look of this Augmented Reality app this AR iPhone app and can see it being a big hit in Japan with it’s quirky but cute mass-user game approach. I think AR is still being mainly used just because it’s cool, but I guess increasingly both games and useful applications will come forth. And I’m not discounting the excellent where’s my nearest tube station app, but you’re never more than 50m from a tube sign in London anyway so I don’t find myself reaching for the app in practice.

I’m all for standard approaches to interface design and conforming to best practice and UI guidelines, but let’s face it, you don’t very often create magical interfaces that way. However, most of the application designs over at Well-Placed Pixels feel much more likely to catch your breath, whether by pixel-perfect information design or beautifully crafted and finessed creativity. An excellent resource when next needing application UI inspiration.

It seems finally it’s cool to be a mobile specialist. Or at least if not cool then certainly in demand. I knew there was a reason why we stuck at it!

NMA’s article refers to how difficult it can be for a traditional media agency to understand mobile, stating that some “find the jump terrifying”! To some extent I think this true, not least because the mobile ecosystem is significantly different to the web. To fully understand and implement mobile delivery it’s critical to recognise the wider ecosystem that affects mobile delivery, including the handset/phone, the operator/network, the user’s context [potentially using enablers such as location], the type of content, etc.

At Common we’ve slowly established a broad range of approaches to delivering mobile experiences, and of course we’re continually learning more, but all approaches rely on understanding the pitfalls and maximising the opportunities of mobile delivery. This means in one scenario we might develop an iPhone application and in another integrate an SMS messaging system with a web server. For those that “dare make the jump” it’s an initially steep learning curve but with great opportunities beyond. And for those who can’t or won’t jump, just give us a call and we’ll partner up.

Having been a very happy Google Android user for some time, when I recently decided I could no longer get away with being a mobile professional who hasn’t used an iPhone as their main device I was surprisingly unexcited about the switch. Furthermore, I’ve had an iPod Touch for ages so it’s not even as though the iPhone held much mystery. Still, it could be ignored no longer (not now it’s on Orange at least) so I thought the least I could do is report back my findings as someone who’s genuinely invested a lot of time and a bit of love in the Android platform. So, with no particular comparison approach in mind, here’s some thoughts…

• iPhone SMS client. Just how bad is this fundamental communication element of the phone. It looks awful and is highly restrictive in that SMS is so often a trigger to other activity such as a call, calendar event, etc. Criminally bad in my opinion and utterly un-apple-esque.
• Similarly, how long will Apple persist without better use of context actions. Android is fantastic at this… Just hold down over a picture, SMS, contact, etc and up pops a menu of all the stuff you wanted to do. Very occasionally this is implemented on iphone and when it is I find it works well (off the top of my head, I think it’s used when you save a safari bookmark).
• I miss the trackball on Android. Repositioning the cursor to edit text is more cumbersome with iPhone’s zoom method, particularly if you just want to go back a few characters.
• iPhone’s screen is glorious (the screen on my new MacBook Pro is equally superior over all PC laptops). Oh, and the sound quality. Oh, and the performance. Oh, and the fact that everything just works. Pretty much flawlessly.
• iPhone’s soft keyboard easily beats Android’s. The Android has a very good hybrid mini-qwerty keypad mode, but that seems a bit like a shortfall of the full size qwerty. (Note: the hard qwerty keypad devices on android are excellent).
• Android’s google-centric always updated sync. is just brilliant if you’re Google-centric (e.g. a Google Apps user). With a little hackery, I’ve managed to get the iPhone to sync with Google Apps just the same but it wasn’t as easy out of the box.
• The iPhone copy n paste is way, way better.
• Most critically for commercial success and end-user desirability, the iTunes and App store ecosystem is the stuff android can only dream of. In fact, no other hardware/software package on any platform can match it.
• The iPhone is pretty heavy. But after a while you forget, and put it down to just being top-end build quality.
• iPhone battery is better, despite what people say.
• It feels initially as though the android is quicker to navigate around - especially regarding multiple tasking and app switching. However, once you’re into the iPhone’s “everything starts on the honescreen” method it gets pretty quick.
• Even with unlimited desktops, the iPhone is much less structured. This can be confusing when you get to having a lot of apps. And you will do.

Overall, the iPhone has become a clear winner during the 6 weeks I’ve written this. The alround user experience is almost perfection (except the SMS App, and even that I’m beginning to forget about). The Android is a very competent platform, and I expect it will go on to great and more varied things than the iPhone. However, the iPhone, as with many Apple experiences, is like a lesson in how to do things right. The icing on the cake is finding the many little gems of interface intelligence and design that they don’t even bother to tell you about - they just let you discover. iPhone users will know what I mean, and if you don’t then check back here and I’ll collate some soon.

(just to be clear, I’m comparing an HTC Hero to a 32gb iPhone 3GS. Oh, and I wrote this post using the Wordpress 2 App over a couple of days sat on various trains).

Very interesting US start-up Square seems to be developing a service to let anyone accept payment by card using a mobile phone. I love the visible verification system for checking the card holder is really who they claim to be (identical twin fraud anyone?).

With general opinion being that Apple [iPhone] has the mobile market wrapped up and that Google [Android] might, if they’re lucky, come in a distant second, it was with some interest that I attended the Nokia Ovi event on Tuesday night in Leeds. It’s widely recognised that Nokia are on the back foot at the moment, slipping [rapidly?] both in terms of market share and consumer appeal. However, from a developer perspective, four positive things things struck me about Ovi by Nokia:

1. Due to leveraging the web and Flash technologies that Nokia have been trying hard to integrate into all their handsets for some time, Ovi offers a speed of development for ‘low level’ apps that isn’t currently as easy on iPhone/Android. Whilst both those platforms also offer ‘packaged web applications’ as an alternative to full software development, neither is yet as feature rich as the Ovi options.
2. Ovi is available on Nokia Series 40 as well as Series 60 phones. What this means is that Nokia Ovi enables developers to reach the mass middle market phones rather than just the high-end smartphones. Naturally, this position will change quite rapidly, with cut-down iPhone/Android devices always being rumoured and with ‘mid-range’ users rapidly migrating upgrading to ‘high-end’ year on year anyway.
3. Nokia were keen to stress that they really really want to help us [to help them]. It would be too bold to suggest they were ‘desperate’ to help, but there did seem a genuine acknowledgement that to make Ovi anywhere near as successful as the Apple App Store, Nokia would have to leverage their massive existing developer community by making themselves genuinely available, so that things get moving before it’s too late.
4. And lastly, I was inspired to feel that they are still, after all, Nokia. It seems crazy to hear so frequently how Nokia are “down and out”, despite being a company that have understood and dominated mobile for so long. They certainly do have a battle on their hands, but being in the same space as the handful of guys representing Ovi certainly demonstrated that their absolute core business is mobile. Whether that’s enough, only time will tell.

Anyway, we’ll let you know how we get on but you can expect us to be visible on Ovi some time in the near future.

Econsultancy’s article describes a handful of rules that many information-centric mobile sites would do well to learn from. The tips in Mobile news sites: best practice tips range from technical issues such as auto-redirection to the mobile site from the full website [if searching from mobile] through to content issues such as providing as much content as possible and allowing commenting. The article doesn’t dig much deeper than some introductory tips but it’s a good baseline to start from.

Something I’m often asked is “What’s the point of building a mobile-specific internet experience when many new phones have the capability to browse full websites?”. [Or even worse, people usually say "my iPhone" rather than "many new phones"]. I’m a strong believer that a mobile-specific service will always provide a better user experience than merely viewing a web-oriented one on a capable device. Even though there are a number of technical reasons to consider [connection speed, screen size, processor speed, lack of rich-media support, etc] there are far greater and more impacting user-focussed reasons, including user context, use of mobile enablers, stronger likelihood of task-oriented activity, appropriate interface design and navigation approaches. The summary from mobiThinking in The mobile Web is dead… Long live the mobile Internet explains some of the reasoning in more detail.

Thumbprint - one of our fledgling services being developed with Blink - was used yesterday to communicate with the person stood on top of a plinth in Trafalgar Square. Thumbprint allows people to read and write about their world [well, currently only in certain cities and least]. As part of the SW11 Literary Festival, any content added to ‘Plinth’ was picked up by Lorinda on the plinth and then written on a whiteboard for the world to see, in a kind of lo-fi one to many broadcast system! Watch how it went at http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Lorinda

Apple have given pretty strong direction about the design patterns and approach to creating iPhone application UIs [in fact 'strong direction' is being kind when you consider some apps have been rejected for using chat bubbles incorrectly]. However, more often than not we’ve found that even when following the Apple UI Guidelines there are often multiple ways to tackle an interface challenge. A good solution is to take direction from other apps that have already made it into the App Store, and to create [where suitable] consistent interfaces through common design patterns where standard methods are becoming established.

I love Android. It’s not quite as slick in certain areas as iPhone but overall, especially if your connected world revolves around Google, it’s a fantastic mobile platform and day-to-day experience. However, one thing that’s been scuppering me for the past few weeks since using an HTC Magic was that I couldn’t get MMS working on Orange UK. Despite checking out the usual forums [Modaco, Android Central, XDA Developers] I couldn’t get the correct settings. And then I came across ‘Android Bloke‘. Were there ever a more male, techie “I call a spade, a spade” name for a blog? Anyway, not only can he accurately title garden implements, he also has the magic [ahem] combination of APN settings for Orange. The trick that I hadn’t previously come across is the value to enter in the ‘APN Type’ field at the bottom of the APN Settings. Instead of a helpful dropdown with options [presumably because in theory some developers may like to create their own APN types], the field is just a text entry field, and hence didn’t know to enter ‘mms’. I can now send pictures of my children to their grandmother again.

I figured one of these would be coming along from somewhere soon. I nearly threatened to do one myself but, presumably like so many others, have battled on with a varied mix of GUI elements used in creating Android screensflows/wireframes and never quite feeling that I had a ‘kit’ that was worthy of sharing. Well, good old Smashing Magazine have done one for us! This Android GUI PSD Vector Kit will be an invaluable resource for anyone needing to design Android flows and screens.

We’re on the brink of finishing our first ‘full’ iPhone application to be distributed through the Apple App Store, and as such have been trying to learn more about the obvious pitfalls to avoid in terms of having an app accepted. We’ve already had some excellent word of mouth advice, and general rule of thumb seems to be “follow Apple’s guidelines like a bible!”. The following sites seem a good start for your checlist too… Avoiding iPhone app rejection from Apple offers a good starting point for the things to run through, with a round-up of comments/replies. Unsurprisingly, Stackoverflow always has excellent developer advice and discussion, and they too are a good starting point for successful AppStore submission.

Obviously we’ll update our own experiences in a few weeks once we’ve been through the process ourselves.

We’re running another installation of Five Trees Forest - our RFID/SMS  interactive mobile story this week at the Showcomotion Conference in Sheffield. Created with Blink, we’ve had to redevelop the mobile interaction this time round so that the game is played purely by SMS rather than RFID due to there being up to 400 players potentially taking part! It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops amidst the context of a conference and whether the players are as engaged using SMS as they have been with the physical interaction of using RFID.

It seems the iPhone has an answer to everything. Or at least iPhone developers/marketers do. I can’t pretend to have tried out the TentFinder App so please do download it and give it a go rather than considering this a review but hasn’t anyone realised a] there’ll be a lot of tears when a lot iPhones go missing or get waterlogged at this years festivals and b] after using GPS, making some calls and recording some ‘amusing’ festival videos, the chances of the iPhone battery lasting long enough to help you find your tent on day 2 would be a miracle! Call me old school but personally I’ll be digging out an old robust Nokia with a black-and-white [black-and-green] screen, two weeks battery life and the kind of casing that you can drive a bus over, and then tieing a flag to the top of our tent.

A piece of work created at the MEX Conference in May shows the interesting, if unsurprising, disconnect between what mobile operators and the end consumer see as key elements of the mobile user experience. The mobile user experience is intricately complex… hardware/devices, network connectivity, differing usage requirements between users, content and services, billing, enablers, marketing/branding, etc. Whilst it seems unlikely that the ‘building blocks’ in the MEX diagram would ever be identical on both sides, it is hoped that they might one day be complimentary. Until the mobile industry adapts and recognises this it appears that mobile user experience will continue to disappoint many consumers for a variety of reasons.

NOTE: If the title to this piece, and perhaps that of the original MEX content, seem familiar then you’re probably thinking of the excellent book by Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience.

Spotify are apparently working on an application which would enable you to listen to their streaming music service via your mobile phone. The killer aspect is that a playlist prepared whilst you have an internet connection can then be cached on your phone for playback when you don’t. The demo is currently on Android, with an iPhone version promised soon.

The lengthy beta of Skyfire [which apparently saw over one million downloads] has come to an end and Skyfire has moved to an official v.1.0 release. If you have a high-end Nokia [N or E Series] or a recent Windows Mobile phone [WM5 or 6] then Skyfire is certainly worth downloading and installing.

At a glance, the features are similar to the very capable Opera mobile browser. The big win for Skyfire however is that it supports Flash 10 content. This means that a wealth of previously unavailable content is now supported on mobile, not least of course Youtube [and similar video sites such as Vimeo]. Having only used the browser for a short time, my first impressions are that it is not as fast at rendering a page as Opera, nor is the rendered text as sharp. However, in general usage the browser performed excellently, and standard browser functionality such as automatically rotating to landscape when I tilt the device worked well. Furthermore, using Flash content worked like a dream. It would also be a dream for mobile operators too of course as, when not in wifi range, the Flash content would typically chomp happily through my data bundle.

All in all, Skyfire is a highly capable browser and brings my N95 mobile browser experience to a new level. Whilst not quite threatening the alround iPhone or Android browser experience just yet, it demonstrates that we can continue to expect a high quality mobile internet experience on non-touch screen phones for sometime to come.

Nice to see Thumbprint, one of our newer projects, getting a reference on Tech Guardian and that it’s rightly referred to as “embryonic”. In his article on hyperlocal information, Victor Keegan looks at how smartphones have created micro-level location awareness, ranging from discovering photos taken nearby to retracing Shakespeares footsteps!

We’re very happy to announce that Common Agency won the Best Application of Mobile Technology award in last week’s Yorkshire Digital Awards 2009 for our work [with Blink] on the Five Trees Forest story/game. In a strong and diverse category which included a Bluetooth city guide and a mobile internet service, Five Trees Forest was lauded for it’s innovative and effective use of future mobile technology to create a compelling and immersive experience. This follows a successful installation in April of Five Trees Forest at the BBC’s innovation labs, where the service generated much enthusiasm in it’s demonstration of future mobile technology.

Having established ourselves as specialists in mobile design and development by delivering numerous projects for key mobile players such as Orange, HTC and other mobile companies - we’re particularly happy to also be gaining recognition from our peers for our mobile work. Furthermore this is at a time when mobile, perhaps ‘finally’ some might say, is becoming a more significant part of the digital landscape. With our current activity spanning applications for iPhone and Android, mobile internet service development and mobile user experience design, it’s a great time to be involved in creating and delivering mobile services.

We’re looking forward to attending the Yorkshire Digital Awards 2009 event this evening, not least because Five Trees Forest - our RFID story/game developed in association with Blink - is nominated in the Best Application of Mobile Technology category.

Not to be outdone by recent publicity regarding the iPhone v.3.0 release later this year, Google has just announced the availability of the SDK for developing for Android 1.5. It’s not the final release of the v.1.5 SDK but apparently is pretty close. From a development perspective it will help with developing for multiple Android versions and introduces some important changes to the SDK/OS structure. In terms of features, some key stuff in v.1.5 are soft keyboards, home screen widgets and speech recognition.

Some interesting perspectives regarding whether any of many’other’ app stores [Google's is out, Nokia due imminently, Blackberry and Microsoft on the way, various operators are live or in the pipeline, etc] can expect to have any of Apple’s success. Without the all-round integrated experience of the iTunes ecosystem it’s hard to see how any other app store can deliver quite as good an experience but time will tell.

With Android app development now heavily underway here in the Common office, it’s currently our flavour-of-the-month mobile OS so it’s interesting to see MJelly’s round-up of some early Android statistics regarding mobile internet usage and behaviour.

Though not a surprise,  Twitter has now revealed that it plans to add paid-for services sooner than expected. It is almost certain that the services will be in the form of a premium account targetted at businesses.

Anyone who’s developed mobile internet sites will know that one of the biggest issues affecting the download experience is the latency often experienced when communicating via the operator gateway. This often means that no matter how fast the connection, device or the server, a noticeable and often unavoidable delay is created. However, a method using Base64 encoding could be used to circumvent this problem by, in simple terms, defining what would have been an external resource [requiring a request] in the form of a text string that can be embedded within a single file [such as a CSS stylesheet] and subsequently understood and decoded by the browser. As is often the case of course, any such trick often leads to other side-effects to be wary of  - one such effect in this case being that of the browser cache limitations. However, in many scenarios, this method could introduce potentially significant experience enhancements to the overall page request time.

Not much point in pretending we’ve had chance to play with iPhone OS 3.0 [it's not officially available until summer '09] but it looks like a pretty significant update and shows just how serious Apple is about staying ahead of the field. Check out the excellent Gizmodo review and some great screenshots from Engadget.

Ahead of next week’s 3GSM Conference in Barcelona - the major mobile event of the year - the BBC reports that Samsung has delayed the launch of it’s Android-based phone. With competition in the touch-screen space becoming increasingly fierce it will be interesting to see what devices are announced at 3GSM on the high-end platforms.

It will be interesting to observe whether O2’s forthcoming venture to run a branded version of Bebo is a success. Apparently an earlier trial saw traffic grow by 60% so whereas on the one hand one might assume that any brand - particularly mobile operators and ISPs - would be viewed cynically by “the yoof” as trying to own their social network, it may be a sign that the mobile operators are finally gaining acceptance as credible providers and partners in such web services as opposed to merely becoming back-end enablers. Or it may just be that the tariff is good.

Ever since I started using the iPhone I expected there to be a glut of decent Basecamp apps due to both being slanted towards a design and tech savvy audience. Also, due to a very capable API, Basecamp seems the ideal focus for an application that could offer high-productivity benefits and hence demand a fairly high price on the App Store.

However, I’ve been largely unimpressed with all the offerings I’ve tried. I’ve used Minivan for a while but it has often suffered from poor responsiveness and isn’t easy to use across multiple projects. Outpost appears to be flavour of the month with a slick website and top billing in a recent 37Signals mailshot but the reviews on App Store are dreadful [though it's fair to say the app may have been through several development cycles since]. And hence I’m currently trying out Groundwork, which seems good so far though there’s definitely room for improvement.

In short, none of the apps tested yet seem to be clear winners and I’d even go so far as to say none are yet worthy of anything other than infrequent or urgent access to your Basecamp projects.

Twitter led me to notice this article about five cool ways to support the W3C, and it made me think that perhaps the W3C isn’t this ‘far off’ organisation that we as a small agency may feel it to be. Perhaps the issue, as the article suggests, is that the wider and in particular lower level web design/development community don’t get involved enough other than [hopefully] using the excellent validation tools.

Er yeah… in that it’s likely to give you Mr Spock ears. What the BBC are covering as a glimpse at ‘top-secret’ phone is raising cynical comment in some of the mobile forums, ranging from “a pat on the back for their PR company” to “a fairly basic way to generate interest just before floating”.

Web designers have always battled with, and found creative ways around, the limited number of fonts available for ’standard’ use on the web. On mobile there is usually no option but to allow the device to just render using a single system font, but on iPhone at least there is a selection to choose from - though not the complete set that is included on Mac OS X. This excellent review of the iPhone fonts explains the comparisons to the ones available on OS X and some of the shortcomings with the iPhone subset.

As an average mobile user, you walk into a shop, buy a phone and come out with it all nicely set-up. If you’re a mobile professional or developer however you’ll frequently have had to set-up a phone from scratch or possibly change the settings to those of another network. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve used the GPRS information and UK settings on the filesaveas site but they have saved me time over and over again when settings up the 3G/data settings for a phone.

Nothing like a live demo to destroy an otherwise stable system so here goes… a live test of wordpress’s own iPhone app. It’s feature set is adequate as opposed to desirable but it’s simple to use and has some good offline awareness of your blog settings (such as categories). Shame it doesn’t handle tags the same as categories though. Many users would miss posting images too, though this is not a problem for me. So, if you’re after amazing features then maybe try one of the 3rd party paid-for alternatives but for something a bit better than just posting by email (and with the official Wordpress badge on) the app seems worth a free install.

Before reading this I’d already installed 1-6 of Wired’s 10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008 and was using Tweetie as my preferred Twitter app so either I’m very common or this is genuinely one of the better iPhone app round-ups. Of the one’s I’ve not used, NetShare sounds good - a feature I used previously for free on Windows Mobile. I’d also add a great little puzzle game called Subway Shuffle which I’ve used to occupy many a train journey.

Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing, says Palm of it’s new ‘Pre’ handset. That’s all well and good but in today’s hyper-competitive touch screen smartphone market, thinking ahead would have been more effective had it resulted in Palm producing the iPhone.

Update: Effective marketing or not, looks like I’ll be eating my words as there are a number of reviews just out saying that the Pre is a damn fine device, measuring up well against the iPhone and G1.

Robert Scoble, well known technology blogger and commentator, suggested nine ways Twitter could make money. And it turns out of course that, with Twitter being one of the biggest albeit tech-focussed successes of 2008, a lot of other people had some ideas too.

There’s some interesting mobile and wireless predictions for 2009 on the mTrends site, ranging from how virtual goods and mPayments will rocket to the possibility of Apple bringing it’s iPhone success to the Nano end of their range.

Forget Smartphones. The Pomegranate has to be the first Geniusphone. Someone should have told them that they only have to include everything but the kitchen sink.

As over half of the UK are now web users, the growth of new internet users is naturally slowing. However, as predicted for the past couple of years, mobile internet usage is now beginning to significantly increase. 25% more people accessed the internet using their mobile between April - Sept 2008. The increase can probably be accredited to improved handset capabilities across mainstream devices, higher awareness of mobile services, an increase in quality and breadth of ‘immediate’ information services and a growing focus on mobile from the key social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, along with simpler, inclusive data tariffs from the operators.

Intersquash.com offers a straightforward way of translating your website content into an iPhone optimised webpage. The resulting page offers little more than a generic iPhone skinned version of a site’s RSS feed, but it appears to be a quick and easy way of optimising any content for the iPhone that’s already available via RSS.

A recent report by internet research company ComScore examines how UK internet users are accessing the internet across both web and mobile.

An often cited future role for mobile continues to near reality as Nokia have been demonstrating their plans to position the mobile at the centre of home automation, controlling heating, security and other appliances.

Who needs medical training or volumes of journals when you can receive instructions by text message? That’s all a volunteer surgeon had to go on as he amputated a boy’s shoulder via text message instructions from a colleague in London.

I just came across the Gaping Void - “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”, and, besides being entertained, it reminded me of a previous life creating some of the first WAP m-cards for Hallmark. In these iPhone rich-experience days, mobile users would now laugh at the 44×96 pixel monochrome bitmap greetings but there is something refreshing about being forced to keep your message concise.

The Future of Mobile Conference appears to be one of the better mobile conferences at the moment, as it’s organised by Carsonified who do a great job of demonstrating the difference between organisers who care about the subject and organisers who care about putting on conferences. As I missed the event I’ve been catching up via the web, much of which has helpfully been aggregated on the MJelly site.

Yes, it’s true. Since the start of November you can no longer buy a license for Windows 3.1. In case that feels worrying, to put this into perspective here is a rough comparison of a PC specification to run Windows 3.1 vs a current Windows MOBILE specification…

Windows 3.1 PC: 10 Mhz processor speed, 640Kb RAM, 640×480 VGA screen [16-256+ colours], 7Mb hard disk, 9.6Kbps dial-up modem.

Windows Mobile Smartphone [e.g. HTC S740]: 528Mhz processor speed, 256Mb RAM, 320×240 QVGA screen [65k colours], 256Mb ROM + 1Gb SD removable disk, Bluetooth/Wifi/GPS/Quad-band GSM connectivity.