Businessweek has an interesting article about Nokia out today. The story pretty much
explains where Nokia is and wants to head in the future. 

It’s not really worth to summarize the article, however I am not sure if Nokia will be able to
fight the current Iphone and Gphone craziness.

Sometimes it is not about market share, but marketing. The US market is still important
and Nokia is having a hard time. However with the smart people in the company and acquisitions like Navteq, there is much room for improvement.

Will be exciting to see what’s going to happen with the new Nokia generation.

Interesting design over at Openpeak. A telephone, messaging, mobile web device for consumers at home.

I really like the device. I myself would love to have a smaller device in my hand, instead of running around with the laptop all day
Found via Mediauser

In 2006 Microsoft launched the Deepfish - Mobile browsing lab research. The goal of this project was to come up with the best user interface for mobile web browsing.

However…the Iphone with Safari is out, Nokia launched Xpressmusic and the Gphone with a possible Chrome browser is around the corner.

Long story short: Microsoft stopped the project and is happy that “Deepfish helped drive that innovation”. Well…sad to see this fish going belly up. Congrats to MS for all their achievements.

Would be nice to know if there will be a new Mobile IE coming out?

ReadWriteWeb, which is certainly one of the best blogs out there has a great post about Africa’s Mobile web.
Africa basically has bypassed the “PC age” and is heading directly to the mobile world.

Here a few mobile penetration stats about Africa:

-Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with
mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country
to country.

- In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years

- Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region.

Having lived in South Africa a while back….I really love stories like that. It’s just amazing that the carriers build up the towers and give third world countries the opportunity to participate in the first world.

I am so glad that I tested the mobile web with my Ipod Touch and didn’t fall for the Iphone. I always was and am more intrigued of what Google is doing since they not only come out with superior products, but also have an incredible reach.

So here it is..it is not a “dream”…and I am sure I will wait in line this time: The Google Android G1 Phone

T-Mobile G1 Android Released : Full Details of the Google Android HTC Dream Phone

HTC T-mobile G1 Google Android Dream Phone (Animated Demo)

Funny that Ralph Lauren, a company that I almost ended up with is using QR Codes in their ads and in the stores:

Picture credit to PSFK.com.
Also other Ralph Lauren / Polo QR codes report here.

Oh well…not sure how secret it is, but someone figured that there is a QR code on
on the Iphone:

Ryan over at Punchkickinteractive is always good for a great post. This time the 5 Commandments of Mobile Web design. Here a quick summary:

1. The Mobile Web is not the little sister of the Traditional web.
2. Give People What they want, when they want it
3. Build unique mobile content, or don’t bother at all.
4. Make it useable (3xtimes)
5. Don’t forget about design. Seriously

and my 6th one:
If you design for mobile, read Ryan’s book (cannot find link now…but read it!).

Mitchel Baker, chairperson of Mozilla, announced that by 2010 there should be an effective
Firefox in the the mobile market. Here the quotation from the Mozilla dev blog:

“Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukicevic has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture
which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and
handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full
web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant
user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work
will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by
allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that
do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s
TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha
release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.”

:

A study held by Innofact AG shows that 53% of Germans Don’t Use The Mobile Web B/C it is to expensive. 53% don’t use it, b/c there is no interest or they don’t see any value.
15% say, there current mobile phone doesn’t support the mobile web. 11% say it is
too complicated (e.g. too slow).
5% are looking forward for a mobile with mobile web capabilities.