Welcome to this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists! As it is Veteran’s Day here in the U.S. (thank you veterans!!) and Thanksgiving is upon us next week, this is a good time of year to reflect on what we’ve been given and what we should be thankful for, including in mobile. So here we go…
Google’s Open Handset Alliance and Android
The big news in the mobile world this past week was Google’s announcement of its mobile OS, coupled with the Open Handset Alliance. While last week’s Carnival could merely speculate about Google’s plans, we have a somewhat more concrete picture now.
Abishek Tiwari provides us with an early analysis of Android, Google’s open mobile OS.
The two most comprehensive writeups about Google’s plans related to Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) came from Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity and Andreas Constantinou at VisionMobile Forum. Michael Mace states that Google is now an OS company, and speculates about its potential huge impact on the industry, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, and mobile developers. The post has an interesting string of comments as well. Andreas’ post is entitled Google’s Android: boring, exciting or breakthrough? He argues it’s all of the above.
Azizi Jennings takes it one step further and asks on Treo Today if the “Open Handset Alliance + OpenSocial = checkmate by Google?”
While much of the blogging about Google’s initiatives has been fairly positive, Carlo Longino at MobHappy describes Google’s announcement of the OHA and Android as “a PR and media manipulation masterstroke. Obviously since they’ve created the ‘Open Handset Alliance’, other handsets that don’t come out of it must be closed, right? It’s a story the press is running with, anyway”. So the big question is, how open is Google’s “open”, really?
As side stories to the Google announcement, Barry Welford from StayGoLinks argues that there will be More Speech-Enabled Applications With The Open Handset Alliance while Enrique Ortiz at …About Mobility talks about local applications as the next big thing in mobile, in part because developments such as the iPhone, the OHA, and Android may remove barriers to success for local apps.
Speaking of the iPhone, the Sentric blog discusses the now past unveiling of the iPhone in the UK on Nov. 9, its high cost, and why consumers will buy the overpriced device anyway. It also discusses potential competitors such as the gPhone and Nokia’s music store.
Mobile and Marketing
Marc Meyer, at Emerson Direct Marketing Observations issues A Word to Mobile Marketers: Dumb it Down. He makes a case for keeping web sites designed for mobile devices simple, specific, and easy to navigate (i.e. with one hand).
The Mobivity blog discusses “a great post on iMediaConnection today about something I have been saying for a while. In this article Dean Macri, CEO of Cielo Group, Inc talks about integrating mobile into your marketing campaigns.” The main point of the post is that mobile marketing should be used to make traditional marketing more interactive and trackable.
Obviously, in order for mobile marketing to be successful we need to know what people carry in their pockets because it informs what we design and how we design it. Bill Day points us to Jan Chipchase and his research in this area. Definitely worth a look.
Finally, Vero Pepperrell at Taptology wrote a thought-provoking post about how Mobile phones are ‘bankrupting’ teens: How can we avoid breaking the bank? She points to “a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to declare themselves bankrupt due to overspending their meagre revenue on mobile bills.” She discusses how mobile telco’s use deceptive advertising and how a little more helpfulness toward their customers could go a long way. This is my favorite post of the week.
Product Reviews
Several product reviews came my way as well. Gadget Guild reviews the new LG enV VX9900, which looks promising.
WapReview’s review of Opera Mini 4.0 – Better than WebKit? concludes that Opera Mini 4.0 is indeed better, because of dedicated page up and page down keys, a mobile view, key board shortcuts, and a huge cache.
Judy Breck posted a quick look at the Nokia N810 T, and finds it ”perfect for reading, writing and arithmetic”, calling it the “learning tablet“.
Education
Finally, and maybe a little unusual for the Carnival, a brief look at some interesting posts in the area of mobile and education.
The most important news here is probably the official announcement of the formation of the International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn), which I posted here.
Karin Fasimpaur from K12 handhelds discusses the Free Kids Dictionary project, an initiative from K12handhelds because of “the need for a free kids dictionary that could be used on mobile devices.” Stay tuned for more if you’re interested in helping out, as the post states.
She also discusses the use of mini-movies for learning sight-words, as “one interesting thing we’ve seen in using mini-movies with kids (especially older middle school kids) is that they are more likely to watch an instructional video repeatedly if they can do it in private. This is one of the advantages of mobile technology.”
And Finally …
Thanks for visiting my blog and this week’s issue of the Carnival. It’s been a pleasure to host the Carnival as I got exposed to a lot of interesting blogs. Thanks to those who submitted their posts. Next week’s issue (#100!!) will be hosted by Abishek Tiwari. That’s all folks!
Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of the mobilists to mobilists@gmail.com or by using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Image Credit: “Finally Fall”, rezlab’s photostream at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rezlab/1436719426/
. I was told I had about 8 minutes to present a unit plan that a teacher and I wrote a while back for Digital Age: Technology-Based K-12 Lesson Plans for Social Studies. So instead of doing another standup-powerpoint-to-death talk, I made a short video. You can watch it here.
