
Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap - Alex3917
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_soft.html
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jsjenkins168
I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's
trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not
involved in or is familiar with.

Take point #3 for example. Has he not heard of OTA installation? That is the
way things are done nowadays, not transfer over the USB cable.

Basically all of his points are BS with the exception of #1. Compatibility
differences really are the problem with cell phone development. But this
really just makes the barriers for entry higher. Cool things are still
possible. Also, I'm not seeing THAT many cell phone startups right now.. At
least not as many as I would expect.

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sethjohn
So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge
of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic
questions.

I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet.
Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There
must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are
they?

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Alex3917
Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience.

1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective.
If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of
these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial.

2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly
if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stuff, but
for two college kids to try it would be like launching a home-by-christmas
offensive of Russia.

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jsjenkins168
I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't
trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell
phones to consider.

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Alex3917
Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention
probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in
the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are
still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage
perspective.

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Tichy
Shouldn't it be possible to somehow educate the users as to what phones to buy
if they are interested in mobile applications? Probably atm it is a catch-22
as there are few useful applications so people don't worry too much about
their phones capabilities.

Most adverts about phones don't even mention Java capability, it tends to take
some detective work to discover a phones capabilities for development. Whereas
having developed for mobile phones, there are some models I would definitely
commend against.

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danw
People dont see mobile as something to run apps on. They see them as fashion
accessories. They want a pretty handset that comes for free with their
contract. This is why many have a RAZR despite it having one of the worst
mobile UIs I have encountered and very poor support for apps. Heck, even I
bought bought one for the way it looked despite being a developer who should
have known better!

Perhaps if you could market a 'myspace' phone or a youtube handset it might
work? A phone with tight integration between the device UI and popular web
apps. This looks like more of a marketing problem than a technical one.

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staunch
It's just a matter of time before all phones have real browsers and plugins,
they already have the bandwidth. That's when it will become interesting to me.
I'm lazy.

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stuki
In my admittedly old fashioned view, the killer app for phones is talk, and
the competition is too entrenched :).

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danw
Talk is great but I know many here in the UK who don't use the phone for talk,
just SMS. I used to be one of them! As a teenager on a PAYG phone voice seemed
too pricey. The per message charging for SMS was preferred than the per minute
for voice. You knew exactly what a text was going to cost as opposed to a
phone call that could drag on. Usually we would spend more on texting back and
forth than the phone call would have cost but we still did it because of the
consistency.

There are plenty of places to innovate even with voice. Theres no mobile white
pages (those great big hulking phone books that contain all of the phone
numbers of people living nearby) for example. Voicemail and other forms of
asyncronus voice are ripe for improvement. Possibly even a 'voice twitter'
that would let you record 60 second snippets of audio and broadcast them over
website, skype, MMS etc. Micro-podcasting as it were!

Like you, I'm sure voice phone calls will remain the predominant use for a
phone but that doesnt stop us innovating with mobile!

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lupin_sansei
Seems to me that Cell Phones are in the position of home computers before the
PC. Each manufacturer having differing standards and specs. I wonder if this
is somewhere the Java really will be WORM?

