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Check out Frog’s press page on Alltel Widget. Cool stuff indeed. In just one month, we saw the release of Y! Go 2.0, TellMe Java, and Alltel Widget. Is 2007 really the year of Mobile? /psych

I am a big fan of TellMe. When you are bored and stuck in traffic, you can always call TellMe and find out what the weather is like at Honalulu….. Voice plan is cheap anyway. I mean, they are not that cheap, but you always ended up with extra min. might as well use it on TellMe.

TellMe has gone J2ME. Very interesting time for mobile technology indeed!

Screen sizes comparison. The actual physical sizes might differ. Nokia N80 and the iPhone are both 160 ppi I think. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Feel free to take the screens here for your mobile projects.

Some quick notes and thoughts about the new Apple iPhone (and the impact on the mobile industry):

• The "it’s not 3G" complain — typical 3G UMTS speed is around 300Kbps while EDGE (iPhone) is around 150Kbps. That is "good enough" for basic Web browsing and defiantly enough for email. Beside, there’s always the built-in Wi-Fi. I have plenty of usage in the UMTS land (both Asia and Europe). 3G is not as fast as you think. This also leaves room for HSDPA (3.5G) and iChat video upgrade as a feature in the future.
• Asian character input would be interesting (especially Chinese) with the lack of stylus.
• The full touch screen system is a usability concern – especially "blind dialing" while driving. 😛
• Some people dislike Cingular. One has to understand, all wireless providers are "evil", yet Cingualr’s GSM network is much more "open" compare to Verizon / Qualcomm’s CDMA system. Case in point, I can freely use my unlocked 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) Windows Mobile device on the Cingular network — as long as I have a valid data plan with Cingular. I don’t think you can do that on Verizon’s network.
• Wireless data plan is expensive. Not true. $20 bucks all you can eat from Cingular (Note: this is also the same high speed UMTS plan if your phone supports it. Cingular doesn’t care if your phone is  2G, 2.5G, 3G, or 3.5G. The settings are the same).
• I feel really sorry for Nokia’s N800 developement team. Orz ; ;
• J2ME support on iPhone will be very interesting for games and Yahoo! Go 2.0 obviously. No mention in the keynote.
• The iPhone is a smart phone – which leaves plenty of room for the next, lower price point product in the future. Think "iPhone Nano" or "iPhone Shuffle" (random dialing? ^^). At the same time, "non-smart phones" are getting better and better. Sony Ericsson’s K800i is a great camera phone with tones of well executed features. Would love to see Apple’s take on a K800i
• Apple rarely does any pre-announcement, but sadly, pre-annoucment is a norm in the handset world. Looks like Apple will follow that in the future.
• Apple did great with the Safari browser, but it’s still a huge pain to view a regular Web page on the 320×480 screen. I think "browse" is ok, but "interact" with it will be pretty bad. iPhone further highlights the need of "mobile optimized" Web pages that are context driven. I am not talking about the old WML/WAP pages here. I am talking about W3C’s mobileOK type pages. Of course, following the standard is not enough but that’s where we should get started.    

I am glad I can finally talk about Yahoo! Go 2.0.

I worked on this for the last year, and it’s officially out today. Long nights, crazy hours, work though multiple holidays… you name it… Not to mention my frequent trips to Hamburg, and Berlin.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the first Yahoo! "globally developed" products. We have designers, engineers, and product management working in Sunnyvale, London, Hamburg, and Berlin to make sure it gets done. Other Yahoo! products are either developed at Sunnyvale that get localized, or local product got picked up by the "mother ship". I know this since I have been at Yahoo! for many years.

Yahoo! Go is also unique in another regard. It probably is the most ambitious J2ME / MIDP application you see today – anywhere from jar size, code complexity, to the logistic of putting this all together. This is a landmark mobile application and service. Other people just talk about the possibilities of mobile, but I think the team went ahead and "did it".

There are many many areas we can improve (and we will), but now it’s the time to celebrate the launch of this landmark product.

Congratulation everyone!

I actually got this book as a gift from my boss. The full title is Designing for Small Screens Studio: Mobile Phones,
Smart Phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs, Navigation Systems, MP3 Players, Games
Consoles. Plenty of color pictures, global stats, screen size mocks, and case studies. If you are new to mobile design or interested to learn more about the subject matter I highly recommend this book. It’s published in April of this year with plenty of cutting edge mobile and device related design here.

Since I got the O2 Atom, I had become a fan of Windows Mobile 5.0 device. Although Windows Mobile 5.0 still looks a lot like Windows 95, but on the functionality front, it’s matches what I need.
My replacement of the O2 Atom is the HTC TyTn. TyTn got a lot of press coverage since it’s first introduced. (I think) it’s the first 3G mobile device with "world support" – HSDPA support in the US, UMTS (slower version of HSDPA if you will…) around the world.

I have been using TyTn for the past few days with interesting results. Cingular (my wireless carrier) has a decent HSDPA deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you are currently on Cingular’s data plan, your settings will be "forward compatible" with the device. Means buying a HTC Tytn, get 3G service in the US of A.

HTC Tytn + Cingular’s 3G network is indeed impressive. In one speed test, I got up to 370kbps throughput, that’s half the speed of my home DSL. In real world usage, the combination of Tytn and Cingular network is a little mixed.
I have had very good results with high quality streaming content such as MSNBC Mobile (full screen QVGA), but poor experience with general Web surf (both Opera Mobile and IE). My guess is Cingular’s (legendary) poor DNS support cause the poor performance. Facing with multiple HTTP request from the browser, the whole experience just seems slow. On the other hand, since streaming of video content is just one request, the performance tends to be more stable.

Back to physical device itself, Tytn is nice but a little on the chunky side. The slide out keyboard is similar to what we have seen coming from the past HTC Windows Mobile. The physical buttons are nice, (browser access, email access, ok/confirm button, etc.) but got placed too close to each other or too small to be useful.

Tytn + Cingular 3G network while not perfect, it gives us a chance to see what’s possible when mobile broadband internet is finally here.