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Speaking of the future, Davos’ “The Future of Mobile Technology” session is on YouTube now. Best part, of course, is Omar ask the first question 38 minutes in. Good stuff.

Check out Carlo’s coverage of Nokia’s Point and Find concept piece (Nokia World last year) + Mac Funamizu’s similar prototype. The connection of “real world” and the internet will be here sooner than we think….

As I mentioned in Carlo’s post. If we add Microsoft’s Photosynth to this, the whole user experience could be very interesting….

Who would have predicted the current iPhone software 1.1.3 is the “most hackable” iPhone to date?

Since the “bootloader 4.6 issue” been solved, its pretty easy to upgrade any 1.0.2, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 Phones to 1.1.3 then jailbreak; unlock.

During the whole process, I ran into a couple of interesting problems but all can be solved with a little interweb research:

– Low speaker volume problem (phone, iPod, YouTube etc,) can be solved by: hold down the power button and the top volume button to restart. After the restart, iPhone’s default volume should be restored.

– vt100 terminal weirdness (probably because the introduction of “mobile user” instead of everything running under root) can be solved by using Terminal v207.

– If you are native Chinese speaker, check out NativeCn 3.01 as well. Best Cantonese input method ever on any computing platform. 😛

3GSM is ON at Barcelona now (I know the name is now Mobile World Congress, but old habits die hard…).

The big news so far is the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1. You can find pretty good pics here at Hong Kong Phone Daily, which both Gizmodo and Engadget fail to come up with any good stuff (Sunday evening PST).

Sure it’s a nice phone, and many anti-iPhone fanboyz already claiming this as the end of the iPhone, but those people forget XPERIA X1 is still powered by Windows Mobile 6…. I have nothing against Windows Mobile 6 and I am actually a fan of Windows Mobile’s Today screen…, but skinning something on top of WM6 is not the right approach to solve the Windows Mobile (over all) UI problem.

“Eat your own dog food”. I am such a “mobile geek” so I try to look up local movies show-time and purchase my ticket via the Mobile Web.

I point my browser to mobile.fandango.com. You’ll see your standard XHTML mobile site. The “check out” flow went just fine, but I have problem completing the final step of purchase.

The error page I saw was “Order Failed”. “Your order could not be completed. Please check your
billing information and re-submit.”

Note: I abandoned the process and went back to my computer and finished the purchase on the regular Web. So is it me or just the mobile site’s broken?

It here in the US. One less reason to get all “Japanese Envy” whenever we talk Mobile. We need to see this for all carriers.

With 1.1.3 iPhone update, users can easily add mobile safari shortcuts to the iPhone springboard screen. This is a BIG DEAL in the mobile world – especially for the designer / developer community.

Different handsets tend to have different requirements on the launcher icons or the so called “9up menu” (since majority of the feature phones can only display 9 icons at a time).

The specs of those icons usually are not very well documented either. Some support PNG. Some claim they support PNG but only in 8-bit with no alpha channel. Some support advanced SVG 1.1 Tiny (i.e. S60 Symbian) but that’s a lot more technical and requires much closeer working with the developer to have things implemented. Some follow the standard J2ME icon size and specs, but might still ended up a few pixels off (I am looking at you Samsung, and LGs). Not to mention different screen size / view could result in multiple icon files with multiple versions.

In short. It’s a mess (if you want to get premium “face time” with your mobile users / customers).

On the business side, it’s even tougher.

Getting your app / web app in front of the consumers usually means “kowtow” to the carriers or the handset manufactures. I am not saying they are “evil” or “bad”, it’s just difficult since they have different concerns on manufacturing, and distribution reasons.

The new iPhone 1.1.3 allows users to add Mobile Web apps directly on the launcher screen just like adding a bookmark. For the designer / developers, it’s super easy (60×60 PNG icon on the server). Apple even handle the reflection and rounded corner for you. Not revolutionary, but it saves developers hours of even days of trial and error and rework.

To help the Mobile Web to grow, this is one of the many of the little things iPhone is helping the ecosystem. We want more.

If you are looking for QRCode reader for iPhone do give the current release of iMatrix a try. Their original release (about 3 weeks ago) does not support the standard QRCode, but version 3.03 fixes that. You are still required to get a “User ID” first but it does not require the ID to decode the QRCode.

Watch some of the keynotes here. Of course, it’s much nicer to be there in person… Looks like S60 is getting a new UI too… Good times.

People are going gargar over the Droid font – which is part of the Google’s Android release. They never border to explain “Why” Google come up with their own font in the first place. Maybe it’s so obvious that they didn’t border to explain, but here’s why:

To have complete control of the UI when you are dealing with multiple handset manufactures, you’ll need your own font. Take a look at the Samsung, LG or even a Motorola phone and you’ll notice all the handset manufactures tends to use their own propietary font – and they all look different.
Funny enough, at Yahoo! we did the same thing with Yahoo! Go. When we develop the Yahoo! Go client last year, we commissioned Meta Design to create a set of bit map font that would look nice on 128, 176, and QVGA screens.

We needed the font since we want to make sure the user experience (of the software client) is identical no matter what handset you are using Yahoo! Go on. We never name the font officially, but it’s always called the Yahoo! Go font or YGo16 as an example (Yahoo! Go 16 pixel). I once proposed to name the font family Hamburg, but no one took me seriously. 😛

I suggested that since it’s a tradition (in the tech world anyway) to name bitmap font after city names (think Chicago, Cairo) plus the good majority of the development team of Yahoo! Go’s based out of Hamburg, Germany.

Back to the Droid font. It’s a very nice looking font, but one has to wonder how the font will hold up on a 128×160 tiny screen when you are trying to read a big chuck of text. But maybe we won’t if there’s no 126×160 screen size devices.
Droid font doesn’t seems too compress to me and I am not sure about that. I am not saying all mobile font has to be a compressed font, but compressed fonts tends to work better when you are dealing with the portrait mobile screens. The Series 60 San (Nokia) fonts family is a classic case of good mobile optimized font – and clearly the Droid font took a different direction. Things you took for granted working on the Web has to be re-fector. Isn’t mobile fun?