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As indicate by this blog post, San Mateo is becoming the center of mobile development. There’s at least a dozen mobile related startup at San Mateo. What should we call this? We need a new buzz word for San Mateo so the media can cover this more. NYC Soho used to be the “Silicon Alley”. List of placed with “Silicon” names.

While I wrote about the launch of I-Mode in Hong Kong a few weeks back, it looks like O2 (Europe) and Telstra (Australia) are actually moving away from I-mode. Best quote in the IHT article:

“I-mode’s major drawback, Nicholas said, was that it was a closed system, requiring users to obtain i-mode software and forcing mobile content providers to adhere to rigid i-mode rules for designing Internet data and games for i-mode devices.”

I have been saying that for a few years now, and mocoNews’ writer James seems to agree with my thoughts on this. Whenever I hear people said how great the Japanese phones are, I usually would try to politely point out that’s not entirely true.
The Japanese mobile industry seems far ahead because of their consumer wide adoptation of their phones as the primary internet device. To stay competative, carriers and handset manufecturers are force to go super high end or super cute to keep their customers. What’s usually being sacraficse is the easy of use of most of these handsets. But the “positive vibe” is certainly there to encourage the healthy eco system of hardware, software, and services.

The current issue of Hong Kong youth culture consumer magazine East Touch did a huge cover infommercial on the Hutchsion launch of I-mode in Hong Kong.

Hong Kongnese’ worship of Japanese culture is understandable, but why border with I-mode (something that’s last gen.) when we are in the age of XHTML (aka WAP 2.0 – the non-gateway mobile internet), iPhone, and turly content-rich open Mobile Web?

At the same time, Hutch is also pushing “open-garden” in Europe so I am not sure what’s going on there.

Take a quick look of the the Hutch Hong Kong I-mode Web Site you will see boring handsets. If you thought I-mode means bringing bleeding edge Japanese handset to the Hong Kong market, then prepared to be disappoint. Sorry, no super cool handsets for you Hong Kong Hipsters. 🙂

Want to experience "full" internet browsing (that promised by iPhone) on your cel phone today? On a non-iPhone? On a Windows Mobile phone?! 😛

I suggest you check out Microsoft’s Deepfish. (Note: at the time of writing, the limited public beta registration is closed)

If you have seen Steve Jobs’ iPhone demo, you should have a pretty good idea on what does "enhanced browsing" means. To put it simply, these type browser rendering technology take a snapshot of an existing Web page and resize it down (like a photoshop scaling effect) for the mobile screen.

During the dinner time, I played with Deepfish for about 15 mins (my wife was pretty unhappy about it) on my  O2 Atom, and it looks to be a pretty promising technology.

Some quick thoughts:

– the user experience is optimized for Windows Mobile Smart Phones vs. the stylus friendly Pocket PC
– it took me a while to realize the Center Selection Key (CSK) pretty much does everything since I am a Pocket PC user that’s used to stylus input
– I hope in the future version we will find the stylus input to be usable for Pocket PC version
– some zooming animation is needed to indicate if one is zooming-in or zooming-out
– the rendering speed on Wi-Fi is very good
– the rendering speed over EDGE is not acceptable
– my test device is an O2 Atom (which has a pretty speedy process) so my positive feedback might not apply to older or slower Windows Mobile devices
– partial / progressive rendering of a page should be nice to have in the future

So far so good. I hope the folks at MS will keep this up.

Funny and not so funny at the same time. Openwave’s MediaCast looks just like Yahoo! Go. Makes you wonder…

Gamma version of Yahoo! Go was the very last thing I did for Yahoo! It’s officially now. There are still rough edges here and there, but it’s very close to a final shipping form – as least very close to how we design and spec. it. 😉

People kept telling me they can’t get their hands on Yahoo! Go 2.0 when it first came out. Now I have no problem getting the latest update OTA (over the air) as I have no insider information about the product developement anymore.

Congratulations to the folks and Hamburg and Berlin. You guys did some amazing work in J2ME! 🙂

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.