Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

How to setup Gravity to post to your Flickr account

Gravity is still the best Twitter client for Nokia / Symbian S60 phones. A recent update (it gets a ton of alpha / beta updates all the time, and they're super simple to upgrade to directly from within the app) added direct posting to Flickr.

Has Nokia lost the plot? /via @rtanglao

So has Nokia lost the plot? I would certainly say so. Definitely lost the geeks and other "small c" and hobbyist creators to Android; the high profit, high margin trendy middle class and rich folks to the iPhone; the only thing remaining is low margin high volume phones and lingering vestiges of brand coolness in Asia and Europe.

The coming tablet revolution /via @RussB

My prediction? Over the next year or so as various touch-tablet devices are launched, we're going to see a massive shift away from notebook and netbook computers for the general consumer. The tablet lends itself to four areas of use: Web (including Internet-centric apps like weather, news, maps, etc.), Media (music and video), Gaming (from solitaire to Farmville-like games) and Communication (email, social networking, IM, etc.). Which is what 99% of people want their computers for anyways.

It's great to see Russell write a bunch of his thoughts down about tablets. Yes, he has an iPad, but he's actually talking about the "end of WIMP" (Windows Icon Mouse Pointer - about which you should go read his whole other piece).

This one quote I've pulled out echoes my thinking, although I actually think Gaming is going to evolve to way beyond Farmville-like experiences very quickly.

The tablet (and touch interfaces) are going to serve 99% of what people want to do with their computers. It will be very interesting to see the progress throughout this year as other non-Apple tablets come on to the market.

I see web-native apps being a major area of growth for two reasons.

One reason is that the app ecosystems on other platforms are not nearly as mature as the Apple one. That is, it's frickin' hard to make money on platforms other than Apple's at the moment.

The second is that the browser component that ships with the other platforms is at the very least on par with the iPad's browser, meaning it is the common denominator across platforms.

Windows Phone 7 vs. Android /via @gruber

The big three mobile platforms right now are iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. (Feel free to add Nokia as a fourth.) I think Windows Phone 7 is most competitive with Android, because that’s the one with the same business model: licensing the OS to OEM hardware makers. They’re even competing for attention from the very same hardware makers, especially HTC.

Europe has become the 'flyover states' of the mobile industry /via @rtanglao

"Europe has become the 'flyover states' of the mobile industry," says a ­senior European executive, referring to the disparaging term used to describe middle America by high-powered business travellers shuttling between California and New York.

I predicted Apple TV and iPad in 2005 cc @scobleizer

So let's just agree that:

  1. Apple could do to movie downloads what they've done to music downloads
  2. iTunes is a likely place for this functionality to live because it's the one app that's already on Windows

But watching things on your TV where you have to walk your iPod Photo across and plug it into your TV (without a remote) isn't really an ideal interface. It would work, but it's not ideal.

Same thing goes for the Airport Express. You can now have all your music on your Mac, and beam it across to your stereo. Except, when you're not actually in front of your computer, you can't control iTunes.

This is where the Mac Tablet comes in. Steve probably poo-poos the Tablet as your main computer (that's what high-end PowerBooks are for). But, a Mac Tablet as media remote, as second computer in the home? Maybe good enough for students, replacing/augmenting the iBook line? Sounds like extra computers being sold.

OmniGroup is porting their apps to iPad

We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can.  Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important:  important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes.  Five.  We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad:  OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.