We already know that Verizon and Microsoft have pulled the plug on the whole KIN series, the question then becomes what to do about existing supplies?

Word has come that anything and everything KIN gets sent back to…ummm wherever…starting tomorrow. What happens to them is anyone’s guess.

That’s right folks, we may be on the verge of a fabled E.T. game situation for the KIN-they will perhaps be dumped in a big landfill, where 20 years from now, rare NIB KINS will fetch for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The geek inside of us wants to run out and buy one to keep next to our big-head Han Solo action figure; the analyst in us sees Microsoft trying to erase this mistake from history and think that’s OK.

Rather than a cheap Chinese look-alike we finally have a serious competitor to the iPhone. For a normal consumer who is used to Samsung already and thanks to Samsung’s much larger distribution network it looks like some interesting things will happen.

The two look almost identical. But the Galaxy has a bigger screen. Even with the iPhone 4 Retina Display, the Galaxy has a Super Amoled screen, so both seem far sharper and brighter and better than most other screens in the store – but the Galaxy is significantly bigger. Suddenly the Samsung is a very compelling player.

Samsung also has several cheaper phones that it can then sell to those customers who don’t want to pay the price of a top line smartphone.

While we are on Samsung, the first Bada phone, the Wave has passed 1 million unit sales. Thats pretty solid for approximately one quarter worldwide. Its nowhere near Apple’s iPhone 4 selling 1.7 million units in a couple of days, but remember, thats not the right comparison. The comparison is to the original launch, first phone on a new operating system. So the right comparison is to the original iPhone 2G launch of 2007. And 1 million Waves compare rather well in that context – far better than for example Google’s highly visible ’superphone’ launch of the Nexus One. Thus Bada is already selling better for Samsung than its Symbian and MS Windows Mobile based phones, and looks to be well on target to be about a third of all Samsung smartphones sold in 2010, behind only Android devices.

www.WirelessFederation.com/news

A slate of new devices and software is under preparation byResearch in Motion as it looks to keep its Blackberry smartphone from losing more ground to touch-screen devices like Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad.  A touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard is worked upon by RIM.

The phone will operate on a new version of the BlackBerry operating system, working much like an iPhone, letting users swipe through screens and expand images with their fingers besides having a universal search bar that lets users scour the entire phone’s data and some data online as well. Experiments are also carried on by RIM on a tablet device to serve as a larger-screen companion to its BlackBerry phone and it will be capable of connecting to cellular networks via a BlackBerry phone.

There are speculations that RIM will ship a phone running a new operating system and a new Web browser in the quarter ending September 30, but haven’t provided details of the device. Waterloo, Ontario, company, which has long led the U.S. market for smart-phones, has come up with new offerings after facing increased competition from devices built by Apple and those that run on the Android operating system from Google Inc.

RIM still sells more smartphones globally than any company besides Nokia Corp, but its share of the key North American market is slipping, as RIM has been slow to match Apple and Android’s touch-screen technology, smooth Internet-browsing capability and add-on software. RIM’s share of the North American smartphone market by shipments dropped to 38% in the March quarter from 54% in the year-ago quarter.

All of the complaints critics have leveled at the company’s devices will be addressed by RIM in its upcoming smartphone and operating system named BlackBerry OS 6.0. The new device will have a Qwerty keyboard that slides out from the bottom of the touch screen and the search may also be able to locate occurrences of the keyword on sites like Facebook or Twitter.

I attended the Bada Developer event yesterday and here are my thoughts.

Samsung have created a complete eco system for their smartphone technology. This includes:
development environment in C++ for their phones
webkit browser allowing browser control in an app or external to app
appstore called samsung apps
ovi style services such as maps and storage (using Amazon S3)
side loader PC based store similar to desktop iTunes called Kies

Overall this has been a massive undertaking for them and it’s appeared in very impressive timescale. The phone itself is exceptional build quality and the screen colours are the best I’ve seen using Super Amoled tech. They seem to have based the system on an in house OS which has been heavily customised.

Incidently Samsung are also hedging their bets because they continue to develop with Microsoft Phone7 and Android. There is a rumour their upcoming tablet will be based on Android.

First impressions is that it’s a complete copy of Apple’s Eco system and a very valiant one. This includes the fact that I think its apps will only be installable from its own appstore after completing its own QA (this is an assumption not yet confirmed, since there may be deals with operators in this area too).

The conference went very deep into the programming approaches and personally I was put off by the level of complexity. C++ now seems very antiquated to me now after having used better languages for years and it seems they make the developer jump through hoops in order to optimise the performance. Considering there’s a 1GHz processor in the phone this is not necessary and making life hard for developers is not constructive. There are no UI building tools and programming a UI seems highly complex. However, if and when I do do some Bada apps I would probably rely heavily on use of the web control and create most of the UI in HTML/CSS; a technique used heavily on the iPhone.

Overall, very impressed. They claim to be selling 40M Bada devices by the end of the year (seems hard to believe that figure!!!) It’s a big play for Samsung and they are investing heavily in the developer eco system (eg most attendees got given phones yesterday).

By Robin Jewsbury

@Robinjewsbury of Alibro

A useful tool which translates text using image based processing on your mobile phone. The application uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of a word or phrase; which is then processed and recognized as separate words. The user is then able to get word-by-word translations on-the-fly. The translations are done accurately depending on the quality of the image taken; the semantics used in the image-to-text conversion appear to be extensive and can usually recognize even a moderately distorted image. Processing of the image hardly takes any time, thereby making the user experience a pleasant one.

FotoTranslate is available in multiple language packages which can be purchased independently.

The application requires Symbian OS S60 3rd Edition, 5th Edition.

You may contact us to get Free Serial Numbers to check the trial version.

For more information : http://www.abbyy.com/fototranslate/

In response to developer complaints that more expensive apps were getting buried at the bottom of popularity rankings, Apple recently introduced a separate ranking based on revenue. (The Top 100 Paid apps ranks apps are based on number of downloads.) In this post, I’ll validate that compared to downloads, the Top 100 ranking based on revenues does contain pricier apps.

For each decile, I calculated the MEAN price of the Top 100 Apps over the 2 most recent weeks. Notice that for the most recent week, the MEAN price for each decile† of the Top 100 Grossing apps is more than $5. In contrast, none of the deciles for the Top 100 Paid apps had a mean of $4 or more. There isn’t much of a relationship between rank and price although there was a slight downward trend in the price of the Top Grossing apps over the most recent week: except for the blip in the 5th decile of apps ranked 41-50, the top deciles tended to have higher MEAN prices.

If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner looking into the mobile application industry, either to ride the wave or to capitalize on the fact that your customers are spending more time with their phone, this post could come in very handy

Bellow you may find some thoughts on how the Mobile Development industry will evolve in the nearest future.

1. Micropayments
Micropayments within mobile applications can be used to upgrade basic app to a premium version, purchase game items, digital content or even small gifts for friends. Mobile bill payments and micropayments for digital content consumption continue to grow in the future.

2. Enhanced Security
Better security for mobile application platforms is expected. This is especially important when more users are conducting financial transactions and life streaming using their phones.

3. Business App Store
With all the mobile platforms targeting their app store towards average consumers, the introduction of a business app store is imminent.

4. Location-Based Technology
Location-based technology or GPS technology received the most buzz in 2009 and we expect it will continue growing this year.

5. Social Based Applications
Social networking activities certainly do not end when you leave your computer. We are already seeing a great number of people tweeting and updating their Facebook status on-the-go, not to mention those who are posting videos and photos to services like Twitpic and 12seconds using their mobile phone.

6. Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

7. High Entry Barriers for Fledgling Developers
Developers that are new to the scene and without much support will face trouble getting user adoption. Not only that there are already tons of mobile applications out there, established developers have better advantages in terms of capability to introduce new features over a short time span as well as the resources to adapt and test their applications on new platforms.

8. Mobile Application Advertising
The increasing number of mobile application users opens up another advertising channel for brands and businesses. This is definitely good news for developers.

9. Importance of Marketing for Applications
There are already hundreds of thousands of mobile applications out there. In order to stand a chance, developers or mobile application entrepreneurs need to know how to market applications developed by them.

10. HTML 5 – Native Apps vs Web Apps
How will it affect the mobile applications space? Well, phones with a mobile browser that has HTML 5 rendering capabilities will be able to run web applications directly without any downloading and installation of apps. As for developers, there will no longer be a need to develop for different mobile platforms.

What other trends do you think will be likely this year for the mobile applications industry?

Your opinions are welcome!

Kristina Kozlova
Altabel Group Company
www.altabel.com

Being able to install new apps developed by third parties gave the iPhone a whole new dimension that other phones simply couldn’t offer, so the iPhone’s stroke of genius was its apps. Before the iPhone, your phone came with a pre-installed set of apps (usually games, a calendar and an alarm clock), and that was that. To get new features you needed a new phone.

The iPhone changed all that by letting you install new apps that fundamentally changed the features of the phone in thousands of different ways.

Except, it wasn’t a new idea, even years before the iPhone was released. Symbian had offered the ability to add apps to its phones for years.

So why did the iPhone become the phone with apps and Symbian become the forgotten mobile OS?…

Simple: Symbian’s obsession with security. In what should be a huge wake up call to Steve Jobs and the increasingly totalitarian regime that he’s creating around the walled garden that is everything i (iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iPod), Symbian insisted on approving each and every app that was written for the Symbian platform.

The only problem was that its approval process was even slower than Apple’s. Whereas iPhone apps can take from a week to 2 months to be approved, a Symbian app still takes half a year before it’s approved!

Half a year is simply insane. The smartphone market is so fast moving that an app is usually out of date 6 months after it’s first released.

According to Lee Williams, Symbian’s Executive Director, this is still the case now. So not only did Symbian squander the app advantage they had when the iPhone was first launched, they continued to do nothing about the situation for a full three years while Apple cut a swathe throught the market unabated.

Sometimes you want to just bang your head against the wall at the sheer incompetence of large organizations!

Found this really interesting article on MobileMentalism :

After the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where Samsung made as much noise as possible about Wave and Bada I have remained curious about the development of yet another OS platform. I really wonder how Samsung plans to actually stand up to the open platform of Android and the existing WinMo and other fringe platforms like LiMo. How could they get developers to actually adopt still another OS and thus fragment the market yet further… not to mention make things even more complicated for development houses.

It is quite obvious what motivates them.. they want to replicate Apple’s success and to a lesser extent to Android’s extent. Samsung wants an app store that allows them a piece of the pie!

Being one of the largest handset manufacturers in the world (about 20% of world wide handset sales) of course does give them a certain pull. But this didn’t do it for Nokia which remains the largest by far but still struggles with imposing Symbian as a viable platform and it’s other ventures such as Maemo/MeeGo flounder. Nokia’s OVI remains an app store player but not a run-away success.

Samsung has recently launched their first Bada phones in Europe and claim plenty of big name content providers who have developped in Bada : Electronic Arts, Gameloft, The Associated Press, CNN, WeatherBug, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Universal Film, Layar, Expedia Affiliate Network, ZAGAT, and many others.Including well-known applications such as Need for Speed Shift (EA), Weather Bug(WeatherBug), Zagat to go(Handmark), and Travel Booker(Expedia) are cited as Bada developers.

But can Samsung really replicate what Apple has done with a closed circuit ? Well a tidbit in their press release seems that they hint at not keeping it closes :
This content will facilitate the development of applications for not just the Samsung Wave, but all other mobile phones that adopt Bada as their platform of choice.

So Samsung plans to licence out the Bada OS ? Seems like it.

But they plan on then selling all applications developed via their store as evidenced by this statement :
Applications developed with the bada SDK can be sold through ‘Samsung Apps’, Samsung’s application store.

Now that seems strange… would LG developers to sell apps for their Bada phones via Samsung’s application store ? I think NOT! So what are we talking about here ? A multitude of app stores for each handset manufacturer ?

I really don’t have the answers but I thought that this article was very interesting article which gives a projected market like this :

So in that hypothetical model the market shares among the Top 10 would be in a couple of years something like

Symbian (Nokia) 35%
Android (LG, ZTE, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Huawei) 23%
Bada (Samsung) 21%
Blackberry (RIM) 4%
iPhone OS/X (Apple) 3%
all other smartphone makers which would include 15 more brands for Android, plus HP/Palm, Microsoft, plus some Japanese etc on Symbian, Linux Mobile etc would share the remaining 14%

Whatever the case it is quite exciting to see what will happen over the rest of year. Lets watch and see..

In response to queries about its future product plans, Skype issued a statement that indicates the company plans to offer an application to all Android handsets later this year, and it will include a video chat feature.

The statement reads, “Skype envisions a world where video plays a larger role in the way we communicate. It’s on computers, televisions, and it will eventually be coming to mobile devices too. We’re betting big on video, and we intend to set the bar on mobile video calling, and it’s something we’re going to do this year. We will be bringing a direct to consumer app to the Android marketplace later this year. This application will be available for all consumers globally to download regardless of carriers.”

Right now, Skype on Android is limited to Verizon Wireless’ handsets. Competitor Fring recently announced a new Android application that offers free video calling. Fring aggregates together a number of services, such as Skype, MSN, ICQ, GTalk and other IM platforms into a single application.