Nokia Interactive, the mobile advertising arm of Nokia, has announced a new alliance aimed at making mobile advertising easier for brands. The alliance will integrate advertising solutions from multiple companies into a single Nokia interface.



The intent of the program is to bring together a variety of mobile advertising formats to give brands a better way to increase consumer engagement. Through the alliance, advertisers will be able to plan, execute, and measure campaigns that include a wider variety of customer engagement points.

Several companies have already been certified as Members of the alliance, including i-movo, Mobile Acuity, Mobiqa, and uLocate. These companies provide a range of mobile advertising technologies, including digital coupons, image recognition, mobile barcodes, and location-based targeting.

This effort directly addresses one of the biggest issues in mobile advertising: • a key strength of mobile is that it is very flexible and can actively engage a consumer in many ways at many times of the day. • one of the biggest challenges often cited by advertisers and their agencies is the difficulty of running mobile campaigns, and the fragmented nature of the industry.

This objective has been appreciated by people in the industry. Scott Heron, Director of Digital Services at Wunderman said “To realize truly integrated advertising, it’s imperative that major brands can make use of a range of mobile services. The Advertising Alliance brings together the most innovative technologies in the market, and brings trust to brands who want to use them.”

Brian Bos, Senior Vice President, Convergence Director at MindShare-Team Detroit said “Mobile is maturing into an effective advertising medium, however, the fragmentation of certain technologies makes it hard for some programs to scale. We applaud Nokia’s efforts to streamline this evolving market and make it easier to manage our clients’ mobile advertising investment.”

Who says you have to share marketing space? Stand out from the crowd with a mobile campaign.

by Mike Baker - VP and head of Nokia Ad Business

An hour of television is sometimes taken up by 20 minutes of commercials; a page of the internet can often contain up to 16 ads; and almost every mile of highway has at least one billboard. With over-saturated advertising like this, it's no wonder consumers have learned to just block advertising out.

Advertisers are fighting for share of voice in traditional advertising media, where they are forced to share space with their competitors and end up just being part of the white noise in the background of consumers' minds. However, there is one channel where advertisers can achieve a greater share of voice in an uncluttered environment -- mobile.

The mobile web page can't be cluttered the way the traditional internet page can, so each ad unit is more meaningful or, at the very least, more likely to burn into a consumer's synapses. Mobile simply delivers a share of voice that just isn't possible in most traditional media.

Take, for example, mobile campaigns that ran during Super Bowl XLII. The Super Bowl represents complete over-saturation of advertising. Everyone is trying to make the most memorable impression, but some brands were able to do this simply by leveraging the mobile device.

For example, Budweiser held the "Bud Bowl," and asked viewers to text in to vote for their favorite commercial; Hyundai's mobile advertising campaign ran on Super Bowl Sunday to coincide with the auto manufacturer's television ads featuring its new luxury vehicle, the Genesis.

Hyundai's program featured banner ads that ran on an operator's mobile portal and clicked through to the Genesis mobile website, where consumers could download wallpaper featuring the new vehicle, as well as ringtones featuring its engine's "rev."


The campaign received a 3.41 percent clickthrough rate, which is more than double what most traditional internet campaigns receive, and 11 percent of people who clicked through the Hyundai banner ad downloaded the "RevTone."

The one-page, one-ad environment guaranteed Hyundai a share of voice the auto manufacturer just couldn't achieve on other media. Additionally, Hyundai was able to capitalize not only on Super Bowl Sunday, but thanks to downloadable content, it also continued to make an impact even after the ads stopped running!

So where next?

Some industry observers (most of whom are not mobile specialists!) have predicted that clickthrough rates and returns from mobile advertising will level off once the medium becomes more mainstream -- citing what happened online as evidence.

We've yet to see this transpire. Mobile keeps performing, thanks to the lack of clutter. With screen sizes growing, the canvas is expanding, and the temptation is there for mobile publishers to cash in as more brands enter the space. However, this would devalue the medium for publishers and advertisers alike, and drive consumers away in droves.

In the short term, publishers must strive to make the mobile medium as accessible to consumers as possible. Consumers realize that quality content cannot always be free, and that advertising is necessary. So instead of replicating the internet by having 10 simultaneous messages competing for your attention on a page, the ideal on mobile is that just one rewarding and relevant brand appears.

As the medium grows, innovative mechanics will be introduced that make mobile work harder than any other part of the marketing mix. The mobile device will remain uncluttered, as long as media networks continue to enforce strong user experience principles, and it therefore presents an unrivalled place for brands to stand out from the crowd.

The mobile world is abuzz with the news of Nokia's plans to open source Symbian. There's been a lot of great analysis of what this means for Nokia and its major competitors. If you aren't up to speed on what it means, I recommend Micheal Mace's in depth business analysis, Symbian changes everything, and nothing and Simon Judge's developer perspective.

What I'm wondering though is how the existence of a free, high quality, open source mobile software stack will change the whole mobile ecosystem. I'm struck by two things:

* The barriers to entry for anyone wanting to manufacture advanced handsets have been lowered dramatically. There are hundreds of mobile phone makers in China and elsewhere with very low costs making cheap hones for the domestic market. Will some of them add Symbian or Android phones to their product mix? I think they will and that we will see direct to consumer online sales of generic smartphones before very long. Think zzzPhone or fake iPhone but toting a real OS.
* Open sourcing Symbian offers the possibility of community development based on the Symbian core. Imagine Symbian Kernel hackers branching off the Symbian core to create custom mobile operating systems. With the full source its possible to do things like removing the restrictions on unsigned applications and adding features that Nokia's carrier customers don't want you to have like VOIP over 3G. Someday will we be flashing our old S60 handsets with customized Symbian builds from a mobile hacker community?

A lot depends on just how complete Symbian's open source offering is. I don't think the software that manages the cellular radio or the boot loader needed to flash a new OS onto a phone are considered part of the OS. There's a lot of licensed intellectual property tied up in cellular radio software that can't open sourced. The would-be phone manufacturer and the hacker will have quite a bit of work to do to fill in the missing pieces.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Ford drives interest in new Ford iKool model through mobile advertising with Nokia.

Mobile advertising has proved to be the perfect way to target the music-loving audience that Ford in India was going after with its new model, the iKool. The campaign delivered for the client with average click-through rates of almost 9 percent reports Nokia Ad Services

Ford iKool case study can be viewed here.

Shaun Zelber

Is mobile advertising going to save AOL from its long slide down ? A recent article written by Colin Gibbs and published by RCR Wireless News gives an interesting snapshot of AOL’s recent activities in mobile advertising. It shows that while AOL has been losing ground to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the online advertising market, they are actually doing well in the mobile advertising market.



AOL has had some difficulty in combining the business operations of all the advertising companies it has acquired in recent years - Third Screen Media, Lightningcast, AdTech, Tacoda, Quigo, Perifilliate, and Advertising.com. However, Gibbs points to the two recent deals that AOL’s Platform A has concluded as evidence of AOL’s growing prowess in the mobile market.

* An agreement with Verizon Wireless to be their exclusive display advertising and sales partner for mobile web inventory. * A similar agreement with Virgin Mobile, which is especially important as the MVNO targets the teen and young adult market that is particularly receptive to mobile advertising. On top of this, Virgin Mobile has already seen big success with the Sugar Mama program that rewards users who opt in to receive mobile ads.

Also they have recently made an announcement that the Platform A is opening in Europe where mobile advertising is already hot.

For a more in depth article please go here.

Yahoo has updated the mobile web version of its widgets platform. When the Beta launched in January, access was limited to iPhone plus a handful of recent Windows Mobile and S60 phones. Even Opera Mini was blocked. I recently tried beta.m.yahoo.com again using Mini and got in. The page I saw in Mini was different too. It sports a new lighter weight layout (image top left). Compare that with the original N95 version (below right). The functionality of the two is equivalent but the original is flashier, for example it has a CSS rollover effect that turns the background of the link under the cursor green. The lite version's page weight is 25% less than the original, 46 KB vs 61 KB for my heavily customized home page and uses simpler CSS for quicker rendering on phones with slow processors.

It looks like a lot of phones are getting the new version including most Nokia S40's and older S60 and Windows Mobile phones like the N70 and Audiovox SMT5600 respectively. I also saw it with the Samsung X820 and Sony Ericsson K750i user agents. But all the Motorola user agents and anything with an OpenWave browser still gets turned away with a "We're sorry. The new home page does not yet support your whatever. I'm sure the new platform works on a lot more phones than the ones I mentioned , give it a try and leave a comment telling us whether you get it or not.



I really like the look and features of both widgetized versions of the Yahoo portal. They are completely customizable by the user. You can pick and choose from dozens of widgets and snippets. There's a choice of Yahoo standards like news, sports and stock quotes plus 3rd party content from Sports Ilustrated and PopUrls among others. The difference between a widget and and a snippet is that the former appears as a separate page accessed from a link on the home page while the later adds inline content, like links to off-portal content, to the Y! front page. In the screen shots, Mail is a link to a widget and WapReview and Mowser are snippets. Yahoo Widgets and Snippets are an open platform. Anyone can build one and submit it to Yahoo's catalog. The snippets are particularly easy to build, I put the WapReview one together in an afternoon and it only took a couple of days to be approved.

Full version of Y! WidgetsSpeaking of the Mail Widget, it's potentially the best part of this new mobile platform. I've been quite critical of Yahoo's mobile web mail for performance issues and missing features. To it's credit, Yahoo seems to have given it's mobile web servers a capacity boost and mobile Y!Mail has been reasonably fast and stable for me lately. But it still has the limitation that links are removed from emails! When someone submits a link to a new mobile site using the Contact form on this site it goes to my Yahoo Mail, but I can't follow the link when I read that email on the phone. The new Mail Widget doesn't have that problem, all links are clickable. Almost all the features of the PC version of Yahoo Mail are available too including folders, move to folder and send from alternate addresses including SpamGuard disposable ones. About the only things you can't do in the widget are check your other POP3 mail accounts and set up new disposable addresses. The mail widget has the potential to be the best mobile webmail yet from any provider including gMail.



The only problem is that the web widget platform is just too unstable for me to use on a regular basis. Literally half the time I try to read or send an email I get the message:

"We Have run into a problem processing your last request! Please try again later."

Retrying immediately usually works but it's quite frustrating particularly when hitting Send after composing a message. The message is gone and hitting the back button does not retrieve it!

Instead I've been using the Yahoo Go 3.0 Java application for mail lately. I've found that installing it in main memory on the N95 makes it much more responsive than when it's installed on the memory card. This is true for some other Java apps including Opera Mini and mGmaps. Installed in main memory, Yahoo Go is actually quite usable for email. It doesn't have the stability problems of the web widgets and you can follow links, although they first come up in some sort of funky transcoder. Fortunately there's an "Open in Browser" menu item that launches the link target in Webkit.

Both Go! and the Web Widgets are Betas so they so they should get better. I'm really looking forward to Yahoo delivering a fully functional mobile widget platform that works in all browsers and includes a fast and powerful webmail component.


Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Strange question ? Well not really in fact.

3 billion humans, more or less, have mobiles. Each mobile is an integrated communication device, via voice but more and more via SMS ; but also a payment mechanism via premium SMS and Operator billing. Growth has not yet reached saturation, in fact some countries have a penetration rate of over 100% ! This means that there are another couple billion people yet to come online.

What has been seen from the mobile industry is that many people who cannot access the web via a PC connection because the cost or the lack of cyber cafes often use their phones as internet browsing devices.The number of users from independent sources is around 1 billion users that access the web via a mobile device. In fact many use the mobile internet or WAP without even knowing it when the download, often through a SMS WAP link. Last year 9.3 billion dollars of music and 5 billion dollars of mobile video gaming were spent using the mobile device (source Netsize).

Our mobile properties like iGloo.mobi and viGloo.mobi have seen great growth from more than 120 countries around the world including visitors from Kiribati in the Pacific, Africa and the Caribbean! We are not alone, many of our colleagues in the mobile internet industry have seen the same kind of growth.

So what does all of this mean for the Movie Industries... from Hollywood to Bollywood without forgetting the rising star of Nollywood ?

It means that if you want to get people to see your movies, if you want to make extra revenue from ancillary sources you need the mobile internet! In fact you can't ignore it for your own survival.

How ? What can be harnessed ?

Well some things are already being done like SMS campaigns and Premium SMS numbers to win things. But frankly that is starting to get stale and people want and really demand more...

Like mini sites that are as engaging as the web sites with plenty of goodies. Like mobile video game franchises that are on the mobile as soon as the movie is out. Like interactive quests and quizzes that make use of the killing time aspect of the mobile internet.. always on, always connected... Like short films and franchises that are made specifically for mobile video viewing. Like recaps of a shows and movies in a mobile video format.

And the list goes on.. I am sure many of you in the mobile industry could add to that list.

So this is a warning call.. to the movie industry don't miss the mobile internet bus!

Shaun Zelber - MobilOpen.org

eBuddy is the latest in a series of reviews on mobile chat applications. We felt that this was one of the most exciting frontiers in the mobile space.

What is great about eBuddy is that it isn't only mobile.. it is also web. Right from the home page though the mobile aspect is put forward. What is even cooler is from the mobile page you can chose two options : 1) to download a java version or 2) to use a browsing version.



Most users will obviously opt for the browsing choice to get to know better the service and whether or not it is any good. If you opt for the browsing you can always change and and download the java version. In fact on the mobile home page the java version is always promoted.



What is great and gives this service an edge of their competitors for the minds and hearts of users is that right from the start you can choose your language. And what a selection of languages they :




Then you can go about configuring your eBuddy, firstly by choosing the networks like MSN Live, Gmail, Yahoo Messenger, etc.. Like Heysan and the web competitors such as Trillian (which by the way now has a beta for iPhone) you can add several types of chat networks visible from one interface. This is extremely practical because if you have a bunch of contacts from different chat networks they are all visible in one place and all on your mobile!

Then you login :



And Voila you have all your contacts on MSN :



Or on GTalk :



And then basically it is easy as that you start chatting.



So what are my conclusions ? Well frankly eBuddy in browsing mode is obviously less ergonomic than in Java mode but it is the best possible solution if you don't want to download or if you have an exotic phone that doesn't have its Java version of eBuddy. Of what I have tested so far eBuddy is the best. Not by a lot compared to Heysan.. but you can tell that there is a larger more mature team behind their service.

Eva de Mel on MobilOpen

The html input tag is what's used to display a text box on a Web page. Input has an optional type parameter. Specifying type="password" causes characters to be masked, asterisk is displayed instead of the character typed. It's standard practice on the "big" web to to use type="password" on any field where the user enters a password or PIN.



This practice has been carried over to the mobile Web were I think it hurts usability while doing little or nothing to enhance security.

Of course, security on the web is real concern. Phishing and identity theft are constantly in the news. For eCommerce and banking sites I'm willing to put up with a little inconvenience in the name of security. But does masking the password of, say, an online RSS reader really make us any safer? What's the worst that can happen, someone marking all our feeds as read?

Phones have small screens and correspondingly small fonts. It's hard to read a mobile screen from a distance of more than a couple of feet. If your worried about password theft, you can usually turn away from onlookers or shield the screen with your hand while entering your password. I think there is a far greater likelihood of a bad guy stealing you password by watching which keys you are pressing than by reading the screen.

Mobiles generally show you the actual character for a fraction of a second before it changes to an asterisk but It's still hard to accurately triple tap passwords on a phone. It's especially difficult if you use "strong" passwords with a mix of upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.

What do you think, do masked password fields on mobile web pages actually enhance security? And even if they do in some small way are they worth the cost in usability; especially on sites where there's no risk of financial loss?


Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Opera has published some intersting statistics about his navigator Opera Mini

Here are the top 10 of most countries :

Russia 1. www.vkontakte.ru 2. win.mail.ru 3. www.google.com 4. www.rambler.ru 5. www.yandex.ru 6. www.dreamwar.ru 7. www.mamba.ru 8. www.marathonbet.com 9. www.dimonvideo.ru 10. www.wmod.ru

China 1. www.sina.com 2. www.baidu.com 3. www.google.cn 4. www.ko.cn 5. news.sohu.com 6. www.xiaonei.com 7. www.3g.cn 8. www.paojiao.com 9. www.188bet.com 10. www.feiku.com

United States 1. www.myspace.com 2. www.google.com 3. www.mocospace.com 4. www.yahoo.com 5. www.facebook.com 6. www.live.com 7. www.hi5.com 8. www.wikipedia.org 9. www.itsmy.com 10. www.ebay.com

India 1. www.orkut.com 2. www.google.com 3. in.m.yahoo.com 4. www.peperonity.com 5. gallery.mobile9.com 6. www.mocospace.com 7. www.160by2.com 8. www.mobango.com 9. www.itsmy.com 10. www.indianrail.gov.in

South Africa 1. www.facebook.com 2. www.google.com 3. intl.yahoo.com 4. www.peperonity.com 5. www.mocospace.com 6. www.gumtree.co.za 7. en.wikipedia.org 8. www.itsmy.com 9. news.bbc.co.uk 10. www.webmail.co.za

United Kingdom 1. www.facebook.com 2. www.google.co.uk 3. www.live.com 4. www.bebo.com 5. www.mocospace.com 6. news.bbc.co.uk 7. uk.yahoo.com 8. www.itsmy.com 9. www.faceparty.com 10. www.ebay.co.uk

JumpTap is a mobile search, advertising and content delivery (think ring tones and games) startup that got $22 million in round C funding recently. Their search business provides a "white label" search box on mobile carrier portals. Other white label search companies include FAST, InfoSpace and Medio. Compared to Google or Yahoo, white label search vendors claim to generate more revenue for the carrier by sharing a larger percentage of advertising dollars and by giving prominent placement in search results to the carrier's billable content like ring tones. I suspect many carrier execs consider Google, Yahoo, AOL and MS Live as competitors for their advertising revenue and user allegiance and prefer not having them on their portals.

I've heard a lot about JumpTap but I've never seen their search service. The white label mobile search engines don't advertise their urls and don't seek off-portal visitors. They are usually accessible only from within the carrier's network. Occasionally I find a carrier whose mobile web deck and white label search is on a public URL. I found FAST search (review) on Australian operator Telstra's portal. Today I found JumpTap (la.jumptap.com/la/wap/) on Alltel's portal (wap.alltel.motricity.com/portal/home).

I expected to see links back to the Alltel portal and to the carrier's ring tone downloads prominently featured in JumpTap's results. But when I searched for "Britney" I got links to fan sites and entertainment news. There were some ringtone sites in the results but they were off portal and even included free sites like MocoSpace! I did a number of other queries and didn't see any real evidence of bias toward Alltel pages or products. I'd have to say that JumpTap, at least as configured for Alltel, is no more biased than Yahoo or Google. JumpTap doesn't return as many hits as the well known engines but it seemed to be pretty good at returning a relevant and useful results for the queries I tried. I was pleasantly surprised by JumpTap's search product. The best part is that it's a pure mobile search engine that returns only sites that are designed for mobile rather than transcoded PC sites. Both Yahoo and Google emphasize transcoded web results over mobile ones. AOL and MS Live don't even search the mobile web, returning only full web sites modified to be more mobile friendly. While transcoded pages have their place, they are never as usable on the tiny screen as well designed mobile pages.

Everyone seems to be trying to improve mobile search lately. There seems to be a consensus that the pure web search model doesn't scale down very well. There's considerable experimentation going on to try to provide answers rather than just a list of web pages containing the search terms. Google has added OneBoxes to mobile results - if your query contains the name of a sports team, you get a OneBox with scores and game schedules. Queries containing place names get a weather forecast OneBox while those with a company name get a stock quote. Yahoo Mobile Search has been doing something similar for awhile and just announced oneSearch which combines results from multiple Yahoo search engines like photos, maps and web on a single result page. oneSearch is part of the downloadable Yahoo! Go product but I suspect that it will soon be rolled into Yahoo's mobile web search as well.

Jumptap's innovation is to have a single search box return results grouped into categories like Mobile Web, News, Local, etc. After you submit your query you get a list of categories and then choose a category to see the results. The screen shot shows a result of a search for "Apple". The News category contains stories about Apple published today, Mobile Web results are mostly items from Apple Tech sites like MacRumours. Chat results are various UPOC chat rooms with Apple in their name and Stock is a detailed APPL quote. I find this design works pretty well. I can enter shorter queries and use the categories as filters to zero in on the types of results I want. I didn't expect to like JumpTap but I do.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

I can't believe I didn't see this site before. Mobility.mobi is a nine month old online forum dedicated to discussing the mobile web and especially the .mobi top level domain (TLD). It's very active with over 7000 and threads and 46,000 posts. Lot's of discussions of new mobile sites, industry news, SEO, domaineering and buying selling and trading .mobi domains. There are also active sub-forums for mobile web development questions, discussing mobile publishing platforms, hosting and legal issues like domain name disputes.

Mobility.mobi uses browser detection to display either the full PC version of the vBulletin based forum or a mobile one using a great mobile template developed in-house by mobility.mobi. There doesn't seem to be a way to force the mobile version if browser detection fails although I wasn't able to make it fail with any of the dozen or so mobile user agents I tried.


Mobility.mobi's mobile front page mobile scores a perfect 5 out of 5 on the Ready.mobi test. The index pages listing the posts in each forum and the post pages themselves can get quite large however, well over the 10KB of markup and 20KB overall limits generally recommended for "one-size fits all" mobile sites. If this causes out of memory errors on your phone, and you are a registered user you can change the number of posts per page from the default of 25 to five on the Options Page which should help a bit. You can only change the settings from the PC version though.

Except for options, the mobile version offers almost all of the functionality of the PC site including posting, private messaging and registering for the site. It's not necessary to register to view the site except for a few members only sub-forums. You have to register to post, of course.

It's really inspiring to see Mobility.mobi doing so well. Anyone who has any doubts about the mobile web's vitality should spend a little time poking around. There's a friendly, cooperative feel to mobility.mobi with developers and publishers helping each other out without any cattiness and flame wars so common to online forums.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Tesco the leading UK grocer has, like some of its peers around the world, launched an MVNO with O2. To supplement their revenues they have trialled placing ads on their WAP portal. They are very pleased with the returns on the trial :

Since May 2007, they have announced a strong month on month growth including 300,000 extra unique visitors in December.

Brands that have advertised on the portal included Bee Movie, ITV, Nivea and Teletext. The ads were delivered and sold by 4th Screen Advertising and have apparently seen a click through rate of between 3% and 7%.

Other interesting facts released by a survey commissioned by Tesco:

* 60% of portal users are female,
* average age is 36
* 60% say they visit it at least once a month,and
* 69% say they would click on a relevant ad.

Ashley Schofield, head of customer management at Tesco Mobile, said in a statement: “Our customers are showing a real appetite for more products and services through the mobile internet. Delivering more great experiences and value through our portal is a priority for this year.”

For those of you who don't know about Orkut, here is what Wikipedia stats :

Orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and 2nd most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil. In fact, as of March 2008, 67.5% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 15.4%. By April 2008, Orkut's user base numbered at around 120 million, next only to MySpace.

Orkut is thus a lesser know (in Europe and the USA) social network. Like other networks a user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos with the additional option of creating either restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.

The most popular features are :

"Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts immediately when a scrap is received was added, adding instant messaging-like capabilities to Orkut.

"Communities". Anyone with an Orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than one million communities on Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site's launch. There were a total of 47,092,584 communities on Orkut as per March 24,2008 4:25PM IST (+5:30 GMT). With the recent addition of the search topic feature in the communities, some Orkut communities become the de facto source for the website links to movies, e-books etc.

On the mobile

Like many Google mobile initiatives it is great and yet not enough. Great because we all want to see these guys, with their resources and energy, believe in and significantly enter the mobile web space. It is not enough because it is a poor relative of their web site. The main features are there but you can't create an account, you can't modify your profile on your mobile and it seems like communities doesn't work yet.



Nevertheless it isn't all bad news. It is a first step. What we hope at MobilOpen is that they will continue to work on this and make it truly mobile. There is now reason why they can't make Orkut's great features work 100% on a mobile.

Some other interesting articles about Orkut mobile :
Rahul Bansal blog : Devils Workshop

Darnell Clayton in Inside Orkut

I'm a mobile geek and I like my smartphone toys but I'm starting to wonder if they are really necessary. Smartphone sales are increasing but I have this wild theory that in a few years they will cease to exist as a separate class of devices.

First a definition. Not everyone even agrees what constitutes a smartphone. For the purpose of this argument it's a device running a named mobile operating system including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry and the iPhone's OS X. Smartphones generally have full web browsers, fast processors, lots of memory and, except for the Blackberry, support installing native applications in addition to Java ones.

What's going to knock out the smartphone? Look for a one-two punch from ever more capable feature phones and Linux, especially Android.

There's a perception that you need a smartphone to have advanced applications and services on a phone. That used to be true but Java ME and the Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) of popular feature phones are getting to the point where they can do almost everything that a branded OS can.

I don't really care about OS labels but there are certain features that I require in a phone. Here's my list. Note that all of these can be found in at least some mass-market feature phones.

* Synchronize Contacts, Calendar, To-Do's and Notes between phone and PC - I use this feature heavily but it's hardly exclusive to smartphones. All but the very cheapest Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones come with free synchronization software that works very well indeed. Motorola has PC Tools which costs extra. Samsung, LG and the other Asian phone manufacturers don't seem to offer any sync software but there are various 3rd party and free synchronization applications that work with most of these phones.
* An extensive library of installable applications - The number and variety of Java ME applications is a match for what's available as native applications for any of the popular smartphones. Java has file system managers, email, SSH and FTP clients, mapping programs, RSS readers, password managers and thousands of games.
* Application access to phone features like contacts, calendar, gps and network - This doesn't really exist yet regardless of platform. Stupid "security" restrictions keep users from using really being able to use either Java or smartphone native applications to their fullest with phone resources. Application signing and/or hacks are generally needed to get these types of applications working on any platform. There are a few exceptions, like Motorola's iDEN feature phones which allow users to grant unsigned Java apps blanket GPS access, something AFAIK no other platform does.
* System level Copy and Paste - This is a must for me, whether it's copying a mailing addresses from an email or SMS or pasting a URL into the browser, I can't live without copy and paste. Smartphones, with the exception of the iPhone and pre 6.1 Windows Mobile Standard all support some sort of copy/paste. This is less common on feature phones but it exists. Most Sony-Ericsson phones let you copy and paste to and from any input field - even across applications including Java apps. Some versions of the much maligned Motorola RAZR feature a rudimentery copy and paste function.
* Task Switching - This another thing that is essential to me and also probably the biggest differentiator of smartphones. Most feature phones can only load one program at a time. But again there are exceptions, Sony Ericsson again leads the way with the ability to suspend and switch between applications. Motorola iDEN's, even cheap prepaid models like the i425, go one better and actually seem to multi-task Java applications. I can suspend Opera Mini while it's loading a page, switch to a Java notepad application to jot something down and when I go back to Opera the page is fully loaded.
* A full featured media players - Pretty much a tie here. Loads of feature phones have capable audio and video players.
* A decent camera - Another tie. I've yet to see a great camera on any phone. My N95 is OK but it doesn't come close to the quality of even an entry level digital camera. Some feature phones have pretty good cameras (again mostly Sony Ericcsons) and some have awful ones.

Given the abilities found in some feature phones it seems that it would be possible to build one every bit as capable as the best smartphone. And all other things being equal, it should be lighter, cheaper, easier to operate and have longer battery life than the equivalent smartphone.

I think we are about to see an explosion of inexpensive feature phones running nameless operating systems but with abilities and performance rivaling today's smartphones. Thank the iPhone for this. It's raised ordinary consumer's expectations of what a mobile phone can do. Normobs want iPhone-like features at the traditional "free with 2 year contract" price point. Carriers and manufacturers can and will meet this demand by building iPhone-lites using off the shelf RTOS and Java applications.

Then there is Google which is building Android to dominate mobile advertising and cement it's position as biggest and most profitable tech company. The big G is spending millions to build and give away a mobile OS and hardware reference design more powerful than Symbian, WinMo, Palm or Blackberry. Hardware manufacturers can build Android phones with zero licensing costs and minimal hardware design expense to provide another cheap alternative to the iPhone and to traditional smartphones.

It's really not so much that the smartphone will die but that every phone will become a smartphone. There will always be high end devices but it will be harder and harder for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, RIM and even Apple to differentiate themselves.

These changes will ultimately be good for the mobile ecosystem. The smartphone features that only 10% of users currently enjoy will go mainstream. As phones with advanced PIM functions, copy and paste, full web browsers like Opera Mini, apps like Google Maps and Mail and iTunes like content portals become the norm we will see a mobile computing surge that will make the PC and wired Web revolution of the last 30 years pale in comparison.

What do you think? Will the expansion of advanced features to mainstream handsets do away will the smartphone market? Dennis would love your comments.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com