Just got an email that Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
Cool !!
vivek
Via Bill, A new article published on the Adobe Mobile DevNet about “Developing Flash Lite applications with dynamic layouts”.
David Brown from Agencynet wrote the article and he showcased an excellent example of Bacardi Mobile application that i have seen couple of times in podcast as well as live in handsets too. This article covers the technical side as well sample files are also included.
It’s always passionate me too see just not a good application but the engaging creative experiences we actually create for everyone 🙂
vivek
Nokia Design Studio they calls “open studio.†Works really closer with local experts such as NGOs or even students, Nokia designers went into each city and set up a community based competition asking people to design their dream phone. Results sometimes lead out some interesting concepts and sometime unusual.
“In the not so distant past, the end game of design for Nokia was the phone, Nokia’s head of design Alistair Curtis says. Now the phone is a springboard to all sorts of services, he says. Developing relevant services, he believes, means creating an open platform. Then consumers can eventually bolt on applications as needed. ”
check out this slide show for some concepts of phone model.
vivek
Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project 2008, A great news and step ahead for flash player reachability ensuring a consistent rich Internet experience across a broad range of digital screens and form factors including mobile phones, consumer electronics, televisions and personal computers “anything to anywhere, experience matters”
The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIRâ„¢ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.
Specifically, this work will include:
Read here for further more What it means for Developer and Businesses.
vivek
A great news for Adobe Flash lite developer, Sony Ericsson today announced at its Developer World conference plans for a new technology that bridges Adobe Flash Lite and Java ME development platforms.
The technology, called Project Capuchin, allows Java ME applications to use Flash Lite as the front-end interface for mobile phone applications.
More importantly, it builds a connection between the phone’s applications and Flash, something that the few phones able to run Flash don’t do. Flash is just a display layer, not actually interactive with the phone!!
“In using Flash, you typically can’t access properties of the phone. But with Capuchin, you can get at information and applications in the phone and use that info with the Flash display,” said Christopher David, director of long-term platform planning at Sony Ericsson
So its a kind of a great tool that wraps that Flash content in a Java file, so it can be used as a Java file.”
Preety cool 🙂
vivek
Have a look to my new character design straight out of the i2fly studio, She is playing around my creative studio for quite a few months so I thought to release it and show the world.
I name this character as “FLORI” I really love this character very much. Flori is sweet, cute, innocent and naughty too 😀 .
You can use “FLORI” as a screensaver/wallpaper in your mobile phones, it looks just beautiful, i really love it. And I am sure you will love too 🙂
Download this content to your mobile phone here.
Flori as an character is also available for license worldwide, kindly get in touch with me at design@i2fly.com
As usual love to know your feelings. Feel free to post your comments/suggestions/views anything. Curious to know about it.
vivek
It’s not a story or just an another post to read !! We all love our mobile devices and can’t live without it. But the simplest thing which we always forget to unplug our mobile chargers after fully charged!!!
Do you know
If 10% of the world’s mobile phone owners unplugged their phone chargers when fully charged, it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes. So pull then plug and start saving energy.
Think again.
Let’s save our beautiful world for tomorrow.
vivek
A very interesting video via The New York Times of Jan Chipchase own life. He spent a week recording his own nomadic life for us in Tokyo and Seattle, taking pictures and leaving phone messages. It shows how wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places and each other.
Very interesting !
vivek
Nice article by Giorgio Natili on forum Nokia for creating Flash lite 1.1 menu, One of the most common stuff with Flash Lite is to create menus and its really important to make codes simple and optimize to work perfectly.
vivek
A cellphone shop in Accra, Ghana, which carries and repairs a variety of handsets.
A great article via The New York Times featuring Jan Chipchase and his work style to find about how people use their cell phones, where they keep it, understanding their behaviour in terms of usability, business and Psychology many more ways . . even a simple idea can make a product more innovative and solution providing as mobile phones are getting more personalized mere just not a functional device to talk. The premise of the work is simple – get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them.
“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as “human-centered design”, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers.”
Chipchase talks to Accra street vendors about what an ideal phone.
Jan Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.†He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.†To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.
I really impressed with him, his thoughts to create innovation and more focussed for the people.
vivek
The Strategy Analytics report says, “Silverlight on Mobile will not catch up with Adobe’s Flash Lite in the foreseeable future, but Microsoft recognizes a great opportunity beyond providing an alternative to Adobe’s Flash Lite. This Silverlight strategic offering will boost Microsoft’s online and cross-platform ambitions in the mobile space according to analysts at Strategy Analytics.
“The Silverlight deal with Nokia gives Microsoft access to Nokia’s S60 licensees including LG, Samsung which is vital for competing with Flash Lite,” commented Sravan Kundojjala, Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “They estimates that over 1.7 billion Flash Lite-enabled phones will be shipped globally over the next three years alone.”
Stuart Robinson, Director of the Handset Component Services added, “Strategy Analytics believes cross-platform wars will likely heat up in the mobile space, an argument strengthened by Nokia’s Trolltech acquisition. And also believes that SUN Microsystems will join the fray with its JavaFX platform.”
vivek
A nice article on The New York Times, what mobile designers think behind the scene and workaround for “hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip“. Forecasting what consumers will want next year, and into the future. Designing a Mobile phone is just not an easy task there are many things to see, evaluate and analyze around the people. Jotting down feelings about features what users are looking for, share their emotions about mobile phone, understanding the psyche of consumers and why they pick one phone over another.
Even interesting designs do not necessarily spell success. The group is the first of its kind at Nokia, the world’s No. 1 seller of mobile phones, bringing together 14 designers and researchers from California and Helsinki, where the company is headquartered. Their charge is to tell Nokia’s top executives not only what consumers will want next year, but 3 to 15 years from now.
“We have the ability to clarify the needs of real people,†said Rhys Newman, who heads the team.
“Design used to be inconsequential: just make it pretty, make it sell,†said Mr. Newman, who, along with three members of his team, was interviewed at Nokia’s design center near a strip mall in downtown Calabasas, north of Los Angeles. Now, he said, “we have to think about human fundamentals.â€
When asked if they felt pressure to design new phones more quickly in an increasingly competitive market, Mr. Jan Chipchase responded with a quizzical stare. “Why do you want to innovate faster?†he asked. “Are you innovating something gimmicky just to sell a product? Or is it saving the planet you are after?â€
So what you think about your mobile phone, how you use it, Do share your emotions, feelings, and what you want in your phone? 🙂
vivek
Forum Nokia organising a Flash Lite Webinar on “Flash and Mobile Browsing”. This Webinar will explore the integration of Flash Lite on mobile devices, give pointers for developing online mobile Flash content, and provide a full question-and-answer session.
Presentation time: approx 60 minutes.
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2008.
Time: 3.00 pm London, 5.00 pm Helsinki, 10.00 am New York, 7.00 am San Francisco.
vivek
Adobe Systems Inc said on Monday it was putting under one roof businesses selling software for computers, phones and consumer electronics to make them run on a single technology platform.
The announcement is part of a series of management restructuring moves and represents the further consolidation of its 2005 Macromedia acquisition with the broader Adobe organization while also recognizing the growing convergence of once-distinct software and the need for it to run across a range of devices.
The merging of the different business units may appear on its face to be simply an organizational restructuring, where the Mobile and Devices Business Unit will be folded under Adobe’s Experience and Technology group.
“As the proliferation of digital content continues to accelerate, customers worldwide are looking to Adobe for a platform that enables the creation of rich, engaging experiences across a variety of media and devices,†said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and CEO. “Key to delivering a well-integrated technology platform is engineering our desktop and device technologies more closely together. Bringing our mobile and platform businesses together under the leadership of CTO Kevin Lynch better positions us to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse customer base.â€
vivek
You must be downloading a lot of things onto mobile phones these days, and now you can even download smells. 😀 isn’t interesting to you. This week, NTT Communications Corp. will test a mobile version of the Fragrance Communication service it offers to fixed-line customers.
Mobile users can download “fragrance playlists” from company NTT DoCoMo Inc. i-mode mobile Website. Via the phone’s infrared port, the fragrance data is sent to a special device that mixes various scents to get the odor the user selected. Users also get to watch and listen to audio/visual content associated with the smell.
NTT says it’s looking for applications that combine fragrances with ringtones, music, and horoscopes. The new mobile version offers the convenience of using mobile communication to download Fragrance Playlists, or files of recipes for specific fragrances together with visual (GIF animation) and audio (MIDI) content.
Now we can think about an application say a cooking one and receiver getting smell of what’s cooking hope to see such live experiments here. My mind is getting many ideas 😀 .
vivek
Forum Nokia published an in-depth article on “Build a reusable Flash Lite 1.1 component”
Components and reusable code are important aspects to developing applications for any platform, including Flash Lite 1.1. Components speed up development and help make coding tasks easier. Many people still thinks or left designing applications or content in Flash Lite 1.1 for many reasons or off-course limitations but i still feel and try my best to work on Flash Lite 1.1 as device can be targeted more and you can reach it to more users.
vivek