Due the outstanding speed this space develops, and the desire from both clients and industry to adopt this space, I felt it would be poignant addition to our weekly publications to nestle in a quick hit on what’s happening in mobile. I hope to get these out every wednesday.
The mobile space is a huge, swirling flux of people, devices, and infrastructure, So i’ll break it up into the big players, Apple, Android, and RIM.
APPLE
The Daily
It would appear that there has been something lacking from the iPad – subscription based infrastructure. Now, any tech savant will no doubt say – why am I supposed to pay for content that I can curate myself for free?
I am one of those. I have my streams of RSS feeds that I can moderate in Flipboard, Flud, Pulse, or any other RSS reader – so how will this be meaningful to me? Will this just be another regurgitation of the multitude of posts that I already consume? Is it curated in a way that is meaningful?
We finally got The Daily in the Canadian stores late last week, and in general the consensus is a bit underwhelming. To me it holds no benefit over getting a newspaper subscription online. The buggy interface jutters and twitches as you try and navigate content, and your not given the news that’s relevant to you – something that you would expect digital to be the perfect agent for, but it grants you the typical blanket news you would get from any other source. The facts are you can get news from a free RSS reading app that would be more poignant to your interests than the waffling of what might as well be the 6 o’clock news.
Have a different experience, let me know!
iOS 4.3 Beta 2
Apple is building out it’s newest version of iOS with a few new features we should keep in mind as we look at developing for the platform. The first has to do with that little black Apple box that some of us have in our living rooms: AppleTV.
In this next iteration of the iOS, Apple has added the ability to stream video directly from the iDevices to your AppleTV (Airplay). Now this may not seem like something new, I’ve been able to do this for a while, but the big news now is that it is available in app. Say you have a product walk-around video in an app you are producing, normally the user would have to watch this video on the screen the app is native to, but with 4.3 you are able to provide the ability to watch it on the TV in their living room. This extends to other media like audio as well. Nifty.
Also with 4.3 we will be able to use the iAd network full screen on iPad.
iAd Producer
This may have slid under some radars over the past couple months, but Apple has introduced iAd producer. Basically it’s WYSIWYG software used to build out your iAds – akin to say, Flash. You can get it here, but you have to part of the Apple developer program (which if you are interested in mobile you should be part of anyway ).
ANDROID
The growth of Google
News this week is the insatiable growth of Android in the mobile market. I mean it’s a hard OS to resist for hardware manufacturers being open source. It also appeals to the lower income markets to as it’s readily available to skin and repurpose to various phones. 615.1% is a phenomenal growth trend.
The Problem with Google
The other side of the google coin came up this week as well with the failing Samsung Galaxy Tab. Reports say that the return rate for this device is reaching up to 16% (compared to Apple iPad’s 2%). This coupled with the less-than-impressive number of sales in general and it would appear to be a flop.
The problem is less likely to be the fault of the hardware, or the Android OS, but the combination of the two. The Galaxy is running Froyo and not Honeycomb (Google’s tablet supporting OS), which could be the cause of a less than stellar user experience.
For a bit of a backstory on the problem seen with Google’s platform: they have a horrible update adoption rate of 4%. This means as new versions of the OS roll out, only 4% of consumers/manufacturers are committing the update. This leads to a wide discrepancy in OS making owning and developing for Android slightly more difficult.
The Motorola Xoom
This is the latest in the line of highly anticipated Android tablets, and unlike the Samsung Galaxy Tab, it does run Honeycomb. You can check out the official landing page for the Xoom for more info.
RIM BLACKBERRY
What else is there: the playbook
This device was met with skeptical eyes – what could RIM possibly bring to the table with a tablet? or it has suit written all over it. But it was one of the stars of tablet infested CES. The device boasts an UI reminiscent of the late Palm’s WebOS, a 7″ LCD display, 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, and the dazzling ability to perform ‘true multitasking’. Current tablets and phones don’t multitask in the purest sense of the word – they simply save the state of the app and reopen it on demand. The Playbook allows services to run behind the scenes so you could, for instance, have a movie playing, switch to your browser to check out a URL and leave the movie playing in the background. Check out the preview ad from Blackberry. And check out the landing page.
Fin
Thanks for reading. Hope it has been useful. If you have any feedback please send it my way.
Darren is a Sr. Designer in our Calgary office.
