This is my first blog article. I have always wanted to organize and present my thoughts, idea and observations to get yeah!s and mass acceptance. This blog is about my experiences and thoughts about PDAs, Smart phones and the likes.
The mobile phone browser has gotten really popular and the demands of mobile-surfers has increased exponentially. Chetan Sharma (from the famed http://www.chetansharma.com/ ) has published numerous whitepapers on demands of data networking being more popular than voice as a choice for mobile handsets by 2010.
Being a mobile developer and integrator for nearly four years I had the good fortune of working with carriers like VMU, Cricket, Vodafone and others. The one thing common among them all is the tight control they have on content delivered to your mobile phone browser.
I would like to consider myself (a person in his mid thirties) a fairly savvy user of the mobile browser. Had it not been part of my job, I do not think that it would have been so. If you own an iPhone, gPhone or a Blackberry phone and pay a flat fee for the data services, you will find yourself using the resident browser or applications for many things like restaurant locations, directions, have2P, searching, checking scores or stock quotes, watching videos and so on.
But the one thing that most busy people do, much like I do is read the morning news in the privacy of the bathroom answering the morning call of nature. A few years ago, it was the newspaper that entered the relief room with me. My wife would hate my disgusting habit and quite honestly, if my dad or cousin did the samething, I would never touch the newspaper. With the blackberry, the complaints stopped and we also saved money from stopping the monthly newspaper subscription not to mention the reduction in recyclable trash and feeling of running a greener house.
The ten minutes(if one is lucky) of the morning, where a man rules the world, is spent reading headlines from bbc or cnn from the 3 inches x 2 inches screen. It is quick, concise and very informative. If there are subsequent visits to the room sports, stocks, games and adult content definitely rule the roost.
On a linked-in group, I read an article on Flurry's Analytics to find out app popularity on mobile phones. The article presented an interesting product that could be easily integrated into phones and worked on many platforms. Wow!. I thought to myself. I could imagine the amount of interest it would have gotten from ODMs, Carriers and Mobile-Content-Providers. Each one still seeks the killer app to popularize their products and services. What Flurry will tell them is which is the current killer-app on the device and perhaps a comparitive analysis in form of a paid report which compares with apps on other devices. Packaging these apps will be paramount to giving the product the edge.
I have owned two smart phones that have accompanied me in my tour-de-toilette. One was a Motorola touch screen phone with stylus (A-768i) and the other a Blackberry Pearl. Both have been excellent companions but the Blackberry definitely wins. No-no .... its not because of the service or the rendering or the performance or the pixel density. Read on to hear my analytics.
Truth be said, the only reason is that the Blackberry is truely all the info you need in your thumb tip. Yes readers, the trackball in my opinion is the best thing to have happened to this bathroom surfer. The other smart phones suffer from distinct disadvantages. The touch screen requires two hands. The qwerty keyboard requires pointy fingers or a stylus and not to mention that the constant fear of the stylus falling in the hole of stench and filth. Gross!!!!
Wonder if flurry can distinguish between the PDA/Phone usage in the bathroom versus usage otherwise. Wonder if popularity of apps and other measures could be used for usage to push ads and involuntary content to the handset. I for sure would dislike it. It would indeed be a very annoying invasion of privacy. We had no choice but to put up with annoying commercials during our favorite sitcoms, I hope we do not have to see mobile ads to access content on the PDAs. Any such decision by carriers will just put back all chapter-elevened newspapers back into business.
To conclude, I'd say that the Mobile handset is a very personal device. As personal as used underwear. Just imagining where the mobile phone has travelled should be deterrent enough not to touch another man's phone leave alone steal it!
