Textopoly Mobile Blog » Blackberry

Apple vs. Android vs. RIM vs. Palm

Asif — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:50:04 +0000

Fans rejoice! Your favorite blogger is back! It’s been awhile since my last blog post, I’ve been a busy man. Happy New Year to all of you!

So, what’s been going on in these past few months? Well, Textopoly is now one of the fastest growing companies in Orange County, we won the 2010 Interactive Marketing Award, our mobile lab has been running on all cylinders with projects for Yamaha, Google, Scanbuy and others, and on top of all that, my brother just got married! Needless to say, it’s been a busy few months. And yes, for those who are wondering, the bachelor party was awesome!

Now that we got that out of the way, what’s going on in mobile!? Well, as always, A LOT! With the high success of the iPad, and the app store in all its glory, rival companies have been trying to get a piece of the action! Samsung’s Galaxy seems to be OK, its running off the popular android system which leaves an open market for applications. However, the more anticipated Blackberry Playbook seems to be a more comparable rival. As of now, we don’t know much about it, except for the fact that it’s going to have the fastest processor available, a video chat function, true multitasking (although it just so happens to be very reminiscent of Palms’ multifunction technology), and a much needed USB drive.

My personal opinion is that this Blackberry product will finally give the developers a reason to improve their app store! Because really, besides downloading the Facebook and Pandora application, what other application would you ever download from the blackberry app store? I’ve always loved blackberry, I think they have a high quality product, but it just needs to be attractive! I’m hoping that with the playbook (great name) they can finally start getting the high recognition that will eventually lead to more app development.

The other highly anticipated product is Palms Topaz Tablet. As many of you know, HP acquired Palm, and initially had not intention of continuing the mobile side of Palm! However that’s changed (thank god) and we’re all awaiting the big announcements of the tablet, as well as the new mobile handsets rumored to be show cased on February 9, 2011.

I for one can’t wait for all of these new products to come out! I’m definitely going to purchase one of the personal tablets, just not sure which one yet!

- Want to chat more about the iPad, Playbook, and Topaz!? Contact me at asif[at]Textopoly[dot]com. You can help me pick one! Till next time friends!

CTIA in stacks

Naushad — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:56:51 +0000

The CTIA is an international nonprofit membership organization that represents the wireless communications industry. Membership in the association includes wireless carriers and their suppliers, as well as providers and manufacturers of wireless data services and products and everyone in between. CTIA organizes 2 wireless trade shows each year that everyone who does anything related to the word “mobile” attends. (If you want mobile antennas, find a Aggregator, see new mobile marketing technology or even need a new fuzzy cover for your blackberry, you attend the show!)

Over the years our team members have attended the show (Vegas one always rocks!) and each year, before the the upcoming show we get reminder pamphlets. This year the number of pamphlets for the Fall show just exploded and we thought it was hilarious that the wireless association who advocates the use of wireless would send out so much paper to us! Couldn’t they just send us a text message with a link to a mobile site for me to get info on the show and a way to register! Here are some fun snapshots of the stack we got in the mail last week!

Do you wish some of the paper you get in your mailbox would go mobile with an App or mobile site?

Wrong Turn by Right Guard -

Naushad — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:36:06 +0000

I was reading ESPN mobile earlier today and saw a call to action mobile banner by Right Guard. Normally, I don’t click on banners. Not on the web and rarely on mobile. Call to actions on web nor mobile are convincing enough for me. However, this call to action on the mobile banner was to the point, slick and looked well designed. It simply said “click to get $1.50 off coupon”. I clicked.

To my pleasant surprise my Quicktime player opened and a video started playing! The video was a commercial for Right Guard with Chris Paul; a 30 second spot that was well produced and kept my attention. Then the wrong turns began. At the end of the commercial there was a static slide that said “To get the $1.50 off coupon visit www.rightguard.com”. Now, already it’s a bad interaction. You asked me to click to get a coupon, fed me a video (albeit a good one!), but then no coupon! Instead you’re asking me to type in my browser your URL to get this coupon!

At this point I’m done with the hopes of a $1.50 savings, and am more curious than anything else. After I type the URL in my mobile browser will another video pop up? Will I get a scannable 2D code to take to a Target or another retailer? Will I be asked to input my email address to get a coupon emailed to me? Will it be something I’ve never seen before on mobile that really pushes the envelope?! The suspense was unbearable! I typed the URL in my browser and hit “Go”.

Nothing. I got nothing. Apparently Right Guard didn’t think to make a mobile landing page, instead the URL directed me to their regular PC site which has a Flash intro! Aside from a niche browser like SkyFire no other mobile phone could view this page! Not Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, etc. Why didn’t they create a mobile landing page for an interaction that started from a mobile site!? Really? Mr. Right Guard you thought this was a good idea? How did you think to convert the leads? Very poor execution, and very disappointing.

The Headache of Building a Beautiful Mobile Web Site

Naushad — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:24:06 +0000

A while ago we were contacted by Yamaha who wanted us to build out a fully function WAP site featuring their Marine Division’s new product line for 2010. This sounded like a great opportunity for Textopoly and after several rounds of designs we were ready to set it up and make it work. If anyone has ever had the pleasure of building a site to make sure that it works in Internet Explorer 6, then they would understand what a headache it is to build for micro browsers. First, let’s break down what WAP is – Wikipedia states that WAP is:

Wireless Application Protocol (commonly referred to as WAP) is an open international standard^[1] for application layer network communications in a wireless communication environment. Its main use is to enable access to the Mobile Web from a mobile phone or PDA.

What they are trying to say is:

WAP is how you access the internet on your phone. A WAP browser (Micro Browser) is your phones internal browser.
– Evan

Originally this site was designed and built for iPhone users. As an iPhone user myself, I know how beautiful a website and/or WAP site can look. Being able to break out of the mold of either full sites which look tiny on the screen or a slimmed down/image free version of the site (think Amazon’s WAP site) was also a unique challenge that we took great pride in overcoming. We created a site designed specifically for the iPhone, each page textured and rendered to look stunning on the portable computer. As Utopian as we were becoming we realized that there was one slight drawback when developing for the iPhone – Blackberry, Motorola, Samsung, and many of the other handsets had errors that we didn’t expect.

Through testing on all major devices we realized that we had some major formatting issues. Blackberry caused the page to reformat itself, because, well, the browser is buggy. Blackberry defaults have style sheets turned off. It also likes to break code, reformat pages, and destroy anything and everything in its wake. It’s like the Terminator of browsers. For being a ’smart-phone’ you would think they would have built a better browser. The annoying part is their new phones are not much better. Additionally, Motorola and Samsung phones would show the area that is supposed to be transparent in a PNG image, defeating the purpose of a PNG image. All in all, these were some of the minor issues among many.

To boil down to a point, if you’re interested in viewing WAP sites, building WAP sites, or even thinking about WAP sites you pretty much have two handsets to think about – Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. I say we as an industry give up on what it looks like on other/older phones. It’s kind of like IE6, we should just stop supporting it and focus on the future instead of the legacy. We’re on the cusp of a potential tidal wave of designer sites. This is the best way to push ourselves as designers and developers. By limiting us with older handsets, we limit our creativity and imagination. Besides, people on older handsets aren’t looking and utilizing WAP sites anyway, they’re too busy playing Snake. I loved that game.

We’re in the process of re-working the Yamaha WAP site, but to see the original design before it changes go check it out for yourself by having a link sent to you. Go to our homepage (www.textopoly.com) – enter in your phone number and presto you’ll have the site sent to you!

CTIA Round Up and Why does Everyone have an App Store?

Naushad — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:32:42 +0000

We’re back from CTIA and overall is was pretty meh….

What’s up with everyone having their own app store? iPhone has it’s iTunes App Store, Blackberry has App World, Nokia has Ovi, Erikson has an App Store, Windows has an App Store, and the list keeps on going. Just about everyone has their own app store today and the benefit of having all these stores is that you get to program for each one! If you want to build for the iPhone it needs to be in Objective C, Flash lite for Nokia’s Ovi, and Java for Blackberry’s App World.

Someone should set up a group like the MMA, but for mobile apps. Something like this would help make the industry more unified and organized, let alone cause less complaints among the end users and developers. The only people the current system is benefiting are the handset makers. The rest of us are getting the short end of the stick. Check out this interesting article from last June that I recently found – What if…Microsoft Had a Windows App Store? An interesting read about what if Microsoft in ‘95 was like Apple today.

Getting back to CTIA, Nokia’s Ovi store was not too impressive, plus how many people are rockin’ Nokia’s nowadays? They do have a pretty cool map feature, where you can overlay an application over their built in maps, but the graphics seemed dated.

Motorola Cliq – one word – ‘meh….’ This was the phone everyone was talking about, that’s probably because it was the only phone or tech that was being hawked. The UI was clunky, boring, and confusing. If you can’t figure it out instinctively, then you have a problem. You know what does really get me to dig on a phone? Dance Dance Revolution. Really Motorola? A little late to the game. Rock Band or Guitar Hero would’ve been a better option – no one wants to play DDR at your booth, give it up.

Overall, there wasn’t much new technology. Sure Microsoft released it’s Windows 6.5 Mobile, but that wasn’t very impressive either. Again, clunky with useless social networking integration that no one really needs. Who uses the Window’s Live Social Networking functionality anyways?

The other big thing that everyone one seems to be doing is geo-tagging one’s location and updating it through one social network or another. Whether it’s a propriety network or Facebook, they all have a ‘unique solution’ that let’s your friends know where you are at any given time. Maybe it’s just me and I’m an old fuddy-duddy (with a word like that I sure am), but I don’t want everyone to know where I am. What if I have some crazy stalker and they’re always wondering where I am? How much easier is it for them to find me know? No thanks! You can keep your geo-tagging, hopefully this is a fad that won’t take off.

Otherwise, I can be fairly confident in saying that the show seemed pretty thin. The floor was empty on Thursday and Friday and the offerings were slim pickings. What about you guys? See anything that impressed you?