Posts Tagged ‘design’
Written on August 29th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Nokia unveiled their next generation internet tablet this week. xThe Nokia N900, like the N810 and N800 tablet before it, the device uses Linux-based Maemo software. Unlike Nokia’s earlier tablets, it connects to the internet over a cellular connection. It’s not a phone, it’s a tablet, but the GSM connections imply that cellular voice may be a possibility in the future.
Features include GSM, GPRS, EDGE and HSDPA connectivity (along with support for AWS frequencies used by T-Mobile), Wi-Fi, a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, TV-out, Bluetooth, FM transmitter, GPS, a browser powered by Mozilla; full Adobe Flash 9.4 support; a slide-out QWERTY keyboard; Nokia’s Messaging service, which allows up to 10 email accounts; 32GB of storage, expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card; and a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics.
The company says it remains committed to the Symbian OS for its smartphones, although analysts are starting to wonder if Maemo could eventually replace it, says MocoNews.
It marks the third operating system that the company has said it will support—just in the past week. On Monday Nokia announced the 10-inch “Booklet 3G”, a netbook running Microsoft Windows.
Nokia said the N900 will be available in some markets starting in October with an estimated retail price of EUR 500 ($712) excluding sales taxes and subsidies.
On 1 April 2008, Nokia announced a WiMAX equipped version of the N810 called the “N810 WiMAX Edition”, with specifications similar to the original N810, but the production of the Wimax Edition of the Nokia N810 was canceled in January 2009. Source: Dailywireless
Written on August 29th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
It’s that time of year when SXSW Interactive puts all the approved talk submissions up for public vote. We hope you’ll take a moment and vote for these mobile and device user experience sessions. Voting ends September 4th.
1 // “Convergence: Already Here, and Gosh It’s a Mess!“
Speaker: Gabriel White, Punchcut
Convergence is here and it’s a big mess. People are using services and media within hacked-together ecosystems; systems without neat connections or beautiful symmetries. Punchcut will share the user insights and design principles needed to create applications and services that integrate into emerging digital lifestyles and convergent ecosystems.
2 // “It’s Slow, Ugly and Not What I Designed: How to Ship Good Design”
Speakers: Patricia Slechta & Christian Robertson, Punchcut
Has your user experience ever been lost in translation? You see the mobile device in the marketplace and you hardly recognize it? Punchcut will share insights and explore organizational principles that bridge design and the go-to-market reality. We will discuss ways to prevent user experiences from being lost in translation.
3 // Crowd Sourcing The Planet: How Mobile Devices Become Sensor Arrays That Can Aggregate A World Of Content
Moderator: Henry Tirri, Nokia
Mobile phones are becoming mobile computers with multiple sensory inputs such as cameras, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, light sensors, NFC and etc. Users of these devices have an enthusiasm for sharing data and content, and as more contribute the possibility of aggregating content together into new forms has wild potential.
4 // “Innovation for Hire: Innovating in the Client Relationship“
Speaker: Jodi Burke, Punchcut
Being a consultancy (or a freelancer) means working with clients to develop innovative concepts, but how do you prevent them from being pared-down, watered-down or shelved? This process-oriented session will present battle-tested techniques on how to partner with clients in order to get innovation to market.
5 // Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences?
Moderator: Josh Babetski, MapQuest
As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.
6 // Death of the Browser
Speaker: Daniel Jacobson, National Public Radio
With the tremendous growth of the iPhone and other mobile devices, are we about to witness the death of the traditional desktop web browser? If so, how fast will it happen? Or can the browser and mobile phone live in harmony in the years to come? This panel will explore the future of the mobile space and how it will impact the way we interact with the Internet.
7 // Mobile Technology: What’s New, What’s Out, What’s Next?
Speaker: Anup Murarka, Adobe
There’s lots of talk about creating engaging experiences for consumers on their mobile phones… but what’s the reality? Hear some of the industry’s top players as they hash out what’s hot with mobile technology, what needs to be changed, and what the future holds.
SXSW Interactive 2010 is held in Austin, Texas in March 2010. Source: Idlemode
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Written on August 19th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Long-range, low-cost wireless Internet could soon be delivered using “whitespaces” — radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. This week at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain, a computer network that uses “white spaces” in a fashion somewhat similar to Wi-Fi was outlined.
Networking over UHF white spaces is fundamentally different from conventional Wi-Fi, explains Ranveer Chandra of Microsoft Research, a main contributor to the paper. Their WhiteFi approach is a Wi-Fi like system constructed on top of UHF white spaces. WhiteFi incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation in unused television channesl, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation.
Most of the prior research in UHF white spaces has focused on accurately detecting the presence of incumbent RF signals, says Chandra in the paper (pdf). Researchers are now beginning to look at the problem of establishing a wireless link between white space devices. Their research pushes the state-of-art to the next level by going beyond a single link.
Matt Welsh, a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and one of the authors of the paper (pdf), tells Dailywireless that the paper was presented at the conference by Rohan Murty at Harvard University, one of his Ph.D. students who contributed to the work along with Ranveer Chandra of Microsoft Research. The paper (pdf) is a joint effort between researchers at Microsoft Research and at Harvard.
WhiteFi focuses primarily on the problem of setting up a Wi-Fi like network, consisting of an Access Point (AP) with multiple associated clients. It uses a new spectrum assignment algorithm with a new mechanism that quickly discovers APs operating anywhere in the 180 MHz white space, using any arbitrary channel width. They also described a new technique for handling disconnections where clients signal to the AP without interfering with ongoing wireless microphone transmissions.
They estimate UHF spectrum fragmentation in 3 settings: urban, suburban and rural (population less than 6000). In all 3 settings there is at least one locale in which there is a fragment of 4 contiguous channels available, that is, 24 MHz of spectrum. In rural areas fragments of up to 16 channels are expected.
Microsoft researchers tested the new protocol, called White Fi, in the Redmond campus. It uses UHF white spaces and adaptively configures itself to operate in the most efficient part of the available white spaces. TV spectrum could provide good long-range connectivity in rural areas, and help fill in gaps in city networks.
The spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz was originally allotted to analog TV channels from 21 to 51. It offers a longer range than conventional Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 gigahertz. “Imagine the potential if you could connect to your home [Internet] router from up to a mile,” says Ranveer Chandra, a member of the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research behind the project.
The FCC ruled last November that companies could build devices that transmit over white spaces but also gave strict requirements that this should not interfere with existing broadcasts, both from TV stations and from other wireless devices that operate within the same spectrum. Chandra and his colleagues say their “White Fi,” protocol can successfully navigate the tricky regulatory and technical obstacles involved with using white spaces.
A second approach, which is being considered by the IEEE 802.22 working group, involves an explicit channel renegotiation protocol between clients and APs when they detect a wireless mic. This approach, however, assumes that control messages will not induce audible interference on the wireless mic.
The White Spaces Coalition consists of eight large technology companies that plan to deliver high speed broadband internet access in unused television frequencies between 54-698 MHz (TV Channels 2-51). The coalition expects speeds of 80 Mbps and above, and 400 to 800 Mbps for white space short-range networking. The group includes Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Earthlink, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics. The White Spaces Database Group maps out available spectrum.
On February 27 2009, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Association for Maximum Service Television, Inc. (MSTV) asked a Federal court to shut down the FCC’s authorization of white space wireless devices. The plaintiffs allege that portable, unlicensed personal devices operating in the same band as TV broadcasts have been “proven” to cause interference despite FCC tests to the contrary.
In (somewhat) related news, researchers at Harvard University and BBN have developed CitySense, an urban scale sensor network testbed. CitySense will consist of 100 wireless sensors deployed across a city. Each node will consist of an embedded PC, 802.11a/b/g interface, and various sensors for monitoring weather conditions and air pollutants.
Harvard’s Sensor Networks Lab has also deployed three wireless sensor networks on active volcanoes.
Read Write Web reviews on Citysense and WikiCity, iPhone applications that integrate sensor networks with social networks. A recent W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, held in Barcelona in January, reviews the trend of sensors mixing with social networks and offers some real-world applications.
Both Social Networks and Sensors information can be modeled using Semantic Web technologies, says the paper. They can be connected in an interoperable and straightforward way. The W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF), is an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.
By combining social networks and social activities to Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, the Semantic Web can map existing applications in new and innovative ways.
Products involving Web-connected devices include flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, and mobile heart monitors. CardioSign hopes to commercialize a wearable blood pressure sensor.
Sensor Web XML-based specifications were created in consideration of Semantic Web technology, which allows data from various sources to be used with a common semantics for the data.
Source: http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/08/18/microsofts-whitefi-wi-fi-using-whitespaces/
Written on August 19th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
The problem has been around forever, yet the mobile industry is still fighting for a solution to SMS spam. As such a quickly growing problem, the FCC and several mobile-specific organizations are still trying to define what is and what isn’t considered mobile SPAM- a process that’s easier said than done.
Mobile spam can be sub-divided into two general categories: legitimate marketers not following best practices and sending unsolicited messages, and the more devious malware attacks, in which malicious messages are sent through text or e-mail to attack a phone’s operating system. Either way, this spam is annoying to consumers, and is giving legitimate rule-following mobile marketers a bad name.
The MMA and other mobile communities have been busy creating industry best practices, rules and regulations to help legitimate marketers stay a step ahead of spammers and to remain transparent in their efforts, but the entire landscape changes so quickly that staying ahead of the curve is getting increasingly difficult.
Contributing to the intolerance of SMS spam is the fact that consumers often will stop what they are doing to read a new mobile message, and will likely have to pay a fee for receiving it. Getting more and more spam messages makes consumers that much more weary of opening any marketing-based SMS message, legitimate or not.
Wireless carriers are doing their part in trying to curb SMS spam, such as AT&T allowing customers to restrict the sources of email that can reach their devices, or replying BLOCK to any email or SMS message deemed unsolicited, but as it does via traditional spam, carriers are usually a step behind the spammers.
“Marketers should enable the end user to control the communications that are received at the device, and enable them as a user, not through the carrier or customer service, to say, ‘I don’t want any messages from short codes’ and also to create lists of who can get through,” says Daniel Hoffman, SVP of communications at SMobile Systems. ”As you eliminate the ability to do targeting what you are doing is making it closer to spam,” Wehrs adds. “So, there is a delicate balance to being targeted and relevant without going too far and making the user feel that their privacy is being invaded.”
It’s a delicate balance, and a problem that won’t be going away any time soon, but the carriers, the FCC and most mobile-based organizations are busy trying to distinguish, fight and regulate spam the best they can. It just reiterates the fact that if you’re a mobile marketer, industry best practices should be your number one concern at all times. Source: Marketing Watch.com
Written on August 19th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
For small-sized retailers, it’s a pain to accept credit card payments on the go. PayPal has teamed up with Transaction Wireless to alleviate the problem.
With the partnership, Transaction Wireless offers users of PayPal to accept all major credit cards via any mobile phone. The technology turns a standard mobile phone into a credit card terminal without any extra equipment. Merchants will pay a subscription fee for the service in addition to PayPal’s regular fees.
San Diego-based Transaction Wireless also offers “enhanced” gift cards and mobile loyalty programs for marketing businesses of all sizes. With this service, consumers can manage, track, buy and deliver gift cards using virtually any carrier or handset. While currently unrelated to the mobile phone credit card transactions, the company may want to explore ways to merge their mobile payments and follow-up with their mobile loyalty programs. The point-of-sale mobile credit card transaction is not a new technology and it starting to gain ground internationally. In April, Visa Inc. announced the launch of the world’s first commercial Visa mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions in Malaysia. In Sweden, mobile payment and security provider Accumulate announced expanding their technology further into physical point-of-sale payments with mobile, and announced a similar partnership with Swedish-based payment system provider PayEx in late July.
However, the partnership makes this available for smaller merchants who wouldn’t be able to afford it before. Merchants, anywhere from the school fundraising bazaar or swap meet to contractors and home delivery services collecting larger sums of money can accept VISA, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover credit cards and issue receipts to customers’ mobile phones or email addresses. Source: Mobile Marketing Watch
Written on August 19th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Smartphone apps are getting more and more comprehensive everyday it seems, and with the advent of location-based services, mobile social networking and other genres, privacy is becoming increasingly important.
There’s been a recent surge of developers and consumers that have noticed what some apps are doing behind the scenes in terms of gathering user information- and it’s raising concerns for those who value their privacy. A programmer recently discovered, for example, that Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS information back to Palm, even though the company’s privacy policy revealed as much.
In addition, ReadWriteWeb is reporting that mobile analytics company Pinch Media allows developers to insert code into applications in order to create a user profile. The information is designed to help developers, although some consider the technique invasive. If the user profile is used with good intentions to help the app in what ever it’s supposed to accomplish, then so be it, but when that user information is used for other purposes without the user’s consent, it creates a big problem.
The regulations associated with this sort of thing are very ambiguous- app developers submitting to Apple’s App store, for example, aren’t required to reveal what types of data they’re tracking. Also, when users consent to have their location revealed, app developers don’t necessarily have to disclose what additional data they’re tracking.
Until regulation is put in place, the only defense is to go over every single line of your TOS and privacy policy associated with any new app you think will collect sensitive user information- since almost nobody will do such a thing, we’re still at the mercy of the app developers. Source: Mobile Marketing Watch
Written on August 16th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Motorola launched its LTE drive tour in Sweden today, to demonstrate their Long Term Evolution technology to operators from across Scandinavia. During the drive tour, visitors will witness LTE’s mobile broadband performance on the move in an urban environment via an LTE-enabled van. The demonstration will include hand-over between sectors and a number of demanding, bandwidth hungry video applications – including live TV over LTE.
The LTE network, which includes two Motorola LTE eNodeBs running on commercial hardware, is operating at 2.6GHz. It was deployed and optimised in just 10 days, says Motorola. Inside the van, which also toured the streets of Barcelona at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, visitors will see Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) streaming video from a Motorola video-on-demand server, as well as voice over IP calls, web browsing, file downloads and other high bandwidth and low latency Internet-based applications. 
Swedish cellular operator TeliaSonera selected Ericsson to build the world’s first commercial LTE site in Stockholm. There are no paying customers on it, but it will be part of the Nordic carrier’s commercial LTE network in Sweden’s capital city. It is scheduled to go live in 2010. The Swedish carrier will also use LTE gear from Huawei Technologies. Huawei has been aggressive in LTE development. Ericsson is currently the largest LTE proponent. Ericsson expects 80% of mobile broadband services will be enabled by cellular by 2012, using HSPA and LTE technologies. Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said the bulk of mobile broadband deployments in the coming five years will be based on HSPA. But Huawei faces little competition in the market for LTE gear, opines Om Malik, with Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent in financial difficulty. Vodafone will use Huwaei gear in its LTE trials where Vodafone Germany and Huawei will test the performance of LTE in the 790-862MHz band using Huawei’ s end-to-end LTE solution. Huwaei opened a Long Term Evolution laboratory in Richardson, Texas. In June, Huawei launched what it proclaimed the world’s first commercial WiMax distributed base station (DBS) with four transmitters and four receivers (4T4Rs).
Motorola is actively involved in LTE trails with operators in North America, Europe and Asia, and earlier this year launched its LTE trial network and testing lab in Swindon, United Kingdom. Earlier this year, Motorola deployed a live 700MHz LTE demonstration network in Las Vegas, replicating their 2.6GHz live LTE experience in Barcelona. In addition to the collaborative trials with operators, Motorola is actively engaged with the TD-LTE trials initiated by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as part of its efforts to develop a globally competitive TD-LTE industry.
Ericsson’s CEO believes LTE will always have a price advantage — through volume — reports Om Malik. Ericsson drew a comparison to India, where GSM-enabled handsets enjoy a price advantage over their CDMA counterparts. “It will be the same for LTE and WiMAX,” he said. “In the end it will be about the economies of scale.” The ITU says their IMT-Advanced specification will be the only “true” 4G system. It calls for 100 Mbit/s downloads and a 1 Gbit/s link for stationary or local area connections. The ITU has said two specifications, 802.16m (or WiMax 2) and LTE-Advanced, will be considered, and it’s also possible that the Chinese government will submit its own specification for consideration.
Meanwhile, Motorola’s WiMAX infrastructure was used by Clearwire in Portland, Atlanta and Las Vegas. The Atlanta area is served by more than 400 cell sites that utilize Motorola’s WAP 400 and WAP 450 Diversity Access Point products. The WAP 400 and WAP 450 utilize tower top power amplifiers linked by their fiber optic cable with the base control unit housed in a small outdoor cabinet situated at the bottom of the tower. Source: Dailywireless.org
Source: http://www.dailywireless.org
Written on August 7th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
TextMagic, a provider of SMS-focused solutions for businesses and developers, has launched a new bulk SMS Gateway API to allow for any application developer to connect to more than 700 global mobile networks and allow for a variety of innovative solutions related to SMS.
Developers can connect to TextMagic’s Bulk SMS Gateway using the HTTP API or Email to SMS service, and add SMS functionality to new and existing Web and back-office custom applications quickly and efficiently, potentially reaching more than three billion active SMS service users, and adding new-age functionality along the way. The company has even published a detailed, searchable online API manual that includes descriptions of commands illustrated with examples and includes testing hints.
In addition to the release of the new API, TextMagic has gone a step further in facilitating the integration of text messaging into software applications with the release of open-source client libraries prepared for Java, Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP. These libraries take over the responsibility of communication with the API and serve as text messaging middleware which is both well documented and easy to install. Since its launch, the initiative has been welcomed by developers and soon will be extended to other popular programming languages.
The company looks to have done a very good job of creating an all-inclusive package, so to speak, to developers wanting to integrate new-age SMS functionality into their projects. Not only that, but an abundance of documentation for both the set of APIs and open source code libraries, which is sometimes hard to find with open source technologies. Source: Mobile Marketing Watch
Written on August 3rd, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
LTE activity gathering pace: Wireless internet access is going to be a better, richer experience than fixed link access Professor Michael Walker, group R&D director at Vodafone told Wireless 2.0 conference in Bristol, organised by Silicon South-West. “People think wireless can’t compete with fixed link, but it can”, said Walker, pointing out that the 100Mbit/s of FTTH is the same as the theoretical maximum throughput of LTE. “LTE capacity on 20MHz is an order of magnitude higher than HSPA,” said Walker. He said that, “in the first real field trials,” average downlink speeds of 15Mbit/s, with 4.5 spectral efficiency, were achieved. “Wimax takes three times more spectrum”, he said. “We decided with LTE that we would make sure the technology works before we buy spectrum,” said Walker. To that end, Vodafone has been working with China Mobile and Verizon to make sure LTE has compatible standards. Source: http://the4gportal.tumblr.com/post/141013908/lte-activity-gathering-pace
Written on August 1st, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Recently at Punchcut the visual design team filled a white board with things related to interface design that drive us nuts. By no means is this an exhaustive list (and yes, I did filter the list before and after posting it).
DVD Menus – Stop it with the low budget animation and let me watch the movie. Also, would it kill them to include the whole song before the thing repeats?
Telephone UIs – the non-mobile kind
TV Remotes – Seriously, how many buttons do you need? A computer keyboard doesn’t have as many buttons as some of these things
Projector UIs
TV Menus
User testing politics – Not the testing, just the politics
Grey – Sometimes we’re sick of it. Sometimes we use it for everything.
Syncing – Every time you push the button you think, ‘which version did I just destroy?’
Using Illustrator for bitmaps
Photoshop’s layers panel – Great for editing photo layers, terrible for drawing UIs. Do I really have to name every single element I place on the screen just to be able to select it?
Acrobat - Why does it take 10 minutes to open a document?
Papyrus – The font, but also the paper if used in an interface context
Designing the same thing over and over
Too many panels – Screens looking boring? Draw a box around each UI element!
Zara’s Facebook friends
Inconsistency
Complexity – Yep, that’s right, we like things simple. Shocking.
Soft keys – on anything
5-way keys
Feature bloat
Wallpapers
Outlined type – See wallpapers
Trying to do too much with icons – Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures
Non-heuristic approach – I’m not sure what we meant here, but I’m sure it made us hopping mad
CAPTCHA
DRM
HDCP – Seriously, my TV doesn’t work 30% of the time when I power it up, even after I upgraded the firmware with a USB key. Unacceptable! It’s a TV! But it works just fine with torrents, hypothetically.
Acrylic buttons
Blue – Everyone L-O-V-E-S it in testing, though
Color coding – If you have more than two categories, you end up rainbow brite every time, and who can really keep it to two categories
Annunciator Bars – 46 pixels tall on a 220 pixel screen? Come on.
Analog clocks on digital UIs
Rounded corners – Except on things that could injure you: glassware, for example
Poorly rasterized text – Good type + lousy rasterizer = bad type
Source: http://idlemode.com
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