Dear Readers,
thanks to a total power grid failure by NS HighSpeed, my train which was scheduled to arrive in Amsterdam at 9h25 has arrived only at like 13h00.
But, I am here now:
DevCon Europe Reporting starts soon – visit our sister site TamsBlackBerry to find out more:
http://tamsblackberry.tamoggemon.com
When it comes to mobile advertising, it is now difficult to find an ad-free free app on platforms like Android and iOS. For many, this seems to compensate at least somewhat for the loss of sales in “classic” business models.
As for the ad market overall, the folks from the advertising firm inneractive have just sent us the following, pretty interesting diagram:
What do you think?
In the good old days of the Palm OS, the main issue faced by Palm was the odd resultion: a base resolution of 160×160 made scaling to more “common” resolutions was difficult.
Apple has had a similar problem with its 480×320 resolution, but managed to follow it up. Samsung is now at 800×480, and the question is what will follow next (and what is technically possible).
A PR company has now sent me the following:
MicroOLED, a maker of highly power-efficient superior image quality microdisplays for near-to-eye applications, today introduced a new 5.4 million pixel density 0.61 inch diagonal, low power consumption OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Display) microdisplay on silicon for applications demanding high picture quality, such as professional camera and camcorder equipment, night vision systems and head-mounted displays used in surgery.
The ultra-compact 5.4 million-pixel microdisplay with a sub-pixel pitch of 4.7 micrometres by 4.7 micrometres is the highest pixel density OLED microdisplay available today. By doubling the pixel density of comparable products, MicroOLED has eliminated the gap between pixels. With no black matrix present, the resulting image resolution is of the highest quality. This makes the 5.4 million-pixel 0.61 inch diagonal microdisplay most suitable for defense, medical and professional camera applications that demand sharp images with very smooth transitional tones.
As of this writing, no data on availability is given – but it looks like the resolution war can continue!
When it comes to new Garnet OS hardware, Aceeca is the company to go to. After having shipped the fascinating PDA32, they now ship an RFID module for their MEZ1500 RDA handheld.
Aceeca has now informed us about the following:
In our last newsletter we let all our customers know that we are now shipping evaluation units for our new RFID Scanner (IDV1500-RFS1). And this week we are very pleased to announce that the great folks over at Satellite Forms now provide full support for it.
Not much to add here…
An article from Forbes – inaccurately titled How China Ate Android – is currently making circles all over Nokia employee’s Twitter streams.
It contains the following passage, which is highlighted by the Nokia folks:
How is it possible the mid-tier Android vendors cannot eke out revenue growth with that kind of global Android unit explosion still going on?
The most likely explanation is the rapid expansion of the low-cost Android phone vendors, particularly ZTE and Huawei. I
Sadly, they fail to read on – as it contains the following passage, also:
… they are also eyeing other device segments. ZTE’s Windows model Tania is debuting in the UK at the monthly contract rate of 10 pounds – half of what the Nokia 710 will cost.
If you ask me, Nokia would have fared best with a proper version of Symbian – with Android being the second best. The reason for this has been outlined here before: while Windows Phone 7 is a nice platform, it is, by design, unsuitable for creating high end phones.
However, all the eeking and squeaking mainly takes place in the mid-range area. High-end Android devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note have little to fear from Chinese manufactutrers – they prefer the cushier mid- and low-range markets to the cold winds faced in the profitable, but challenging high-end market.
Let’s quote Winston Churchill: “I am not a person to be prodded. If anything, I am the prod”.
Sadly, Nokia has all but given up that position. So, better invest in impact dampers – and get aquainted to that prod…
Dear Readers,
I am unhappy to inform you that we have had a minor break-in into our systems – an attacker of unknown provinience exploited the software used to host the Tamoggemon Content Network, as to insert content to “spam” the Google search engine with ads for his own products.
As this was a purely Google-targeted attack, no post data was damaged and no user data was stolen. We have been able to remove the hack fully from all sites already.
This disclosure is made only to satisfy our legal obligations. The following sites were affected:
Should you recognize any oddities, please let us know immediately!
With best regards
Tam Hanna / Jatinder Singh
This one goes out to all true Tam Hanna fans who happen to be in Germany in February – you can meet yours truly at the Mobile Developer Conference.
I will be speaking about data persistance on Windows Phone 7 – and most definitely, attendants can expect a few surprises!
Find out more via the URL below:
http://www.mobile-developer-conference.de/
When it comes to Samsung, most other mobile companies do not get the motives of this firm. Still today, I can hardly restrain my laughter when thinking about how Nokia accused Eldar Murtazin about “being sponsored by Samsung” – bollocks, the company just happens to be everywhere.
The BBC now reports the following:
Samsung Electronics has agreed to buy out Sony’s entire stake in their liquid crystal display (LCD) joint venture.
The Korean electronics maker said it will pay Sony 1.08tn won ($939m; £600m) in cash for its stake.
The move comes as Sony has been restructuring its TV business, which has been making a loss for the past seven years.
…
This report nicely fits into the Samsung picture – it is a little-known fact that the company offers, among other things, building services. In fact, the picture to the left of this story shows the Petronas Towers…which were, incidentally, built by Samsung.
Samsung’s management takes an extreme long-term view on many industries. For them, an investment makes sense even if it takes 10 years to pay off – especially if it gives you control over the competition. Let’s take a look at that.
If we look at past reviews, Samsungs products consistently stand out due to the extraordinarily high display quality. Furthermore, the devices tend to be very affordable – the launch price of the first-generation Wave (bada phone) can almost be called dumping.
All of this is made possible by a very unorthodox trend: anti-outsourcing! If you make the stuff other manufacturers have to buy, it gives you more leeway – selling an LCD to yourself at production costs is an entirely sensible decision as long as the end product makes money.
Of all firms in Mobile, no one has perfected this approach to the extent Samsung has – what do you think?
I have always thought that there is no correlation between screen diagonals and click through rates – what impact should the screen size have on user behavior?
InnerActive has now sent us the following diagram, which shows a clear correlation:
Any ideas?
Rumors about non-payment of developers my MobiHand’s have made circles in the BlackBerry market for some time – reminding veterans of the Palm ESD which also almost went belly-up and repaid the developers over a few years.
A recent CrackBerry forum post purpoted to be coming from MobiHand now reads as following – emphasis added by yours truly
To help you folks avoid further misunderstanding on a couple of issues, here is some information about recent topics we’ve seen discussed on these forums. First, MobiHand continues to provide customer service in the same manner as in past. In the few cases of activation code problems that have actually been referred to us, the cause has been the removal, by the applicable developer, of the linkage between our systems and the developer’s systems, which is needed to generate codes based on the application’s DRM model. We encourage developers to continue to provide service and enable us to provide service to our mutual customers. We are late on some payments, but we are working to resolve that and it is not appropriate or helpful to the situation for any of us to hurt or scare our customers.
Another issue recently raised has been “refunds” recorded on the system over the last few days. Almost all of these are not voluntary refunds to customers. These are “chargebacks” (forced refunds) imposed by the credit card companies when the original purchase was made by a user not authorized to use the credit card. Unfortunately, these fraud events are common in online commerce, especially for sales of items that don’t need to be shipped to a real physical address. We use several techniques to detect and reject many fraud orders, but some get through undetected. We historically experience fraud rates lower than industry averages and much less than 1% of sales. The experience rates for different products often vary as the fraudsters sometimes seem to target specific products. These chargebacks come from the credit card companies day by day, normally several weeks or months after the original sale (after the cardholders have examined their credit card statements) and we normally record them in big batches. The items recorded in the last few days represent an accumulation of chargebacks over about two months. We are simply completing the accounting after not recording them for some time.
We ask developers in this forum to understand that MobiHand continues to work hard to provide services, get all of you paid and generate growing revenues. If something is not perfect, please do not interpret it to mean that we have given up or do not intend to get it right. Most developers with questions and concerns have addressed them directly to us in a businesslike manner, using the help tool inside their MobiHand account, and most concerns are resolved to their satisfaction with the one exception being late payments. We appreciate that most developers are not using payment delays as a reason to create more problems by inconveniencing customers or encouraging panic by the developer community. You should also know that MobiHand is not some giant corporate monster — it is a small technology company with real people who have provided outstanding service to customers, developers and website stores for seven years. As usual, businesses go through easy times and difficult times and the only way we know to get through difficulties is to continue to work. MobiHand is continuing to provide services and intends to pay every single dollar owed to every single developer and we have several initiatives underway that we believe will enable that.
Finally, please understand that we don’t read these forums everyday, we don’t intend to become regular participants and, if we are silent about issues, it is not because we don’t care. We are simply focused on running our business. Instead of engaging in debates, we are trying to serve the developer community and our mutual customers.
Thanks.
As of this writing, not much more is known…
P.S. To clarify some accusations levied against Tamoggemon Limited by a hysteric developer who will remain unnamed: we have not made any revenue off MobiHand for ages. We stand in no commercial relationship to MobiHand whatsoever.
The more I look at the situation of webOS, the more I feel that HP has made a huge mistake in abandoning its former legacy in the way it has.
Good fate and bad fortune brought me face to face with the manager of the store who ran the TouchPad fire sale mentioned here some time ago. He told me the following during a casual chat:
The TouchPad sale…it was insane. We actually needed hordes of private security and even the Austrian police to prevent the TouchPad situation from escalating into an FFA.
We had a huge amount of stock…but it was depleted in less than two hours…
Not much to add here…except that only the fair get strokes (in servitude, Hubert I.) and that only the good die young.
P.S. I asked for pictures, but he, sadly, had none…too much stress to grab the camera…
When it comes to deciding which countries to target during localization, knowing more about the habits of the inhabitants of the land is very useful.
The folks from ComScore now bring us the following table:
| Total Internet | |||
| Total Unique Visitors (000) | Average Hours per Visitor | Average Pages per Visitor | |
| World-Wide | 1,431,939 | 24.6 | 2,402 |
| Europe | 376,644 | 27.8 | 3,013 |
| Russian Federation | 51,641 | 24.4 | 2,664 |
| Germany | 50,704 | 25.4 | 2,967 |
| France | 42,520 | 28.3 | 2,957 |
| United Kingdom | 37,404 | 37.5 | 3,510 |
| Italy | 23,986 | 19.1 | 2,132 |
| Turkey | 23,234 | 33.4 | 4,017 |
| Spain | 21,382 | 28.3 | 2,475 |
| Poland | 18,193 | 26.7 | 3,189 |
| Netherlands | 11,987 | 35.5 | 3,562 |
| Sweden | 6,219 | 26.5 | 2,761 |
| Belgium | 6,047 | 20.4 | 2,282 |
| Switzerland | 4,764 | 19.5 | 2,121 |
| Austria | 4,733 | 15.0 | 1,720 |
| Portugal | 4,263 | 21.6 | 2,240 |
| Denmark | 3,676 | 23.5 | 2,483 |
| Finland | 3,381 | 26.2 | 2,633 |
| Norway | 3,264 | 29.2 | 2,703 |
| Ireland | 2,349 | 21.4 | 2,139 |
Not much to add here…
In the past, our business applications have fared extraordinarily well in India – Nokia is a large brand there, and business apps are extremely popular in this market.
Mobile Business Briefing now has the following bit of advice courtesy of Reliance:
…combined circulations of all of the English-language newspapers does not approach that of the single most popular local-language title,…
Feel like localizing? Let us know!
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