Linkbait

This week’s.

• Andrea Giammarchi looks at The Status of Mobile Browsing. Extremely useful overview, especially the fundamental tip to do 2D transformations and animations in 3D because 3G is hardware-accelerated and 2G isn’t. He also advocates browser detection.
• Paying the experienced hand less (and part 2). Why it sometimes makes sense to pretend a web development job is pretty tough while you could have done it in an hour. Sounds familiar?
• Smartphone market predictions. Points out that the smartphone price will start dropping prodigiously, and sales will grow tremendously. Android will certainly benefit of this, but I doubt whether it will be the only beneficiary. Besides, they also said that 2010 was going to be the year of Android. Which it has been — up to a point. But don’t overlook MeeGo, bada, maybe Windows Phone, and certainly good old Symbian.
• Horace Dediu adds some thoughts to the previous item and believes this may actually hurt the top-10 phone sellers:

  Instead, what I am suggesting is that the bottom of the phone market is very vulnerable to becoming smart. This may sound like an odd sort of disruption, but it’s a very sinister threat to companies who are in the business of selling brands and not platforms.

• Nokia and Google are working on near-field communications (NFC), meant primarily for mobile payments. Your mobile phone will contact another device via NFC, and the required amount for a bus or cinema ticket will be automatically deducted from your account.
  Sounds fun, but I’m left wondering why we need it if you can also pay by SMS. This may be a solution for which there is no problem.
• Extremely useful and recent overview of the mouse events by Jan Wolter. He tests what events fire on a right-click, something I’ve never done, and is thorough and detailed in his treatment of the many events and circumstances. All in all a must-bookmark if you ever want to create really fine-grained mouse event handling.
• Tomi Ahonen discusses the state of the mobile market at the end of 2010. Required reading.
• Web Apps Overview of the Android developer site. Useful details here.
• And the PlayStation Phone is finally coming. In spring. Based on Android. Will it help SonyEricsson regain some market share?