Linkbait 3

This week’s.

• Amazon Android App Store. Rarely heard such nonsense. Why the hell would an Android developer put his apps here instead of in the Android Market? Oh, and they’ll waive the $99 fee the first year. Wow!
  I don’t know what Amazon is smoking, but I want some.
• Tomi Ahonen gives his Smartphone bloodbath update (part 2); the last for 2010 to work with approximations, since all relevant numbers will be known by the start of February.
  Summary: Apple doing really well, Android too, Windows Phone 7 not so well, Nokia N8 not brilliant; Samsung just behind HTC. Projected total sales 2010: 310 million smartphones, up from 175 million in 2009, for a growth of more than 75%.
  Nokia still largest, Apple and RIM fighting for second place, HTC comes in fourth, then Samsung, then Motorola.
• Interesting white paper about native vs. web apps. (PDF, free subscription required). Collected answers from about 90 people involved with mobile apps. Some highlights:
  • Reasons to choose native over web: superior UI; access to device APIs
  • Reasons to choose web over native: creating single interface more cost effective; control over distribution.
  • User adoption higher for native.
  • Use of native apps peaks at download and then steadily decreases. Use of web apps grows steadily after download. (The differences are not huge, though.)
  • Higher ad click-through rates on native apps. (Stands to reason: people already know how to ignore web ads.)
  • Session length for native higher than for web.
  • Development costs for native higher than for web.
  • Web apps weeks quicker to deploy than native apps.
• BlackBerry’s dirty geolocation secrets.
• Simon Judge points out that the better an Android phone is differentiated from all the countless others, the harder it is to upgrade to a new Android version.
  An interesting conundrum. Device vendors and operators want differentiation; consumers (and, presumably, Google) want upgrades. Someone will have to give in somewhere eventually.
• In Tanzania, doctors send bus fare to women needing care by SMS.
• Excellent piece about the Why Wasn’t I Consulted syndrom. Incidentally, this syndrom is why I switched off comments. You weren’t consulted because I don’t care about your opinion.
• Stephen Hay points out there is no mobile web (or a desktop or a tablet web), just The Web.
• HP will hold a press event on 9th of February, just before MWC. It is expected to reveal a whole slew of webOS-powered devices.
  More to the point: time is running out for HP. If they don’t wow the world now they’re history as far as non-traditional devices are concerned. And the traditional desktop/laptop market doesn’t look wonderful, either, when it comes to profits.
  And if they’re history, webOS is history, too, and that would be a shame since it’s still the only system that can give iOS a run for its money UX-wise.
  The announcement better be good.
• Zoltan Hawryluk has created a matrix construction set that helps math-challenged people like me to create CSS3 transform matrices. Useful!
• Vision Mobile discusses RIM’s recent acquisition of Swedish UI house TAT. The biggest boon for BlackBerry will be easy customisation of the UI, so that RIM can quickly differentiate for operators and its own two increasingly disparate audiences: teen texters and enterprise users.
  I do not, however, believe that the acquisition will allow RIM to match the iPhone in UI, nor do I think RIM should even try. You can’t copy the uncopyable.
  Also, the porting of existing BlackBerry applications to the new Cascades UI technology is an acknowledged and serious problem. And for the enterprise customer secure connections to the company’s Intranet and mail servers is mandatory, so without properly ported apps RIM can’t use Cascades yet.
  This is a long-term acquisition, but with just enough short-term UI goodiness to placate the crowd that says RIM must copy Apple or die.
• Endgadget’s tablet chart of CES 2011. More than 30 tablets announced. What a craziness. And there will be at least 20 more before the quarter is out.
  I hope someone starts a tablet overview site real soon.
• Horace Dediu discusses processors and why Intel is doomed. Bottom line: Moore’s law is becoming useless to mobile processors because the device doesn’t need that much computing power. Modern processors are simply too advanced for mobile devices. Instead, the mobile market demands flexibility in chip design so that it can be integrated with many different kinds of devices, something Intel cannot deliver.
• AT&T has understood something about HTML5 apps:

  AT&T announced a string of new offerings for mobile developers, aiming to encourage them to bring their wares to the whole range of AT&T's smartphones, not just the Apple App Store. It is creating a software developers' kit (SDK) for HTML5, which could eventually break down the power of the app stores by shifting mobile apps and content to the browser.

  ’sright, except for the SDK stuff. Web developers don’t need SDKs. Also, no word on deployment. Creating HTML5 apps is all fine, but how are they going to get deployed on all the different phones AT&T has?
  Of course it remains to be seen whether web developers are interested. Precedent suggests that AT&T will badly mismanage its outreach to web developers because it only does bloody contests. But we’ll see.
• Nokia will launch the N9, its first MeeGo device, at MWC. Count me interested; I’m curious to see what they came up with.
• Steve Souders goes mobile full-time. I welcome the move, because we need him to make sense of mobile performance.
  Part of the reason is that he wants to speak at Mobilism. This is the first time someone makes a major career switch because of a conference of mine.
• Tomi Ahonen calculates Apple’s benefits of releasing a CDMA phone. Bottom line: not so many extra sales. Most Verizon iPhone buyers will be deserting from AT&T, and outside the US CDMA is important only in China, where the iPhone is unsubsidised and wholly out of reach of even the middle class. There are a few more CDMA operators around the world, but most of them also operate a GSM network and don’t particularly need a CDMA iPhone.
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• And in the Fun department: a 98-year old woman communicates with her bank.
• DUTCH. Het Belgische Mobistar heeft klantenservice niet erg goed begrepen. Klanten nemen WRAAK. Video, circa 10 minuten. De moeite waard om tot het laatst te kijken.
• Have a tip for next week?