How to

A developer's guide to pitching mobile apps to operators

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:59:59 -0400

One of the few highlights of last week's otherwise moribund CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment 2007 conference was the State of Mobile Content Mini-Conference, a panel discussion bringing together the data services heads of the five largest U.S. mobile operators. During the course of a lively and far-ranging session moderated by Douglas Garland, executive in residence with venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the subject turned to developers' best bets for successfully pitching their applications for inclusion on carrier decks. Here's what each data chief had to say.

John Burris, Sprint's vice president of wireless data programming: "Understand what kinds of services Sprint offers today. You'd be surprised by the number of partners who aren't aware of what's part of our portfolio today… Be flexible."
Wade McGill, Alltel's senior vice president of product management and development: "Have a business model and an elevator speech. If it takes an hour or two hours to get through what a product is, it's not going to sell. Show me the value in the first five minutes."
Lee Daniels, Verizon Wireless' staff vice president, consumer services: "You have to understand the network impact of your application. How often is it hitting the network? How much data is it sending? You can't crush the network with streaming audio and video."
Ian McKerlich, T-Mobile's director of mobile web and content services: "Know what else we have and how your application is different. Take time to know how our business is different from other operators. We all go to market differently. Tell me how it adds value to the consumer, how we can make money, and how you can make money."
Mark Collins, AT&T's vice president of consumer data services: "What's the customer experience and why should a customer be interested in what you have to offer? If the customer isn't going to have a good experience, neither of us is going to make money. We have limits to our resources--we've got to prioritize."

For more of our comprehensive coverage of the CTIA event, including exclusive photos of some of the newest mobile phones and devices, click here. -Jason

Gettings started with SVG Tiny

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:59:56 -0400

Sony Ericsson has posted a new tutorial for learing SVG Tiny, the XML-based vector graphics language defined by the Mobile SVG 1.1 spec.

dotMobi updates Web Developer Guide

Tue, 22 May 2007 06:59:56 -0400

dotMobi, the organization behind the mobile top-level domain, has published an updated version of its Mobile Web Developer's Guide. (New Mobile Web developers would also be wise to read the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices and Luca Passani's Global Authoring Practices.)

Compile BREW applets with WinARM

Tue, 15 May 2007 06:59:56 -0400

Ward Willats has posted an in-depth how to describing how to compile ARM BREW apps an expensive commercial compiler. Ward's WinARM solution uses a recent version of GCC and creates pretty lean code. But be forewarned, this technique is not for beginners.

Understanding ActiveSync partnerships

Tue, 01 May 2007 06:59:56 -0400

ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center require a "partnership" to be formed between the desktop and the mobile device, not unlike BlueTooth pairing. Chris De Herrera's Windows CE Website takes you through the mechanics of that partnership.

Scaling images with BREW

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:01:36 -0400

DevX shows how to scale images programmatically in BREW. It's surprisingly easy in BREW 3.0, but still a good read if you're targeting BREW 2.X or new to the IIMAGE functions. Tutorial

Plus: New to BREW development? Check out Anjum's introduction.

Roll your own SMS gateway

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:01:36 -0400

Sending high-volume SMS messages usually requires a gateway service or some serious hardware, but the protocol is actually quite simple. This tutorial takes you through the steps needed to build a working SMS gateway using a Pocket PC phone and a Windows computer. Though if you planning a voting application like the example, I recommend finding a way to ID voters other than their Social Security Number.

Editor's Corner

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:01:39 -0400

Mobile Web best practices battle it out
Creating web content for mobile devices is tough work. dotMobi, the registrar for mobile-only .mobi domains, just made it a little easier by publicly releasing its Mobile Web Developer's Guide (pdf) to the public. The guide explains how to meet the minimum requirements for a .mobi domain (namely that content be served as XHTML-MP by default) along with a large set of best practices and an overview of some of the varied approaches to the mobile Web. The dotMobi guide is impressive and was clearly written by someone who has been in the trenches (Brian Fling of Blue Flavor), but in some ways yet another set of best practices is the last thing designers need.

The W3C's Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices is the benchmark guide, but many developers feel it is an impractical and Utopian vision of "One Web" that can be accessed by any device. To quote Luca Passani, a maintainer of the venerable WURFL device capabilities database, "I understand that W3C is all about the web and some may dream about a unified web which can be accessed with equal ease by PCs and mobile devices, but this is just a dream: web and mobile will remain separate media for many many years to come (probably more)."

In response, Luca has created Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web (GAP), which purports to be the only independent alternative to the W3C's guide. Some of the general advice is similar, but GAP differs vastly from the W3C when it comes to nuts and bolts. While the W3C recommends creating pages as XHTML 1.1 Basic, a standard with mixed support on today's mobile devices, GAP (like dotMobi) recommends XHTML-MP, the de facto standard. GAP also focuses on adaptation--customizing pages for the specific device making the request--rather than risk locking out low-end handsets or being forced to design for only the least common denominator.

Now what's the best practice on choosing a set of best practices? For desktop Web designers the choice is largely philosophical. To borrow some terms from English grammarians, it's a split between the prescriptivists, who want to do it "the right way" with clean, 100 percent standards-compliant markup, and the descriptivists, who believe in markup that works and that designing inclusively is more important than conforming to a spec. On the mobile Web, unfortunately, there doesn't even seem to be a "correct" markup specification, and differences between browsers are so vast that an XML database is needed to keep track of them.

The mobile Web is the Wild West; it's a hostile development environment with no clear rules. But the mobile Web is also full of opportunity. A recent survey revealed that 76 percent of respondents in the U.S. and Europe had access to the mobile Web, but only 32 percent actually use it. Sounds like plenty of room for growth to me. -Eli

Intro to J2ME's PIM API

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:01:36 -0400

The Sun Developers Network has posted an excellent introduction to accessing the PIM functionality (address book, calendar, etc.) with Java ME. This is the first in a six-part series on the topic. Tutorial

.NET CF v2 SP2 compatibility forecast

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:01:36 -0400

The Microsoft .NET CF team has posted the results of its backwards compatibility tests against version 2 SP2. The team found a few quirks, but it looks like most applications will work just fine. Blog