The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy

Communities Dominate Brands: The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy - Have All Failed. Why Nokia Must Fire CEO Elop Now

poor Nokia. Shame as they still make great hardware ... should have stayed with MeeGo and the working old strategy.

Choice: None

Right now the only reasonable choice seems to be Unity3D. Developing from Windows instead of my beloved Ubuntu Linux. Shame ... Within Unity3D things are looking good so far .. tbc.

Google Nexus Tablet as Android Alarm

Google Nexus tablet reportedly shows its pre-rendered face, packing Android 4.1 and a $199 price -- Engadget
this would be really nice. Cheap enough to just buy as a toy. I really don't see a good reason for me to have a tablet. They just aren't useful enough at the moment. I'm sure that will change with time. I hope they offer a decent looking stand/docking station with it. Then I would have one use for it at least, as a fancy alarm clock. I do want to buy some internet radio/usb storage playing alarm anyways. (The iHome iC50 would be a nice alternative for that)

MOAI: Multi-Platform Development

As Tim Schafer postet a movie about how they are going to use MOAI in their latest game. So I had to have a closer look at it. A few months back I already once noticed MOAI but I didn't care much about it. Nor did I have a closer look at it. Now that this changed here are my first thoughts on it.

MOAI is primarly intended for 2D mobile game development. But it's also possible to develop and distribute Windows and Mac games with a Linux port soon to follow. At least that's what their Website tells us. Mostly as a user of MOAI you code using LUA which is a pretty neat programming language. Overall it looks like a fast multi-platform 2D game development environment.

Zipline Games is the company behind MOAI. They make money from selling Games and Cloud Services (which MOAI fully integrates with). I especially like the Cloud stuff as that's definitely something I would want to use in my games.

My biggest problem with MOAI is the currently missing Linux support. As I develop my private projects solely on Linux (Ubuntu) I can't do much right now. The only possibility is to build the Linux part yourself from the Linux branch. But last time I checked they said it will be integrated soon. So I'm waiting for that.

Right now I mostly use libGDX which offers similar things except for iOS support (which they work on) and Cloud integration. Otherwise they seem very similar. But cloud for me would be a big plus and I would move my development efforts to MOAI with proper Linux support.  I hope that's gonna be released soon.

Ad-Supported Apps Killing Your Battery

Free, Ad-Supported Mobile Apps Are Killing Your Battery

yeah, who would have thought that ... :D ... good thing to add to your reasons for your customers to upgrade to the premium app ;) ..

Lumia sales vs N9 MeeGo sales

Communities Dominate Brands: How Many Lumia Sales? As Nokia (and Microsoft) ashamed to reveal number, lets count - and compare to N9 MeeGo sales

Ahh, yeah. The Nokia-Ship is sinking and they just don't seem to want anymore. Shame, MeeGo would have been so nice ...

Top Moblie Apps of 2011

As I'm already blogging on my mobile phone I thought that maybe some are interested in what Apps I use on my phones. Also at the end of next year I'm able to compare and see what Apps are still there. So here's my list of important Apps:

• Facebook
• Google+
• Dropbox
• Skype
• Google Maps
• WhatsApp
• Viber
• Blogger
• Google Docs
• YouTube
• Shazam
• Google Reader
• Gmail
• Fancy Widgets
• Barcode Scanner
• Wifi Analyzer
• OkCupid
• Juwels Deluxe
• Geizhals (local price comparison)
• Inside 3 (from my service provider)

Furthermore, I've lots of apps I installed, but don't really use. These are the ones I really like and use. On a new phone I would install these first. Oh and those are all free Apps.

My Mobile Phone Choice

Choosing the right mobile phone is a time consuming task. In the end it all depends on how you plan to use your phone. Here a list of the most important things I care about on my mobile:

• make phone calls and send text messages
• a usable webbrowser
• a good selection of useful Apps
• capable of replacing a mp3 player
• being able to take quick pictures
• a map application (not necessary route planning)
• replace any USB Pendrive (being able to mount it on every device)
• capable of sharing an Internet connection (USB, optionally WiFi)
• use it as a remote for other devices (DLNA and similar things)

Making phone calls and writing text messages is a pretty obvious one. Also a decent webbrowser supporting current standards is an important feature. Useful Apps to add features and customize the phone to ones likening is great. Apps like Shazaam, Grooveshark, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook, aso. are all great to have on your phone. Usually I settle around 40 Apps on my current Android mobile. Especially Dropbox is a very essential App to me as it makes exchanging files between devices very easy.

I like to have a Map around. It has proven to be a handy thing at times. I don't care much about what provider it is of. I usually prefer Google Maps as they have a lot of additional data. But it's not as important to me. I just want it to show my current position and the streetnames to find something. In a big city this is a very useful thing.

I want my phone to replace other devices I used to carry around with me. So replacing an MP3 player is an obvious thing. It doesn't necessarily need to be the best player but it should get the job done in some meaningful way. For example I'm constantly confused by the Windows Phone 7 Player. I need at least double the time to get together a playlist of what I want than on Androids default player. The WP7 player is capable of playing what I want but I find it rather confusing to get there.

An other device my phone needs to replace is a quick shooter for pictures. Usually current generation phones are good enough for my taste. I just like to take pictures of funny things or something I want to remember or post on a social network to share with others. For serious Pictures I rather take a better Camera thats likely more expensive than my phone anyway.

Yet another device I want to replace is a Thumbdrive. My phone should be able to be used as one. This has already proven a very good feature multiple times to me. Every phone that isn't able to do this is out already. I usually don't need much space, a GB or two should be enough for this.

As my phone already has Internet access I want it to be able to share that with my other devices. I usually use it over USB on my Netbook. Most of the time this is enough but it's still nice to be able to also share the Internet over Wifi. I don't want to carry around yet another thing so I have Internet on my Netbook. Like right now I'm sitting in a Train on my Netbook and using the Internet of my mobile phone to write this. And I'm listening to music played by my phone as well. It's great what's already possible and I can't wait for what's next.

As more and more devices support DLNA its really handy to have a remote for them right in your pocket. I'm looking closely at the DLNA features on all my new media devices.

So with these features OS choice is very slim. Windows Phone 7 and iOS aren't capable to deliver the features I want without some great effort like Jailbreaking on iOS. Android is the only bigger choice left. WebOS as well as MeeGo would be nice but just don't have the needed traction and with that support. Hardware wise I'm against taking a device with your contract as these aren't as cheap as they seem. And the lockin you get is even worse. Most of the time you pay more in the end. So Carriers get more money from you and have you locked to them. Great for them, bad for you most of the time.

I think in the future Smartphones will also start to replace other devices we have. Like your computer at home. It just needs a dock where the monitor, mouse and keyboard are connected. On-the-go you just need a cheap Netbook shell to place your phone in. As our phones get more powerful this will be enough for most people. Want to watch a movie? Your DLNA phone will stream it and your DLNA capable projector or TV will make a cinema experience out of it. It's gonna be great :)

Google bids For Motorola

Google Goes Soup-To-Nuts On Android With Bid For Motorola | TechCrunch

wow! thats big news. That could really turn troubled android around into the right tracks. Also I'm sure they have some advanced dev tools for android that could be added to the SDK now. Very very cool indeed

Apparatus and the Amazon Appstore

Apparatus will be pulled from Amazon Appstore - News - Bithack AB

Besides for a few big developers the Amazon Appstor seems not such a good place. I have jet to read a good blog post from a developer on the Amazon Appstore.

Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games

A good talk about compatibility on android. He talks about a lot of good points, even a few I wasn't aware of or didn't now that detailed why it works this or that way.

Nokia and Microsoft

The Elopocalypse: Nokia chooses Microsoft | Be the signal

Basically what I think about the whole thing is stated in this post.

In my opinion a very bad long term decision for Nokia. I really wonder how much the Ex-MS CEO had influenced this. The thing is it's just bad for Nokia as a company but a really great thing for Microsoft. I think its uncommon for a company to do good things for an other company without getting a good value back. And I really don't see much value coming from MS. Basically Nokia has outsourced its OS development to MS. So Nokia has given up on a major part of the company.

And all the other now incompatible projects they have running. I just don't see where this turns out good for Nokia in 5 to 10 years from now. I see the benefit shortterm as Meego just isn't ready and they are loosing a lot of market share. In my opinion they should have killed off symbian much sooner and direct that cash to meego. They didn't push hard enough for any platform and now they are somewhere in the middle and need to jump ship to something that works already. And I think jumping ship is never a good thing to do. We will see how this turns out ...