Mobile Marketing News
Palm Pre has yet to release more information on their verison of the app store and the pricing model behind releasing Palm apps.
However, today they opened up to developers a preview of their Mojo SDK which can be accessed here. If you’ve got some time (approximately an hour) watch this O’Reilly Webcast with Mitch Allen, Palm’s Software CTO, about developing applications with their development kit. Also, they’ve got the first chapter of their webOS available for free. Enjoy.
The gang from Plastic Mobile Agency is heading from Toronto, Ontario over to a warmer climate to the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association) 2009 conference in the fabulous Las Vegas. We covered it from a high-level in our post here but the true coverage will commence once we’re on the ground. We plan to bring you live updates to our blog here and be the first to report the many exciting findings.
Some early rumors of what maybe releasing include:
Be sure to be tuned to both our blog and Twitter for updates as some of these rumors become reality.
Here are the events that we will make sure to cover:
Stay tuned right here for live updates.
According to BusinessWeek, it looks BlackBerry App World might be launching at the CTIA 09 next week on April 1st. Plastic will be at CTIA 09 in Vegas and it’s going to be very interesting to see what RIM will be bringing forth for both developers and consumers. As a consumer, we hope to see apps that are rich with functionality and have a well-designed mobile user experiences - things that we’ve become used to thanks to the iPhone.
As a developer, we hope to see a better development arena (IDEs, debugging tools, frameworks, etc.). At Plastic, we develop mobile applications for many platforms (iPhone, Andriod, Windows Mobile, …) and by-far we put the most effort (man-power) on our BlackBerry projects. For instance, comparing development for the BlackBerry vs. iPhone… we see a multiple of 3-4 times the effort needed. I hope RIM is listening and catch up to Apple and other developer-friendlier platforms.
Check out these guys control an RC car (and later a McLaren Mercedes) with a BlackBerry Storm:
With all the hype and popularity around mobile (native) apps across smartphones and their respective app stores it’s important to remember that the web browser capabilities on most of these smartphones is quite robust and a lot of the mobile native apps out there can be achieved as a mobile web app as well.
For example let’s take a look at the Webkit browser which is being used on the iPhone, Android, and S60-based phones. It allows for mobile web apps to take advantage of the following capabilities:
What does this mean? With these browser capabilities the user experience seen in most native apps can be equally brought forth as a web apps - of course 3D immersive games are not included. Also, as browsers evolve and adopt other W3C standards such as the GeoLocation API, the gap becomes narrower between their native relatives. Furthermore, as smartphones get shipped with these robust mobile web browsers, the web applications can support a wide variety of devices. This is currently not the case with native applications when dealing with cross-devices
Of course, there is an obvious benefit to mobile native apps over mobile web apps - App Stores. App stores can help companies and brands easily distribute (and monetize) their application(s). Looking to how the (desktop) web exploded and is currently being monetized - I am sure similar paths will be taken.
A great example is the latest version of GMail for mobile web browsers. Google introduced a new version of GMail for mobile web browsers at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. It exposes a lot of the rich capabilities on smartphone (iPhone and Android only for now) web browsers and allows for GMail to be used offline much like a native app. Below is a demo of it (priovided by iPhone Buzz).
Is it just me, or are all new mobile phones being released these days all look + feel exactly like the Apple iPhone? By coincidence they all seem to have very similar feature-sets as well and they all claim that they have just come up with an innovative new product. Are they really to blame? Apple may have just created the perfect mobile phone. For example, take a look at the new Palm Pre and the LG Arena KM900 that are releasing soon.
As if making their phones look and feel like the iPhone wasn’t enough, they’re also knocking off Apple’s monetizing approach with their App Store. Here’s a a list of all the App Stores announced post-iPhone:
Apple’s competitors really need to work at innovating and not just ripping off their product and strategy. At least if you do so, please do not pretend that you’ve come up with something revolutionary.