Collaring our very own Matt Radford, I pressed him to try the Nokia N97 mini, the latest touchscreen offering from the Finns, albeit with a QWERTY keyboard as well. Below are his video impressions after two weeks with the N97 mini. Happy watching and happy Christmas!
In-app advertising has become more and more common in the iPhone world – it’s a great way for developers to monetise their apps and games while keeping the app itself free for users. But how does it all work, in terms of putting the right ads in the right apps to the right people? Following on from the Heroes of the Mobile Screen event in London, I tracked down Smaato founder Ragnar Kruse and got to the bottom of iPhone (and Symbian) mobile advertising. And if you’re a developer, Smaato.com is the place to try first for this sort of thing.
The new site has been in development for a few weeks. I wanted to bring you a fresher look, with more focus on the writing, and easier access to the popular posts and comments. There will undoubtedly be a few tweaks required to the new layout; if you notice anything awry, please contact me.
It also highlights the ways in which you can keep up to date with AAi – via RSS, email, and my Twitter updates.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the writers so far – Steve, James, Jim, Andy, Gideon, Jane and Adam. Your contributions are very much appreciated. Thanks to Jim for the CSS tweaks and Matlock for the new logo. And thanks also to you, the readers, for sticking around. I hope you enjoy what you see here.
Best wishes, and thanks for reading,
Matt
OK, so maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. Or maybe it was the chocolate cake that my daughter upended onto the kitchen carpet. Or maybe it was the frustration of wading through another couple of hundred applications, new in the iPhone App Store since yesterday. Either way, it’s been a bad day.
Of the 20,000 applications in the store, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that only around two to three hundred are actually any good at all. Add the same number again which are so niche that only a dozen people across the world might want them and you are left with over 19,000 apps which are completely and utterly pointless. Or rubbish. Or both.
But one app caught my eye today: Nothing.
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I got a shock today when starting up applications on my iPod Touch. Nearly every third party application was broken. Each quit back to the launcher after a second or so. After a few minutes panic and the usual restarts and soft resets (none of which worked), the penny dropped. I’d upgraded to iTunes 8.1 yesterday and the application problem was only since my sync. In other words, something in the new iTunes had blatted all over my applications.
In my year of owning an iPod Touch, this was my first real showstopping problem. But what to do? I’d be very surprised if this was a Touch problem – I’m guessing this is equally applicable to the iPhone as well. Half an hour’s Googling and I came across a reference to a similar problem encountered on a previous iTunes update by some users. I decided to try their solution – and also to try the iTunes/iPod backup system for real.
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Up until about a month ago, I’d been very impressed by the way the App Store app (if you see what I mean) kept me up to speed with updates to my installed applications. However, I’m now as wary of App Store’s claimed updates as I would be of a cornered lion…
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Regular watchers of my Phones Show will note that I recently did a feature on Convergence, listing ten things which my phone did that used to require separate devices – quite an impressive (theoretical) list of now redundant ancillary bits of hardware.
For my list, I pointedly used the Nokia N82, reckoning it as the ‘most converged device on the planet’ – how would the Apple iPhone hold up against this convergence list? And, more to the point, what about the ways in which it offers extra means of Convergence beyond the original somewhat-Nokia-centric top ten? Let’s find out…. Read the full story
So my daughter’s best friend got an iPod Touch for Christmas. And she brought it round to our house. Whereupon a light went on in my daughter’s head and she asked to borrow my iPod Touch. Being very tech savvy (hey, it runs in the blood, you know?), she showed her friend how to browse the App Store and grab freebie after freebie.
Move over DS?
They were hours playing around.
Leaving aside the question of whether the iPod Touch (or iPhone – and either way, the iPhone platform) can replace the Nintendo DS as a mainstream kids gaming device, lending my iPod Touch out in this way brought out some interesting observations. On the plus side, the kids loved playing the games, demos and novelties. Loved. With a capital ‘L’. The App Store discovery process itself became a shared experience for them (“Hey, search for YYYY, it’s really cool”, etc.)
However, on the negative side, I have to balance this against a number of cons that rear their ugly head when you try and ’share’ an iPhone or iPod Touch with another family member…
No, no, not another post referencing the iPhone’s AppStore – and in any case, Nokia for one can’t be accused of going all me too on that front, since every Nokia smartphone since 2005 has had a ‘Download!’ on-device store (just not a very successful one) – what I’d like to focus on here are the innovations in the iPhone’s form factor and how Nokia and others are responding.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the momentus MacWorld keynote at the start of 2007 in which Steve Jobs announced the iPhone to the world. The three main points which stuck in my mind about Apple’s new creation were:
