Rob Tiffany's Windows Mobile Accelerator : Mobile Web

Rise of the Psuedo Smartphones

robtiffany — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:50:00 GMT

What do the following feature phones have in common?

LG Dare
LG Voyager
LG Versa
LG enV Touch
LG Rumour 2
LG Lotus
LG Neon
LG Xenon
LG VU
Samsung Alias 2
Samsung Gravity
Samsung Behold
Samsung Highlight
Samsung Memoir
Samsung Propel
Samsung Rant
Samsung Exclaim
Samsung Instinct
Samsung Magnet
Samsung Eternity
Samsung Impression
Sanyo SCP-2700
AT&T Quickfire
Pantech Matrix
Motorola Karma

They include features like:

High-Megapixel Cameras w/Zoom
GPS
Touch Screen
QWERTY Keyboards
Play Music
Play Videos
Web Browser
Email
Games
Apps
Instant Messaging
3G
Stereo Bluetooth
Video Capture
SD Card Storage
Calendar
Contacts
Quad-Band GSM
Voice Dialing
Alarm
Calculator
Photo Album
SMS
MMS
Wi-Fi
Internet Tethering
Slide-out Keyboard
Turn-by-Turn Navigation
Push to Talk
Radio
Hi-res Graphics
Streaming XM/Sirius
Mobile TV
Java
Facebook
MySpace

We consider phones with advanced mobile operating systems like Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, and WebOS to be Smartphones. When I look at the list of features above, I think most people in world would have a hard time distinguishing between what we call Smartphones and the rising tide of super-charged feature phones. At a 30,000 ft level, a published API and development tools that allow you to create rich applications to access databases and remote servers may be the only distinction. Of course that would be a slight againt Java ME that's found on over a billion feature phones. I would venture to guess that 99% of the buying public can't tell the difference and may not even care as long as the price is right.

The big takeaway is that the large chasm that used to exist between feature phones and Smartphones has diminished dramatically. In the coming years, Smartphone OS and hardware manufacturers have no choice but to innovate in a big way in order to put some distance between themselves and the clones attacking them from below or risk becoming commoditized and irrelevant.

- Rob

Mobile Architecture Pocket Guide v1.1

robtiffany — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:01:00 GMT

Just wanted to let everyone know that version 1.1 of the Mobile Architecture Pocket Guide is now available on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/AppArch/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=19798. This is the first patterns & practices update to this guide since 2002 so it's a welcome sight to to have it out there for all our Windows Mobile developers.

I've spent the last couple of months working with J.D. Meier, Rabi Satter, Rob Boucher and the rest of the P&P team to tune, tweak and update the new Mobile Architecture Pocket Guide to ensure that it's as accurate and relevant to today's Windows Mobile platform and runtimes as possible. The guide's chapters include:

Ch 01 > Mobile Application Architecture
Ch 02 > Architecture and Design Guidelines
Ch 03 > Presentation Layer Guidelines
Ch 04 > Business Layer Guidelines
Ch 05 > Data Access Layer Guidelines
Ch 06 > Service Layer Guidelines
Ch 07 > Communication Guidelines
Ch 08 > Deployment Patterns

Our goal is to empower our Windows Mobile developer community as much as possible, and while this guide may seem like it's targeted exclusively to developers, I ensured that the IT Pro side of the house is accommodated as well. Mobile infrastructure elements of this guide include System Center Mobile Device Manager (Deployment), SQL Server (Sync Services + Merge), IIS (Web Services + Sync + WCF), Exchange (WCF Store and Forward) and Active Directory (Auth).

Download it, take if for a spin, and give us your feedback so we can keep improving it.

- Rob

Welcome to the New Windows Mobile Developer Center

robtiffany — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:21:00 GMT

A quick glance at the Windows Mobile Developer Center clues you in to the fact that we’ve done a complete overhaul of the site. For years, our “bread and butter” has been delivering you content on Smart Device Development which most often included articles on building apps with the .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server CE/Mobile/Everywhere/Compact. While we will still do that, we’re now making a concerted effort to expand the diversity of our content to cover an ever-growing mobile developer audience.

The biggest thing you notice when you come to the site is 4 big boxes. Think of these as 4 concurrently running worker threads delivering more content on more topics than ever before.

1. From the “Applications for Smart Devices” box, you’ll see content that targets native, managed, and SQL Server Compact topics. Don’t worry. It won’t be 100% enterprise development 24/7 anymore. We’ll tackle more and more consumer scenarios like Peter Foot did recently with his article on Mobile Facebook. We’ll also go the other direction too and provide content on working with low-level APIs with C++. And yes, we’ll even start talking about creating better device drivers.

2. The “Mobile Web” box will unleash wave after wave of new content that covers the explosion that some are calling “Mobile 2.0.” You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of building web sites designed for mobile devices as we talk about things like the new .MOBI standards, W3C Mobile Web best practices and the XHTML Mobile Profile. Don’t forget AJAX on Internet Explorer Mobile. Jim Wilson and Mel Sampat have blown everyone away with their coverage of AJAX on our favorite mobile platform.

3. In the “Mobile Games” box we’ll resurrect a topic that we used to give a lot of coverage to several years ago. Based on the way this segment of the market is taking off, teaching you how to build games for Windows Mobile devices could turn out to be just as important as the work we’ve done in teaching you how to build mobile apps for the enterprise. We do in fact have a portable gaming runtime for all our devices called Direct3D Mobile that can be programmed via another portable runtime called the .NET Compact Framework. We also have Direct Draw or you could just chill out and create a casual 2D game with simple Sprites using NETCF and maybe a little GDI+.

4. The “Rich Internet Applications” box is a bit of a mystery and looks to be pretty vacant place at the moment. Don’t think of it like you would an “Under Construction” web site. Think of it as the big tease that it is. Who knows for sure what’s to come in the RIA space for Windows Mobile devices?

Now that I’ve covered the 4 big boxes, take a look at the “Getting Started with Windows Mobile” section on the top-right hand side of the page. This place is a tour de force of readiness to get you going with Windows Mobile development. Labs, Webcasts, Videos, Solution Accelerators, Wiki’s, SDK’s, runtimes, and Power Toys oh my!

Stay on the right side of the page and drop one section down to give props to our Device Application Developer MVPs. We all owe so much to these great folks! They single-handedly created the Windows Mobile developer community back at the beginning of this decade by answering questions in the NETCF newsgroup, writing books, speaking at conferences (with the highest scores) and creating amazing organizations like OpenNETCF.org. They also identify a disproportionally greater number of bugs in our beta software than any other individual or group.

If you move back beneath the main boxes on the page, you’ll see a section on the left that completely displays the content of the latest Windows Mobile Team Blog. The section on the right displays the latest blog posts from Jim Wilson, Loke Uei, Me, Visual Studio for Devices, the NETCF team, the SQL Server Compact team, Steve Lasker, Jason Langridge, Mel Sampat, Constanze Roman, and Frank Prengel. The real-time information delivered by these blogs will keep you abreast of the latest developments in the Windows Mobile community.

Last but not least is a section at the bottom that lists all the Forums that help make up the Windows Mobile ecosystem. Get answers to some of your toughest questions from Microsoft employees and the community at large whether you’re building apps with C++, C#, VB, and/or SQL Server Compact.

As a Mobile Developer, Architect, Marketer, Planner and former Embedded MVP, it’s been my vision to create a one-stop resource for all my Windows Mobile needs. I believe this new Windows Mobile Developer Center is a big step in that direction. The multiple, concurrent streams of content that follows the launch of this new site will represent the proof in the pudding. It’s been my great pleasure to deliver fresh content on a monthly basis to the Windows Mobile developer community. As always, I look forward to your feedback so that I can better equip you with the information you need to get your job done.

Best Regards,

Rob Tiffany

Mobile 2.0

robtiffany — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:43:00 GMT

The second annual Mobile 2.0 just wrapped up. The key takeaways are:

Mobile Web (iPhone Safari Webkit sets the standard)
Mobile Advertising (4 out of 10 Japanese click on mobile ads)
SMS (Dominant and growing messaging technology but still underutilized by mobile apps)
iPhone (Shape of things to come and raises the bar for all other handsets)
Mobile Social Networks (Perfect for personal nature of phones)
U.S. is out of touch on mobile data due to cheap flat rate pricing
Speech/Audio (unexploited technology)
Flat data roaming prices needed

The words "Microsoft" and "Windows Mobile" were never uttered at this conference which I find strange based on the tens of millions of devices we have in the marketplace. If I based my view of the mobile landscape on this conference, I would believe that people only carried iPhones and Nokia Nseries devices. One of the speaker panels pushed the notion that truly rich and innovative apps can't be acheived until mobile Linux with open APIs takes hold of the mobile OS marketplace (I guess the Yahoo! guy on the panel hasn't seen his own company's Yahoo! Go application for Windows Mobile yet). While we wait for that to happen, speakers at the conference conveyed that the primary form of mobile app development was web-based (I guess the offline strategy was just a fad). Questions about mobility in the enterprise went largely unanswered. For the most part, the only kind of mobile apps people talked about were for social networking. I wonder how many social networking apps we need?

I often felt like I was in an alternate mobile universe. I came down to San Francisco to avail myself of differing mobile viewpoints than I might have by working for the Windows Mobile product group. I've learned a few things and plan to reach out to this mobile community to better educate them about what Windows Mobile brings to the table.

Rob.