Judy Breck has done a fine job with a veritable cornucopia of entries into this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. Check it out for the very best writing about mobile this week.

- The 21st-Century Peep Show (Village Voice)

-
Helio Unveils 3G Gaming Service (Wireless Week)

- A Cellphone in Park, Even More Powerful (NYT)

- Vodafone Completes Vodafone Japan Sale, To Return GBP6 Billion (cellular-news)

- Is the Palm OS missing the multimedia boat? (News.com)

- Disney announce mobile phone service in the UK (Pocket-link via MocoNews)

Following a comment by best selling business authorTomi Ahonen on my post about sex and mobile search on Tuesday, I was inspired to raid the extensive MobHappy archives for this post on the Shag Phone - in case you hadn’t seen it.

Tomi pointed out that recent European surveys had found that between 41% (Innocent Italians) and 67% (Suspicious Swedes) had snooped inside their partners’ phones for evidence of illicit hanky panky. Which is why people need a Shag Phone:

As with all societal change, it tends to happen imperceptibly. And then you look back and remember how life was different.

I heard someone talking about their “shag phone” the other day. He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a “his and her” pair of Pre-pay shag phones.

Only they knew each other’s number, so when the phone rang, they could answer in an appropriately passionate way. While much the same effect could be achieved with caller recognition (assuming they were mobile literate), there was more than just a romantic gesture involved with this behaviour.

Technology still can’t hide your phone bill from a suspicious spouse. And it can’t hide your amour’s frequently dialed number from prying eyes. Better to get a pair of pre-pay phones with no incriminating phone bills or records. A small example of how the mobile is impacting on 21st century life.

And if you’re tempted to get your own Shag Phone, just remember this quote from Brief Encounter (pictured thanks to Cinema Review):

Laura Jesson: “It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading.”

UPDATE: Make sure you click through and see the comments on this post. Tomi has left a great one about how you chat up a girl in Dubai.

First posted in June 2004

As Jonathan Schwartz, the famous blogging COO of Sun Microsystems, steps up to take over the big job from Scott McNealy, it’s a good time to ponder where “Java Platform, Micro Edition” as we must now call it, or J2ME as it used to be known, is actually going.

The concept of a platform like J2ME (sorry, the new name is just SO cumbersome) is that a developer can produce one application and then port it across many different handsets with ease. But anyone who has ever done any J2ME development knows that, in practice, this is simply not the case and the vision falls far short of reality by a very long way indeed.

In non-technical terms, developing in J2ME is like trying to change a bicycle tyre for the first time. Firstly, it’s difficult enough in its own right. But when you do manage to get the inner tube inside the tyre, you have to work it in all the way round. And when you get back to the beginning, it’s popped out somewhere else, so you have to start all over again.

20% of the time and effort in developing a J2ME app goes into the first iteration of the code. And 80% of the work goes into porting it across all the handsets that you want it to run on. This can be a cripplingly expensive, not to say, time-consuming process.

I was chatting to Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic (great service, if you haven’t checked it out) and he launched the product in J2ME only to abandon it within a few weeks. In Mark’s case, it was partly as the WAP version proved to be better than expected and proved to be very popular with users. But partly as Java isn’t suitable for rapid application development.

If you launch a mobile application or service, you need the ability to make changes all the time as you work out how customers are using it and as you learn more about the product. Changing a WAP site is pretty simple. Changing a J2ME application is easy too, but then you have to roll those changes across all the different handsets and test them. This means the pace of change and innovation crawls to a snail like pace. Or maybe that’s unfair to snails.

Whichever way you look at things, when a high profile product like Flirtomatic, led by a tech veteran and thought leader like Mark abandons a development platform altogether, it’s not good news.

So who is to blame? If only it was that simple. I spoke to Tom Hume of Future Platforms and J2ME and all-things-mobile guru and while Sun could definitely do a better job, the main issue is the widely differing specs among handsets. As Tom says:

But I don’t see how we can persuade a disparate group of handset vendors to make their phones the same - these guys have to differentiate themselves from each other.

So where does this leave J2ME and Jonathan Schwartz, as he ponders Sun’s future? Well, apart from coming up with a better name, the future doesn’t look encouraging. J2ME can do lots of things that the mobile web can’t do - yet. But, I bet in many cases, those extra features are nice-to-have and not truly essential.

I think we’ll see more and more products and applications which should, by rights, go the J2ME route but seek work-arounds if they possibly can, by going for a WAP solution. Ironically, this is the very outcome predicted by none other than Sun’s Scott McNealy himself with his “the network is the computer”. Java is old-school rich client, WAP is the network.

However, McNealy, visionary though he undoubtedly is, didn’t go quite far enough. Actually, the network is the mobile, which doesn’t leave Sun in a great place if their main mobile product simply doesn’t deliver.

We’ve seen time and again in technology that “good enough” often beats “perfect” and I’m afraid that we might be about to see this happen all over again.

[tags]java, j2me, schwartz, mcnealy, sun microsystems, curtis, future platforms, flirtomatic[/tags]

- Nokia announce N72, N73 and N93 Nseries handsets (All About Symbian)

- Sprint Sends Texts To Landline Phones (Phone Scoop)

- Cisco to partner with Nokia on dual mode phones (Infoworld)

- ‘Huge opportunities’ in mobile search, says Microsoft exec (Computerworld)

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that people are using Google mobile search to find porn, but a new study has found that this type of search is twice as likely to happen as on Google on computers. Nearly 1 in 5 mobile searches are looking for adult entertainment, with the runners up being general interest entertainment, telecom, local services and games.

Sceptics of porn consumption on mobiles point to high costs in both content and data download charges, as well as small screens. But on the plus side, the mobile phone is with you all the time and can cater for those sudden spontaneous urges to say, search for a game (what else?). The mobile is also less likely to be shared, along with one’s browsing history. In fact, according to a recent Wired article, 63% of Americans wouldn’t lend their phone to anyone and just maybe, the two facts are related.

Having said that, the early history of the net shows that porn search was once just as high as we’re now seeing on mobile. However, as people become more and more used to search, they find more and more things they want to search for. So will the same thing happen here?

My view is that search on phones isn’t going to be as important in the short to medium term as the big players think it is. While data charges are high and the user interface clumsy, you really need to want to find something now, to consider using your mobile, rather than waiting to get back to the computer. Or you’re looking for something that you can consume on a mobile anyway, which is certainly the case with gaming and porn, but add other forms of content and the old favourite, gambling.

A few other surprises were revealed in the study. About 1 in 5 searches were for full URLs as in http://www.mobhappy.com, which demonstrates that many people are misunderstanding what they’re actually doing - treating Google Search as if it is actually a browser.

And that the average number of characters and words used in a mobile search is almost the same as on a computer. It seems that people aren’t tempted to reduce the terms in deference to the more difficult interface. However, I’d also guess that much of the search activity is currently being driven by young people to whom text input on a phone is as easy as breathing.

Via eWeek

- Office Communicator Mobile Released (BetaNews)

- Can you have too big a range? (Feet up!)

- Nokia Enterprise Solutions: By The Numbers (Mobile Enterprise Weblog)

- Tech Innovation ‘Noses’ Into Phones (Korea Times)

- Microsoft Developing Next Mobile OS: Crossbow (IDG)

- Re-run of WAP fiasco on way (The Inquirer)

Earlier today, I wrote about Hotxt, which offers cheap messaging via a Java application over GPRS. I concluded that I was a little luke warm about it, despite their high profile investor, and that it had usability issues and would be more ballsy if it were free.

SMS Text News linked to the story and MobHappy reader (and Tex2me founder), Stuart McWilliam left a comment, both pointing in the direction of Tex2Me.

Tex2Me has been launched on a shoe stringn in December 2005. It actually overcomes all my criticisms of Hotxt, in that it offers a free service (apart from operator data charges, of course) and it’s very clear and simply explained. They don’t have an equivalent to Hotxt’s Out service, which means it’s easy to understand - both parties need to install the app and then they get free messaging. End of story.

I spoke to Phil Jones, one of the founders of Tex2Me and he says that the basic service will always be free and that they plan on introducing premium services in the future. This was the formulae that worked for Skype and I think it stands a good chance of succeeding here too.

Bearing in mind that Tex2Me have (unwittingly) overcome all my issues with their richer rival, I think it’s only fair to give them the red hot accolade I was withholding from Hotxt. I expect they’ll be getting a few calls from some likely investors pretty soon.

Hotxt has been attracting quite a lot of attention in the UK, not the least because it’s backed by Dragon’s Den entrepreneur Doug Richard. Dragon’s Den is a TV programme where wannabe entrepreneurs pitch their wares to a panel of VCs.

Hotxt is a mobile messaging service that offers an all-you-can eat menu for £1 ($1.79) a week. It’s pitched as an alternative to sms, but offered at a far cheaper rate, especially for heavy users.

How it actually works is that you download a Java application to your mobile, which then allows you to send messages across the mobile internet, bypassing sms. You still incur data charges from your mobile operator, as well as your £1 a week, however these are likely to be negligible and you’ll certainly save money over and above ordinary sms.

I like the idea, but have two concerns - one easily sorted out and one on a more strategic level.

The first area, which they can correct with a bit of time, is how the idea is presented in detail. The site really isn’t clear and the above summary I wrote took some digging around from someone who knows this space pretty well.

Java isn’t mentioned at all, for instance, and maybe this is deliberate to avoid jargon confusion. But what isn’t clear and up front is that if you want to send a message to someone else, they need to have the application installed too. What happens if they don’t have Hotxt installed isn’t very clear, but seems pretty important. After all, with a new service, the chances are slim that all my friends will have Hotxt installed, so I really need to know what happens. Will I be told that they’re not a Hotxt user when I send my message? Will they just not get it? Will my phone explode? What?

There is something called Hotxt Out, that I can use to send an sms at about 7.5p to non-subscribers. But does this kick in automatically if I try to send a message to a non-subscriber? I’d quite like to know, especially if I’m buying this primarily on a cost basis.

So, the presentation of the detail needs to be improved significantly and suffers from a common issue of the writer almost certainly being too close to the product they’re explaining. At the very least this element needs revamping and I’d recommend doing some proper usability work on the website and how people understand the service, sign up and use it.

The bigger issue is bundling. UK mobile operators already sell bundles of sms messages, which cost significantly less that the “retail”. For instance, you can buy a bundle of sms from O2 starting at £3 ($5.36) for 50, or 6p (10.7c) each and you can drop the price to as low as 3p (5.4c) by buying bigger bundles. If you’re a heavy user of sms, you’ll almost certainly be buying bundles, which already offer cheaper sms than Hotxt Out.

Of course, the core messaging service is still considerably cheaper than bundles offered by mobile network operators. But the problem is that, in the beginning, most people won’t have installed the Hotxt application, which means that most of the time your £1 a week, all-you-can-eat service is pretty useless. Therefore, the temptation for most users will be to wait until more people have signed up and if everyone does that….you see the problem.

Hotxt clearly recognise this and have built in a viral recruitment mechanic into the very heart of the system. Users get a week free messaging for everyone they sign up to Hotxt, which is indeed a powerful incentive. But whether it’ll be powerful enough to drive critical mass adoption remains to be seen.

Skype, which has clearly influenced Hotxt in everything from design to terminology, managed to succeed with a very similar model, as you can’t Skype someone who doesn’t have Skype installed. Later on, Skype introduced Skype Out and I can’t help thinking that this would have been a better route to follow for Hotxt. Just offering a low cost messaging application, which both parties needed to install is a lot simpler to communicate, without the complication of cheapish sms on top.

Another possible lesson from Skype would have been to simply offer free messaging using the application and generate revenues from premium services. This would clearly have been very ballsy, though it is an approach you’d have thought would have been seriously considered, especially given their investors.

So, is Hotxt hot? To be honest, I’d go for luke warm with lots of potential. If they sort out their usability/copy writing issues and went for a free service at the core, I think they’d be red hot.

One more RAZR-beating post before the weekend: Engadget Mobile has pictures of what’s rumored to be the RAZR 2, or “Canary”. It’s still thin, looks a bit narrower, has a glossy finish, and a giant bulbous bottom. Yay.

The best bit, though: they say “it uses the same software build as the RAZR V3x” — so more of that lovely Moto UI you’ve come to know and love. What else can you expect from Moto’s “flagship” handset when it hits the market late this year or early next? Groundbreaking features like Bluetooth and maybe a 2-megapixel camera (both of which are already in the V3x). Oh Motorola, what will you do next?

[tags]mobile, motorola, razr[/tags]