Linkbait 10
This week’s.
- Interesting breakdown of the Indonesian mobile market. In five years, mobile phone ownership has gone from 20 to 54%, while landline subscriptions halved from 25 to 11%. It’s the young that drive the transition.
- The mobile context does not exist according to Mark Kirby. Or rather, it’s impossible to accurately guess what the user wants by looking at his screen size or browser string.
The examples Mark quotes are all about mobile websites or apps leaving out vital stuff because the developers misunderstand the mobile context (or lack thereof). However, if they’d just kept all functionality in there would be far less of a problem.
As I read it, guessing at the mobile context is not allowed when you decide what to put in the mobile site, but it is allowed when you decide what to put at the top of the site.
- All is not well in Windows Phone 7 land. An update that was distributed last week was put on hold after it turned out some Samsung Windows Phones, especially the Omnia 7, could cease working entirely (being “bricked” in mobile parlance). To their credit, Microsoft acknowledged the issue.
This update is not important in and of itself, it merely paves the way for a much more important update coming in a few weeks. But if even this update misfires, what can we expect?
- And then it turned out that Windows Phones sometimes un-pin and de-link stuff all by themselves. Here, too, Microsoft acknowledged the bug and is working on a solution. Still, not good.
- Apple requires publishers to pay them and obey all kinds of silly purchasing rules, but Amazon is not worried. Why not? Because it’s working on a web-based Kindle. That’s the obvious solution, but there are only few publishers who’ve drawn the same conclusion. Silly them.
- A practical look at using media queries and designing for mobile first.
- Horace Dediu discusses the difference between the phone and tablet markets. The iPad was designed not to be dependent on operator subsidies or stores, unlike the iPhone.
I continue to believe that another reason operators won’t subsidise tablets is that they cannot deliver enough bandwidth.
- Some figures on mobile data traffic:
- Global mobile data traffic grew more than 150% in 2010.
- Data traffic becomes more widespread: in 2009 the top 1% of data users used 30% of all data; in 2010 only 20%.
- Smartphones initiated 78% of all data traffic. That means feature phones still use up about a quarter — more than I expected.
- The average tablet (i.e. the iPad) generates 5 times as much data as the average smartphone.
- There are 48 million people who own a mobile phone but do not have electricity at home.
(OK, that last bit isn’t really about data traffic, but it’s still stunning. For comparison: South Korea has 50 million inhabitants.)
- Amy Hoy makes a powerful point when she says there’s no information about the money side of starting up your own subscription-based business. There’s plenty about venture capital and such, but not about ... well ... the subscriptions. Which are supposed to be your prime source of income. But on how much can you count? Then she gives some numbers and calls for others to follow her example.
- Wonderful! BrowserRank takes StatCounter’s statistics and creates nice world maps from them. Now you can see at one glance which mobile browser is most popular where.
Unfortunately they still have to discover that they have to add iPhone and iPod Touch in order to arrive at the total Safari share. Android is not (yet) the US’s largest mobile browser.
- Somewhat related: a visualization of Android activations, 2008-2010.
- Mobile UI Patterns documents and shows mobile UI patterns. Useful!
- Good news: Nokia continues to invest in MeeGo. Thus it’s not totally dependent on Microsoft, but has a Plan B.
- Meeting cost calculator. Because meetings are usuall a waste of time, but you must be able to prove that fact to the project manager.
- And did you know you can guess a wine’s price based on the words used in the description?
- Have a tip for next week?
