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Linkbait 24

This week’s. Not much is happening; everybody’s still recovering from the latest bombshells.

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• Interesting article on BBC Business.

  If you think pinning a suitable price tag on it and waiting for it to take the various app stores by storm is all that's needed, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

  [...]

  Sometimes giving your app away for nothing may mean a bigger payoff in the future.

  As I said, the future of mobile apps is giving away the app for free and charging for content.
• Horace Dediu wonders if LG is going to exit the phone market. It loses money at a prodigious rate, and the only real solution is diversifying to other platforms, except that every other phone vendor will do the same after MotoGoogle.
• An overview of Opera Mini request headers.
• Simon Judge talks about mobile platform R&D, and shares some memories from his Symbian time:

  When I worked at Symbian in London in 2006/7, I was amazed that the people there were hit by the same problems as 3rd party developers. I had somehow thought that the difficult APIs and ideoms might have been mastered by the people creating the OS. Instead, a mindset persisted that things were difficult because they needed to be, to provide for an efficient OS.

• The webOS dev blog remains optimistic. It can hardly do anyhting else, but it’s right when saying

  ... the past week has demonstrated once again that the passion and dedication of the webOS developer community is what makes this platform so special.

  It’s true that webOS is much more talked about since the HP news broke than before. It might even be true that that might result in a permanent raise of awareness and interest. But first we need to see what Samsung (or another buyer) is going to do with it.
• Huawei and Dutch technology institute TNO are going to do a LTE test around Delft. Source; Dutch.
• Samsung releases bada 2 as well as a trio of smartphones running the upgraded OS.
• Samsung also enters the messaging app market. Everybody feels that this is a competitor for iMessage, but frankly I think it’s more aimed against BBM, which is way more important than a fledgling Apple service that doesn’t even exist yet. But of course Apple and Samsung are aiming for the same market.
• HP seems to regret its decision to cancel the TouchPad. Hint to HP: selling many TouchPads for $100 does not mean you can make it a profitable business.
• Good news for Opera. Dubai-based brand MiFone is going to make cheap Android phones for the South African market with Opera Mini as the default browser. Why? Less network traffic.
• Installing Chrome Frame without admin rights just became much easier. Since Chrome Frame is an excellent way of ridding the world of ancient IEs, I’m all in favour.
• And some non-tech news: wealthy Europeans calling for more taxes.

  I would say to Merkel that the answer to sorting out Germany's financial problems, our public debt, is not to bring in cuts, which will disproportionately hit poorer people, but to tax the wealthy more

  Hope this works!
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