It’s a new year, and we’re supposed to make some predictions. So I’ll try to order my thoughts about the post-Android market, although I should warn you I won’t make a true prediction but will be a bit wishy-washy and vague.

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Today’s hot story seems to be the supposedly Google-initiated howtogomo.com website. I heard some complaints, and decided to take a look myself.

Oh. My. God.

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If you’re not into blog posts that state the blindingly obvious, skip this one. It explains why Google’s whole Dart idea will fail miserably as a “structured language for web programming.” Most people will have already figured this out by themselves, but for those few who haven’t, here’s why:

JavaScript is already there. On a couple of billion devices.

That’s it, really; there’s little else to say. Still, since a blog post is supposed to be longer than two paragraphs, I’ll say a bit more.

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Samsung will not buy MeeGo but instead focuses on bada. Meanwhile HTC confirms it is considering buying its own OS, but “won’t be rushed” — unlike certain other large Android vendors we could mention.

Time to update last week’s overview. #15 is the first new one.

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So Samsung won’t buy webOS after all. Instead, it is said to be interested in MeeGo, which Intel may want to sell. And HP will not sell the webOS team, which has been transferred from the PC division, which will be sold, to a strategy division, which will stay. Good, HP can use some strategy. As can Samsung.

That thud you heard? I fell because my head is spinning.

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Opinions abound on the Motorola acquisition. A quick rundown is in order.

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So Google buys Motorola. What does this mean?

Personally I feel this heralds the high-water mark of Android’s OS market share. That’s not the same as its developer mindshare, or customer satisfaction, but I don’t think the other Android vendors are going to be thrilled, and that we’re going to see that in Q1’s sales stats. Android will drop slightly, and one or more new OSs will take its place.

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Via John Gruber I stumbled on The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995. The article ignores key facts of the mobile market because they don’t fit the point the author wants to make.

People have the right to participate in re-enactments of historical platform wars, but they should not confuse them with reality.

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AdMob, the mobile advertiser that was bought by Google some months ago, has released its latest market share figures for the mobile browsers.

Their main findings have already been discussed extensively:

1. Smartphones are on the rise; 48% versus 35% last month.
2. Feature phones are falling quickly; 58% to 35%.
3. Still, the absolute number of feature phones rose by 31%, which means that the market as a whole is growing rapidly.

The AdMob report, however, is not about browser market share but about ad impressions. And that may matter a lot. Unfortunately we don’t know how much it matters.

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Yesterday evening I returned from my fourth foreign trip this year. This time I went to the Mobile World Congress, the annual Barcelona-based get-together of the mobile industry, and I can tell you, it’s something else.

This post gives an overview of announcements by mobile players that might be of interest to web developers. There’s an incredible lot of it, too, because every single major mobile player except Apple feels that MWC is the ultimate forum for major announcements.

If you know of more news, or have links to additional information, please leave a comment.

I was there because Vodafone had invited me to sit on a panel in a technical “embedded conference” about W3C Widgets and related technologies. The concept can use some fine-tuning; I’m hoping to do some of that in the future. I was there mainly to stress that the mobile browser situation is not as simple as it looks. THERE IS NO WEBKIT ON MOBILE!
While I was at it I also invented guerilla browser testing.

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When I reviewed the reactions to my There is no WebKit on Mobile post, it became pretty clear that few had expected its conclusion that there is no single WebKit on Mobile. Overall, it seemed that most people were pretty surprised, and hurried to revise their ideas of the mobile browser market. That was the point of the article, so I was happy.

The most-often heard criticism was that I was unclear about the browser version numbers. That’s true, and I have updated the table to include them. I also split out the tests into Acid, CSS2, CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript, and calculated separate scores for each browser. The results are interesting for some browsers. Konqueror sucks at JS but is very good in CSS, while Android is exactly the opposite. Interesting data.

(I’m still tinkering with the interface, by the way, and I didn’t have the time to finish my current revision. So the coloured bars are temporarily gone, but they’ll return in the future.)

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Last week I spent a lot of time on WebKit in order to produce a comprehensive comparison of all WebKits. My purpose was to prove there is no “WebKit on Mobile,” and to gain some more insight in the complicated relations between the various WebKits.

Therefore I now present the Great WebKit Comparison Table. In it I compare 19 different WebKits on 27 tests.

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Having tested mobile phones for the last seven months or so, I have become pretty well inured to odd, or even disastrous, results. Still, after encountering the following bug on the Android, even I started to doubt my sanity.

I don’t usually spend a blog post on a single browser bug, but this time I break that rule because this is doubtlessly the weirdest bug I found so far, and possibly also the most serious one.

CSS width may be unreliable on the Android — in certain situations.

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