During its first BlackBerry Developer Conference co-Founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion Mike Lazaridis unveiled plans for an online application store for its smart phones. The store will launch in March 2009 and will include both an online and on-device component giving 20 million BlackBerry users on all platforms the opportunity to find and download add-on applications for their specific phone models. RIM is working with PayPal to build the payment system for the store.

“A new online application storefront and a new on-device application center will help application developers and carriers reach millions of BlackBerry smartphone users worldwide and will provide consumers with greater choice, enhanced application discovery and an easy method for managing installation, upgrades, and purchases.” (source: press release of RIM)

In December this year developers can begin submitting their applications. The storefront will allow them to set their own prices for applications. Developers will get 80 percent of the revenue generated from their application.

In its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Sept. 27, Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones and has now sold more than 13 million iPhones this year (Apple’s sales goal was 10 million in 2008). Compared to Apple, RIM has sold 6.1 million Blackberry devices in the quarter ended August 30.

“RIM is a good company that makes good products and so it is surprising that after only 15 months in the market we could outsell them in any quarter,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during an analyst conference call following the release of the financial report.

Jobs also said that Apple was the third-ranked mobile phone supplier worldwide by revenue during the quarter.
Sources: eetimes.com theglobeandmail.com golem.de

O2 and Vodafone have launched their new payment service ”mpass” in Germany. Through mpass mobile phone customers with any German provider now have access to secure online shopping on their mobile phone or PC.

mpass combines the direct debiting system (German: Lastschriftverfahren) with SMS payment confirmation through mobile phones (we blogged about this before). Some companies like Cinemaxx, Blume2000.de or Beate Uhse are already supporting the service.

More about mpass here: http://www.mpass.de/

Source: zdnet.de

As soon as Nintendo announced the next version of the hugely popular Nintendo DS gaming console, called the Nintendo DSi, I was curious if along with some hardware upgrades, such as 2 cameras, better screens and a SD card slot, there would be major changes to the OS and software included, especially if a decent web browser would be available or even included…and I was hoping for Opera. There is a video of the DSi presentation on YouTube.

Turns out there will be a web browser available (see above video from 01:45)…and it will be an Opera browser! In contrast to the current DS version, the DSi web browser will reside on the console’s flash memory meaning it will not come as a game-cartridge as the currently available Opera browser does.

This week I attended another Mobile Monday, the venue was provided by IIR who did their Converged Messaging Summit there as well.

It probably was the Mobile Monday with the lowest number of attendees I’ve ever been to. That’s mostly because the Oktoberfest takes place and everybody has to decide between having a few (liters of) beer and listening to powerpoint presentations during the evening…I decided for the latter ;)

The presentations were interesting. Taptu went first talking about their mobile search engine, enhanced by human edited results, social interaction and sharing of results with your friends. Apparently groupile.mobi is crawled as a desktop web page, which it is not, probably a header recognition issue.

Yesterday we attended the Webmontag at Optaros in Munich. Nice people, interesting event, relaxed atmosphere and you always meet new people, but also see familiar faces … like Claudia (CScout), Georg and Raju.

Before the networking part started, there were some presentations. Since we were a bit late, we only catched the rest of Hartmut’s presentation about WTF (World Tag Framework). Flash developers out there, please check out this stuff! BarCamp was presented by Nils - in general and especially the one in Munich and the one for women coming soon.

After this presentation Magdalena did a small introduction to Netvibes’ widgets. The last presentation held by our friend Raju from Optaros (formerly at OpenLaszlo) was about E-Commerce and WebTV. He gave us some insights about IPTV and how video and multimedia can improve and enhance e-commerce/online shopping.

We’ve been monitoring the mobile browser market pretty closely during the last couple of years, especially in regard to Mobile Ajax and how it could help to create new and powerful web applications for mobile phones.

Mobile Ajax is a lot of things and it always depends on the individual’s definition what is really meant, but one thing that is a pretty common aspect of Mobile Ajax is the ability that it might at some point be used as a gateway or API to connect the web browser on the phone with the device hardware, such as the GPS system thereby giving access to the device’s position within a mobile web application.

These things are in development at every mobile browser vendor today, that much is for sure, but what’s more interesting, because it’s hardly known, is that this functionality already exists on some BlackBerry Devices, namely those of the 8800 series! Now maybe we’ve been too busy developing our stuff lately to notice, maybe this time nobody really made a big buzz out of this, but personally I feel bad that I missed this until now, because I feel this might have a tremendous impact on mobile web application development:

Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.
Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser

Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:

Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide

Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.
Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany


You can find more information and the whole report here: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report

While working on a couple of things we realized strange behavior in IE Mobile on a Windows 5.0 phone. It’s not really a big issue but it could lead to tiny hiccups for developers, so I felt like posting it here.

The issue occurs then POSTing a form (multipart/form-data) to the server (running PHP 5.x) which contains an input field of type “file” and you leave this file empty.

What you on the server side normally do is to read the form values submitted by the user through the $_POST and the $_FILES array (in PHP) and then do whatever you like with it. These arrays are populated by PHP with the values of the various input fields on your form, and inputs of type=”file” don’t appear in $_POST, but in the $_FILES array, any other input type’s value goes to $_POST.

As I was reading an older issue (#7 in 2008 from 17.03.2008, current one is 9) of Germany’s premier computer magazine c’t I spotted a mentioning of Frost, our open source Ajax library for mobile browsers.

The issue’s title topic was “The web in your hand” and the article starting on page 112 was about “Webdesign for Mobile Devices”. On page 114 Frost is mentioned in one sentence. Yay!

“Event the first JavaScript library for mobile browsers, that are getting increasingly mightier, has been released; Frost is supposed to make simple Ajax manipulations possible.” the article reads (translated from German).

Just a small clarification here: we’re still trying to get the first real release out of the door, shame especially on myself for not bringing up enough time to get this thing done. Anyways good to know we’re on the radar, stuff like this certainly encourages further developments, but time always is an enemy.

If you wanna know more, check out Frost here.