Carnival of the Mobilists 98: Hey Google, Trick or Treat?

Photo by Toby Ord. License information here.

[Edited to fix a typo; I apologize if you get a second copy in your feed.]

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists comes just after Halloween, a holiday when (at least in the US) people are disguised in costumes and kids fantasize about all the great candy they're going to get.

In the spirit of the holiday, Google has been keeping its mobile plans in disguise, and many of the Mobilist authors are speculating about the candy we'll get from them:

Skydeck makes some very interesting predictions about what the Google phone OS will do, and how much Google will subsidize it. I especially like the financial analysis.

In the second part of a three-part post, Abshishek Tiwari speculates about the services that might be included in a Google phone.

John at Nellymoser gives a long discussion of Apple and Google's efforts to open up the mobile ecosystem.


Other goodies in the bag...

Taptology does a nice job of comparing the buzz-building skills of Nokia and Apple to the buzz-killing behavior of Motorola and SonyEricsson.

Barry at StayGoLinks argues that the mobile web will take off when voice can be used as an interface to it, and gives a nice roundup of some recent voice-related technology announcements. Barry, I hope you're right. But speaking as a frustrated (non)user of Dragon Naturally Speaking, I'm not holding my breath.

Tarek Speaks Mobile enthusiastically reviews the new update to the Nokia N95, and says Motorola could learn something from it.

C Enrique Ortiz discusses the US mobile industry and the power of the operators.

Mob Happy rolls out a mobile version of its site, and discusses the traffic that resulted.

Xellular Identity reviews the various pricing and service plan options for ringback tones around the world. I had no idea there was so much diversity.

Vision Mobile gives a very detailed discussion of efforts to make mobile phone software customizable and flexible. It's an excellent overview.

Should schoolchildren in New York who perform well in class be given free cellphones and prepaid minutes as a reward? Yes, says Judy at Golden Swamp. She reviews the controversial proposal in New York and gives some interesting thoughts on the potential use of mobile phones in education, based on her own experiences.

Post of the Week. It was a hard choice. Although Vision Mobile's post is very detailed and worthy of consideration, I chose Golden Swamp as the Post of the Week because it gave me an interesting new perspective.

Next week the Carnival will be at Ubiquitous Thoughts.

Carnival of the Mobilists #70: Is RIM stupid or lying?

Welcome to the 70th weekly Carnival of the Mobilists. If you're not familiar with the Carnival, it's a collection of mobile-related commentary from the last week, nominated by the weblog authors themselves. The hosting duties rotate from week to week.

This week's articles cover a huge range of subjects, from game-playing cameras to RIM's service outage. I tried to come up with some clever theme to link them all together, but I think the main message is that the mobile market is so diverse that there are no common themes.

And away we go...

RIM's service outage: Are they liars, or just incompetent? Wow. The Mobile Enterprise Weblog gives a scathing analysis of RIM's recent service failure, and concludes:

"Either RIM's NOC is managed by idiots OR RIM's PR department is incompetent OR none of the above."

(With 'none of the above' meaning the company had a more serious failure and is trying to cover it up.) I have no idea what really happened, but this commentary is what occurs online when you try to play down a story. It's far better to be completely open about a problem. Then at least people may trust you in the future rather than assuming you're lying.

MVNOs: Victory of the bottom-feeders? Jason Devitt at Skydeck, a mysterious new mobile startup, contributes a very interesting post on the fate of MVNOs. He argues that the high-profile MVNOs targeting lucrative customers are doomed, and that the ones to watch are those targeting low-end customers.

How to improve feature phones. Little Springs Design reviews some of the flaws of today's feature phones, and makes suggestions on what needs to be changed.

American business executives should all use SMS instead of e-mail. That's the message from Tomi Ahonen's fervent (and very detailed) essay on the benefits of SMS messaging, and its ubiquity outside the US.

The dumbest convergence product of all time (in my opinion). Pocket Gamer brings us news of a new digital camera that comes with twenty video games built in. They treated the product with very polite respect, but I can't restrain myself: I thought I had seen dumb convergence products before, but this one's the new champion.

Using SMS to communicate to students. Mopocket editorializes that universities should use text messaging to communicate with students in emergencies.

The rebirth of Web Clipping? Well, sort of. Web clipping was a technique Palm used several years ago in an effort to overcome the latency problem with accessing web content on mobile devices. David Beers predicts that Palm's going to use something similar in the future.

Anger over mobile data charges. Helen Keegan editorializes on the charges for mobile data in the UK, and she's not happy.

Enthusiasm for Nokia's web tablet. b-trends brings us a very enthusiastic review of the Nokia n800 Internet tablet device. They tested a nice range of websites, and there are good screen shots.

Checking out a new operator in Spain. WAP Review gives a hands-on review of the Spanish operator Yoigo.

The future of mobile advertising. Always-on Real Time Access summarizes a recent panel on mobile advertising.

Future barcodes. The Pondering Primate speculates about possible future competition between Microsoft and Google in barcodes.

Mobile phone myths corrected. Shackkdiesel tackles some interesting myths about mobile phones.

Which devices to target in enterprise? Mobbu talks about the process for choosing which devices to target when creating an enterprise mobile application. It's not always best to pick the most advanced device.

Bloggus interruptus. My submission for this week is a short commentary on trying to use the mobile Internet while riding on a train.

A robot to load the dishwasher. SharpBrains contributes a summary of the recent Stanford Media X conference, a technology conference featuring Stanford researchers and others. Most of the content wasn't mobile-related, but it makes interesting reading anyway. Check out the robot that can load a dishwasher.


Post of the week. Each week's host traditionally picks a favorite post, and mine this week is Mobile Enterprise's rant on RIM's service outage. It's not the longest post of the week, but the analysis made sense to me, and I always enjoy a weblog post with a bit of passion to it.

So it goes. Next week's Carnival will be at the Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition. Anyone with a weblog can submit a post to the Carnival. You can use the new online submission form here.

Vote for the best mobile post of the month

The folks at the Carnival of the Mobilists give an award to the best mobile-related post of the month. But it looks like they must have forgotten to do it since August, because they just opened the voting for the best posts in August through November of last year. You can find the voting forms here. Just scroll down to see each month.

Here's how I voted:

November. I thought the best nominee was VisionMobile's post on the right data strategy for operators. It was well argued, and I agreed with it. An excerpt:

"Operators should realise that consumer service innovation most often comes from 3rd party service developers....Operators should develop platforms that link service providers with advertisers and consumers (and do it faster than Yahoo, Google and Nokia) -- in other words be service pipes, to avoid being bit pipes."

It's amazing how many of the nominated posts were commentaries on what the operators are doing wrong. You might almost say the mobilists are obsessed.

October. Although my post on whether the smartphone will kill the PC is one of the nominees, I think the best post of the month was All About Symbian's fantastic overview of Internet radio. So I voted for that one.

September. Two posts from Mobile Opportunity were nominated in this month, so I'll refrain from making any recommendation here.

August. I think David Beers deserves credit for an insightful analysis of Palm's OS plans. He spotted some subtle wording in the company's financial disclosures, and broke the story of Palm buying back its OS several months before it became common knowledge.

Full disclosure: The winning authors get $250 each from Khosla Ventures, so I guess I have a vested interest in encouraging you to vote for my stuff. But actually, I think you should vote for the posts you think are best.

There's also supposed to be a vote on the best post of the year, sometime later this month. I'll let you know when that vote begins.