WMSkins Blog » iphone

Windows Phone 7 & iPhone – Can You Spot The Difference?

mushipkw — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:52:38 +0000

Only two platforms share the exact same set of attributes: Apple’s and Microsoft’s. Its like iPhone is Relaunced only its named Windows Phone 7 Series this time.

Combine Various Mobile Apps Into One Snac

mushipkw — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:39:03 +0000

Are you tired of all the talk of “apps” (applications) for your mobile device to do everything from tracking ball games to keeping up with Facebook friends? Wish you could get some of that fun stuff on your more conventional, not-so-smart phone?

There’s an alternative to apps called “Snacs.” These are free, instantly accessible programs that run on the phone that’s already in your pocket if you’re a customer of Sprint, T-Mobile or AT&T and have upgraded (but who hasn’t?) in the past couple of years to a so-called “feature phone.”

(Snacs also run on a bunch of smartphones, including BlackBerrys and Androids, but not in closed-system iPhones, unless you “jailbreak” it.)

By definition, a feature phone has a decent amount of memory and a nicer, more readable screen. Some displays are as big and touch-friendly as a fancy smart phone’s. But feature phones cost a whole lot less (some are even free) and only require only a $5- to $10-a-month data plan to bring home the Snacs.

Developed by mobile communications veteran Mark Caron, a New Jersey guy, co-founder and head of marketing of the former Omnipoint Communications (swallowed by T-Mobile) and CEO of MobileSpring/Ztango (a ringtones pioneer now part of Real Networks), Snac is moving out of the beta-test phase and ready for mainstream feasting.

Snac scoops up and presents a bunch of the apps “that people actually use on a regular basis – offering them access to things like news and weather, Twitter and Facebook, Google Calender and MySpace,” Caron told me.

“You hear about the iPhone having 140,000 apps . . . but when push comes to shove, most people only really use three or four regularly,” the developer said. “And Snac serves them to you faster, with fewer clicks and much less taxing of the phone system or your data plan.”

Snac offers up its treats as an array of icons on a home page that looks similar to an iPhone dashboard. But look closer and you’ll see that the Snacs are not static symbols but mini-billboards, regularly updating the local temperature, game scores, stock prices, news headlines and such.

Click or tap (if you have a touch screen) on one and the Snac opens to reveal more info. To read the full story at a news site, tap again at the bottom of the screen.

“The request comes up instantly because our service is always streaming in the background and caching to the phone, storing its updates to the phone’s memory,” said Caron. “Apple won’t let you do that kind of multitasking on the iPhones.” Nor will the iPad, which has been a source of much grieving since its recent introduction.

At the moment, Snac supports about 300 models, including non-smart phones that run Java programming language and smart phones that run Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS and Symbian phones, with a version two OS coming out shortly.

BRINGING IN BREW, TOO? If negotiations go as hoped, Snac also will pop up this year on phones that run Qualcomm’s BREW MP cellphone operating system, likewise designed to bring smartphone functionality to lower-priced phones.

And a good thing, too.

Verizon uses a version of BREW on feature phones. AT&T has said it will adopt Brew MP for all its new, quick-messaging phones (those with hard or virtual QWERTY keyboards), with first models coming out this summer. Both Samsung and LG have announced plans to make Brew MP phones.

Go direct and load your phone with just the sites you want (including virtually every RSS feed) by visiting the Mysnacs Web site. Some heavier Snacs like Facebook will also need to be configured on the PC with passwords.

Touchscreen Analysis: iPhone vs Eris vs Droid vs Nexus One

mushipkw — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:48:43 +0000

Using a simple technique that anyone can perform at home, MOTO evaluated the resolution and accuracy of each touchscreen device. All they used was a basic drawing program, a steady hand, and a few straight lines drawn very slowly on the screen.

“The iPhone’s touch sensor showed the most linear tracking with the least amount of stair-stepping. The Droid Eris and Nexus One tied for second with only faint wiggling – but actually performed best at the edge of the screen. Last in the line-up was the Motorola Droid, which demonstrated significant wavy artifacts or “stair-stepping.”

Read the full article Here

Comparison Of Various MarketPlaces For Mobile Platforms

mushipkw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:57:29 +0000

As previously announced by Microsoft, the online “desktop” web version of the service is now also available. I will briefly go through the different features and also recap with a nice comparison to the other application store fronts available on the marketplace today for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia, WebOS, Samsung.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile on the web

The main login page is here: http://marketplace.windowsphone.com. And looks like this once you have signed on with your Live account:

You can easily drill down into any application and see the details, reviews and screenshots.

Features

Perhaps the most interesting is if you click on the “Purchase History” label at the top you can visually see all of your previous purchases, freebie or otherwise:

You can drill down into each purchase and see the additional details:

The “Account Settings” tab brings up an easy to use place to change your payment preferences. You can have different ones either for the phone or the web site.

The “Community” link brings you over to the Windows phone Forums, where there is also one for the Marketplace.

Filtering

Without signing into your Live account, or if you have never setup Marketplace on your Windows Mobile device(s) you can still view all the applications available. You can filter the available application for the 2 device types, Professional (touch screen), or Standard (non-touch screen) in the top right hand corner of the screen:

Language Selection

One last perhaps interesting tidbit I noticed, is that if you don’t sign-in you can actual select which language filter you wish to display the available Marketplace applications. In the bottom right corner there is a “Select Catalog” drop down:

Perhaps interesting to see the differences in the amount of available applications in certain languages just like they have been reported on the portable devices..

Quick Comparison to 7 Competitors

In the world of mobile application store fronts the monetary success of Apple’s iTunes store simply can not be ignored. So not just the operating system vendors are jumping on this bandwagon. Many mobile operators, and now OEM’s are also getting onboard. More competition is usually healthy for the consumer or enterprise customer. So it is definitely interesting times we are in.

Apple

The Apple iPhone folks actually have multiple avenues nicely packaged for them:

Web Apps: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ – Provides an overview of some of the 1700+ applications you don’t have to install on the iPhone, but uses a plain Internet URL to access them. Most are optimized for the specific iPhone screen size and Safari browser.

iTunes Store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/ – No native web interface to access the store. You must install the iTunes application, but can browse without a configured device. With it’s 100,000+ applications for the iPod Touch/iPhone the current defacto leader inthe mobile space. The newer Genius feature, where application picks based upon your current installation of application is very clever and surprising attractive..

For another interesting view of the iTunes App Store, be sure to check out the “App Store Wall”. Originally shown at the Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) in the summer of 2009. It provides a live view of the top 20,000 applications and their live activity of purchases on twenty 30” monitors. Better screen shots here. It is now on display at Apple’s Cupertino, CA corporate office in the main lobby..

Blackberry

The RIM Blackberry folks have the launched their “Blackberry App World” earlier this year. It has a nice open web access to view it’s contents as well: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/.

Several different filters and views to drill down into the applications you are interested in. A nice touch is the RSS feed on the featured applications.

Android

The Android Market web site appears not to be a full view into all the available applications. Just the featured, and top paid and free applications are highlighted. For the free applications, they can be filtered by 16 sub-categories.

Only screenshots and a brief description are made available. Hopefully some more development and feature will be added in the near future. Only a few months in life it clearly needs some more work..

Nokia

Nokia lunched it’s application store front back in May of 2009. It’s called “Ovi Store”, and was supposely launched with more than 20,000 applications in it’s back pocket to give it a boost from the get-go. Looking at the other platforms, probably not a bad decision for a mature platform to get it going.

However the web interface is not geared for desktop web viewing, even though it does pulls up in a fairly readable way: https://store.ovi.com/.

Ovi is already a cloud service for the Nokia platform, much like Apple’s MobileMe, or Microsoft’s MyPhone services. Nokia is also dabbling in the multimedia space with their own Nokia Music Store.

webOS

The Palm webOS application store is named “Palm App Catalog”. Tied to the public SDK releases for the operating system the App Catalog is coming up with a slow start it appears. Full support for paid apps appears to be coming up in December, where more developers and companies might have been waiting for to gain access into this well thought out platform.

No direct web accessible version of the Palm App Catalog so far, without using a webOS device itself. Although the application page on Palm’s web site gives a good glimpse of the top featured applications in 16 different categories.

The newly available Palm Pixi device running webOS does indeed look interesting and may push this platform into the application boom it probably deserves..

Samsung

Samsung is calling their own version simply “Application Store”. Limited to the United Kingdom, Italy and France at this time. Perhaps not a global or even regional play at this point in time, but shows their interest and willingness to have a full fledge “store” solution.

Samsung is borrowing heavily from the Apple playbook and created their own iTunes type application they are calling “Samsung Kies”. Installed on your desktop you can sync applications and browse for applications. On the device side, it appears they are catering this mainly to the Omnia line of devices running Windows Mobile at this time. But Samsung is a multi-platform OEM company and has not been shy to announce future Android and Symbian handsets coming out soon.

Verizon

One of the first larger mobile operators (United States-wise) to go public this summer that they want to have their own branded store front on their devices is Verizon. They are adding a new twist to this new frontier that only their own application store will be initially made available on the handsets sold by them to their customers. Customers can download and install the vendor store application (RIM, Microsoft, etc) but this is again a sign of the monetary gains at stake with mobile applications and stores.

The “VZAppZone” is already live and appears only Windows Mobile and RIM devices have been supported in the beginning.

BTW, for consumer LG devices sold by Verizon there is a whole other “Media Store” where ringtones, music, games, applications and wallpapers can be purchased and downloaded. Some with monthly usage fees. So a mobile operator driven store is nothing foreign to them and only natural to expand to more platforms and devices in their portfolio.

Discover Latest Mobile Applications – SmokinApps

mushipkw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:41:33 +0000

SmokinApps lets you discover useful, entertaining and latest mobile applications for a wide range of mobile platforms including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others, with up to 10 new app reviews added daily. Users can browse apps by platform, by tags (finance, games etc), sorted by rating and date, and filtered either by free/paid.

Read description, view screenshots and download apps onto your mobile phone from the website. To receive updates on the newest reviewed apps without visiting the website, you can subscribe by RSS or follow SmokinApps on Twitter at twitter.com/SmokinApps.
Features:

Discover the latest, useful and entertaining mobile applications.
Browse apps by a mobile platform (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile etc.), by tags.
Filter apps by free/paid, sort by rating and by date.
Read independent app reviews, view screen shots and download the app’s version for your mobile platform.
App developers, submit your own apps to be reviewed in the directory.

Check out SmokinApps @ www.smokinapps.com