Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

This video is hilarious: “When Bluetooth, Car Phone and BlackBerry team up, iPhone gets what he deserves.”

Thank you Dave for sending me the link!

I was excited when the news about T-Mobile’s brand new “App Store” first leaked last month. It was all about how it will be different from the “traditional carrier deck”. Now the official T-Mobile DevParner Community is open. WapReview has a detailed review on it. It is a huge disappointment to me. I did not see anything new comparing to the “traditional carrier deck”. On the contrary it is much worse than any Java ME carrier decks in the US such as the ones from AT&T or Sprint.

Certification

Applications must be tested, verified and signed. Is this needed for protecting customers from vicious applications? No. That is just an excuse for the carrier to abuse Java ME signing for its own advantage. T-Mobile even blocks unsigned applications from network access. I am a T-Mobile customer because I still keep a good deal of an old plan. But I usually just buy unlocked phones instead of handicapped handsets from the carrier.

Testing price

The testing price (~$200 per handset) is prohibitive. I could not imagine any freeware developer could spend that amount of money to put his/her free software on T-Mobile Deck. Symbian signing has free program for freewares. Apple iPhone App Store will list free softwares for free. I know the price is still cheaper than True BREW Testing from Qualcomm, but Java applications are supposed to be safer than native code, thus the testing should be easier and cheaper.

No games

Unfortunately I think games are majority of the Java ME application sales. In last year’s JavaOne, one session’s title was something like “how mobile developers work with carriers”. One representative from a major carrier in US said if you are a mobile game developer and your name are not one of the big names such as EA, just forget about it. I guess T-Mobile has deals with those big name companies, which are worrying innovations from small development shops (and individual developers) will kill their revenue stream.

Via Apple’s App Store, individual developers like Eliza Block and Steve Demeter will become millionaires with their popular games. T-Mobile does not even give you a chance to make a penny.

Greedy 50%+ split

Five years ago, I checked the revenue split rate of Handango. It was 30% or 40% (I could remember the exact number). I thought that was a big chunk. It might make some sense if the application uses network bandwidth intensively. However for simple applications, what T-Mobile provides is just a distribution channel. It is the developer who makes the big investment in front and takes the risk in case of commercial failure. 50% and even more split by T-Mobile does not make any sense to me.

An ideal Carrier App Store to me should be:

(1) Certification is only for developer identification purpose. All APIs should be open to developers. Let end users set permissions (per app) on API accesses such network, PIM, file etc.
(2) Reasonable testing price to cover the cost. Free application should be listed for free.
(3) Do not deny applications unless it has really improper content (like violence and porn). Let the end users make the judgment and vote.
(4) Do not make carrier deck the sole source. Users should have other choices to install apps to their own devices.

I am thinking about getting a T-Mobile G1 as my next phone. Now the T-Mobile DevParner news makes me a little nervous. I hope tomorrow’s Android Dream announcement will not turn out to be a big disappointment. We will see, a few hours later.

I used to use Google Send to Phone service and the FireFox plugin to send SMS. But today I found that free SMS service has been stopped by Google. I remember that Yahoo had a similar service before. It turns out Yahoo Web2SMS is not longer available either. I do not know when that happened.

Here are a list alternatives I know:

(1) Via Email

AT&T: number@txt.att.net
T-Mobile: number@tmomail.net
Sprint: number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: number@vtext.com
AllTel: number@message.alltel.com
Where number = your 10 digit phone number.

I did not use this method for quite a while, I hope those emails still work.

(2) Via carrier websites

They often provide simple web forms to send SMS. For example Sprint has messaging.sprintpcs.com, T-Mobile has t-mobile.com/MESSAGING.

(3) Gizmo SMS

GizmoSMS.com site allows you send SMS globally. You can pick the country name from a long list.

This is a great collection of tips to let your smartphone do more useful stuff for you:
101 Ways to Make Your Smartphone Smarter

It has links in the following categories:

• Communication
• Finance
• Travel
• Media & Entertainment
• Organization
• Information
• Utilities
• Utilities
• Convenience
• Hacks
• BlackBerry
• Windows Mobile
• Palm
• Symbian
• iPhone

TagsMe has a list of very impressive demo videos to show how easy it is to develop mobile applications using its GUI Editor and XML-based language. I am impressed not only by its mobile client, but also its Netbeans based IDE. Everything seems to be well polished.

Cascada Mobile takes a completely different approach. Instead of letting the developers deal with mobile geared markup languages, they can just use standard xHTML, CSS, and Javascript to write applications. Cascada Mobile provides tools to convert them automatically to mobile Java applications (MIDlets). Interesting enough, the development tool is an Eclipse plugin.

Back to the year of 2003, I read an article on MSDN, which was talking about why a startup company should avoid entering development tools (IDE specifically) market. I was kind of involved in mobile development tool at that time, so I remember that article very clearly. I could not find the original article now, but the main reasons are:
(1) IDE needs heavy investment and
(2) the customers for IDE are very picky, because they are developers themselves
With über IDEs and RCPs like Eclipse and Netbeans, the situation has been changed dramatically now days. The barriers to entry for development tools are much lower.