Tablet wars heat up with Motorola Xoom release, iPad 2 announcement around the corner

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Will Sullivan

This afternoon the media embargo on Motorola Xoom tablet reviews dropped in preparation for tomorrow’s opening of sales and every tech site worth their domain name had reviews. In general, reviews have been pretty positive and it sounds like this is actually a worthy iPad competitor.

One of the most interesting reviews I read came from Robert Scoble, a self-confessed iPad lover who owns three (yes, three!) iPads:

The common positive praise is:

  • Features are a step up and several people have called this the first official legit iPad competitor and the first tablet to beat the iPad in several areas
  • Interface is better resolution and better looking than the iPad
  • The OS is more intuitive, faster for multi-tasking and the best Android experience seen so far
  • Google integrated apps (Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Contacts, etc.) are substantially better than the versions on Apple iOS

The biggest complaints are:

  • Limited apps available currently for the new Android Honeycomb operating system (which will change over time, since this is the first Honeycomb tablet)
  • Some advertised features are still TBA — Flash and 4G coverage is supposed to be coming soon, just not yet.
  • Using a proprietary charging plug is a very “Apple-like” move. Come on Motorola.
  • Pricing is often debated if it’s worth the extra money compared to the iPad (the Xoom is generally around $100 more than iPads with similar features)

Walt Mossberg of All Thing D said:

Bottom line: The Xoom and Honeycomb are a promising pair that should give the iPad its stiffest competition. But price will be an obstacle, and Apple isn’t standing still.

Boy Genius Report says:

I’m not sure how much better an Android tablet can get right now — and this is the first one we’ve reviewed here at BGR. The Motorola XOOM packs a serious punch, and doesn’t have room to store an ice pack. I love that Motorola has been pushing forward with innovate ideas and concepts, most notably with the ATRIX 4G, and the XOOM isn’t an exception. It features great hardware, impressive specifications, and the latest Android OS designed just for tablets. There are many things to rave about with the XOOM, though there were some annoyances and frustrations that stemmed from Google’s OS for the most part and not from Motorola’s hardware.

Engadget perhaps had the most critical review:

Is the Xoom a real competitor to the iPad? Absolutely. In fact, it outclasses the iPad in many ways. Still, the end user experience isn’t nearly where it needs to be, and until Google paints its tablet strategy and software picture more clearly, we’d suggest a wait-and-see approach. Honeycomb and the Xoom are spectacular — unfortunately they’re a spectacular work in progress.

All this news comes at an interesting time, with Apple yesterday announcing it will be holding a media event on March 2, which many people have speculated will be announcing the iPad 2. Hopefully, Apple will bring some more innovation and help raise the bar again to keep Google and Motorola on their toes.

Long live competition!

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile & tablet development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

Filed under: Innovation, android, apple, tablets | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

MWC: Amazing potential, for a privacy price

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Will Sullivan

The future is almost here. (Screen shot from Minority Report)

Today was an interesting day with a lot of future think sessions. A lot of ideas made me think of sci fi movies, like Minority Report. My mind is overwhelmed. One panel about Mobile in 2020 was particularly inspiring to listen to and see a lot of examples of mobile products from leading R&D firms (and panels usually are pretty difficult to make amazing).

One central theme that most of the panelists discussed — and many of the keynotes and presenters including Eric Schmidt’s keynote yesterday — discussed the looming debate over users privacy and user data. There’s amazing potential to make rich, personalized, hyper-localized, automated, intelligent, efficient experiences and customized, interactive interfaces with mobile tools, but you have to be comfortable with letting some privacy go.

Some of the real ideas that were discussed, like developing mobile apps or devices that can sense your emotions based on the tension in your voice … it just blows my mind. I don’t know if they’ll come to market, and if so, in what form but most people are going to have to work through their personal issues with privacy and find out what they’re comfortable with because I don’t think the majority of the public is ready to surrender their privacy.

Will the public surrender privacy for the sake of innovation, convenience and customized technology tools in the future? Could you be the next John Anderton accused of precrime!?! I know it’s a big jump, but it’s amazing to think of the potential of these tools and what the world will be like in even just 10 years. :)

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile & tablet development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

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MWC: New HTC phones get Facebook on speed dial

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Will Sullivan

HTC announced today at Mobile World Congress that it is releasing two new phones with tight Facebook integration all the way down to dedicated (and somewhat awkwardly placed, imho) Facebook buttons.

The Salsa and ChaCha are interesting concepts, especially if you think about how it could be integrated as a communication tool, especially how Facebook could essentially replace your phone’s contact list. Extrapolating this concept further can offer some wild possibilities such as just having a Facebook communicator handset tied into their messaging, chat, sms, games, photos, video all run on a data network; no need for cell phone minutes at all. They’re not there yet, but it could be a possibility in the future. Maybe even as a starter phone for younger users who live on Facebook.

If this data charted by Business Insider and tracked by ComScore is any indication, these Facebook phones aren’t going to go away anytime soon:

Both HTC phones are running on the Android operating system, which HTC has a lot of experience customizing for it’s popular Sense interface.

During the announcement, there was a quick video of Mark Zuckerberg discussing the announcement where he also pointed out that this wasn’t just the only ‘Facebook phones’ coming to market over the next year, he said ‘dozens’ will be released. (Video available below)

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile & tablet development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

Filed under: android, applications, Handsets, Innovation, Mobile World Congress, social media | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

MWC: Tablets galore, overpriced

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Will Sullivan

I’m at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain right now and much like the Consumer Electronics Show this year, MWC is ablaze in Android tablets.

Also, much like CES, pricing and real-world availability is still TBD.

Please forgive me if I seem unimpressed and underwhelmed by the vaporware hype, but I think a 1-2 combo from the manufacturers and the carriers are going to slow a lot of the potential that many of these yet-to-be-actually-manufactured Android tablets had and Apple is going to continue to dominate the market with the iPad. (Let me state for the record: I’m an on-again, off-again Android fanboy but frankly, Apple is absolutely crushing it, with no end in sight.)

The two cost factors slowing growth are:

1 – The majority of the tablet options being shown are 3g / 4g models, with little talk about less expensive wifi tablets. Obviously, of course at this mobile event, run by the mobile operators they’re going to tout the mobile tablets. But the market for folks who are going to pay for a tablet that requires a mobile contract (along with their normal mobile contract and probably home Internet service) that is very narrow and very elite.

Since most usage for tablets is based in the evenings and early morning, most users are using them at home, where there is usually a Wifi connection is available and having a mobile connection is not as critical.

2- Some of the early tablets hitting the market are so absurdly priced, they’re running more expensive than computers with better specs and features. Case in point: the sexy Motorola Xoom which has had prices ranging from $1199 to $800. If that former price does come to market, you’ll pay as much for a tablet as a new MacBook Pro.

Hopefully, over time Android tablets will reduce in cost as competition increases and they’ll become a viable mass market option. The irony that the open source platform with a lower cost, actually costs much more than Apple’s system is not lost on me. Apple has been really smart with their hardware purchasing, manufacturing, distribution systems and maintained control over the price points, where Google doesn’t have much control on any of those factors with the manufacturers.

For the time being, I don’t see anything replacing my iPad anytime soon, and especially with the iPad 2 coming sometime this Spring, the chasm could get larger for both consumers and perhaps the most critical component — innovative developers (who follow the mass consumer audience).

The way things are going right now, the only Android tablet I may be purchasing anytime soon is a Barnes & Noble Color Nook, which only costs $249 for the wifi version and it runs the Android OS (which with some rooting it and hacking can be made into a decent tablet).

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile & tablet development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

Filed under: android, apple, Innovation, Mobile World Congress, tablets | Leave a Comment »

Mobile phone photos win at Pictures of the Year International competition

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Will Sullivan

Damon Winter / New York Times, courtesy POYI

New York Times photographer, Damon Winter’s, “A Grunt’s Life” photojournalism work won a third place in the Pictures of the Year International competition this week. What’s unique about this is the photos were shot using an iPhone 4 and a simple app call Hisptamatic that adds effects to photos.

Winter talked about why he used the mobile phone for photojournalism earlier in the year:

“Composing with the iPhone is more casual and less deliberate,” Mr. Winter said. “And the soldiers often take photos of each other with their phones, so they were more comfortable than if I had my regular camera.”

Mr. Winter even found himself taking a few iPhone pictures during firefights while he was shooting video with his single-lens reflex (a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, as long as we’re on the subject). The Hipstamatic app forced him to wait about 10 seconds between photos, so each one had to count.

Winter isn’t the only New York Times staffer using mobile reporting tools, Ann Derry, the New York Times Editorial Director for Video and Television says the iPhone 4 is a ‘game changer’ used by reporters on the staff.

For more information about Hipstamatic and other photo editing apps for mobile reporting, check out the RJI mobile journalism gear and app guide.

[Disclosure: The POYi contest is partially organized and funded by the University of Missouri and the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where I have my fellowship]

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile & tablet development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

Filed under: apps, best practices, Innovation, iphone, journalism, Mobile Reporting Tools, photography, RJI | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Qualcomm mobilizes the ‘hood

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Clyde Bentley

The biggest mobile phone industry gathering in the world starts Monday, but Qualcomm got a jump on the media crowd today by pre-announcing a new technology that could have far-reaching impact on the news industry.

flashlinq logoWhen the Mobile World Congress officially opens in Barcelona, Qualcomm will unveil its FlashLinq technology that promises neighborhood-level mobile networking without the aid of cell towers and central servers.  The system will use licensed bandwidth from a mobile service provider.  Instead of going through the system’s servers and towers, however, FlashLinq-enabled phones will be able to recognize each other up to a kilometer away.

On one level, FlashLinq opens the door for neighborhood-level social networking, news distribution and very local advertising.  It does not stop there, however, FlashLinq uses a new peer-to-peer standard called Wi-Fi Direct that many see as the key to machine-to-machine mobile.  Samsung already uses that protocol for a camera that can use your mobile phone as a remote viewfinder.  Others, however, eagerly await a fleshed-out system that turns vending machines into robots who can not only ask their customers’ phones for money, but can dial back to the warehouse when they need to be restocked.  Taken to an extreme, this “M2M” commerce could radically change the retail industry.

Qualcomm and the Mobile World Congress share a reputation for size.  Qualcomm is the world’s biggest supplier of chips, especially those that power mobile phones.  The Mobile World Congress is enormous in its own right — more than 50,000 attendees jostling through nearly 500,000 square feet of display space.  It is traditionally the venue for the mobile world’s biggest announcements and product debuts.

I attended last year, but next week you’ll get the MWC scoop from my colleague Will Sullivan.  Stay tuned.

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The word on mobile in India

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Clyde Bentley

Santosh Vijaykumar, one of my former graduate students, posted this insight on Facebook today:

India is truly a mobile hotspot!

Uma Borkar’s mom’s student was asked for the antonym of ‘mobile’ in English class. Guess what he replied?

Landline!

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Mobile reporting from the Egyptian protests and government Internet blockage

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Will Sullivan


The amazing photo above is from The New York Times and it really tells the tale of the revolution going on in Egypt right now.

The Egyptian protests going on right now are facinating to watch for many reasons, one of which, how the citizens and media are using mobile reporting tools to communicate about the news there. The Egyptian government has blocked out major internet service providers to prevent protest organization and communication with the outside world.

Citizen are organizing on Twitter around the hashtag #jan25 and Facebook groups. They’re also using tools like Bambuser, YouTube (which has also been helping curate dozens of videos in it’s CitizenTube channel), Skype, TwitPic (and the dozens of varties of twitter photo sharing tools), SMS and MMS messaging systems. There’s even some people organizing how to use dial up networks to connect to the Internet.

Matthew Ingram on the GigOm tech news blog sites the power of the network as a means for starting a revolution:

Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.

Many citizens are having to use a technique I teach when working with mobile reporting tools for journalists — ‘MacGuyvering’ their communication. (Finding a solution by any means possible, sometimes using a non-conventional DIY solution).

CNN International posted a good wrap up of events going down and how some activists are trying to keep the information spreading by using technology to work around government blockages:

Online activists — normally young professionals and often multilingual — have also been quick to find ways to combat the interruption of social media sites, with links to sites offering free downloads. One message read: “Nokia users in Egypt, use Snaptu application and Twitter and Facebook will never go down.”

People have also used sites known as proxy servers, which allow users to surf the web almost anonymously and offer access to banned sites by circumventing the host country’s servers. A similar method was used by WikiLeaks when its website was taken off Amazon’s servers in the United States.

Filed under: Commentary, journalism, Mobile Reporting Tools, photography, SMS, social media | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

An excellent checklist for social (and mobile) media reporting

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Will Sullivan

Mandy Jenkins of TDB and Zombie Journalism created an excellent “Accuracy and accountabilitychecklist for social media” which I think in many places can apply to mobile media/mobile reporting and general good news reporting:

Before tweeting:

  • How do I know this information?
  • Is this information independently confirmed? Should it be first?
  • Do I know the location of the news event? Check a map.
  • Will this require follow-up tweets to better explain? Do I know this story well enough to follow-up?

When tweeting:

  • Are proper names spelled correctly?
  • Does the link go to the right place? Is it shortened properly?
  • Are any Twitter handles included? Do they go to the right accounts?
  • Does this tweet have/need attribution for reported facts?
  • Does this tweet need a hat tip for another Twitter account/news outlet who first alerted you to the info?
  • Is a location included/necessary?
  • Is this tweet short enough to be easily re-tweeted?
  • Check to see if auto-correct changed the text intended.
  • Check your shorthand and contractions to make sure they make sense.

When re-tweeting:

  • Is it clear why I want to share this tweet, or does it need context?
  • Is this tweet reporting heretofore unknown information?
  • If so, is this source reliable enough to throw your name behind?
  • Is the original tweet written clearly enough to be passed on from me?

When sharing on Facebook:

  • Is the image that shows up in my link preview actually connected to the story?
  • Is the post text and headline reflective of the content of the story?
  • Are any tagged users in images/posts the correct people?

It’s easy to get caught up in the rush on the scene or in a breaking news environment and this list gives excellent perspective on how to do ‘slow news’ reporting, focusing on accuracy above speed. It’s definitely a great tool to bookmark or print out for future news events.

 

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Mobile continues to grow quicker than analysts predicted

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Will Sullivan

Will Sullivan 2010-2011 Reynolds Institute fellow studying mobile & tablets

Gartner released research last week predicting that the mobile web experience will overtake the desktop web experience in 2013. This is a year before many analysts including Mary Meeker, formerly of Morgan Stanley, predicted the mobile surge to take over by 2014.

Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.

Gartner also predicts large growth in mobile tools being used as currency. This is well underway with many major companies rushing to add these features to the mobile experience, most recently in December, Google announced they were adding Near Field Communications (NFC) mobile payment systems to their Android operating system. Just today it was announced, Starbucks now allows their customers to pay with their mobile phones.

Nielsen also released a very interesting infographic that puts the U.S. media in perspective, especially how high mobile penetration is already compared to several other mainstream formats including TV, DVD players and more:

(Click to see a larger version)

Filed under: Mobile Web, Mobile users | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

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