An amazing glimpse at how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances, form the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series.
Pico projector technology allows for some interesting interaction…
Orange has had a look at the Welsh-speaking community and decided it needs a phone of its very own, so has launched the Samsung S6500 with Welsh language on board.
See the full Techradar article.
AdMob (a mobile advertising platform) have released their latest metrics report – and as far as their advertising impressions go, Google Android has now pulled in front of Windows Mobile (in terms of requests to the AdMob network, not handset marketshare).
The difference is actually even more pronounced in the UK than the US:
Of course, this is just one advertising network, and results may well be skewed depending on how/where their adverts are displayed, but it’s still a useful thing to note as the mobile web continues to grow in popularity at a tremendous speed.
(via Android and Me)
Google have updated their mobile Google Mail interface to use cutting-edge HTML5 and CSS3 features available to WebKit-based browsers and the upcoming Firefox 3.5.
The new interface provides new functionality such as offline access – you can load Gmail in your browser even if you go offline, then reply to e-mails, etc, and it’ll all be synced back to the ‘cloud’ when you’re next online. The new Gmail also uses the <canvas> HTML element (a region of a web page defined in HTML code, which can then be drawn on with JavaScript) to draw various graphic – thus preventing the need to download images – as well as CSS animations and transformations to make the interface more dynamic. Clever stuff.
It’s amazing that this kind of stuff is leading the way is on mobile devices, where the most popular browsers (Safari on the iPhone, and the Android browser on Android-based phones) are generally more capable and advanced than the current versions of the most popular desktop browsers.
For more information, see:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-mobile-gmail-experience-for-iphone.html
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/html5-and-webkit-pave-way-for-mobile.html
Whilst doing some research on mobile web design, I was looking for information on how to cater for the wide range of devices and screen sizes that are out there, and came across a useful article at mobiForge.com: Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes.
It provides some handy statistics on the most common screen sizes for mobile devices; I was amazed that 128 pixels is the most common width for a mobile (I would’ve imagined it to be a little bigger). It actually turns out that most devices share one of three widths: 128, 176, or 240 pixels. These values are generally getting bigger year-on-year – especially with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 (which has a 320 pixel wide screen).
The gist of the article is that by targeting your design at a medium screen size, and using good, clean, semantic markup, it’s fairly straightforward to make a site that degrades gracefully to smaller screen sizes, and can be progressively enhanced to provide extra functionality/styles to more capable devices.
A gallery of creative iPhone friendly sites.
My wife had an iPhone for Christmas – I have never seen her so immersed in tech.
One of my implementation team, JSJ, proudly showed me our latest launch on his iPhone… I was pretty impressed. (More on that soon).
