The Free Market

I believe the App Store should be totally open to every application without Apple as content arbiter and the free market will separate the wheat from the chaff. Florida real estate

The Upside

At least in this particular case (I’m not trying to make a general free market argument for economists here) the upside of a totally free market is that it will autonomously, without any outside influence, result in the best outcome for buyers. Developers will create applications and if they do the right thing people will buy their applications, rank them highly, and recommend it to their friends. Conversely, if a developer does not do the right thing and create an application that sucks in some way they’ll be penalized and sink in to oblivion.

The beauty of this system is that it is self-perpetuating too because buyers are undoubtedly drawn to what other people are buying; it’s a fundamental quality of human behavior. The more an application is downloaded and well-reviewed, the more it will move up and up in the charts, the greater visibility it now has, which will mean more people download it, review it, etc, etc. It’s an avalanche. The opposite holds true for a bad application.

The Downside (and why it’s wrong)

There are two arguments I have seen presented by people who favor the Apple arbitration approach (anti-free market) and I think they’re both flawed.

I know what’s best!

The first is that by controlling what content gets approved, Apple gets to decide how applications should work in their opinion. As the creator of a platform, this is naturally appealing. However it is flawed and will actually decrease capitalization potential. When you have a small subset of people who decide what is best for the rest of us, there is a good chance that they’ll get it wrong. One good example I can think of is the way that application settings/options must be all accessed from a central location according to Apple’s guidelines. However, speaking with a number of iPhone-toting friends many believe this is the wrong approach because when you want to change some setting in an app you are running, you have to exit out, go and make the change, and then come back in. It’s inconvenient and perhaps that inconvenience some people face will lead to a less than stellar iPhone application experience. In a free market users will vote with their wallets to decide what is the best way they like application settings to be handled and developers will see this and develop their applications accordingly. It makes sense and it is the path of buyer satisfaction maximization, and profit maximization for developers and Apple.

No crappy apps!

The second argument, and the one you will hear most often, is that by controlling what is and isn’t in the App Store Apple ensures that everything that is on there is high quality. Ergo, users will think more highly of the App Store. Ergo, consumer confidence in the store sky-rockets. Ergo, users will buy more.

But here’s the thing: Practically, a free market provides you with the exact same thing. Let’s run through an example:

A developer creates a buggy application that doesn’t work well. When first introduced, this application will be right, right, right down the bottom of the store - visible to near nobody - and will get maybe five downloads on day one. If those five users all have a bad experience they’ll maybe leave some reviews saying “This app sucks” and boom, there this application will stay right, right, right down the bottom as a poor-selling application with bad reviews. Nobody will download it and nobody will buy it. No potential customer will wade through 50 pages of applications just to find this. It will possibly never be downloaded again and its visibility to the average person who comes on to the store will be approaching 0. In other words, it does not exist.

Because users buy what other users are buying, they’ll walk through maybe the first five pages of best-selling applications, tops. Anything beyond that doesn’t exist. The best analogy I can think of to this is Google search:

Do I think Google search sucks because it returned me 10,000 pages of results to my search query, many of which beyond the first five pages have little to no relevance to what I was after?

NO!

All that matters is what is maybe on the first one or two pages. Beyond page five, nothing exists as far as I’m concerned.

The same is true here and this is why this argument about quality control is stupid…A bad application will not affect the overall perception of the store because 99.99% of people who visit will never even know it exists!

I hope RIM and Google do the right thing

It’s unlikely the validity of my arguments would sway Apple. However, I hope if RIM is planning an App Store they take in to consideration the arguments I have put foward and similarly for Google with their App Store. Hey, I can dream can’t I?

24Jul08

By the end of this month BBSmart will once again be just me, a step back to how it all started: a one man micro-corporation! Primarily it was my little venture in to the unknown to see what would happen and through it I’ve learned a lot. But I’ve decided to wind things back a bit due to the increasing brutality of the BlackBerry software market (things just seem to get tougher and tougher!) and to think a little bit about what I actually want to do in the future.

One thing I do know is that I like designing and programming software. It’s good stuff. For me, programming is like intellectual candy. Whilst growing up I was always a bit of an intellectually-oriented person. I was the problem solver, the go-to-guy for the tough problems, and if you take a look at the about section you’ll notice that early on I even gravitated more towards the sciences and got offered PhD scholarships in the field of computational science. But I decided that I didn’t want to spend my life cooped-up surrounded by the type of boring people you encounter in academia - the Real World ™ is just too much fun and my more outgoing personality would never have been a good fit.

Economically, times are getting tougher for BlackBerry developers too I think. Talking with a number of fellow devs. that operate in the BB consumer software market confirms that they’re feeling things getting tighter too. A part of me wonders if the stark juxtapose with what can be developed for the BlackBerry compared to the iPhone is driving this. Well, actually, strictly speaking you probably could pull off some of those apps. on the BlackBerry too, but the same reward won’t be there and you’d never make return on your investment. The beautiful thing about what the App Store is doing for iPhone developers is making it economically viable to invest significant time & money in to developing amazing applications, set a low (sub $10) price point, and still make a good return. That cycle is going to self-perpetuate too; the more money back in developers hands the more they will re-invest back in to products.

At one point I thought it might be kinda cool to work for RIM actually. But I figure some of higher-ups guys that I’ve no doubt got under the collar of would see to it that would never happen (Hi Jeff!). It’s a shame really. Because of this site I’ve actually got a couple of good friends within RIM now…That’ll teach me for sending around fiery emails at 3am in the morning! Earlier on I got some job offers too from some pretty well-known tech companies (one starts with G!) but turned those down too. At the time, my desire for independence was running high. Maybe I should rename this website to ScrewTheMan2 in a nod of approval to Paul (www.screwtheman.com)!

There’s actually lots of other interesting markets out there too that are flashing in to my mind now. I’ve got my battle-scars from XNA Game Studio which is something Microsoft is pushing very hard at the moment, trying to attract indie developers to target their platform with the promise of unclaimed riches. Sounds cool. Indie. Cool. For all their business douche-baggery Microsoft is actually pretty good to developers: they sent me a whole stack of free Windows Mobile stuff to try and entice me over last year and I spent a bit of time doing that which was fun! I wonder what developing for Symbian would be like? People I’ve talked to have some pretty good stories about the Carbide environment. I can do web development too (J2EE & ASP.Net) but I’m not so sure that a web-startup is actually as glorious as Paul Graham makes it out to be. Heck, I even wrote a multi-player car racing game in Flash once and my friends tell me Flex is awesome…And of course, the siren, formally known as the iPhone, is always calling. Maybe something will even re-ignite my spark in BB land again! So many choices…

Nothing as exciting us the uncharted path that lies ahead…

Well, for the short-term things seem pretty charted I suppose. BBSmart has got some product updates to release and a couple of other products that are near complete just waiting to be taken to market. Time to get busy!

24Jul08

For mobile developers the term “fragmentation” is a familiar one but the underlying sources of fragmentation are quite varied.

API level fragmentation - Google Android

For starters, there is the fragmentation we all love to talk about when discussing Google Android [1]. Google Android is probably the most high profile Open-Source Mobile Operating System due to the spate of media coverage it received earlier in the year. The fragmentation talk so far has focused on the notion that Google is releasing Android to partners and has granted them the flexibility to mix-and-match with portions of the APIs. Andy Rubin, Google’s Senior Director of Mobile Platforms, even said as much at Google I/O:

“They can add to it. They can remove from it. They make it their own…They can rip out all the Google stuff and put in all Yahoo! stuff.“

One developer responded:

“I see Android and I see all its APIs. What’s to stop someone from turning off all those APIs?“

To which Andy replied:

“There’s nothing to stop them“

However, having said all this there are two things that brings me solace about the whole affair. The first is that in November members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) were made to sign a non-fragmentation agreement where they promised not to “modify [the Android code] in non-compatible ways” [2]. But for me the most convincing argument for why Android will not fragment was put forward by a Google spokesperson recently:

“The idea behind putting together the OHA was to create a critical mass of standard implementations of Android. If that critical mass exists, the motivation to fragment decreases. The advantage is for developers to build cool applications for it, so creating an implementation that fragments to the point where applications don’t work doesn’t make sense. What is the motivation to fragment if the main draw for Android, from a consumer perspective, is that you get the applications and benefit from innovation?“

That makes sense to me.

Market fragmentation

The second kind of fragmentation developers sometimes talk about is general market fragmentation. This refers to the fact that there is no one single mobile platform to rule them all thus making it impossible to “reach the world” with one implementation of your application. For some reason, apparently, a lot of people in the tech. media had got the dimwitted idea in their minds that Google was trying to take over the world with Android and it would be on every single mobile phone. Then, what was even more funny was that a lot of those same tech bloggers came back later once they had heard the word “fragmentation” and scoffed at Google for trying to achieve such a lofty and naive goal. In effect, the tech bloggers setup a straw man and then later ripped him to shreds in an attempt to be controversial. It was stupid.

I don’t think anybody at Google ever believed or believes now that Android will run on every phone. Obviously, they’d love it if somehow that came to pass, but you can’t just dethrone overnight a giant like Symbian which runs on something like 65% of the world’s smartphones [3]. And who the hell knows anymore how people are even defining what a “smartphone” actually is.

My kind of fragmentation - BlackBerry

There’s a third kind of fragmentation that is near and dear to my heart as a BlackBerry developer. And that is OS & device level fragmentation. You might argue this is similar to the fragmentation scarecrows of Android, but it’s subtlety different.

In the BlackBerry world, we face OS level fragmentation where users are out in the wild running all manner of different OS versions on their devices. Right now there is a small chunk of people running OS 4.1 or lower on their device. The majority are running OS 4.2. Another good chunk are running OS 4.3. And increasingly OS 4.5 is gaining traction. The Bold which is due to come out very soon will be running OS 4.6

Oh and did I mention that since the OS 4.5 release was fucked up so badly that you’ll likely also have to support all the minor sub-variants of OS 4.5 which introduced various API-level bugs as well? Apparently BBSmart Alarms Pro crashes on OS 4.5.0.37 but works fine on others because of bugs RIM introduced.

Great stuff…

There is also fragmentation at the device level with SureType and full-Qwerty and also devices with different screen sizes. And did I mention that the Thunder is also coming down the pipeline with a touchscreen and OS 4.7? I have no idea on the release date for the Thunder but now picture this upcoming scenario my dear fellow BlackBerry developers. It could well be that before this year is done you will have to support:

1. OS 4.2
2. OS 4.3
3. OS 4.5 (and all it’s freaky variants)
4. OS 4.6
5. OS 4.7
6. Touchscreen/Non-touchscreen
7. Suretype/Qwerty
8. Several different screensizes & resolutions

Or, you can choose of course not to support some selection of these and risk loosing what is already an extremely small market of people interested in buying applications for the BlackBerry.

Times are getting tough my friends. Very tough indeed.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Is there light at the end of this tunnel for BlackBerry developers? I’m not sure to be honest. There is one thing that could poentially save us all from this fragmented mine-field but in true RIM fashion details are fleeting. What RIM essentially needs to do is:

• Standardize the OS so that the latest OS will *always* run on at least the majority of devices out in the wild.
• Provide seamless no-bullshit automatic OS upgrade functionality to everybody at the same time - ala iPHone. This per-carrier OS stuff has got to stop now.

In both departments the details RIM has provided to us developers are tantamount to nothing. But it is high time they did, because right now we all have a giant sword dangling over our heads. Tell us how you are going to fix this RIM. Please.

23Jul08

Today as I was waiting for my coffee down at the local haunt I overheard two people talking about the iPhone and began to think about how Apple’s marketing works. Of course, we all know what I’m talking about when I say “Apple marketing” as Apple is surely one of the most successful companies in the world today in the dark art of consumer manipulation. But what is it that makes it so effective?

I think there are a couple of key things that Apple PR intentionally do and by following the same patterns of behavior other companies (like RIM) could learn a lot too. Initially it was my intention to enumerate those key things that I had picked up on about Apple marketing but when I got home and did some more reading on the topic I found that somebody else had already done this and in a much more authentic way than I ever could. Over on www.marketingapple.com Steve Chazin, a former Apple Marketing Executive, pretty much nails everything I wanted to say with his summary eBook: Marketing Apple. It’s a very interesting read and I recommend you take a look if you’ve ever wonder what makes everybody go so “gaga” (read: batshit insane) over Apple.

Evaluation RIM with respect to these marketing guidelines

So, having been robbed of the opportunity to show you all how witty I am by working out Apple’s marketing tactics, I thought it might be a fun thought-experiment to see how RIM stacks up against each of the five “secrets” of Apple marketing.

1. Don’t Sell Products (People buy what other people have)

RIM I think actually does a fairly good job in this department but I fear increasingly they are going to suffer from fragmentation of the core BlackBerry message; a direct result of attempting to satisfy both hardcore business professionals and “I love Britney!” consumers. I’m personally still not sure whether the BlackBerry Bold is designed for me (Not exactly a Britney fan, but hey..) or my Dad, an executive. RIM’s message with the Bold, whether it be conveyed through their video or through comments made by Mike Lazaridis at WES ‘08 this year (which I attended), seems to be “It’s the best business device ever, oh but you can do all this other media stuff too.” Honestly, I still don’t know if the Bold is the device for me or not.

The other final point I wanted to make is how the Bold lacks character. Steve Chazin says “Figure out how to add something to your product that does for you what Apple’s white headphones do…,” and I personally think this is one of the Bold’s weakest points. There is nothing about this device that really stands out to me as being very visually distinctive.

2. Never be the First to Market (Make something good greater)

I think RIM scores highly here. RIM was not the first to the PDA or smartphone market, but when they did really arrive on the scene they surely took a page right out of Steve’s book by honing the email experience down to a fine art. Or, stated otherwise: “No matter how arcane, focus on the one thing you do better - then make that matter to people.” The legacy of this long march is still core to the way people perceive the BlackBerry today. Very often we (BBSmart) get customer support emails where people refer to the BlackBerry as an “email pager”. RIM made the email experience on the BlackBerry #1 in the world and they owe a great deal of their current success to that alone.

3. Empower Early Adopters (Help your customers help you)

This is surely RIM’s weakest point in their overall marketing strategy, bar none. At its core the idea here is to cultivate communal activity surrounding your products so as to drive increased word of mouth. Far from engaging community sites, fans, and enthusiasts, RIM is stand-offish and hostile towards those who would seek to drive a strong grassroots initiative. I maintain pretty good friendships with the guys who run some of the biggest BlackBerry media sites and what is abundantly clear is that RIM does nothing to assist or even encourage their endeavors to spread the word. In fact, I even have some horror stories about how RIM has engaged some sites which I think if the community knew about would blow to high-hell their perspective of RIM. Sorry guys, I can’t talk about it!

In the tech arena, I would rank RIM as one of the worst companies I have ever encountered when it comes to playing ball with the community and I’ve been blessed with having perspective from almost every angle as a user, a developer, and as a media figure. They fail on all three counts very badly.

4. Make Your Message Memorable

In order to evaluate how effective RIM has been in conveying a message to people I sat still for a moment and the following words rose unbidden in to my mind “You can do more with BlackBerry.” If any of RIM’s marketing people are reading this right now, I’d bet they’re pumping their fists. Yep guys, you got me. At the same time however I have to wonder whether this is a message that has been communicated effectively to other people who don’t absorb every little minutiae of information RIM passes out like I do. As I pointed out earlier, customers still email us and refer to the BlackBerry as an “email pager” and I think those earlier concerns I had regarding message fragmentation are still valid too.

In short, it’s not clear to me how effectively RIM has made their message memorable in the minds of the average person and I would need to study this a bit more before reaching any sort of meaningful conclusion.

5. Go One Step Further (Surprise and delight your customers)

I would have to argue this is one of RIM’s weak points as well. Lacking storefronts like Apple (OK, RIM have a couple but they’re in the middle of nowhere) the experience of actually buying a BlackBerry is not a particularly memorable one. Steve draws our attention to the iPhone box: “Look at the iPhone box: finely crafted, with extra touches like velvet-lining reminiscent of a fine watch box. The iPhone rests in a tiny lucite bed, cradling the object d’art. Included is a tiny pamphlet called “Finger Tips”…along with the All important Apple stickers.” It sounds, and is, the epitome of style. I cannot say that my experience unboxing my Curve for the first time was as elegant.

Summary

So that’s it, my evaluation of how RIM currently stacks up against the five key “secrets” of Apple marketing. I would love to hear from people on whether you agree or disagree.

Reading back through my evaluation now one particular area catches my attention. When I first got a Bold I came home and showed my girlfriend. She picked it up for 30 seconds and responded “whatever”. When I brought home my iPhone 3G (well, my friend’s…mine is still on “back order” - read Seth Godin’s article Scarcity to see how Apple did misstep here) she said “Cool” even before seeing it. The first moments of playing with it were something we both wanted to do together. And I bet when she went off to work she told her friends “Neil had an iPhone 3G today” and hasn’t thought about the Bold once since initially seeing it. RIM’s line-up of devices are looking decidedly uninteresting and I don’t believe inspire a lot of enthusiasm beyond the realm of people who already own a BlackBerry or were planning on buying one.

A human company

The famous Apple ads have led us all to picture them as the young, hip, cool guy while Microsoft is portrayed as the balding, bumbling nerd. In my mind Apple is that same cool guy but he’s also a bit of a business noob. While he stuffs up sometimes and is a bit of a goof, everyone still wants to be his friend. In my mind RIM is an experienced 40-something executive; reliable and trustworthy, and brings along boot-loads of business experience. But he’s also annoyingly arrogant. And oddly he’s trying to ride a skateboard and shouting “I can be cool too!” The juxtapose is unsettling and a little bit confusing.

One of these characters appeals more to the college jock, the “I love Britney” indoctrinated consumerist, and the soccer mum. And the other character appeals more to the executive, the serious man of action, the road-warrior.

Both have a place in this world, and both will thrive.

22Jul08

Those familiar with the works of Galileo are intimately familiar with Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a book famous for its discussions between Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. I’ve read this book a number of times and what always draws me in to the dialogue is the knowledge that all such thoughts were penned by one man. You gain a sense that within the mind of this one man several voices are indeed at play and in his essay Galileo chose to let them all share the center spotlight; a battle in an open arena. Though, having said that the book is well known to be quite unbalanced with very one-sided arguments presented; a tip of the hat to his Copernican leanings.

When I wrote earlier blog posts on DevBerry, a similar internal dialogue took place chiefly focused on the question of What is this blog? Is it supposed to encourage would-be BlackBerry developers to pick up their trusty mouse and book on Java. If so, it surely failed at that task. Or rather is it a place to provide a technical guide to BlackBerry developers to assist in navigating the dangerous road of BlackBerry development. If so, it surely failed at that as well, as a blog is no place for the aggregation, sorting, and presentation technical content. A venting ground is I suppose the best thing you could have called it; an open unrestricted battle ground with only one army. Certainly, getting angry at RIM on this blog at times was probably about as productive as shouting at a brick wall.

In First Post, lacking a way to see how to continue writing without devolving in to sincere (but, as I always have had a knack for, brutally harsh) vulgarity directed at my three-letter (or four if you’re a NASDAQ hound) acroynmed dear friend, I stopped.

It turned out to be a silly thing to do.

Why? Because these last three or so weeks since my last post have been the most exciting times a mobile developer will likely ever see in their lifetime. Oh, it’s got nothing to do with RIM by the way. Sure, they launched a new developer forum which nobody even in the BlackBerry media picked up on (I must take a brief pause here to give a tip of my hat to the RIM marketing team for demonstrating an utter failure to understand the concept of grassroots marketing). In fact, RIM did some other interesting things too in the development arena like release a beta version of JDE 4.6 for developers to play with.

But these things are nothing compared to how much Apple is changing the game.

Apples have never tasted sweeter

First, if you think I’m going to talk about the device as something sent from the heavens, you’re wrong. And possibly you need to get outside once in a while to see that much more significant shit happens every day all around the world. No, what’s unique about what Apple has done is charge through a giant invisible barrier that has been in place since carriers realized they own the customers.

First, let me start with the bang and then give the sizzle. You need to read this NOW. Over one single weekend Super Monkey Ball is estimated to have brought in near $5M for Sega. Excuse my descent in to vulgarity, but fuck. In fact, over a single weekend it seems many developers made over $1M. Now let’s work backwards to see how this came to be.

The cornerstone of this is really very simple and there are three things that need to happen for such a situation to be reproducible by any smartphone vendor:

1. Users. Apple has bases well covered here with the usual marketing machine drumming up hype to near-unheard of levels. All smartphone vendors want this, that’s a given. So there is economic incentive.
2. Application Distribution. App Store on device and integrated in to iTunes. Killer. Most smartphone vendors, RIM included, couldn’t give a shit about application distribution because if they’re not making the money why should they care? Compounded with this, carriers have forever wanted to control application distribution to be more than just a “dumb data pipe”. But they suck at it. Very, very badly.
3. Application Platform. Without a powerful platform, apps suck. But users don’t want to buy a platform, they want to buy a phone, and the two are very often mutually exclusive. Again economic incentive is lacking.

What Apple has done, for the first time ever, is give the finger to carriers and tear down those walls. And the net result? Users are loving it. And so are developers. Who would’ve thought…Oh yeah, that’s right we all did! It was patently obvious to every single mobile developer that if everybody just got out of our way and let us do our thing we’d be able to drive activations (device handset sales), device stickiness, and all around there would be rejoicing and everyone would profit. But nobody would listen.

They’re listening now though.

In RIM land making even $1M is practically unheard of. Even if you had a “best selling” BlackBerry application for many years you’d be lucky to get anywhere near that. I know, because BBSmart Email Viewer was such a best seller.

The iPhone is a ground-breaking device, but not because of the device itself. Rather, it’s what it represents and what it has done for fellow mobile developers who are used to being treated like shit.

Can you imagine what is even in the works now? Some of the most seasoned Nintendo DS and PSP professional game development shops are right now staring down the barrel of what could be one of the most lucrative mobile software platforms ever made. They know all too well the tyranny of Nintendo and Sony. They know all too well the pain of managing physical distribution of their products. I know, because I have friends in this industry and they complain every single day. Damn whingers! Now they’re all staring at the iPhone. Digital distribution is the future. They are going to bring massive titles to this device and the iPhone software market is going to become physically hostile. There will be eye-gouging, punching, kicking, spitting, and in the end users will have an incredibly array of excellent software to choose from. The apps we see today in the App Store today are just the beginning.

You know how this story ends

When iTunes was first introduced I bet mainstream CD distributors laughed. Now, they’re all sucking it down. When I talked to people from RIM about how the iPhone is going to make them regret neglecting developers for so long, they may as well have laughed at me. Sorry gents, I reserve this last laugh. The simple fact is if you are or have ever been interested in mobile development, skip Windows Mobile, skip Symbian, and skip RIM. Economically the iPhone is where you want to be.

So if anyone out there from Apple is reading this, I just want to say a heartfelt thanks. For the first time ever it is possible for a person to say “I’m a mobile developer” and not get kicked, spit on, ignored by carriers, ignored by users, ignored by venture capitalists (maybe a good thing!), ignored by mainstream media, or have change thrown at you (because obviously all mobile developers are poor).

30Jun08

Oh wait, this isn’t Slashdot…Sorry! I actually mean “Last post” though, regrettably, that doesn’t have the same Internet meme ring to it.

Yep, I’ve decided I’m going to stop blogging on DevBerry. I guess firstly I should note that this isn’t related to BBSmart - no sir. We’ll continue to operate as usual. In fact, we just recently released BBSmart Shortcuts which looks like it could be another big hit, and we’ve also got some more really cools apps coming up to release in this market. Heck, we’ve even got a Cracky! So, for BBSmart business as usual!

For this blog however, I’ve decided to stop for a couple of reasons.

First, I’m not so sure after all this time that it has actually made a difference. I would like to think that it has, but all evidence would seem to point otherwise. It has certainly drawn a lot of attention - attention I’m sure RIM did not want - to what it’s really like as a small BlackBerry ISV. However after a year of making fun of the same trivial problems that could be fixed in five minutes they’re still here, as discussed in my previous post. I’m sorry, but I just don’t hear the drumbeat of progress and even when I do I’m not in a position (legally) to talk about it which is frustrating. Truthfully, I do at times hear a faint drumbeat, but it’s drowned out by the loud and pounding “rat-tat-tat-tat-tat” made by everybody else (Google, Apple, etc.).

Second, I’m actually a pretty cheery “cock-eyed optimist” (to quote Kramer from Seinfeld) in Real Life, and this blog doesn’t reflect that. It’s been more of a venting ground and I’ve decided to get a punching bag instead! Seriously though, writing about BlackBerry dev. stuff is a bit of a mood-kill; which is why I’m guessing pretty much nobody does it (though, I definitely do refer you Jonathan Fisher’s blog and Slashdev which are both great).

Finally, there’s lots of exciting stuff going on in the mobile development world. Things like Google Android, the iPhone SDK, and Nokia opening up Symbian, have got me brimming with ideas and positivity about the future of this industry. So, I’m going to take a little bit of time off blogging and then start a new one sometime down the track about mobile development in general. I think that way I can go back to being my regular optimistic self and not feel like a war-time reporter.

So that’s it. Thanks everybody for reading and commenting! And thanks to CrackBerry, BerryReview, and BlackBerryCool for helping the items covered here receive more mainstream coverage.

Cheers,

Neil.

25Jun08

Or, “Developer Newsletter Substitute Post #1“. Anyway, up on RIM’s developer site the new 4.5 JDE and Component Pack has now been released.

Of course, in order to obtain the download you still need to go through the inane login/registration process (I’m still not sure if I’m logging in or signing up). And, as I download now I’m still locked to 20KB/s. Nice.

A US-based friend downloaded the JDE but received an “archive is corrupted” message on attempting to install. Haven’t had a chance to test myself, my download is at 12% and with RIM artificially limiting my download speed to 20KB/s I’ve got a good couple of hours to wait…

For all you more important US and Canadian developers, have at it.

19Jun08

So I’ve got Firefox 3 now. Have to admit I absolutely love it. However for the time-being I’ve lost all my fabulous plugins including my most favorite: AmIOnMySpace.com?

It’s a sad, sad day. Once again I feel exposed to “the sweaty armpit of the Internet.”

18Jun08

I first heard about Unite almost six months ago now and I have to admit at the time the idea did sound quite promising. The ability to synchronize calendars, and share contacts and documents in my own “private network” of BlackBerries - a mini-BES if you will - sounded killer. Fast forward to today and the reality is looking quite different.

BlackBerry Divide!

The core problem with Unite is technical. Users expected it to “just work” and far from just working, the restrictive IT Policy it placed on devices by default caused a heck of a lot of problems. Because of these problems with the first version of Unite that launched, I think the hugely negative media coverage about it has scared anyone who might have been interested in trying it out.

Unite sounded promising. Heck, I still think it could be very good one day. But, RIM has totally blown the launch of this product by pushing out something clearly not ready for the market. As I think about how the whole Unite situation has been handled so far, again I have to wonder if RIM is compromising on quality just to get something out.

I think adoption rates of Unite thus far have been extremely low and will continue to remain low until RIM makes this software far more user-friendly. Furthermore, they need to re-think their strategy on how they market Unite so that it makes sense to mum Jane and small-business owner Joe.