Wak Oentoenk

Three mobile-related news items caught my eye today.Welcome to the real worldThe first item was the least important. Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom talked about getting his software on mobile phones:"When we began developing the mobile-phone version, we didn't realize the number of technical obstacles. It is challenging and is taking much longer than expected."Well, duh. There are a couple of ways you could use Skype on a mobile phone. One is to establish an data connection via 3G and then use the...

I wrote an article for the newsletter of my employer, Rubicon Consulting. Thought it might be of interest to some folks here.This will probably sound crazy, but despite all the hype about Web 2.0 and web startups, the most common mistake we see tech companies making with regard to the web is underestimating its long-term impact on their businesses... Click here for the full article.==========By the way, I owe thank-yous to the last two Carnival of the Mobilists hosts:Mobile Gadgeteer has some interesting...

For me, the highlight of fall CTIA this year was that I finally got to play with a Pearl, RIM's latest smartphone. It has more media features, plus a miniscule trackball above the keypad for navigation. The trackball is about the size of a pea, and at first glance I thought it would be too small to be usable. But I was very surprised when I tried it. The trackball works very well. It's fast, so you can zip up, down, and sideways very quickly by sliding your thumb. But it doesn't feel loose...

I went to two conferences this week: the CTIA telephony conference in Los Angeles and The Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. It's always interesting to travel between the Bay Area and southern California. This is going to irritate Bay Area partisans who like to look down on LA, but I think the cultures are almost identical in the two areas. The main difference is that drivers on the freeway in southern California are more likely to yield the lane when you put on your turn signal (the standard...

By now you've probably seen the news that Nokia is going to start naming its phones just like the Razr, rather than assigning them numbers.I'm tempted to make an unkind comment about Nokia once again playing catch-up to others in the industry – first camera phones, then flip phones (or clamshells, as some parts of the world call them), then ultra-thin phones, and now named phones. There's a pattern here, and it's not very comfortable for a company that wants to be seen as a market leader.But actually...

In last week's post about Palm's phone plans, I made a passing comment about the right way to display your mobile phone at dinner in Europe. It turned out to be the most popular part of the post, and produced a couple of requests that I say more comparing European and American attitudes toward mobile phones. I don't pretend to the world's expert on the subject, but I'll summarize what I've seen. Here goes:In the US, a cellphone is a tool. In Europe, a mobile phone is a lifestyle.I guess I ought...