Wak Oentoenk

I saw a great example recently of the problems caused when mobile companies don't understand the structure of the market for mobile data. A report by Research and Markets gave a somber view of the current status of mobile data in Europe:"Only about 14% of subscribers use MMS/picture messaging, and only 10% of mobile users across Europe who have access to mobile Internet make use of it....In areas such as mobile TV, successful trials have not yet translated into general consumer acceptance."This...

A reader sent me a note asking if I had seen the thread on Treo Central discussing some patents Palm received on mobile devices with folding screens. Several people have been speculating online that this design might be the new category of device that Palm's developing.The product designs depicted in the patents are intriguing. They show a device that looks like a mobile phone:...but opens to reveal something that looks, well, almost exactly like I've always imagined an info pad would look:There's...

My kids have a phrase they use whenever their parents share embarrassing personal details: "Too much information!" I think that's what the folks at Astraware must have thought when they recently asked their users to describe where they play Astraware's mobile games. You know where this is going, right? "In the bathroom" was the most common reply.I don't think the Astraware responses were unusual. If you do a web search for the phrase "mobile phone in toilet," you'll find all sorts of sad stories...

With all the new mobile devices coming out, I thought it would be useful to give an overview of the market for mobile data. I covered some of this information in a post written about a year ago, but this one has a lot of new information, plus diagrams.I believe the market for mobile data devices (smartphones, PDAs, mobile game machines, iPods, etc) is not structured the way most people think it is. A lot of new mobile products fail because they're not designed for the real market, or because they...

In case you're interested, I wrote a short commentary on this subject for the newsletter of Rubicon Consulting, the consulting company where I work. An excerpt:At the end of 2006, Gartner Group predicted that Vista would be the last major release of Windows, with future updates being delivered on the fly, in modular format. "The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end," Gartner said. "Microsoft will be a visible player in this movement and the result will be more flexible...

Concluding thought on the iPhone (for a while):Usually I take a few days to think about a mobile announcement before I write it up. That gives me time to read other comments and get my own thoughts settled. But there was so much attention on the iPhone that I posted ideas as I went along. I hope you didn't mind the stream of consciousness approach.So now it's a week later, and I've come full circle to where I was when I first heard the announcement: I think it's not a phone. It's an entertainment-focused...

The folks at the Carnival of the Mobilists give an award to the best mobile-related post of the month. But it looks like they must have forgotten to do it since August, because they just opened the voting for the best posts in August through November of last year. You can find the voting forms here. Just scroll down to see each month.Here's how I voted:November. I thought the best nominee was VisionMobile's post on the right data strategy for operators. It was well argued, and I agreed with...

Apple's taking a fair amount of heat from developers and some customers for its decision not to open the iPhone to third party applications. So far Apple's explanations for why it made that decision are pretty lame.Newsweek quotes Steve Jobs:"You don’t want your phone to be an open platform....You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."That spawned the following sarcastic response on the Palm Entpreneurs...

It's too early to tell if the Apple iPhone will be a sales success; we'll have to see how the product actually works. But I think Apple's announcement is very promising, and whether or not the product is a best-seller, it resets a lot of the agenda for the mobile industry.This post is in three parts:--Information on the iPhone. What we know for sure about its specs and functionality, and other information that appears to be true but is not yet confirmed.--Prospects for the product. Speculation...

I'll do a post tonight with thoughts on the iPhone announcement (update: now posted here), but in the meantime here are some tidbits. During the announcement, Chris Dunphy and I did an instant messaging session as we watched feeds of the announcement (we're on opposite sides of the continent right now). Chris and I worked together at Palm, so we're both mobile veterans, and we used to spend a lot of time talking about industry trends.I thought you might like this transcript of our comments. It's...

Quick look at the specs of the Apple iPhone: High-resolution multi-touch touchscreen, Mac OS X built in, no dialing buttons, camera and music player built in, email, browser, Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.Quick reaction: This isn't a phone, it's what mobile computing was supposed to grow into. The phone is just a part of it, and in my opinion not the dominant part.I don't think this kills RIM; a hard keyboard is better for dedicated e-mail hounds. But for entertainment-centric users, this looks...

Yes, I know Sprint's serious about WiMax -- it's spending more than $2.5 billion to build out a mobile WiMax network across the US. That's old news. The surprise to me is the business model Sprint says it'll deploy on that network. That hasn't gotten much coverage at all, but I think it's critically important. If you believe what Sprint says, its WiMax network will be totally open: any device, any application, without any contract required.When I first heard Sprint describe that business model,...