Mobile

Cingular 8525 (2006), HTC Fuze (2008), Samsung Galaxy SIII (2012).

The Pew Research Center reports on the 'app gap':

"...[W]hile almost half of adults get local news on mobile devices, just 1 in 10 use apps to do so. Call it the 'app gap'."

Please just put me in cold storage for the next 5 years. I don't know how otherwise I'm going to endure the incessant call to build to particular brands (iPhone! iPhone! iPhone!) rather than to the platform in general. Hopefully by the time I'm revived, they'll have come up with a credible standard. I mean, that's how it usually works.

You'll be able to wave your smart phone at a product in a store and buy it if this article in the New York Times is to be believed.

Of course, the notion that people will be willing to turn their phones into a delivery device for retail marketing based on their every GPS move, called "aggressive merchandising" in the article, is a complete absurdity.

This however sounds more promising:

I think in the eagerness to embrace Smartphone technology, librarians need to develop a sense of proportion.

I mean, yes, of course someday everyone will have a smartphone but that hardly precludes owning any other device. In fact, by far the most likely scenario, at least for students, is that they'll come equipped with a smartphone in one hand and a laptop in the other. Indeed, this is practically the case nowadays.

Enough already with the fetishism about eReaders! It's the market for Smartphones and Netbooks that's advancing in leaps and bounds.

Just got my new HTC Fuze from AT&T. Going through the always helpful forums at XDA-Developers, I came across the following cry of pain:

Why did AT&T (and others like Verizon) have to make changes to it?

Why can't they just leave it as it is as the Touch Pro? I can't stand the fact that they had to change the keyboard to be different!

No tab and Ctl key.....come on!!!!!

The guy has a point.

Every once and a while I come across an article which pretty much declares any device larger than a cellphone as dead because cellphones are what the kids are using and hence everything else is on the road to extinction.

This is silly.

I use my smartphone/pda/call-it-what-you-like -- all the time but even I know it doesn't replace my need for larger devices depending on what I'm doing.

I was studiously trying to avoid any mention of the iPhone today. I'm at home putting the finishing touches on a site for work. Anyway, I ducked out for a chicken and baguette and what do I see? A line around the local AT&T/Cingular store with people waiting for the new contraption!

This is the North Side of Chicago. We're not even close to Downtown. Still there was a line starting at the front of the store and going around the corner into the alley (bottom photo). The guy at the head of the line said the phones were expected by 6pm.

As a personal contribution to iPhone-mania, I'd like to present 'iPhoney' -- a software program (mac only) that gives you "pixel-accurate" views of how your site would look on a real iPhone (if you had one). This may be of slight consolation to those of you who'd rather have the unit itself but hey, iPhoney is free for the downloading!

Meanwhile in other mobile news, you can also try out your website in Operamini's new online Simulator.