I’m reliably told that the level of champagne sales is a good economic indicator;  I’m sure that the way people dress at Mobile World Congress is an equally important indicator of how well the mobile world is doing. As usual there were very few fashionistas at the event, but it was noticeable that this year the vast majority of men we wearing black or dark suits over open-neck formal shirts. Last year was jackets and chinos, year before was polo shirts and jeans. Why this sudden interest in how people dress? Simply because this shows both how confident people are and how activities are viewed. Suits mean consolidation, jeans mean creativity.

Interestingly all the folks on the Microsoft stand were wearing branded football shirts over their poloshirts. They looked uneasy in this combination of clothes. However the product they were launching - Windows Phone 7 was as wonderful, slick and elegant as the idea of making Microsoft stand staff wear football shirts was unpleasant, unaesthetic and badly executed.

Windows Phone 7 really has a game-changing UI - it’s breaking away from the icon grid into a live interaction surface. Edward Tufte would be delighted at the removal of frames and the intelligent use of colour and pictures to group information. It’s not just about sexy transitions, although there are plenty of them. It’s also quick, elegant integration of diverse sources of information without worrying whether they are Microsoft owned or not.

Hopefully this will help provoke Apple to move away from the Fischer Price grid that the iPhone foists on its users. Although I doubt that they’ll be allowed to be as free with non-Apple branded products. I’ve thought for a long time that the proper interface for a phone is a self-prioritising feed of contacts and information from social media sites, calenders and feeds, with frequently used functions and information bubbling up to the top of the screen and things you don’t use discretely hiding themselves. It looks pretty much like Windows Phone 7 gives you that.

Elsewhere Nokia were presenting their latest S60 interface and frankly it looked dull. No sparks of excitement there.

Equally, the last-minute unholy alliance of operators and handset makers promoting apps through the Wholesale Application Community looked like too little way too late. After spending years blocking the routes to market for app suppliers it is going to take a long time for the behemoths to change their policies. By then the world will have moved on even further and part of the business will be struggling to keep up with something else while another part does its best to block innovations.

I also found it difficult to be excited about Bada, a new C++ framework from Samsung for building apps. The earnest young Frenchman who tried to persuade me that we should port our existing customers to Bada seemed surprised when I said that Java was infinitely preferably to C++. Full marks for supporting developers, but I’m not rushing out to get our team skilled up on yet another framework of which our customers haven’t even heard.

Bada proved one thing though, nobody seemed to care about handsets this year - it was all about the software user experience. Unless it’s all bling, a handset is a bit of glass and plastic with as little to get in the way of the user experience as possible. Shame that so little has been done by most of them not to copy what iPhone looks like without actually understanding the deeper through-design elements that make it work. The sensible people were all opting for Android which was the defacto operating system on new phones.

There was one exception - the Puma Phone - which integrates branding and sports information to make something that frothed up excitement. Shows how a known brand, excellence in packaging and production with good marketing budget beats innovation for buzz every time. Check out the site it really is quite weird.

Elsewhere the only thing that appeared as a theme was in-building access. Femtocells and other tech to ensure that we can access wireless everywhere was popping up round the halls.

Will next year show the return of casual? I don’t think so. I expect the suits to still be in ascendency; the creative buzz will be elsewhere.

With all the noise about the new iPad I’d have expected to hear someone talking about a slight disadvantage for us here in the UK and the diversity and the developer challenges that it brings. Instead people seem to prefer to moan about pointless stuff like the name or the absence of cameras. Anybody with even a hint of marketing would realise that it’s iPod and iPhone so iPad is right in there. The idea of putting a back-facing camera on had me laughing as I was visualizing people putting hoods over their heads like old plate cameras. Front facing camera might be neat, especially given that huge bezel, but currently there are no Apple-branded services that would make us of it immediately.

For those who haven’t looked closely, as described on the Apple UK website, there will be no iBooks support here. That’s right - an book reader with no books. Clearly this is due to not having content licensing agreements in place for the UK and no some evil Apple plot, but it surprised me that they aren’t getting global licenses from day one. Maybe even the mighty Apple can’t get the publishers to agree to that.

However moving on to the challenge of diversity. When I first downloaded the iPhone SDK I was mortified to see the sample code using literal constants for screen width and height. That reinforces the line that there will only ever be one screen size on the iPhone or iPod touch, but is fundamentally bad software engineering. We all know that things change, so it would have been good practice to provide methods that returned screen size even if they were constants.

So now the four-of-them-taped-together model comes out with a four-times the area screen. Ok, so apps can run with pixel doubling, but that’s not going to look nice. Brand managers will weep as they see steppy versions of their logos and graphical designers will sigh at what’s happened to their luscious creation.

How much better would it have been to think stretchy in the first place? The UI designer tool works in relative terms anyway so that shouldn’t have  been an issue. So now some number of app developers are going to be running round making their iPhone apps iPad aware and behave accordingly.

But how many of them will take, or be allowed to take, the opportunity to build a proper iPad app? This is a very different device and really opens opportunities for spectacular new app styles. This really is direct manipulation - right there at the ends of your fingers. Note: fingers. Not a stylus. Ever since getting my first touch-based phone, a Sony Ericsson P990i,  I used my fingers to work with it. This is completely natural, and is likely to become the key modus operandi of casual interaction. Serious text input will always need a real keyboard or voice recognition, but only a tiny minority of us actually need that.

When the original iPhone came out I wasn’t excited. Despite the hyperbole, it isn’t really that interesting a platform. It has since become much more interesting, but primarily due to the millions poured into smart marketing.

In the case of the iPad, I’m excited about it despite the endless stream of superlatives. This is a product that doesn’t need talked up.

It takes quite a long time to analyse 47 different companies, but it was very interesting. There were 49 shortlisted, but that included British entries Mobile Acuity and Audioboo so I wasn’t allowed to vote for them. Very pleased to see that they have both made it into the finalists list.

As I expected the most radical and unusual uses of mobile came from what we condescendingly call the developing countries. I particularly liked RedSalvavidas, which has become terribly relevant in view of what has happened in Haiti. In many ways using technology and business models in ways they were not originally intended is the core of innovation as most of the time we have more technology than we can use, but it doesn’t do what we need.

I was surprised at how many outsourcing and development shops were in the list, but I guess this just shows that the state of the mobile market is very variable round the world. One man’s innovation is another man’s old hat.

Sounds and image features among surprisingly few of the entries, but where it did it was interesting. I think Augmented Reality is going through a big hype phase, but has underlying real applications. Let’s face it, the idea of having always-on connectivity in our pockets was fantastic concept only a short while ago. In some ways AR is a solution looking for a problem, but all the elements needed to make it useful are coming together at last. And that is really the sharp end of technology.

Socialising stuff is going to be interesting, as the basic transports of social networking have gravitated to a few centres. So I’d look out for more new ideas servicing that area.

I’m pleased to have been selected as a judge for the 2010 Mobile Premier Awards, which recognise new tech startups in mobile from round the world. Out of 250 submissions, the local Mobile Monday chapters have nominated 49 companies.

Our local MoMoEdi chapter has nominated Mobile Acuity with its new visual search technology. The London chapter has nominated Audioboo. I’m not allowed to vote for these being UK based, so that leaves me 47 companies to look at and judge.

I’ll report back with what I find, but you’ll have to wait until Barcelona to see how we all voted!

We’ve just run our Java ME (J2ME for you oldskoolers) Goaljam Football Predictor app through the Netmite Java-to-Andoid converter. It works exactly as advertised, giving a perfect replica of the original app’s user experience on my G1, flawless comms and good timing. Since our app automatically adjusts to screen  sizes this works just fine. Not sure how well a very-highly graphic app with hand-crafted image assets would work or something with very demanding timing controls..

I’m also not sure about the intellectual property implications of firing your apps up onto someone else’s systems for analysis and distribution.  I’ve not checked out the agreements - or even if there are any - but we won’t be firing any clients apps through it at this time.

Last Monday we held our December Mobile Monday Edinburgh event on the 30th of November to avoid clashing with a London-based event. Thanks to University of Edinburgh Informatics and especially Informatics Ventures for hosting us in the wonderful new building, and also to the Apps Club for providing copious food and drink.

I was struck at the event by the diversity of areas and approaches - far from being a surfeit of the latest iPhone toys, the services being demo ranged from medical monitoring equipment to voice-based automated customer feedback systems, by way of network-service apps, visual search and, for sure a few apps for iPhone and other devices.

I contributed to this showing off the app we built for Finnish weather  company Foreca. This included the soon-to-be-released iPhone app with unique drag and zoom of maps, as well as conventional and touch-based Java ME version.You can download the latter here.

As I was taking photos of the event I couldn’t take copious notes, but overall it was a fascinating view into how our local mobile community is coming together. With an audience of nearly 50 people from a good range of backgrounds and vocations it indicates that mobile development is leaving its corner and while not really mass market yet, is heading that way.

And that only leaves me to wish Mobile Acuity best of luck with their cool Visual Search technology in the Mobile Premier Awards at Barcelona 2010.

We had a power cut in central Edinburgh on Monday night. Power was out for slightly over ten minutes, but it was long enough to get the candles out to continue eating dinner. I only mention this because my younger daughter, who is nearly ten, said that it was her first power cut. Needless to say she found it very exciting. So we’ve not had a power outage in our part of the city for at least ten years. This is an amazing story of reliability and robust infrastructure - and the power industry, which is really only a century-or-so old is to be congratulated.

Once the candles were on our first steps were to check on a few potentially vulnerable people and ensure they either had power or torches. But of course our landlines were out because of the DECT base station being mains operated. So it’s  onto the mobiles, which worked fine.

Then this morning Vodafone had an outage - I noticed this when I turned on my phone to feed my e-mail addiction. No connection, so switched on WiFi and off it went. I assumed it was our local base station having a bad morning, possibly because of all the people using phones from their cars queueing in the traffic jam that forms outside our house at the moment due to roadworks somewhere downstream.

But apparently not - it was nation wide. And for the first time that I’ve seen, Vodafone actually posted information on what was happening. This is progress since operators traditionally deny furiously that anything could ever go wrong, so congratulations to Vodafone for opening up.

And finally, congratulations to the Brazilians for having the right attitude to the massive power cut that hit all the major cities there this week. One man was quoted as saying “we’ve a different way of doing things here - we just drank beers until the power came back.”

Encouraging Free

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

Having spent the weekend pondering free as a business model, I was reminded of how much influence that price point has with the free apps check box on the Apple App Store.

Gift from O2

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

Out of the blue, O2 have sent me a gift of a bar of Green & Black’s wonderful organic milk chocolate. Nice idea - certainly an original promotion and eye catching.

Does your phone have bad hair, oops, battery days? Mid afternoon and suddenly the battery low light has come on, despite no special activity? I know my G1 does, and the N95 I used before that.

Looking carefully at the network activity indicator has given me an idea why this might happen. Sometimes data connections are effectively instant, particularly checking for new e-mail. All the networking ducks are aligned between me and our mail server and, lo, the radio goes on, the data comes over the air, and the radio is off again.

Other times the connnection sits for long seconds before either failing or finally returning some data. Clearly the radio circuitry is working a lot longer, chewing down the power. The delay could be coming in at any point from weak signal, busy basestation or any point back right up to the mail server itself.