1. Smartphone

“Feature phone” cellphones just are not going to cut it. Mobile employees need mobile computing devices. A smartphone such as Apple’s iPhone, Palm Pre Plus, or one of the many Android phones are the starting point of a toolkit to mobile-enable your employees.

Costs: phone (sometimes free or discounted), phone minutes, data plan, activation (sometimes), chargers, cases, mobile apps.

2. Netbooks

Smartphones, as powerful as they are these days, can’t do everything. But if a laptop isn’t always convenient to carry around, a netbook can often do the job. Besides being very light and usually having the same types of ports (USB, VGA, etc.) as a laptop, they have 3G+ cellular data plans, which allow Internet connectivity on the go, in coverage areas.

Note: Netbooks do not have optical (CD/ DVD-ROM) drives but depending on the operating system, can be enterprise-enabled.

Costs: Cellular data plan (no minutes), netbook (sometimes free), case, software.

3. Tablet computer

Right now, the iPad is the most prominent in the “tablet computing” arena, but other companies are racing to compete with Apple, and other tablet computers are already appearing. For certain types of use, a tablet computer might benefit an employee in the field better than a netbook — especially in situations where there’s no flat surface to lay a netbook or laptop.

Enterprise use of the iPad, for example, is growing, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs indicated in his recent WWDC keynote address that there’s “deeper enterprise integration” in iOS4, the mobile OS that powers the next iPhone and which will have an iPad version to match.
Costs: device, cases, converter cables, mobile apps. In the case of Apple, apps purchased for the iPhone will often run on the iPad, and there’s no extra cost of re-purchasing. Just sync your devices with iTunes.

4. Personal mobile hotspot

Some smartphones offer tethering capabilities that allow Internet access to nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices, or via special cables. Other phones have “mobile hotspot” capability that allows net access via WiFi. Mobile hotspot capability is also available via standalone devices that do nothing else. Internet access is handy for mobile devices that are WiFi-only, such as a laptop or an iPad WiFi-only model.

Costs: Depends on the device. Palm Pre Plus phones have ability and Verizon offers it at no extra cost beyond the phone, monthly minutes and data plan. AT&T will offer tethering for the iPhone 4 but the iPad will not be able to use it. Standalone devices run on a monthly data plan.

5. 3rd-party apps

Depending on the smartphone or mobile device, there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of applications available, many of which would suit businesses.

Cost: Per-seat app purchase, monthly subscriptions (sometimes).

6. In-house custom apps

For some companies, custom apps are a necessity for the mobile employee. The choices are Mobile Web and Native, and on some mobile devices, the difference between the two has been narrowed.

Note: Distribution methods differ depending on the mobile platform, with some options more “open” than others.

Costs: development, maintenance, distribution, training.

7. Cloud storage

Not all mobile devices make it easy, at present, to move files between desktop/laptop and smartphone/ tablet. One option is to provide a cloud storage account to mobile employees. There are a growing number of choices, and some work on the Freemium model where a basic account is free. E.g., Dropbox.com.

Costs: Size- and/or usage-based storage plans.

This is just a starting point for managers who want to mobile-enable their employees. Want to discuss a mobile Web or native mobile app for your business or projects? Feel free to contact us to discuss your app idea or mobile campaign needs.

There are now two per-usage options for iPad 3G data plans through AT&T:

1. DataPlus plan, $15/month, capped at 200MB/ month. Extra data costs $15 for 200MB blocks. Not sure if this is prorated if you go over by a little bit.
2. DataPro plan, $25/month, 2GB/month cap. Extra data costs $10 for 1GB chunks.

While the DataPro plan is obviously a better deal if you’re going to be a power iPad data user, it’s going to end up costing a lot more. AT&T claims the majority of consumers are not using up their 5GB caps on the iPhone. That’s probably because they never allowed tethering. They will now, for the next iPhone, but it’ll cost you an extra $20 in addition to requiring the DataPro plan. That means $45/mth to let your iPhone be a tether so that your iPad (WiFi-only or 3G models) can share the data plan.

By comparison, Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus phone has a Mobile Hotspot feature that allows tethering of WiFi devices at no extra cost over the data plan (roughly $40/month), which is capped at 5GB. What do you think is the better deal, aside from the fact that the new iPhone is expected to have a much longer battery life than before, and Palm Pre Plus’ tethering drains the battery within 3 hours or less.

If you were plan to use your iPad in all the amazing online ways that Apple’s commercials suggest, it’s going to cost you. Forget watching video on the go, because that’ll eat up your data plan in short order. AT&T claims this is a new lower-priced wireless data plan intended to make mobile Internet more affordable to more people. Unfortunately, power users get punished, but this sort of plan change has been part of the cellular industry for years.

The big bookstore chains even seem to be hedging their bets by introducing iPhone OS apps intended for people who don’t own their device. Barnes & Noble is the latest with their Nook app for the iPad. The app has several iPad specific features, including new fonts and customizable layout for readability, in-book search, bookmarks, cross-device syncing, ePub support. Crunchgear have published the full press release from Barnes & Noble, which says there’ll be an Android version this summer as well.

Amazon isn’t ready to give up yet, with plans to release a thinner Kindle reader in August. But it’ll have neither a touchscreen nor a color screen. I think about the beautiful Alice in Wonderland interactive book in full color on the iPad and ask myself why I’d ever want a non-color, non-touchscreen Kindle? Sure, the iPad might cost more than some people want to spend, but there are expected to be low-cost tablet devices appearing later this year which can double as both e-readers and mobile computing devices.

So why would you want to buy an e-Reader device? Well other than ZDNet’s finding that the iPad is poor for outdoor reading, and another experiment’s finding that suggest the iPad might disrupt your sleep habits because of its backlit IPS screen. E-Readers that use e-Ink technology (Kindle, Nook, Sony’s devices) are said to be less likely to do that.

Image: Flickr.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Justice Dept probe is looking at how Apple does business with non-music media businesses. Apple’s market capitalization just passed Microsoft’s this week, and a recent complaint from Adobe has already triggered an anti-competitive practices probe.

Probes take time and in the meantime, it’s pretty clear that Apple will be announcing a new iPhone some time in June — an iPhone that’ll be leaps and bounds, technologically, ahead of the last generation, in order to support all the new features that appear in iPhone OS 4.x.

Digitimes Research has a Q&A with senior analyst Ming-Chi Kuo about some of the iPhone rumors, but the existence of a new phone is not a rumor. In fact, BGR says in two-line post that AT&T has already confirmed to their employees that there is a new iPhone in June.

Unfortunately for consumers, AT&T seems to be upping the cost of ownership. While the new phone itself is possible going to cost only $18 to upgrade to from an older iPhone, AT&T’s ETF (early termination fee) for all smartphones has increased from $175 to $325.

BGR also says that AT&T is launching a new iPhone insurance plan that costs a ridiculous $13.99 and launches in June. That’s nearly half the cost of the data plan. There’s also a deductible fee to be paid, for some claims. Are they expecting an increase in thefts and planning to capitalize? Or are they losing exclusivity and trying to come up with new revenue streams?  Or maybe both? Considering that AT&T claims that 40% of iPhone sales are to business users, businesses might in fact approve the insurance rates and write them off against profits.

Oddly enough, this insurance is supposed to be available in the Apple App Store, but you have to sign up within 30 days of purchasing or upgrading to a new iPhone. In case you don’t feel like doing the math, that’s nearly $170/year in premiums.

It’s happened: According to the New York Times, cellphones are now used more for their data connection than for phone calls. Now that’s very interesting, considering that other statistics show that cellphones outnumber home phones, at least in the USA. So how are people making phone calls these days? Is anyone still talking, or does everyone chat through IM apps?

If you’re a TV fanatic to the point that you have a Hauppauge TV tuner card or external box for your computer, you can now use their WinTV v7.2 app’s Extend feature to stream TV content to your iPhone/ iPod Touch/ iPad device. Note that the app is not free, checking in at a price of US$9.95. [Hauppauge via SolSie] I have used an older Hauppauge external box to grab TV via coaxial cable, but not their newer devices which can capture analog (NTSC) and digital (ATSC, QAM) over-the-air channels. Hauppage devices also work with the Orb content streaming Web service, which allows you to watch live and recorded TV anywhere from almost any web-enabled device. Though you will have to leave your computer on. Note: Some Hauppauge TV tuners only work on Win PCs.

AT&T is now offering a Palm Pre Plus phone that’s very similar to Verizon’s, with the exception of a SIM card slot for AT&T’s version. (Verizon runs on CDMA and thus their Pre Plus has no SIM card.) Not sure yet if AT&T will offer tethering via the Mobile Hotspot ability that Verizon now offers for free (which used to be $40/month). They don’t offer tethering for the iPhone — which is what led me to buy the Palm Pre Plus in the first plus — but if I’m not mistaken, do offer it for select Android devices. Now while the AT&T version is more expensive than the Verizon version, you do get a Touchstone charger for free. PocketNow has a video review of the phone.

Image: Flickr.

The NCHS (National Center for Health Statistics), a CDC sub agency that uses telephone surveys for data gathering, has determined that nearly 25% of American homes have no landline, only wireless phones. As well, 15% of American homes have landline phones but don’t usually use them. These and other related mobile statistics are available in a CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) report [PDF, 17 pgs; via Reuters].

Now as early as 2006, there have been reports about how many N. Americans were tending towards wireless phones over landlines. What this essentially means is that smartphone ownership will continue to increase as “dumb” mobile phone usage decreases. Thus, too, the number of people using mobile applications will increase — which is in line with predictions that the mobile platform in general will become the predominant distribution channel for software applications. With tons of new smartphones offering great new features, like the rumored next-gen iPhone, that’s even more likely to be true.

So if you own a business, you should at least be aware of what mobile marketing or even a custom mobile application can do for your bottom line. Feel free to contact us to discuss your mobile apps or mobile campaign needs.

Image: Flickr.

Like most of the Internet, we were glued to the various blogs covering Apple’s iPad event today (gdgt seemed to deliver both the best quality and availability). As soon as the SDK was announce we jumped on it and got to work updating one of our iPhone apps to see what kinds of challenges were ahead of us.

We made all of the basic changes needed to get our HexOut puzzle game running at full iPad size with new high-resolution graphics in just about an hour. I can’t wait to see things running on a real device.

Building an iPhone app that also takes advantage of what the iPad offers (namely more than 5 times the pixels to fill) is going to be more of a challenge when you have a complicated application that has to scale all sorts of UI layouts smoothly. With a game you can generally just substitute bigger iPad-suitable images for the smaller ones that are used for the iPhone version. Developers that stuck with standard table views and navigation layouts are going to reap the benefits of adhering to Apple’s guidelines soon. Highly customized UIs are going to be a lot of trouble to scale up to iPad size.

I can’t talk about many of the details thanks to the NDA (can I even say that there is an NDA?). I can say, however, that I think that the iPad will be the platform to host some of the most important UI innovations of the next decade. I can also say that this is going to be one heck of a casual gaming platform. I also think we will see some really innovative apps for different areas where tablets have been tried before like medical, retail and industrial. We are also pleased to offer iPad development to our clients who are looking to take advantage of this new platform for content distribution and custom applications.

Enjoy. I will update the gist as I improve the script.

Motorola’s Droid is probably the most-discussed of the bunch, with beefy specs and a pretty slick design (and marketing campaign to boot). From a feature standpoint it’s enough to make an iPhone geek want to jump ship. Whether or not the new batch of Android phones will catch on with consumers is yet to be seen, but we know that developers are getting on board.

Now, I’m not about to ditch Interface Builder for the paltry Android equivalents and start churning out mountains of XML, but the hype is enough to make me give some form of Android development a second look. I’ve always felt that cross-platform development is less than ideal. Some cross-platform mobile development tools rely heavily on web views or not-quite-native controls to get things done. You write HTML, and they stick it in the native platform’s WebKit view and call it a day. Compared to an application developed with the native APIs you get something that is slower, looks worse, and behaves in very strange ways. You can’t build the type of experience that the hardcore iPhone fans will pay for that way.

Enter Appcelerator Titanium.

Titanium combines web development with native controls through its clever JavaScript bridge. It bridges your JavaScript code to many of the native API methods on the iPhone and Android. This allows Titanium apps to really look and feel like native apps (because they are native apps, with native controls). There’s even a module system to add additional native components, like OpenGL views for graphics, or libraries that don’t already come with Titanium. There’s a whole class of applications that seem like a great fit for Titanium. Many apps that follow the CRUD pattern and mainly deal with web services or web content are prime candidates for something like Titanium. Writing JavaScript after writing Objective-C is a bit of a breath of fresh air. Using familiar HTML and CSS markup to define layouts is great compared to configuring UITableViewCell objects on the iPhone.

Being an open-source project, however, there are still some rough edges. From the GUI tool, sometimes it takes two or three clicks (of the same button) to launch your app in the simulator, or to stop the simulator. I found that a fresh project that included Prototype.js would not build, even though Titanium let me choose it when creating the project in the first place. The ease of writing JavaScript is balanced by the difficulty of effective debugging from within the app itself. It’s back to printf-style (with log4j-style levels) debugging for now. There seems to be no apparent output when JavaScript errors occur at runtime on the iPhone, and the JavaScript bridge technology may need extensive development before any more powerful debugging is possible.

The best part is that it actually does work! Despite a few obscure bugs in the Titanium library my quick-and-dirty Mobomo Blog Reader application was fairly simple to develop.

In short, I am willing to give iPhone/Android cross-development a chance for many types of apps with Titanium, and I’m interested to see where the platform goes.

-John

We got to meet Ted Leonsis, Capitals’ owner and AOL Exec at the DC Chamber of Commerce Gala, over the weekend with our friends at Network Solutions. Ted won the “Economic impact of the year Award.” During the Gala, the Capitals won against the Nashville Predators with a final score of 3-2.

Councilman Marion Berry was at the next table. We got picked up by TechBisnow here.