Well, it looks like we lived through the 2012 doomsday prophecies Much like Y2K, there was much fanfare but little in the way of activity. But will this year bring with it the unluckiness of its number 13? Who knows. But you can be guaranteed some action in the mobile ecosystem.
Let’s brush the doom and gloom aside and see what wonders await us.
Consumerization of IT has driven the corporate world into using more and more consumer-oriented devices. With that comes concerns around interoperability, support, and last, but not least, security. These devices have been a boon to employees and a bane to corporate IT. To me, trends like BYOD are revolutionary, and evolutionary solutions may not be the best match. Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon, and it’s coming from more than one area.
No doubt that you’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa regarding the use of HTML5 for their mobile platform. He felt that they put too much of their strategy behind HTML5 and that they couldn’t get the performance that they could get from native apps on iOS and Android. He even went so far as to cite it as “one of the biggest mistakes, if not the biggest mistake” that Facebook has ever made. From a technical perspective, here is a link to a good article about the technology challenges encountered by Facebook along with comments from other technologists outside of Facebook.
On the other hand, LinkedIn’s iPad application claims to be 95% HTML5, and it is quite impressive. The application is quite responsive. The updates area appears as headlines a la Flipboard which gives your connections a bit of star quality.
How can two similar products (social networks) utilize the same technology and come up with different conclusions?
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Well, this September turned out to be a huge month for announcements in the mobile world. We all have come to expect the Apple fall announcement, but now everyone seems to be getting into the act. So in case you missed any of them, here they are all are, in date order. With over eight hours of video, better grab plenty of that favorite caffeinated beverage.
While watching television recently I came across two favorite programs from my youth. One was the cartoon The Jetsons. I really enjoyed the space-age technology and futuristic designs. The other was Star Trek (the original series). The idea of travelling around at warp speed and ‘beaming’ from one point to another was always fascinating to me. I realized that these advanced civilizations had at least one thing in common: they talked to their computers. No bulky keyboards, no awkward mice, no fancy trackballs, just good old-fashioned speech. And their computers not only listened, but they talked back, usually with good results.
Using speech to interact with your computer hasn’t really caught on. Other than converting speech to text, there are not too many business applications where you talk to your PC. With mobile technology, many of us have voice-dialed a name in our address book but not much else. And then Siri comes along.
Microsoft has certainly had a lot to say about mobile computing in 2013 and looks to be a watershed year for them. Let’s take a closer look at their story.
It’s the 4th of July again and citizens of the United States are celebrating America’s birthday with picnics and fireworks. There’s another birthday of note which celebrates another type of independence.
The iPhone recently had its fifth birthday, having been launched on June 29, 2007. It’s hard to put into words the impact that the iPhone has had on the mobile computing industry. Every so often I go back and view Steve Job’s iPhone announcement at MacWorld 2007. Simple things we take for granted today like pinch/zoom, screen rotation, and a usable mobile browser had us in a state of wonderment. Today most of the smartphone designs are building on (and improving on) the iPhone’s innovative design.
On occasion you may have the desire to demonstrate a new app that you’ve developed for the iPad or just share a website at a meeting. While iPad 2 and the new iPad have built-in capabilities which allow mirroring to directly-connected projectors and televisions/monitors, how can you share with remote participants?
I recently attended the TabTimes Tablet Strategy conference, an event specifically targeting the use of tablets in the enterprise. End users, hardware and software vendors, and journalists descended on New York to discuss the highs and lows of tablet deployments in healthcare, education, retail, government, manufacturing and other industries.
I wrote on media tablets in my blog almost a year ago. What a difference a year makes.
Just over two years ago in 2010, the first iPad was launched, creating a new form factor now being called a media tablet. In 2011, the iPad 2 as well as dozens of other products hit the streets. Now the third version of iPad (current called the iPad, the new iPad, iPad 3, etc.) is flying off of the shelves.
One of the mind-blowing things is how quickly media tablets have progressed from the consumer market to the corporate ranks. Just a year ago media tablets were sort of a novelty or a status symbol.
Virtualization is a major industry trend. Server virtualization is especially popular in many corporate data centers. Veeam Software publishes a V-index which monitors server virtualization in the enterprise and their 2011 third quarter report showed that over one-third (38.9%) of all enterprise servers were virtual. While desktop virtualization is not as popular, surveys indicate that almost ¾ of organizations are evaluating or using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. These products use hypervisors, which are software programs that manage multiple instances of the same operating system on one computer.
I often hear people describe the mobile computing industry as ‘immature’. For some reason, this really irks me. Cell Phones and PDAs have been popular since the 90’s and smartphones started gaining momentum in the early 2000’s. Now, of the 7 billion people in the world, nearly 6 billion of them have a cellular subscription (Source: ITU).
We’ve been using computers to enhance our world for many years. We’ve even used computers to built our own imaginary worlds through the magic of virtual reality. Augmented reality (AR) is the use of virtual reality in combination with the real world to provide an enhanced experience for the user. One of the more common examples is in football (the US version) where a computer-generated line is shown on television for the first down marker. As real world items (players, objects) pass in front of it, the portion of the line that would be behind the item disappears (called occlusion). It has been featured in several sci-fi flicks such as the Predator movies, the Terminator series, Minority Report, Avatar and the Iron Man movies.
There was no shortage of action in the mobile industry in 2011. So what will 2012 bring? There are plenty of 2012 doomsday prophecies, so you’d better go out and get that smartphone or tablet that you’ve been drooling over early in the year so that you can at least have some fun before the end is here. Now, on to happier topics. Read the rest of this post »
Mobile device management (MDM) is a hot area with enterprises today. Gone are the days of IT dictating the devices, or even the operating systems. The complexity of managing multiple mobile platforms has brought this cottage industry into the mainstream. For proof, look no further than the dozens of MDM product offerings. As the name implies, these products focus on managing (and securing) mobile devices.
I came across this article about a lawsuit against Apple’s iPhone 4S for violating a VPN patent. The patent was awarded to VirnetX on November 1, 2011. The lawsuit was filed by VirnetX on November 1, 2011. That’s not Internet speed, that’s mobile computing speed.
When developing code for mobile devices, it’s always good to test it out on the targeted device(s). However, it’s not always convenient or cost-effective to have access to the real thing. That’s where mobile device emulators and simulators come into play.
I did a rant blog entry in August of 2010 entitled Smartphone OS Proliferation: When Will The Madness Stop? The answer may be now. What a difference a year makes.
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Everyone continues to be excited about the advances in mobile computing technology, and 4G is no exception. Who wouldn’t want blazing wireless speeds that rival old-fashioned wired connections? Read the rest of this post »
Most people think of two types of mobile applications: the mobile web and native applications. The mobile web is obviously web sites that are optimized for mobile devices, like feature phones, smartphones, and now media tablets. Their strength is that many developers are fluent in web-based development languages and tools. Their weakness is you don’t have access to most hardware features (camera, accelerometer, sensors, etc.). Native applications are developed for a specific OS platform using the associated software development kit (SDK). Their strength is that you can leverage those hardware features previously mentioned. Their downside is that you have to write different code for each mobile OS (like Objective-C for iOS devices and Java for Android).
Another application type which is growing in popularity is known as a hybrid mobile application. The idea is that you can leverage common web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) but get the experience of a native application. Read the rest of this post »
Well, Apple did it again. On April 3, 2010, they unleashed the iPad, a thin, sleek, tablet that has excited consumers around the world. It borrowed a lot from its little sibling, the iPhone, including compatibility with mobile applications in the Apple App Store. Just to give you some perspective, it took 74 days to sell one million iPhones. We know how that product revolutionized the smartphone industry. It took only 28 days to sell one million iPads. Simply amazing.
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Randy Nunez
Mobile Computing Trek 