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Wednesday, 20 January 2010

Why Are RIM Over Complicating The Touchscreen Blackberry?

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In recent years Blackberry have produced the Blackberry Storm and Storm 2, both sporting a large touchscreen with SurePress technology. There can be little doubt that this device is inspired by Apple's very successful iPhone but in making the Storm similar to iPhone's design I feel that RIM may have missed a great design opportunity. Find out why after the jump.










If you look at the Bold 9700 and the iPhone when the keyboard is displayed then you'll notice that the display area is exactly the same. The icons used in the Bold OS would be very easy to press with a thumb of finger if that was possible......why isn't it? Why not simply make the Bold screen touch sensitive. Keep the physical keyboard for typing and, like Android devices, keep the trackball but allow people to select icons and move around text input using touch. Just think about using your Blackberry and discovering a typo earlier in your email. You simply touch the screen and the cursor moves to that point on the screen where you can make the change then touch the end of the message and continue typing on the physical keyboard.

Wouldn't this unite the great physical keyboards of the Blackberry with the strengths of the touch screen devices into one fantastic device. There is room in the Blackberry fold for such a hybrid device and I for one would be delighted to purchase it if it ever came on the market. Anyone agree that this is the kind of device we need to see from RIM?

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Saturday, 11 April 2009

The Missing Windows Mobile Component

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I’ve been looking into developing on mobile platforms recently and after looking at Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm I’ve come to an unusual conclusion regarding the Microsoft offering. Everyone knows the UI is weak in comparison to other devices so I’m not going to look at that. I’m actually talking about the developer tools for Windows Mobile.

Downloading the SDK for version 6.1 is nice and easy from Microsoft.com but the problem emerges when you start looking for a supported environment. Android and BlackBerry use Eclipse plug-ins which are free to download as is Eclipse itself. If you own a Mac you will get Xcode when you download the iPhone SDK and once again these are free. Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Express environments are not actually supported for mobile development. You have to go out and purchase a copy of Visual Studio before you can develop for the Windows Mobile platform. To me this is a massive flaw in the Microsoft model. Google, RIM and Apple are making the most of innovative developers who might think twice if they had to purchase the development environments.

Microsoft may be able to boast about the number of applications they have for Windows Mobile but many of them are pretty awful. I do feel that if Microsoft doesn’t want to get left behind in this field and lose developer support they must offer a Visual Studio Express version that hooks into the 6.1 SDK and allows developers to play and build apps for free. After that they can charge for distribution because everyone else basically does.

Image from msdn blogs

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Thursday, 17 January 2008

Google vs. Apple

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Could the peace between Apple and Google be coming to an end. In this quote from an interview Steve Jobs gave, it looks as if he's making the first threat that the war is approaching.

"I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It's just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/index.html?ex=1358226000&en=dc35254b0fcd5490&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Would you regard Apple and Google as virtually partners at the moment because I would.

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