Mimi Ito is coming to talk

Mimi Ito’s going to be here tomorrow. From her blog, I see she’s a DS player so I’m looking forward to hearing some of her observations on how it’s used by kids in dense urban areas. If kids in England are gathering in the back of trains to play DS together, I wonder how it works when every car on a train has a bunch of DS’s. Does Nintendo’s crippled wi-fi implementation even put a damper on connecting to others? or are users actually walking around with games like Animal Crossing and Nintendogs running?

Also, what do kids do for power? Whenever I was in Tokyo, once I’m out, then I’m out  for hours. With phones and DS’s pulling down lots of data, I wonder if finding power has become an issue.

Mimi has an interesting post about “Location Based Entertainment” where I thought she would be talking about gaming that dynamically adjusts to your location in real-space. I was pleasantly surprised to find that she’s actually talking about arcade games that interact with the real space around them. For me this is a fascinating contrast to the MMO genre where there is a distinct feeling of “diving into” the game world. Like our group Mario Kart games, this feels more like reaching out.

Speaking of Mario Kart, folks are using upcoming.org to gather up and race. I wonder if there are random Mario Kart beat downs happening in places like the Shibuya train station? In a place with such a dense population of DS owners, I’d hope there are impromptu matches all along the JR Line.

Google Mobile Mapping is great

The one application that everyone should download to their phone is Google Mobile Mapping. Hands down, it’s the only J2ME app that has ever mattered; nothing created before it is worth downloading.

You really shouldn’t be caught out with Google Mobile Mapping on your phone. Performance is excellent, and most importantly the latest revision features an improved UI that never loses anything you’ve taken the time to type. It’s a design principle often stressed with designing AJAX applications: “If the user spends time creating the content, do anything and everything to keep from losing it”. That point isn’t lost on Google. It takes time to type in an address, and you’ll be happy to know that you don’t need to type it again between sessions. It’s well done, well thought out, and I’m jealous that I wasn’t on the team that built it.

I’ve long believed that 2008 would see J2ME finally emerge as a solid platform for innovative mobile development. I say 2008 instead of 2007 partially because of manufacturers like Motorola who need a better VM on their mass market phones, but more so because I’m hoping the Location Based Services JSR’s will finally be implemented on enough consumer phones with GPS. At that point when “where you are” becomes available to 3rd party applications, a huge slew of services customizing your phone experience around your physical context can be enabled. This is everything from navigation, friend finding, location based advertising, location sensitive social apps. That said, it doesn’t mean you couldn’t have developed a compelling J2ME application in 2004 or 2005 targeting phones which supported floating point arithmetic (CLDC 1.1 phones), it’s just that no one did do that. No one except for Google, with the first version of Google Mobile Mapping (called GLM – Google Local Mobile at the time) shipped in 2005. The only drawbacks as I mentioned earlier is the poor performance on Motorola phones(not Goog’s fault) and the lack of Java Location Based Services APIs (also not Goog’s fault). Currently Nokia, Sony and Samsung all have decent JVM implementations. That’s all the big players with the exception of Motorola. Currently the Motorola VM on their phones like the RAZR, SLVR, PEBL, etc… doesn’t handle memory well, and is plagued by performance problems. This is a complete and utter shame as the phones are so popular. As long as you aren’t using a Motorola phone, go ahead and download and the first time you need local search or directions on your phone, you’ll be glad you did.

Technorati Tags: google, j2me, mobile, programming

PSP versus DS Lite

The Nintendo DS Lite is crazy good. A whole gang of us here got our last week and the device combined with Brain Age caused a domino effect here at work. Gordon and gang went and cleaned out an EB Games of their inventory and more DS Lites are on the way for other coworkers. Who would have thought that working math problems and little puzzles would be the trigger for all of us to new handhelds.

Now my PSP sits there at my desk unused… anyone want to buy it and give it a home?

buddyping

I’m liking the redesign of buddyping.com
All cotton candy fonts, and rounded corners… not liking the very very long short code. Seriously though, it is a cool app for friend finding via SMS.

Sony Ericsson W810 is out in QUAD BAND!

So nice… this was probably in the original announcement but I only just realized that the Sony W810i is quad band. The phone was announced quite a while ago as an update to the very nice W800. This version supports EDGE and has some small improvements to the chassis. Most important is the improved 5-way which reduces those accidental selections. I’m really interested in the quality of the 2MP camera. Cal uses one of Sony’s phones that is quite similar to this one and I’ve always been impressed by that phone’s flash.

What’s a little annoying is that phones like this get a flurry of coverage on the blogs that are part of the tech hype machine (engadget, gizmodo, etc…) when they are announced, but no coverage when they are actually available. So consider this your official announcement that yes, that phone you read about last year is finally available for sale.