Following The Worst In Mobile, 2005 that I wrote a few weeks back, it seemed proper to follow it up with the best of the year in the mobile industry, so here goes:
- 3 UK’s Gareth Jones Moves On: You probably best remember Jones, 3’s COO, as the guy that told New Media Age “People don’t want open access, that’s not what our customers tell us they want. Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts.” So anybody that wants to do stuff on their phone other than exactly what their operator has authorized is crazy — yeah, we’re really sad to see you go, Gareth. Don’t let the door hit you, etc etc.
- Opera Mini: Opera Mini is the best J2ME application I’ve ever seen. It’s a highly competent HTML browser that runs beautifully, and works better than pretty much every native browser I’ve seen on non-smartphone handsets. It renders complicated pages well, and works pretty quickly, even on my GPRS connection. It really is quite a big deal, as it can bring an easy, well-rendered mobile browsing experience to mid-range and low-end devices. Incidentally, it’s now freely available to all users, regardless of where they live. Of course, ol’ Gareth probably isn’t impressed by this, and it’s just furthering his opinion that I’m craaaazy.
- the Sony Ericsson K750i: Both Russell and I’s pick, the K750 is a fabulous device. I switched to it after a succession of smartphones, and I don’t miss them at all. Physically, it’s a great size and is well-designed. The screen is bright and sharp; its autofocus 2-megapixel camera takes excellent photos. The UI, though, really shines, blowing away the interfaces of similar phones from other manufacturers (particularly Nokia’s Series 40, which is really showing its age these days). An added bonus — the K750 survived being dropped and submerged in water unscathed.
- Yahoo and Google start paying some real attention to mobile: 2005 was notable in one regard, as the search giants began a real mobile effort with things like Yahoo’s nice, powerful SMS search and Google Local Mobile, a sweet little J2ME app. With the way things have played out so far in 2006 — both with Google and with Yahoo Go — makes me think it should be even more interesting.
- Mobloggers force O2 rethink: Alfie Dennen and his posse from moblogUK got O2 to quit sending MMS as links to Web pages when they were sent to email addresses, effectively preventing people from using any outside moblogging or image-hosting service. Of course, O2 had a moblog service it offered alongside Kodak that worked just fine (for a while anyway). Good year for Alfie and the moblogUK crew, given this and their prominence in the cameraphone coverage of the London bombings.
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