A few years ago I became infatuated with writing cHTML mobile sites. I saw it as a challenge. Develop a website that can render on a 120×120 screen and be considerably usable. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as it has to render correctly to over 25 browsers and their (buggy) iterations, and have an actual design (rather than being a bunch of text on a white background like most mobile sites are).

But these days are gone. There is no point doing that anymore for the future browsers and handsets. Most phone manufacturers these days use either the Safari engine, or license Opera or they try to fake it by licensing Netfront and not give it enough RAM to play well with big sites (Sony Ericsson, this was for you). Most manufacturers now want next-gen browsers. Teleca went out of the mini-browser game last year, while today Openwave, the most popular mini-browser company on the planet, laid off 200 employees today, and they put a stop to further development of their browser (they’ll only do maintenance now, I guess). Thank God my JBQ left this company in time.

This is not to say that mini-browsers won’t be encountered anymore. Nokia still has their own S40 browser, Motorola has their terrible little P2k browser, while LG/Samsung fluctuates between Openwave and Netfront these days. Truth is, no one uses these mini-browsers. The halt of Openwave’s browser today is a testament to that, as Openwave once had 52% of the mobile browser market, and right now are below 20% just a few short years later. Besides, if someone was unlucky enough to get such a low-end handset for free from their carrier, they are much better off by installing the impressive Opera Mini instead.

This is not to say that we should not be writing mobile sites anymore. There are BILLIONS of people still who don’t own a smartphone but they still use one of these micro or mini browsers. Heck, even the mobile IE/Opera/Safari-based browsers DO need a simpler desktop-version site layout with not too much CSS and Javascript to render fast/well-enough. But the point is, the world is going towards a mobile system that can’t be characterized as “limited mobile” anymore, but a mini version of anything desktop. The keywords here are “full-featured browsers”.

A few years ago I said that 2010 will be the time that I will start using CSS and XHTML for my mobile sites instead of cHTML. My estimation seems to be good. Thing is, I don’t have the enthusiasm to do that anymore. I am seriously thinking of giving away my mobile autodetection script, the one that powers OSNews and Gnomefiles.

Disclaimer: The following is just my personal opinion on my personal blog, based on the experience I have with their products and strategies both as a user but also as a tech reviewer for the past few years.

As you know, today Motorola announced a split in two, while an insider’s email tells all about the terrible situation in the company that even lead to deaths/suicides. The insider cites the no-interest and no-knowledge of the execs to runs such a company as the reason for the failure.

I will have to clarify one point though, which I believe was a catalyst in Motorola’s current failure in the cellphone market. And that point is the way they treated their Linux phones. They missed a huge opportunity.

I was one of the first reviewers in US to try their EZX Qt-embedded Linux-based phones back in the day. These phones were mainly developed and manufactured in Asia, with minimum support from their US offices. MontaVista provided the (poorly supported afterwards) modified kernel. The first such phone was released in 2003 and it wasn’t half bad for the time.

Between 2004’s version of the OS, and the newest one’s released in 2007, the changes in the OS were MINIMUM. Having tried most of these EZX touchscreen models over the years, it was more that obvious that no real engineering went on behind the scenes, just some bug fixes and some small modifications here and there. It felt like “ok, we got a UI that works now, you are all fired, we only keep a few guys to maintain the thing”.

The problem was that Motorola-US didn’t care about these phones. They saw them as something that was done in Asia, for Asian markets only. They didn’t have the insight to think that “hey, we have a next-gen platform that works, why don’t we fully invest in it and go beyond Symbian v2 and v3, or UIQ, or Windows Mobile or Palm?”. Instead, they were short sighted, and they kept rehashing hardware designs running the old Moto OS, which looks like it was sprang out of the ’80s. Motorola’s basic phone UI (the one found on the non-Linux phones) was the worst I have ever encountered on mainstream phones.

What Motorola failed to realize was that the cellphone market changed their buying decisions from “hardware”, to a “software decision”. People want to run real, native, apps on their phones. End of story. After the initial boom of cellphone designs in the early ’00s, people don’t care anymore if the new RAZR is 1mm thinner than the previous model. Phone form factors and battery life have become good-enough in the last 4 years for almost all manufacturers, and so the interest and market differentiation has shifted towards software solutions instead.

Motorola would be alive and well today if they had actively maintained their EZX line, if they had innovated on it (their UI is still not as great you see), if they had open sourced everything after getting a QT license from Trolltech (no matter the cost) to allow free development of apps, release an SDK etc etc. I mean, think about it. Motorola had at least a TWO year head start in EZX development compared to Symbian v3, UIQ v3, and the iPhone. THEY could have been the big market players today after all these years maturing their touchscreen product.

Instead, they shunned their EZX phones, they completely missed the importance of an SDK (old readers of this blog will remember my rants about it), they started about 2-3 different Linux international mobile groups that have seen ZERO lines of code (this is equivalent to what we make fun here in the Silicon Valley, that is, someone wants to start writing an application and he first starts by creating the web site for it…). Then, they said something about joining the Android group, leaving all their partners of the other mobility Linux groups in peril.

Obviously, Motorola is a company that doesn’t know what it wants. That’s why they can never do anything right. I hope the company dies or bought and assimilated. They deserve nothing better. I just hope their employees find new jobs soon and get the hell out of there.

This survey essentially saying that most people now want real smartphones (that are able to run real applications and such) and don’t want to deal with simple basic feature phones anymore. Good to hear. I’ve been saying that feature phones will be bust since 2004.

I’ve always been disgusted by the way LG does business. It’s the mobile company that I can not stand the most. They do quick jobs with shady usability, and most importantly, they never release firmware upgrades. “Arpa-kolla”, as we say in Greece.

MobileBurn posted their recent press release where the Viewty LG phone can now capture 120fps at VGA resolution (previously it would only do so for QVGA). Instead of releasing a firmware upgrade for everyone to have access to that small feature and possibly other bug fixes, they just re-release the same god damn model in to the market, leaving everyone with an already purchased Viewty in the cold.

I hate LG. And I go on record with that.

The inevitability of using a complex operating system in your embedded product: more bugs. I’ve found 2-3 bugs so far in this Apple platform, but this one is a funnier one. At around 7:50 AM PST today Yahoo!’s stock was up about 45%, but the iPhone/iPod Touch (including in the latest firmware) show that it’s up 90%.

If you follow the news lately there’s a chance that HTC will be hit with a class action lawsuit from its customers because all their latest PocketPC phones don’t have hardware acceleration. HTC has the nerve to say that they won’t cater to their users, and that there might be a possibility to have a driver on future models. Their current phones are running on a default safe mode graphics driver, with no acceleration at all for the UI, video playback, games etc. This is particularly disturbing as some of their phones have been advertised as multimedia powerhouses.

Now, many people online are putting the blame to HTC for not being as serious regarding the software they are including with their devices. To me, HTC is like any other Asian company: products with short life cycles, not many official firmware updates (if any), poor software engineering. And Microsoft knows this. Which is why I personally put the blame to MS and not to HTC. HTC is being HTC, just like LG is being LG (which is even worse in comparison). Microsoft on the other hand, they hold the upper hand by owning the operating system. They should have never given HTC a license if HTC (or MS) didn’t have a fully working accelerated driver for the ATi graphics chip HTC used.

But of course, both companies went after the easy money. Both HTC and Microsoft should take responsibility for this and either offer refunds, or sit down their asses and complete the driver and offer it as a free download.

I don’t claim to know what’s in the contracts between Google and their Android Alliance, but I surely hope Google takes precautions in the future, because most Asian manufacturers are as care-free as HTC is (and usually, worse).

I wrote this blog post purely as an affected owner of a TyTN-II smartphone btw, and not for any other reason. I am just venting out because spending $800 for a phone that has a driver speed equivalent to 1990 with Windows 3.0 is unacceptable.

FIC upgraded the hardware of OpenMoko, and some nice upgrades are in. However, they still didn’t go for a quad-band phone, with EDGE. It’s still triband with plain GPRS. These guys really need to get a clue. Just because in Asia EDGE is not very popular doesn’t mean that it’s not in the rest of the world — their focus is the whole world anyway.

Occasionally I’ve been asked which phones I believe they have the best usability. I’ve tried over 30 phones in my time as a reviewer in the past 3 years, so here’s my opinion on what’s intuitive:

Sony Ericsson’s non-smartphone OS tops the list, with Series60 from Nokia being close. Everything else in that market is mediocre IMO. In the touchscreen market, iPhone kicks everyone’s ass. PalmOS and Windows Mobile can kinda compete because they have been in the market longer than anyone else so they have fixed some mistakes over the years, but overall, Apple got it right, right off the bat. The funny thing is, that I consider UIQ having the worst usability of all touchscreen systems I ever tried (even worse than some half-baked Linux systems I’ve seen out there). Sony Ericsson bought UIQ this past year. And they went from having the best smartkey OS, to the worst touchscreen OS. Nice going SE.

UPDATE: A video grabbed by the Viewty, downloadable higher quality VGA version here.

I will be reviewing the Viewty on OSNews in a few days, it’s an interesting competitor to the iPhone. Is it as good though? Here’s a screenshot from the touchscreen system, rendering OSNews in windowed and fullscreen modes. The browser used is a 2005 version of Obigo (the company behind Obigo is out of the browser business for a year now btw).

F_ck you both, Motorola and HTC. Both use the mini-usb port for headphones port on their latest phone models. So a few months ago I bought two Motorola converters (mini-usb to 3.5mm audio jack). So when I tried these cables on my new HTC Kaiser, they wouldn’t work. Apparently HTC uses a different internal wiring. Why?!? Why make the freaking lives of the consumers so difficult? I am not ok at all to use the mini-USB port for audio (which is also shared with data and charging, so you can’t do multiple things at once), but when there are such incompatibilities between different manufacturers even when using the same kind of port, I just want to throw their phones out of the window.

I think I will be using the iPhone from now on as my main phone instead of my HTC PocketPC. Except Apple, a small glimpse of hope from Nokia’s S60 team and the non-smartphone line from Sony Ericsson, no hardware manufacturer out there has a clue how to create a good cellphone experience. The PocketPC OS is not bad, but HTC pisses me off all too often.