Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

3D Game Widget!

coultonp — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:27:42 +0300

Not content with how far he had already pushed the WidSets platform my PhD student Will Bamford has implemented a 3D version of our first Widget Bombus (267324 downloads). Here is a video showing the game in action.

Despite seeing the game throughout is development cycle I am still amazed how well this runs (remember WidSets is a virtual machine running on top of a virtual machine) across both S60 and S40 devices. At the moment the Widget is still only on the developer site but hopefully will get upgraded to a BetaWidget on the main site soon.

We have some other cool Widgets coming on line so will blog about them soon as they all offer different perspectives of the versatility of Widgets.

Looking backwards and forwards

coultonp — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:59:14 +0200

On this day last year I posted a blog about predicting the main mobile trends for 2007 and suggested a few ideas with the help of a few comments from the community. I thought I would start my year in a reflective mood (must be my age) and see how we did. Location based services have certainly come to the fore (although I am not sure if anyone is actually making any money) but I think we can have a point for that one. Flat rate data tariffs becoming the norm hasn’t come about as widespread as I thought (certainly not in the UK) so I think we only get half for that. The emergence of social sites on mobile is coming about although as yet presence is not really part of the equation so I don’t think we get anything there. Finally the increase in Flashlite content, which has grown but not as much as I expected so might get half a point for that one. Overall this gives us a hit rate of about 50% which is what the article I originally discussed predicted so perhaps no surprises there and shows the dominance of a not so educated guess. In regard to this year I will say:

‘Green’ will replace ‘Open’ as this year’s mobile black
Widgets will become a force in mobile content
Ad driven content will continue to increase (widgets no doubt being seen as having huge potetial)
NFC use will start to accelerate and public awareness will grow

Ok so if I’m able to do this again next year we will see how it goes and if anyone wants to add to my rather simple list then please add a comment.

BTW a happy new year to the mobile community in general and lets hope it’s a much fun as last year

We++ Mobile Social Software

coultonp — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:01:10 +0300

A while ago I blogged about an application (m3Dcam) Will Bamford and I had come up with that allows users to create their own 3D photographs on their mobile and upload them to a community site. As I said at the time the project was meant to be a bit of fun and I was expecting fairly minimal interest for a number of reasons

1. You need 3D glasses to view the result (I now carry a pair with me at alltimes !)

2. The users bares the cost of the up-load

3. The cost is more than a single picture as we split the image between eyes and colour planes.

4. Its fun but not really a social activity

Despite this we have had over 650 uploads and if you Google m3dcam you get literally hundreds of hits and my first blog has be viewed over 1100 times.

I am reminded by of something Howard Rheinhold said in his book Smartmobs “The ‘Killer Apps” of tomorrows mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices”. Whilst I would not completely agree with the influence new hardware might play I am minded to think that given this example predicting social practices in the area of mobile social software is going to be tricky and success could come from the strangest of places

BTW the site now supports colour images as shown and there is a handy flash viewer that Will has created which allows you to practice how best to do the alignment.

Designing for the Emergent Markets

coultonp — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:57:55 +0300

I came across this post at Mobhappy by Carlo Longino which highlights two new Nokia phones (1200 and 1208), which have probably generated little interest amongst developers in the West as they are entry level phone, but are particularly interesting (at least to me ) from a socio-techinal standpoint in that Nokia has introduced a couple of features which are aimed for users in the emergent markets. In particular as Carlo notes:

“they support multiple phonebooks — a nod to the fact that in many developing nations, a single handset is shared among several family members or friends”

“they have a call-tracking feature, which lets users set the maximum cost of a call before dialing. This lets users control their spending, but it also helps empower the entrepreneurs in these markets that buy a phone and airtime credit, then resell calls.”

This is great users centric design from Nokia.

BTW if you are interested in the practices highlighted above I recommend this great paper by Jan Chipchase of Nokia.

How people carry phones

coultonp — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:22:13 +0300

I thought I would point everyone to an piece of cultural research performed by ethnographers working for Nokia on the site of Jan Chipchase (For those of you interested in the social impact of phones I can highly recommend Jan’s site as one to watch). The report is very interesting and has lots interesting stuff in it which I wont repeat but interesting points are:

“30% of pocket carriers and 50% of bag carriers sometimes or always miss incoming mobile phone communication”

“The adoption of phone straps varies considerably between Asia Pacific and the rest of the world”

Is T9 changing our language?

coultonp — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:17:55 +0200

I came across this piece (my blog is so book) discussing how T9 is creating new words associations as people are starting linking words that appear from the same key presses in T9 together which otherwise have nothing in common. For instance in London kids are apparently using book to mean cool as it comes up first on the T9. Although, on my phone cool comes first which is probably just me J

However, I now realise I should have called my children Ablysso and Fant? rather than Calypso and Dante as it would help with texting.

Mobile health blogging on the journey to school

coultonp — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:16:12 +0200

I have been a little quiet on the blogging front lately as Will Bamford and I have been working hard to complete the first stage of project we are working on with members of our Universities Geography department.

We have created a version of Locoblog, which we have christened geoblogger, that will allow us to record the journeys to school of 30 children during the course of a week of their journeys to and from school.

No only do we record the route but we have given the children the ability to blog their health status along the journeys together with an concerns about the environment.

The application also provides a twice daily health survey which is sent back to us along with the distance travelled.

We are going correlate their children’s school journeys with local traffic pollution data in the hope that we can make recommendations on the best routes to take and whether the local council needs to consider creating green corridors for such journeys. Here is the kit we have a amalgamated for the project which looks a bit scary all in one place .

The experiment will take place in 1 week periods in each season over the next year with the first one starting next week. I will blog more details and perhaps some preliminary results during the course of the trial as it will hopefully provide some interesting insights in using mobile phones for fieldwork recording and experiences of using this technology with children

Environmentally friendly base stations

coultonp — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:45:21 +0200

Interesting article on the BBC technology site discussing proposed use in India of bi-diesel which is made from a combination plant oils and alcohol to rum mobile phone base-stations. This type of fuel has much less environmental impact than traditional petroleum products and as such seems and ideal solution for countries where power is a problem.

Nice to see the mobile industry is doing its bit to help minimise our carbon footprint

The mobile phone as a cyber policeman

coultonp — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:18:28 +0200

I came across this article via a number of mobile blog sites which details New York’s move to accept images and videos as part of its 911 and 311 services. In the UK we certainly saw the power of user reporting with the London tube bombings and I guess this is a natural extension to utilise the power of such phenomenon. Be interesting to see how successful this is and whether is changes peoples perceptions of the mobile phone.

Shameless book plug!

coultonp — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:52:05 +0200

Having finally finished the version 9.0 S60 book I have been working on for a while with my fellow authors Reuben Edwards and Helen Clemson plus many others at Symbian Press and Wiley and I though I would share my joy in the fact that I have been told it will be launched at 3GSM in a few weeks. You will have to excuse my enthusiasm its my first book and even though I have published many academics papers in journals its much cooler to see your name on the front

The book is based on the exercises we do as part MSc in Mobile Games Design here at Lancaster University and takes the students from a simple console based card game up to a full GUI graphics based multiplayer version over Bluetooth. I hope useful particularly for new developers as I particularly want to encourage people to enjoy developing for mobile as much a I do.