Archive for March, 2010

Apple = 67.5% of UK mobile traffic

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Admob’s latest mobile metrics report makes fascinating reading:

  • iPhone + iPod Touch together make up 67.5% of all UK ‘mobile device’ traffic.  That’s even higher than the US, surprisingly.  Wow.
  • Nokia has only one device in the top 10 worldwide devices.  And that’s the old N70.  Oh dear.
  • Nokia owns the developing world.  In India every device in the top 10 is a Nokia.  They need to learn from their mistakes and make damn sure they hold on to this – as it looks pretty easy to see smart phones coming down in price and stampeding over Nokia in developing territories too.
  • HTC is making great guns with it’s Android devices.  Android is coming and it’s coming fast.
  • RIM needs to pull its socks up.

This data only represents Admob’s ad traffic – and is therefore not fully representative.  In particular, on-portal activity will be significantly under represented (and Admob is owned by Google ;-) ), however it’s extremely insightful data none the less.

Mobile calls in the developing world are all about Nokia.  Mobile content in the developed world is all about iPhone and Android.

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Do we need 64 kb/s video in 2010?

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Techcrunch reports today that Justin.tv was required by Apple to provide 64 kb/s versions of all its live streams in order to gain approval for the app store.  We have been battling with this over at Orca Digital for a few months now – and it’s extremely frustrating.

Apple has started rejecting all live streaming apps unless they provide adaptive bit rate streams (ie. the quality of the stream is optimised for the available network conditions).  In itself, that’s reasonable – and ensures a great user experience – however the requirement to provide a 64 kb/s video stream is not appropriate in today’s world.  For those of you who know anything about video, you will know that quality at 64 kb/s is ropey – certainly not in line with the user expectations of an iPhone.

We have appealed hard against this, but Apple is not giving in.  We believe that it’s better to get no video than a 64 kb/s stream, but Apple is adamant that streaming works on EDGE networks – rather than just 3G.

The other challenge is that many live encoders won’t stoop to 64 kb/s – requiring the purchase of new (expensive) live encoders unless you really know your video salt.  It has driven us to develop our own mobile optimised encoders – which we’re now using to power live streams.

Apple continues to keep us on our toes – are they going to insist on 64 kb/s video for the larger screened iPad?  It would look truly shocking…

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Skype launches for Symbian – really, really?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I read over at Mobile Crunch this morning that Skype launched for Symbian.  This time it’s really running over IP rather than the so-called ‘VoIP’ offering on 3 UK and Verizon from Skype – which consist of a load of free minutes running over the normal (circuit switched) telephony network (clever marketing rather than clever technology).

I’m still persevering with my Nokia N97 – mainly because it’s so laughably bad, but partly because I love the hardware/keyboard.  I never use the Ovi store because it sucks – despite being a heavy mobile data experimenter.  But Orca Digital is in the VoIP business, so I thought I’d give this a try.

  • I fired up Ovi store
  • I searched for Skype – amazingly it came up (the search facility doesn’t work well with Ovi), though it was only 3rd on the list
  • I clicked install
  • It downloaded, then took a while to install (this is usually slow)
  • I clicked launch
  • “The operation could be completed due to an error”

Oh dear.  That’s that then.  No pointer as to what went wrong or how to rectify it.  Game over.

On an interview over at Mobile Industry Review, Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki said that he can put his N97 “sleepless nights behind him”.  Not from where I’m sitting.  My N97 is shocking.  I get ‘memory full’ errors the whole time (even though I have oodles of free memory), it crashes, it hangs…

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