I am delighted to be able to announce the first ever edition of the 361 Degrees Podcast – a new venture by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review, Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian and yours truly (with my Wireless Worker hat on). I’m fortunate to have had the pleasure of working with these chaps quite a bit recently and we wanted to produce something that would offer the readers of each of our sites a taste of some broader topics.

Episode 1 - Smartphone convergence, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play & a tiny bit of Dom Joly

Episode 1 covers “Smartphone convergence, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play & a tiny bit of Dom Joly” and includes interviews from the Xperia Play launch party:

• Liam Green-Hughes of GreenHughes.com
• Dom Joly off the telly
• Rob Kerr of One Mobile Ring

Episode 1 is also available on Soundcloud.

You can follow 361 Degrees on the dedicated mini-site, on AudioBoo, on Soundcloud, at Wireless Worker, at Mobile Industry Review, at All About Symbian or via iTunes.

Impressed by some of the business features the Motorola Atrix is sporting (such as finger-print authentication and a desktop environment with connections to remote applications) I shot 4 short videos of the device being demonstrated whilst at Mobile World Congress.

Motorola’s not a name I’d come to expect much in the way of innovation from but aside from being a high-spec Android smart-phone there’s a number of innovative new features to this device that will have me watching them more closely from now on. OK, they are still the RAZR people, but with a bit more of this I could forgive and forget…

The videos were all shot for Wireless Worker – an enterprise-focused site I’m running which grew out of the Mobile WiFi Challenge (which, incidentally I’m still doing!)

In a market where high-end Android devices are looking very same-y this is a smart move by Motorola – it will be interesting to see if the execution is as good in practice as it seems from the demos. What do you think – are they useful or novelty?

February; the shortest month of the year has, somehow been incredibly long this year. What with the Nokia/Microsoft announcement, Mobile World Congress and of course, NOT at Mobile World Congress, it’s a wonder the Really Mobile team have had any time to do anything!

However, we’re quite good at wonders here so, a short while ago, I sat down with Audioboo CEO and Founder Mark Rock to talk about his latest Audioboo client, this time – for Symbian.

Update: Audioboo for Symbian is now fully baked! Get it from the Ovi Store now!

Audioboo!  For Symbian!

Yes, so what if Symbian won’t be here after the Olympics, let’s talk about the right now. Right NOW Audioboo is going through the Ovi Store approval process and yours truly has been given a special sneak preview of the client to test out on his Nokia N8.

Functionally, it’s almost exactly the same as the other client(s) available on the market; namely a rather suped-up iPhone variant and a somewhat buggy Android version. At long last, Audioboo has come to Symbian and it’s actually very, very good.

What’s right with it?

Clean interface. Fantastic audio quality. Geo-tagging of posts in and sorted.

What’s wrong with it?

The image capture feature seems to be missing but, I’m guessing, that this is down to the N8′s camera API not being completely open (if at all) quite yet.

I’ve uploaded a fair few ‘boos since getting the app and, having had an extended play, it really is quite cool and fun to use. I managed to sit down with Mark Rock and grill him about a few of the things that were playing on my mind (pre and post-Windows announcement).

1. Audioboo for Symbian, we’ve heard rumours about it for a while now, so what took you so long?
   It was actually the 2nd platform we focussed on after iPhone back in 2009. We outsourced development to an external company in June 2009, not having the proper skills in house. The process was a nightmare. Audioboo does some pretty intensive stuff – recording to the FLAC format, managing memory allocation, uploading to the servers, along with an image, location etc. After we still didn’t have a working version delivered to us after 7 months, we canned the project. The Android version had gone live by then (not without its own problems) and we just felt defeated by the whole thing.
   
   Moving forward to 2010, I shared a panel at The Radio Festival in Manchester with Nokia’s Mark Selby (note: panels are the best form of networking known to mankind) and we hatched up the plan that eventually became the S^3 app.

2. How was the development process?
   I have to say it was a pretty seamless and overall quite good. There is a lot of work to do on the S^3 platform admittedly, but kudos to them for launching early. Qt is quick and light and a lot of developers are happy with that environment. We’ve got most of the features into it we wanted and in some respects this release is more advanced than our Android version.

3. The full feature set hasn’t been implemented quite yet, is this something you hope to roll out in a future update?
   Our approach is really straightforward, (although people might feel we’re being Apple fanboys). We have very experienced iOS expertise in-house and it is the most advanced mobile platform, so we aim to launch first on iPhone as a way of developing the best app experience across all environments then iterate onto other platforms. Since we’re tiny and don’t have grown up things like project managers, it’s the easiest way for us to work.

4. When will the app be out on public release?
   I don’t know I’m afraid. All I know is that it went to the Ovi Store before Christmas, so fingers crossed it’ll be soon!

5. Any final words?
   It’s a good, solid app. I’m excited about finally getting Audioboo out to S^3 users ( it may work on later S60 versions also). I’m probably more excited about creating the next version, which will hopefully really push the capabilities of S^3 to the limit

Thanks for your time Mark and, if you’re reading this Ovi Store, hurry up and release this app!

Thanks to Gerry who spotted that Audioboo is available now in the Ovi Store:

If you’re in London town tonight then come and join half of the Really Mobile team for much merriment and mobile-shaped beers.

If you’re coming, get along to the Facebook page and sign up. We know for a fact some people are already flying out of Barcelona to make it back in time.

Details:

Date: 17/2/11
Time: 7pm onwards
Place: All Bar One, New Oxford St
The Event: #NotatMWC

For me, day 2 was all about the Chinese manufacturers.

HTC and Huawei both introduced significant numbers of phones and tablets that show how strong they are right now. They’re both majoring on Android at the moment, but HTC also runs a Windows Phone stream too. Their booths are massive and the amount of ‘stuff’ they do is amazing… not just devices but also (in Huawei’s case) all the infrastructure to run an entire network. In HTC’s case Jon French (HTC UK & Ireland Executive Director) highlighted the involvement of Mark Zuckerberg in the launch event of their new ‘Facebook enabled’ devices as a sign of the firm’s scale and influence.

ZT Who?

However, ZTE is the firm that has most surprised me. Having previously considered them as ‘low cost’ producers of things networks typically white-label (such as the Orange San Francisco in the UK), their stand is covered in tablets and devices of all specs and network-types. They’re also showing gaming, network management and IPTV solutions that have been deployed in China to user-bases of millions. One of their scrolling presentations caught my eye:

ZTE are the world's 3rd largest IPTV provider with a customer-base of 4m in one Chinese telecoms company

Previously the Korean firms (such as Samsung / LG) looked like the challengers for the established brands… not now.

In Other News

An HP event also provided an opportunity to spend some time with the HP Touchpad, Pre3 and Veer – nice looking devices showing their 2d gen maturity now, but I wonder if they’ll generate enough interest to sustain the ecosystem needed long-term. HP’s pushing them hard though and the usability refinements are pretty nice. One to watch… Oh and they get really upset when commentators forget to list WebOS in the (now everywhere) ’3 platforms’ list: iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Weather

More Rain.

Over on Wireless Worker I’ve  published a set of videos and pictures in a first-look at the HP (previously Palm) TouchPad, Pre 3 and Veer. WebOS looks like it’s matured nicely since we first saw it, but facing stiff competition against a range of other similar devices it’s likely operator take-up will play a big part in their success.

• HP TouchPad First Look Video
• HP Pre 3 First Look Video
• HP Veer Quick Look

I’ve just written an opinion piece for my more business-focused blog ‘Wireless Worker‘ about the ‘Plan B’ reaction to Nokia’s shift to the Windows platform:

If you don’t understand the problem you’re probably part of it.

‘Plan B’ is an anonymous attempt to campaign for Stephen Elop’s removal and the reinstatement of Nokia’s previous Symbian and MeeGo strategy. The authors claim to be ‘9 young investors’ but their lack of awareness over the pressures the Nokia board were under to ‘do something’ and their analysis of what and where the problems are is crude to say the least.

A change like the one being executed by Nokia at present is a difficult one – it’s an emotional challenge as much as a technical one, as anyone who’s worked in changing a business will tell you. It’s especially hard in this case because firms and individuals’ livelihoods are impacted by the announcement. Fear of change is normal.

Read the rest at Wireless Worker.

As ever opinions and comments welcomed.

My summary of what’s been going on at the world’s biggest mobile event…

Talk of the Town

The big news here is still the Nokia / Microsoft tie-up that was announced last Friday, but is being fleshed out with a little more detail at the sessions here. Stephen Elop (Nokia CEO) has added some (but not all) of the detail people are hungry for but insists the company has a cash value of ‘billions’ to Nokia whilst Steve Balmer (Microsoft) was a little easier to read as he talked about volumes, markets and carrier relationships (especially with regard to carrier billing for the app store) which Nokia brings to the party. There’s still some shock about the speed of the move – you can pretty much ditch Symbian and MeeGo as of now unless you’re targeting a big legacy community and we’ll see the first device by Q4 this year. It’s also bad news for Intel as it highlights how slow MeeGo development has been and damages their potential to sell mobile chips (without a platform to push them with). It is now – apparently – all about the ‘ecosystem’ not the device or OS.

Money, money, money

There’s quite a lot of mobile payments / NFC noise with a few carrier / finance organisations announcing roll-outs (such as Visa and Orange in the UK) but mostly technology demonstrators. It all looks quite exciting until you realise how far away from consumer ready the exciting stuff is. For mobile banking / payments I’m still not sold on the value of simply putting the ‘card in the phone’ and wonder how enthusiastic consumers will really be.

The ‘other’ Steve-note

Windows Phone is getting multi-tasking and hardware accelerated web browsing. Not revolutionary but it shows that Microsoft is moving at speed to get the platform matured.

The Droids You’re Looking For…

Android is everywhere and Samsung, HTC and Huawei all have new devices to show off – Samsung’s at the high-spec end of the market but Huawei’s offerings are showing how the price can be brought down. Motorola’s Xoom – the new Android 3 tablet – is very nice, fast and well built (albeit I’ve heard painfully overpriced, but that will improve with time and volume). The tablet-specific refinements in the newest version of Android are very well done and easy to get on with.

And finally…

Elsewhere there’s a million different types of app stores for every conceivable need (yawn), the wireless power companies have finally got themselves agreed on a common standard which will be built into some big-name products soon and I saw a very impressive technology demonstration from a 3D mapping company which creates 3D models of cities using photography rather than hand-built models or laser-scanning as others do.

Weather

It rained.

Well, they did it and the details are now starting to dribble out.

Last night, in his pre-event press conference new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop talked more widely around the issues that have been raised as a result of the firm’s decision to move to Windows Phone. During he event he shared another rendering of how future devices might look after one leaked-out last week.

The first renderings of Microsoft-powered Nokias that leaked out...

However, it’s worth remembering these are only renderings showing the ‘stock’ Windows Phone interface.  In several conversations since the announcement Nokia people have raised the subject of customisation … It’s clear the firm is keen to differentiate its devices with ‘valuable’ customisations – a concession which no other firm has secured from Microsoft and (perhaps) a measure of how the close the relationship is.

It’s unlikely that any customisation will involve the wholesale replacement of the UI – the language and aspirations seem more subtle than that to me. The aim seems to be to add ‘Nokia value’ into the Microsoft offering and (to me) that may give a better indication of how Nokia intends avoid the trap of becoming ‘just another’ hardware vendor.

I’ll say it again – it’s not the announcement that matters… it’s what happens next.

A consensus is forming that Nokia and new CEO Stephen Elop are going to announce something big on Friday. It’s rumoured to be a Windows Phone 7 announcement, specifically one for North America where Nokia is mostly ignored.

If they do there’ll be an explosion in the tech press… and I’ll be liberally hitting ‘Mark All Read’ in Google Reader.

Because it doesn’t matter… not in isolation.

A Microsoft-powered Nokia device could be great – I’d love one. It could be a delight to use, but I see two possibilities for such a combo:

1. A stop-gap until Symbian and MeeGo are ‘ready’. Integration with the existing Nokia eco-system (Ovi store, Ovi services and developer platforms) would be minimal. This would just be about selling devices in the US.
2. A new smart phone platform ‘forever’. Symbian is relegated to dumb-phone territory and the new OS provides the platform for everything up to ‘mobile computing’ (where MeeGo lives). Windows Phone gets the full Nokia treatment and runs Qt (the software ‘layer’ that already provides compatibility between Symbian and MeeGo).

Both start with a single Windows-powered device, but the consequences are interesting…

Stop-Gap Option

This sells some devices, pacifies the tech press and does some emergency repairs to Nokia’s brand image in the US. But it doesn’t build a legion of loyal North American Nokia users… it just re-enforces the Windows Phone platform. When the time comes to switch back to the ‘master plan’ (or any time HTC offers a better hardware / price combination) consumers will go as easily as they came.

See you again in 2 years for the same conversation.

‘Brave New World’ Option

This offers a way forward longer-term, but it emasculates the Ovi services. Windows Phone 7 has its own marketplace, email, cloud platform and IM service. How would Nokia promote its own offerings, especially if they only worked on Nokia devices (because of Qt)?

Nokia can’t just be a hardware vendor… customers need to move easily between platforms and developers need a common language. More than that though, it’s about the money… To continue as a top-tier player Nokia needs app revenue, content revenue and all the things that come next (like financial services).

Apple has this. RIM has this. Google has this. Nokia must too.

So does it matter if Nokia announces a Windows Phone? No. It matters how they answer the question “what next?”