Carnival of the Mobilists #101

It is said that all good things are three and I feel greatly honored to host the Carnival of the Mobilists for the third time now. The mobile ecosphere is moving at an astounding pace and it becomes quite obvious when I look back to when I first hosted the Carnival early 2006: The first usable 3G phones slowly coming to market, Nseries in it’s infancy, no iPhone, not a lot of talk then about mobile web 2.0 applications. Today, all of this is in full swing and this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is the proof:

Kindle: Starting off with Michael Mace’s analysis of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. I like Michael’s drill down approach of looking at new products and services including their impact on the industry. He always goes far beyond ordinary device reviews. He writes to the point: "Kindle makes the wireless network do what it should do: Disappear". True words of what should happen, not only for the Kindle. Vero over at Taptu has also taken a look at Kindle and shares her thoughts whether this will be the future device for book reading.

Education: Judy Breck over at the Golden Swamp writes about the "The Million" program which is an initiative considered in New York to give mobile phones to school students with on board learning software. Students get rewarded when using the software by additional voice minutes, SMS messages, etc. Great stuff!

More Education: Judy is not the only one writing about education this week. Mark van ‘t Hooft has attended Handheld learning 2007 in London and gives us his impression from the exhibition/conference.

Mobile News From China: To most non-Chinese the Chinese mobile market is a big mystery especially due to the total absence of 3G because no licenses have been given out yet. Paul Ruppert gives some insight in his post on Mobile Point View about a Chineese future of Vodafone.

Mobile and Africa: I think Tomi Ahonen and his Communities Dominate Brands blog needs no further introduction here. This
week, Tomi has written about short wave transmissions of SW Radio
Africa being blocked by the Zimbabwean government and what the radio
station does about it: To bring uncensored news to the people in
Zimbabwe, they have started using SMS messages. 8000 people have
already signed up with 100 additions daily. A great service and let’s
hope that those who have figured out how to block radio waves don’t
also figure out how to stop SMS messages.

The Real Web on the Mobile: Dennis Bournique over at Wap review has written a pretty extensive article on the “real” web on phones and what it means for designers. A very difficult topic and I am still waiting for a one approach does it all as everything he mentions in his article has happened to me in the past.

Missing Local Wifi Apps: Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless is also somebody to whom you should listen closely when he’s got something to say. This week he joins the Carnival with an analysis of why Wifi now built into many cellular mobile devices have not yet started a revolution in the local network.

More Android: Andreas Constantinou of the VisionMobile forum has written a great piece about the significance of Google’s Android – A long, analytical thought piece on why Android is different to every other OS out there. Definitely worth to be checked out!

Battery Life: Staying in the mobile device area for another moment, Amir has analyzed battery capacity enhancements in Nokia’s N95 evolution to see what effect the larger batteries and new hardware have on the latest N95 versions.

IMS and fixed/wireless convergence: And finally, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carnival: I guess there’s not a lot that can be found on YouTube today. So I am not sure why I was a bit surprised to see Telecom vendors such as Ericsson, Nortel, Nokia-Siemens-Networks and Alcatel-Lucent spreading the word there, too. The mobile world from the vendors perspective!

Next week, the Carnival goes to to Symbiano-Tek in Egypt. I wished I could go there fore a little vacation, too 🙂