Mobile things

I was arguing with myself about what to include in my ePortfolio (more on that later) when I found myself stumbling around on the RJI Collaboratory for no particular reason. I found this:

Mobile App Standards:(From mobile session): The Collaboratory can work towards creating standardized platform of mobile applications/interfaces

Whoa...

RJI admits that's out of its league - it belongs to Google, Apple, and Amazon. But that's an interesting question nonetheless.

I have an HTC Tilt. I don't read news on it. Partially because I refuse to pay $500 per year for a data connection when there's WiFi virtually everywhere I go. But for the most part, I don't want to read anything longer than a quick email on a tiny screen.

Does anyone else agree with that? Not at all. Every iPhone user has a special relationship zooming in and out of CNN.com.

On the other hand, I understand, and agree, that mobile devices have limitless potential for breaking news. Especially with the coming of the Integrated World (a less dreary version of The Cloud), which will let you receive a newsbrief, and push a button to send the developing story to your laptop. Not to mention streaming video and audio - especially on mobile devices - is in its infancy.

Here's a question: do we need new standards, or do we already have them?

RSS is very good at deploying headlines. H.264 is incredibly efficient for video. MP3 streaming (or download) is easy. And some of this is stuff you can do with Twitter, which is already very mobile friendly.

So it seems what we need isn't new standards, but new software... Songbird style projects that "revolutionize" the web. The problem is, we need it for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm OS and it's successor, Web OS, Google Android, and Symbian.

I doubt these applications will be standardized. Why should they be? iPhones and Palm Pre may work well with a touchy, glassy interface, but when RIM came out with a finger-oriented Blackberry it got really bad reviews, because that's not what Blackberry users want.

And of course, there's still the Kindle, which kept selling out despite the fact that it was a Generation 1 proof-of-concept that was not easy to read. Generation 2 is supposed to be a sweeping improvement, but what will it look like in 2015? Will there be a day when the New York Times simply stops printing and delivers a daily digital paper to millions of subscribers' eReaders?

And that, for the record, is something people seem to be willing to pay for.

Hmm...