The Jesus tablet has been revealed and the product hasn’t lived up to its hype.  I’m intrigued by the device, but it’s not really a great mobile device – nor is it a great netbook. In fact, it’s not really even a tablet as we’ve defined them.

It’s essentially a large ipod – or a Kindle on steroids.

Here are 5 reasons why i won’t be buying the first version:

1. Poor resolution – 1024 resolution is a major disappointment. You can’t watch full high definition video.
2. No Camera – most laptops now come with a camera for things like skype calls and making raw videos. 80% of all new mobile devices also come with a camera…. So not including one with the ipad was odd and a major miss. You also can’t access external content from outdoor media and printed magazines that are increasingly coming with 2d (or QR) codes and AR codes. No camera also limits potential gaming applications.
3. No GPS – along with no camera, having no GPS means you can’t use the device for navigation or for any of your geo-social media apps – like foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. The future of digital media is going to be location driven – so why make the ultimate media device already irrelevant? Now I have to carry around my mobile phone and the tablet. No GPS also means Apps such as Layar that leverages augmented reality to add data to your view will also be restricted to your mobile device. Outside of layer, how useful is google maps without GPS on a mobile device?
4. No flash support – so many websites that you’ll now be able to enjoy on a larger screen will have lots of broken buttons. I know that flash is dead (or dying), but many sites including the new york times integrate flash elements to enhance the browsing experience. I’m sure site designed for the mobile web (even the iphone mobile web) will look great – but on a screen that stretches nearly 10 inches, I’d want the full web experience.
5. No expandable storage or USB port – so that means I’ll need to carry my netbook or laptop in addition to my iphone along with the ipad. That’s too many devices for even me to carry around

Don’t get me wrong – the device looks beautiful and the user experience will be typically amazing as Apple always puts a premium on it; however, it fails as a true tablet device and even at its attractive price point, I will wait at least until the second generation of the device to appear (likely next year) before I consider picking one up – or at least paying for one out of my own pocket

Over the last 2 weeks I had the opportunity to travel to Europe for a ski and adventure trip to Zermatt, Zurich, Paris, and London.  It was my first time back in Europe for pleasure in a few years and it gave me an opportunity to observe & immerse myself in European mobile culture.

Here are some highlights of what I learned:

1. SMS is ubiquitous. We took a bus from Luton Airport to Heathrow (coming from Paris to London to home) and the Coach bus we took had cling-on signs on many of the windows encouraging passengers to text their feedback on the driver, comfort or experience to a shortcode. Who needs to write a letter, send a fax or call an automated IVR system when you can simply text instantly?
2. Even Grandma is mobile.  Standing on a train I watched as an older and white haired women gleefully shared an MMS picture of her grandson and his dog to her friends that she had just received
3. Many phones but not necessarily smart phones.  I saw very few blackberrys, iphones, or other smartphones. People we interacted with mostly carried Nokia, LG  or Samsung phones
4. Wifi is everywhere but not very reliable. Having turned off my data roaming ability on my iphone in order to keep my phone bill under $1,000, i was constantly searching or checking for wifi.  Many cafes had wifi – but it either wasn’t working or you had to go through a 7 step process to get access. I tried to pay a few times on some of the city services, but the sites weren’t optimized for mobile and only in French… which made it difficult to figure out what to do.
5. Roaming rates are killer. If you go to Europe, make sure your mobile device is unlocked so that you can buy a local SIM card for data so that you can cost effectively use your GPS, check email, or look for things to do.
6. 2d codes are not yet ubiquitous. The Metro paper in Paris didn’t have any 2d bar codes, but interestingly enough many of the free tourist guides came with QR Codes. The call to action sent consumers to 2dscan.com – the same site the National Post uses to auto-download 2d bar code readers for their paper. It’s also the same one I’ve used recently for our SKI PRO Ontario magazine.

Like in Canada, it’s expected that the iphone will be offered from multiple carriers all over Europe over the next 6 months.

In combination with the next generation android-based devices about to hit the market, I’m sure my next visit will yield very different observations about how mobile fits into the European culture.

Recently I was having a healthy debate with my friend Steve Sorge over at Mobile Fringe around “Wap vs App” – or should marketers focus their efforts on building out a mobile website vs. building out a mobile application.

Since my presentation at marketing magazine’s mobile 2.0 conference, my point of view had been shifting towards Wap – or the mobile web. My reasoning being that with the mobile safari browser webkit being commonly adapted by nearly all smartphones we can now build once and deploy many times with few changes to fit each platform while outputting a very rich experience.

This is not only cost effective but ensures reach – which is key if your audience isn’t on an iphone yet.

Steve pointed out that most people with iphones would rather search or browse on the App store than on Google – a huge shift in behaviour. With over 85,000 applications and 2 billion downloads, the App store is evolving to become your life tool for anything you need. After all, isn’t there an App for everything?

I was being trumped with my own traditional point of view – user experience trumps technology every time.

Yesterday it was announced in the media that the iphone is coming to Bell and Telus next month. Having recently completed upgrades to their networks to enable GSM (which is what the iphone works on), they can now offer the iphone and compete head on with Rogers. With iphone users already driving +60% of all mobile web traffic in Canada, what will happen when you suddenly make the most popular device available to everybody else?

2010 will be the year that the iphone changes the mobile landscape in Canada.

Although Canadians have other great options in the Palm Pre and the pending new Storm from Blackberry, making the iphone available to nearly all Canadians is a game changer – for both consumers and marketers.

So… Wap or App?

I’m back to the middle. You should probably do both, but start with a mobile website – unless your target audience is already on the iphone. By this time next year, that could be everybody.

Late last week I downloaded the latest iPhone app for facebook dubbed version 3.0. Within minutes of downloading this app it was clear that this was not only the best version yet for facebook, but one of the best apps period. Here are some highlights of the new app:

• Brand new interface that better leverages the native iPhone interface which makes what was a good user experience even better
• Better search that is also integrated into the entire experience
• Updated news feed
• Ability to “like” and “comment” more easily
• RSVP for Events
• Ability to create new photo albums, upload photos to any album, zoom, easier tagging, and profile Pictures albums
• Access to pages – FINALLY!

This last upgrade is especially relevant to marketers who have been frustrated at spending time and energy in creating a business or brand page on facebook only to have it unavailable for viewing on mobile

You can now browse pages and even bookmark your favorite fan pages right to your main homepage screen.

What’s amazing here is that it’s now easier for me to access my top fan pages on my iPhone than it is on the desktop version.

What’s missing? Push notifications that could make your facebook app more relevant that your twitter app. Stay tuned for version 3.1 which should add this ability – which again will give marketers and brands a chance to better tap into this social community.

Last month ZoomPass launched in Canada giving Canadians the ability to send and receive money through a new mobile enabled service. Here’s how they describe their new service:

Zoompass is a unique mobile payment service that offers a new way for you to send, receive, and request money quickly and securely, using a mobile device operating on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo, or TELUS network. With a mobile application that can be downloaded onto your mobile phone and synchronized with your phone’s contact list, you can use Zoompass anytime, anywhere while on the go.

Zoompass funds are held in a stored value account that is linked to your personal bank account or credit card, which makes loading your Zoompass account and transferring money simple and convenient. You can also use the optional Zoompass Prepaid MasterCard® card with PayPass™, linked to your Zoompass account, to make purchases in-store and online or withdraw cash from an ATM.

Think of it as paypal for Canadians that is fully supported and enabled by Canadian carriers.

It’s a great idea that is long overdue for our market.  After receiving an SMS from ZoomPass notifying me that I’ve received $1 from a friend, I decided to register and take this new service for a test drive.

ZoomPass unfortunately was anything but quick or easy.  Here is a summary of my experience:

1. I received an SMS message that $1 had been sent to me. Super!
2. The SMS message contained a registration link. I clicked on it and was brought to a website that was not optimized for mobile as the flash movie showed up as an empty box in my mobile browser. Moving around the broken flash box on,  I found a registration link and began the process. The SMS should have brought me directly to the registration page and that page should have detected I was coming from an iphone and delivered an optimized experience. Many consumers would give up upon seeing a broken / non-optimized page.
3. The registration process was long. I actually abandoned the process and started over again the following day when I had time to go through the entire process. A better practice would be to allow users to stop & save where they are in the process if they need to continue later. Having to start over again will not motivate people to go through the process again… well unless of course there is a ton of  $$$ waiting for them
4. I received another SMS message with a verification code that I was instructed to enter in step 3 of online registration process. I had to then go to my laptop, go to ZoomPass and then enter the verification code received since this simply was not easy / intuitive for me to do on my mobile device.  Ideally when I received the SMS message with the verification key all I would have to do is click on a link that would auto-verify. This would save time, energy and make the experience much better.
5. After successfully registering I realized there were fees attached to actually depositing my $1 into my bank account – which also required extra steps to validate my banking information. At this point I decided to abandon the process

I then read their press release and discovered 2 points of interest:

1. They have a mobile enabled website at zoompass.mobi which I discovered is fully w3c compliant… which means it will work on all mobile devices. Although great,  their mobile website is very basic with little functionality and is designed for the lowest common device denominator.  As very few Canadians on non-smartphones actually surf the mobile web, I think they need to develop a mobile web version that is optimized for today’s devices and should have an auto-detection script enabled on their website that will serve the right version. Having to promote 2 URLs (one for the desktop experience and one for mobile) just doesn’t make sense anymore.  Typing in zoompass.mobi on my laptop should auto-redirect to the desktop version and visa versa when I type in zoompass.com on my mobile device. This is a best practice that is easy to implement.
2. They have a mobile application! I went to the iphone App store and did a search for zoompass and came up with apps for Meteors, Photo Mania, and DinoColor!  I did some further research and discovered that their app is only available for the blackberry storm! Although the storm is a good device, it doesn’t have nearly the market share of the iphone.  Recent industry reports from Admob and others indicate that there are about 2.5 million iphones and itouches in Canada and about 250,000 Storms. Given that the iphone is driving well over 60% of mobile web traffic, it would have made more sense to launch with an iphone App first so that reach & buzz could be maximized. Apparently an iphone app is in the works.

In order for this service to get mass adoption, it needs to be dead simple & easy for the average consumer to find, use, and share with others. It’s still way easier for me to use my paypal account or send an email money transfer (EMT) through my online banking site.

ZoomPass is in beta mode – so I’ll cut them some slack and remain cautiously postive and optimistic about the future of this service.

If they can address some of the usability issues identified above, they will be well on their way to not only being the first multi-carrier supported mobile payment system, but the defacto standard in Canada.

The annual world mobile congress (wmc) starts today in Barcelona, Spain.  

The WMC will bring a lot of news and announcements. As the largest mobile phone show in the world, GSMA not only attracts people from around the world, but also sets the stage for what will happen in wireless for the next 12 months.

Although this will be the first year in a few that I haven’t had the opportunity to participate directly, I’m looking forward to following some of my favorite mobile blogs and news sites this week to stay at least partially connected to what is happening.  Look for mini-updates in my twitter feed and some summary stories on this blog. 

Look for some big announcements this week including a new smartphone from Toshiba and Acer, an upgraded mobile platform / os from Microsoft, hopefully news of a 3G GSM version of the Palm Pre, more Google Android devices, news on rival app stores to compete with Apple, details into how Nokia is going to focus more on services than hardware and probably nothing from Apple who were noticeably absent last year as well.  

What are you hoping will be announced this week?

Today while reviewing the weekly carnival of the mobilists, I came across a review of Palm’s new Synergy over at atmaspheric.

What’s most interesting about Synergy is that it accesses the “cloud” in order to sync all your calendar, email, and contact accounts.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple’s iphone, you don’t need a central computer to sync or save data. There isn’t even a button to sync.. all you do is use the device and when changes, additions, or deletions are made, the Pre will automatically make the updates through the cloud to the original sources.

For example, if you are accessing your facebook contact list and you update a phone number on your Pre, it will auto-sync your facebook account.

As I commented on the original post, wouldn’t it be super if they went one step further an aggregated & synchronized all your social data? It would be like Yahoo’s oneconnect or friendfeed for mobile – but native to your mobile OS.

By leveraging the cloud and aggregating all data, we could see some nifty new services that create the semantic web experience (or web 3.0) many have been talking about since the term “Web 2.0″ was coined.

Microsoft has introduced their own 2d bar code called the “Microsoft Tag” (how original) which differentiates from most other types of 2d codes by being colour based and using a different shape pattern than what has been typically seen.  See article here at onedegree.ca for overview of 2d codes.

Microsoft makes it sound like they invented this space, but the reality is that their distribution reach and power online and offline (especially through gaming) means this could quickly become the de-facto standard worldwide for 2d bar codes – even though the QR code has been around since 2002 and already widely adopted in Japan, Korea, and even the Uk.

What are the advantages of the Microsoft Tag over other 2d codes?

Functionally there doesn’t appear to be anything unique. You can encode your own Microsoft tag to link to your facebook profile, blog, video or whatever you like – just like every other 2d code.

Having said that, the Microsft Tag is the first 2d code that works really well on my iphone. 

I’m not sure if that’s because the code reader is better equipped to handle low resolution cameras (like the one on my iphone), or if their 2d code is just easier to read & interpret due to fact that it may be easier to interpret colour over little black lines.

Getting my iphone setup was as easy as doing a search on the app store and downloading the free reader.

Check out their promotional video here. What do you think?

Around this time last year I made some outrageous predictions about what was to come in 2008.  Let’s take a quick look back and see how well I did: 

1. SMS third party advertising will take off.  Didn’t really see this take off in Canada and with the mobile web / and mobile widgets taking off, I can’t see this as a big focus in 2009. Having said that, there are more services popping up that allow media planners to venture into SMS as well as the Mobile web.
2. Mobile Web Advertising will become part of your media buy. This definitely happened in 2008 in Canada with Quattro and Yahoo offering a good mix of inventory to buy. This will only continue to grow in 2009. 
3. MMS Common short codes will arrive. This did happen in 2008 – although not all mobile aggregators are able to facilitate this for you. MyThumb mobile was the first to offer MMS short codes and now you can also go through Magnet Mobile too. 
4. Mobile payments will start to emerge as a new payment medium. There was a great conferences this year on the subject in Canada facilitated by the Canadian Institute.  RBC and Visa launched their pilot program for contactless payments in Canada. Visa also recently launched 4 new international pilot programs. Mastercard also announced this past May that they’re launching a pilot to extend their pay pass program to mobile. 
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada. It sure did – and I was right that they waited until the 3G version came out. I also predicted that other retailers may offer the device – which didn’t happen… although both Walmart and select Sam’s Club stores will be selling them in the near future.  Best Buy and Future shop also announced that they would be carrying it. 
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal. Although not as low as we’d like, we finally have affordable plans in Canada. Yah! I was paying $80 for 500 megs last year and now I’m paying $45 for 500 megs and includes a voice plan. 
7. Mobile web will catch fire. I was partially right here. Thanks to smartphones like the iphone, more consumers discovered the mobile web, but more specifically mobile widgets that grab data from the mobile web have really taken off thanks to the iphone app store. 
8. New mobile carriers will be announced. This happened and was blogged about here.
9. Google will launch their own phone (gphone) with their own operating system and buy U.S. spectrum. The first two happened, but they decided not to aggressively pursue spectrum… this time. There are other auctions coming up in 2009…
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point. We definitely saw a huge leap in 2008 to mobile – with facebook, linkedin, hi-5 and twitter all offering great mobile options through widgets and mobile web. Twitter saw over 600% growth and a big part of this can be attributed to mobile.  Mobile only social networking sites such as itsmy.com also saw big growth in 2008. They even partnered up with my favorite mobile and social search tool taptu to enhance their member services. 

I published a second list in August as part of a mobile insert at Strategy Magazine.  We’ll take a look at those ones in my next post before making some super crazy predictions for 2009

Over the past year I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about the frustrations many Canadian Marketers have had around the lack of data available on how Canadians use and interact with mobile.

This week Lemay-Yates Associates Inc. (LYA)has released a 100 page report after conducting extensive research into the Canadian broadband mobile market over the last few months covering handsets offered by 17 mobile carriers, flanker brands and MVNOs/resellers, as well as their features.

LYA also surveyed Canadian consumers to assess which mobile data services they currently use and to characterize the overall penetration and current usage of Canadian consumers.

Check out this 7 minute interview that highlights many of the findings (sorry for the secondary browser link – bnn does not offer video embed – shame!):

Their mobile report also addresses questions such as:

• What is the status of brand competition in each region of Canada: from BC, top Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces
• What is the status of handsets with GPS capabilities for each service provider?
• Which carrier is the champion in supporting social networking applications?
• What is the current penetration of social networking applications such as facebook and MySpace among Canadian consumers?
• Who currently uses heavy data applications such as watching streaming TV or YouTube?
• How many iPhones could Rogers sell over the relatively short term and which carriers are more at risk of losing customers to the iPhone?
• How much do Canadians think mobile data is worth to them?
• Mobile carriers and service providers, broadcasters, third party applications developer, equipment and handset suppliers will gain new insight and a better understanding of this rapidly emerging market by purchasing this Report.

Want more details? Go to their website here.