Here the first ‘This Week In Mobile’ for 2010, a quick 5 minute easy-to-digest wrap up of the big news in mobile. I took a week off to visit some family up in northern New South Wales, and had a great break. I hope you had an enjoyable festival season too.
In the week off we missed the hype around the first Google branded Nexus One and rumored Apple tablet. Like me, you are probably tired of reading the same information, so you won’t read a thing more about this here this week.
This week in mobile we saw the release of several interesting iPhone applications in Australia, namely the official Australian Open iPhone application in time for the first tennis Grand Slam of the year which is held each January here in Melbourne. I’ll do a full review of the app, created by event partner IBM, which has an exhaustive list of features, once the tournament gets underway. In the meantime – here is the iTunes Link so you can download it and try for yourself.
Leading Australasian business commentary website Business Spectator has released an iPhone App to compliment the existing Blackberry formatted site businessspectator.mobi. The initial release is disappointing, with only the KBG opinion articles formatted for iPhone (see below). All other sections (news headlines, stocks and homepage) point to the website, which is both heavy to download and very hard to read, offering little added value to the reader. As a regular reader of this site, I hope they update this app soon and fill out the remaining features.
HSBC sponsors the app and the mobile website. You can download it free here – iTunes link.
Breville, an Australian based small appliances manufacturer that exports to Europe and North America, has created a new mobile site to better educate consumers instore when making purchase decisions. The mobile website – breville.msite.tv built by New Zealand firm The Hyperfactory – features 30 second video clips demonstrating each product and other additional information. This will be interesting to see how much impact this tactic has – provided there is significant pointers from the packaging to this site to make potential customers aware of the site.
In other news: Australia’s second largest mobile carrier Optus, a SingTel subsidiary, is planning an initial public offering that could raise $4billion and value the company at $16 billion (one billion less than its purchase price at the height of the dotcom boom a decade ago). Some commentators take SingTels enthusiasm for the IPO as a sign that its focus on smartphone plans and generous data plans is working for it in gaining revenue share on rival Telstra.
Finally, it is almost impossible at the moment not to report on Google, and through all the other big Google news this week (Nexus One and China relations) came the news that Google has removed over 50 banking apps from Android Store after concerns over security breaches. The applications had been created by a mysterious developer going by the name of ‘Droid09′ and have highlighted a weakness in the Android Market approval process which is present in the certification process required of apps made available through the iPhone App Store or through Signed by Symbian programs.
