Even the US Military wants mobile APPs!

There has been a flurry of news over the past few days including the words “US Military” and “mobile Apps”

part one:

DARPA, home of the pentagon’s technology research gurus, has announced it wants to buy an “AppStore” to use for distributing mobile apps to soldiers.

This is newsworthy on several fronts:

1: DoD (department of defence) are thinking of using normal, everyday-type connectivity (3G), on normal, every-day type devices! (Android)

2: They plan on taking their own 3G coverage with them, to save relying on the possibly unfriendly locals when in far away lands

3: they have dropped both WindowsMobile and iPhone in favour of Android

4: they plan on asking the open market to bid for funding to make apps

 

Read those again. Bog standard kit. Mainstream networks. Open standards. Open market for apps. Wow.

 

part two:

A couple of days later, DoD announces the A4A (Apps for the Army) initiative to encourage software-savvy soldiers to propose and make apps (mobile and other).

There is only enough funding for 100 lucky soldiers, but this is clearly just the beginning because …

 

part three:

DARPA are expected to announce that they are looking to buy apps. If you have a good idea for an app, and the technology skills to make it, they might well be in the market to buy it.

 

“Flurry of news” is definitely the phrase, here. Until a few weeks ago I had seen hardly any publicity from the US military around mobile learning. Here in the UK, there has been a bit more, with people like Major Roy Evans who has been doing some innovative trials in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You can here him talking about it here (though you will need to ffw the first few minutes, which have no sound!)

Publicity. Nice projects. But quite small trials.

 

Now, all of a sudden the US has significantly upped the game and leapt for a very mainstream, and imminently achievable solution. Wow!

 

Bring on those Android Apps, and as Google says, “don’t be evil” :-)

NokMote - Wii style interface with your Nokia !!

Here at moblearn we love people who challenge the way we use our technology, and challenge our assumptions about interfaces.

The iPhone / iPod Touch did that for me with its web browsing. Tactile zooming. Automatic rotation.

But did you know some of the same magic is available for Nokia N95?

Like the iPhone, it has an accelerometer inside, but until now it wasn't used for much.

Until, that was, a french programmer called Samir got hold of it ... and produced NokMote. Check out the video - and be sure to watch the end bit, where he uses the phone as a remote control. Amazing!

Which phones are my students using?

We build applications for all sorts of different phones, and despite the hype, many of the development tools and platforms we use are fairly stable: (MMS, SMS, Flash, Flash Lite, C for PPC etc).

The one technology that we seem to be endlessly tweaking is Java for phones (J2ME), because despite the good-karma that surrounds java's "runs on any device" ethos, the harsh reality is that each phone is different, and J2ME applications need to be tweaked endlessly to deal with new phones.

In fact, we have a huge box full of ex-ebay phones we use for testing.

But how do we know WHICH phones to test on, and which to build for?

It is a bit of a black art, and we rely heavily on our friends (thanks Wolf!) but here are a few useful links:

1. top seller lists are a good start:
http://www.ciao.co.uk/charts.php/ListId/3

2. then, you need to try to get some "install base" lists. This is a lot harder to do, as you need access to some insider knowledge, or very expensive reports. Here is a UK list for jan07:

Nokia	6230i	1,614,900
Samsung	D500	981,660
Motorola	RAZR V3 Black Edition	932,760
Sony Ericsson	K800i	879,900
Nokia	6230	860,470
Sony Ericsson	K750i	792,680
Nokia	6280	781,560
Samsung	D600	774,260
Nokia	3310	769,520
Nokia	1100	744,440

but this still doesn't help you narrow down to your target group. What we do for this group is:

3: We make our own lists. Because we offer free previews of many of our java games, we log all incoming connections against phone types. That way we can spot trends, as well as see new phone-variants we don't support yet and do some preventative development!

here is a sneaky screen dump from one of our games. You can see there are two columns - the red (pre-support) shows the number of downloads we missed out on, and the green (post-support) are the success stories. For total attempts you need to add these together.

Make your own Playstation (PSP) resources!

Wow! This is a hot-off-the-press sneak preview.

I have just seen some of our mobile learning materials running on a PSP!



We have been dabbling with it for a while, but what I am looking at right now is materials, built by a non-technical author, using our Mylearning authoring tool.



The games were intended for display on a PocketPC, but the team here in cambridge have been reconfiguring our mobile framework, and now it runs just fine on the PSP as well!!!

It looks awesome. (if I say so myself)



Yet another step forward to give authoring tool to the masses, so they can transform all sorts of mobile devices into learning tools!

So far, I know that they have been used on TabletPCs, UMPCs, PCs. PocketPCs and Whiteboards - but this is the first real gaming platform to be included.

Huge thanks to Juan, Ivars and Chris who helped make this rather out-there dream into a reality!

free SIM cards?

if, like us, you have a lot of mobile devices hanging around for trialling and testing, you will also be familiar with the pain of SIM swapping.

(picture the scene. You have 10 different phones you need to test your new phone game on. Each of the phones need a SIM in them to start up. But since you only lkeep the phones for testing you don't have a contract per phone.)

well, the solution to your problem may be pay-as-you-go, and every now and again the phone providers offer free PAYG sim cards.

now is one of those times: here is a free sim promotion from Orange. I haven't noticed any nasty smallprint, yet.

thanks for the link, Kelly