Tag: android

- by Joe Duffelen

The Future is Mobile

The question used to be: do you have a mobile phone? Now we’re asking; what’s  your smartphone? Apple?, Android? or Blackberry? Last year something happened that has never happened  before; according to Henry Blodget, the number of smartphones sold exceeded the number of personal computers (PCs) sold.

With a rapidly growing smartphone and tablet market, the operating system developers and manufacturers face a strong battle to become the dominant player within this competitive space. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Android and Apple are the current market leaders and arguably other manufacturers and operating systems are falling at the wayside. Surely, for them, it is now too late, or perhaps not! The Business Insider slide deck by Henry Blodget reveals that over half the mobile audience in the U.S does not use a smartphone; so if IDC’s predicted 49.5% increase of smartphone purchases occurs by 2015, there is certainly room for Microsoft, Blackberry or any other manufacturer to establish themselves as market leaders. Although time is of the essence and they must move fast.

Is your business mobile?

The Financial Times cites a JPMorgan prediction that 657 million smartphones will leave stores in 2012 and IDC predicts smartphone sales will rise to 982 million in 2015. It has been a prediction on the tip of many industry experts’ tongues for a while; organisations will NEED to be mobile savvy. Fast, relevant and easily navigated information is what is wanted by  every organisation and every user.

From a business perspective, this can also only mean two things. Your web presence needs to shift from the desktop to the mobile device and you must discover how you engage and transact via the mobile medium.

What is the way forward?

At Volume we have developed a number of mobile apps, mobile sites and mobile-optimised sites:

Our own web site www.volume.co.uk is mobile-optimised. The site is developed using the latest technology (MVC HTML/CSS2/CSS3 and jQuery) to ensure the user experience is of the highest quality if viewed on a smartphone or tablet device. 10% of the people who have visited the Volume website in 2012 have come from mobile devices.

If a user visits your website through their smartphone or tablet device to only discover the website to be incompatible this could mean a number of lost opportunities; a sale, a lead, a potential business partner?

Then there are Mobile apps. Mobile application software is designed specially to offer the user a seamless experience, for a specific product, service or game. Volume designed and developed a mobile app for Zebra Technologies, ZipShip. This was intended to allow Zebra printer users to search for available printer consumables and media for various Zebra machines, cancelling out phone calls, emails and the waiting game; making the process mobile and instantaneous. The beauty of ZipShip is the convenience, ease of use and captivating trance it has on a consumer; there are no distractions, just you and the product you need to be delivered when and where you want. There is obviously one implication to consider when creating a mobile application; an app is only available on the specific operating system in which it was designed for – to make it available on all operating systems could prove costly. Therefore research into your target market is essential to ensure your mobile application is relevant and used.

‘Mobile optimisation versus mobile apps’ is another blog. For now, I will leave you with this: Dan Frommer from the Business Insider quoted Matt Galligan saying;

…the future of mobile is the future of everything.

So watch this space and think carefully about how your business can be active by preparing for the mobile take-over, instead of letting it become something you employ once traffic to your website and online sales begin to decrease.

- by Volume Tech Lab

Volume @ Droidcon 2011.

So it’s all over for another year. Droidcon UK is the place for developers, entrepreneurs and leading industry figures to come together to talk about the Android Operating System, by some estimates, the world’s most widely used Mobile Operating System.

Droidcon 2011

Photo by Kevin McDonagh

What struck me on arrival was the number of people wielding fondleslabs (a.k.a tablets). The audience for Droidcon is certainly at the leading edge of technology, but for a device that was nowhere to be seen two years ago, the sheer number of them in evidence was astonishing. Despite the failures of the HP tablet, the latest figures from Gartner have suggested that by 2015, tablets will have effective parity with PCs.

So what makes them so popular? The long battery life? The portability? After all, there have been attempts to produce tablet devices before, yet they never caught on.

The importance of User Experience

Some of the most interesting talks were about improving User Experience (UX) – this is an area where many people would agree Android falls down when compared to iOS and the iPad. I went to two talks about UX, one by Greg Taylor (@greg_taylor) and another by Giorgio Venturi (@gventuri). Being a developer, user experience is often something I leave to Volume’s dedicated UX team. What I found fascinating was how seemingly small decisions can have a major impact on how users perceive your app, and whether they will even bother to open it a second time. Some great examples of good UX would be apps that have a shallow navigation structure, making the key functionality discoverable using traditional tabs or the newer carousel-style tabs, and avoiding the use of dashboard-style home screens or using the menu button for navigation. Reducing ’negative energy’ for the user and making using the app an enjoyable experience overall all helps to give your app the edge.

The pen-ultimate talk

Picture a PDA 10 years ago and it would probably include a stylus. HTC has established a new technology that works with the capacitive displays employed by modern devices and has a much finer level of detail; this means you could paint a broad stroke with one pen and draw fine lines with another. I’m not convinced this will take off, at least in the consumer space. The major selling point of a tablet is that it’s quick and easy – I can’t see people wanting to carry a pen with their tablet and having to get it out each time they use certain apps. Still, it’s nice to see a company trying something new – and I can imagine it being popular for businesses. Being able to scribble down notes like you would on paper and having them converted to searchable text is something that I would find useful, although Microsoft was touting this back in 2001 with its ’Pocket PC’ platform and it never took off. I don’t know whether the new HTC devices will do this; I hope they do.

The rise of the tablet

This brings me back to my original question. I went in wondering why tablets have become so popular and the answer is obvious: user experience. The success of the iPad is living proof that offering a great user experience can sell a product. Modern tablets offer a cut-down, simplified experience that gets a user straight into the functionality that matters: web browsing, email, and apps tailored for touch. As a developer, this is something I will definitely be taking on board when writing code.