Today I am handing over my beloved phone to a colleague. I have had the pleasure of using an Android for some time now, and I must say that I am really happy and impressed by the usability and performance of this phone.
I have done testing and development on the Android to see how it will support mBricks applications. The Java based Android platform is a perfect match for mBricks. The idea is to keep all the business logic, message layer and most of the UI in mBricks, then use Android native API for the functionality that needs higher performance and integration towards the hardware, e.g. web browsing and maps. This will ensure a very cost efficient way of creating high performance applications for Android. My colleague will continue the work with Android and mBricks. I think its going to be a important platform for us.
My new phone is going to be a BlackBerry Bold, not a bad exchange I would say. I think that BlackBerry will get increased marked shares in Norway and with their strong focus and appeal for business users it fits mBricks perfect. I will start porting some of the mBricks applications to the Blackberry platform, I will keep you posted about how development for Blackberry proceeds.
Pål Berg, CTO mBricks
May 27th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Interesting to see the different strategy concerning screen sizes on the Android G1 and Blackberry Bold. How do you like the 480×320 wide screen on the Blackberry?
May 28th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Yes, the G1 and Bold have selected different default screen size strategy, but the G1 can operate in both modes landscape and portrait, depending on use of the hardware keyboard. I think that it is better to read text in landscape mode, so for example when working with emails I used landscape. This is also because I find software keyboard hard to use. The next Android, the G2 has only a software keyboard and it will be interesting to see how well it will be received by the users. Google has like Apple done much work to make the user experience better.
The functionality that I really miss in the Blackberry Bold are the touch screen capability and the full integration towards Google Apps. With Google Apps the Android is of course excellent, but it seems that in near future this will also be available on Blackberry devices:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html
As a conclusion we might say that for business use, like reading and answering emails, the landscape mode is better than the portrait?