Microsft & HTC get intimated

The companies announced today that they have reached a licensing agreement. HTC will pay MS for leveraging their advanced patent licenses in the mobile space. The fact that Apple's pending lawsuit against HTC which is really directly against Android is a good move for HTC. It is certainly a 3 way corporation to fight against the mobile giant Apple's dominance.

ArcTechnica and AdMob released data traffic for the US and worldwide. The iPhone is certainly still the big dominance in the US. But Android is sneaking up from below. Sadly the other OS are trailing behind with a pretty big margin. The overall data traffic for smartphone still garners a mere 17 percent of the overall traffic. Yet, it is a astonishing 400% growth last quarter. More on this story.

iPhone & network load.

One of the main reasons, other than too many people are overloading networks, that iPhone is causing such headache for operators (esp AT&T)is that the paging channel is not implemented. In order to save battery life, smartphones completely drop off from the connection when data is done and reconnect when data is needed. This requires the re-establishment to the network again and eating up the channel bandwidth rather than using the paging channel and using keep alive message.

Android Fragmentation

According to IMS Research, Number of Android based handsets is expected to be 20 million shipped by the end of the year. Certainly a big achievement for a hot OS. However, this comes with like everything else, growing pain - fragmentation. There are two types of fragmentation for this platform. First it is the OS itself and the second one is physical design.

The Android OS is now at version 2.1 which has few major revisions since its launch. Each revision comes with different features and interfaces that developer and applications may chuck on one device but works great on the other.

Screen size and physical design is also an issue for developers. Android is supposed to be able to handle different screen size - only the ones it supports and uses Android's own resources type. Like the Archos 5 Internet tablet is certainly not part of this category.

Developers need to be aware of this. Prepare your apps to handle this type of different resources. Or take your battle and choose only the platforms you think make most sense for your app.

Can NFC play an important role in small biz growth

It seems the NFC industry is like the interactive TV industry... we are here, now. (repeat that for 5 years).

With the increasingly smartphone adoption rate, this may change as people are relying more on their phone which is no longer a voice device.

Businessweek has an article recently about the overall contactless mobile payment. Certainly enterprise can generate extra revenue with this technology as soon as they can figure out the revenue model. what about small business? it is an largely untapped market that I think can help reduce operating cost with this kind of technology.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/europeinsight/archives/2010/03/alcatel-lucent_1.html