Just spotted this from a Novarra chap (Novarra being the guys behind the ire-generating Vodafone content transformation proxy): "A well-designed content transformation server can do a better job of following the mobile best practices than a human author, especially when taking into account the capabilities of the many different mobile devices. The result will be a more consistent, uniform experience."

I'd completely disagree; I don't understand how an automated product can produce a better experience than one designed by someone taking into account the context of use, unique characteristics of mobile, and so forth. I *can* see how an automated proxy might be more rigid in defining its markup, but most of the W3C mobile web best practice recommendations are nothing to do with markup, and everything to do with common sense: something very difficult to codify into cold machine logic.

The MobileOK tests are a different matter (much more focused around markup and easier to automate), but a mobile service that complies with MobileOK without BPG is both technically perfect and practically useless.

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[Disclaimer: this post is about some work my company did. So you can't expect anything unbiased in here ;)]

So... one big thing I didn't get to write about last week was Trutap going into beta at the TechCrunch conference in the US. We've been working on the product all year; a lot of sweat's gone into it (and there's more on the way), so it's good to be able to talk publicly (ish) about it now.

Scale-wise it's the largest thing we've ever built, along almost every axis: time, team size, complexity, capability, and application size. Like everything we do in J2ME, the product is built on a foundation our Cactus platform provides for rapid mobile development, and the dev team have pushed it further than ever before: Trutap has an almost Flash-like in appearance (particularly some of the private builds we have which contain a few additional tweaks). We've done a lot of hard work on communications, optimisation and storage too - not all of which is immediately visible, or launched yet. If I can get permission I might write a post detailing some of the ways we've squeezed this into contemporary handsets, or about the development process: lots of lessons learned there across the board, but all behind the obligatory NDA.

And experience-wise it's slick; my favourite part is the in-built IM client which is gorgeous, dirt simple, and lets you handle simultaneous chats across all your different IM accounts (Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber and ICQ - with more to follow)... and nicest of all you can do this whilst updating your blog, managing your contacts, or messaging.

The product isn't finished yet: we've a busy month ahead getting ready for a full UK launch, and even after then we've a roadmap for further development. But a big "yay!" to the team at Future Platforms (Miss Lozdan and Messrs Hopper, Franglen, Skinner, Ribot, and Falletti: that's you) who've made this possible, and are carrying on the good work :)

(If you're interested in getting onto the pre-launch beta, drop me an email and I'll let you know a super secret beta code you can use. Or check out the demos online if you like.)

Blyk are launching at last: "The company is offering customers 43 minutes of voice and 217 texts a month for free as long as they opt in to receive up to six ads to their phone a day."

Good to see that they've lined up a reasonable set of advertisers, but the offer to consumers seems bizarre (43 minutes? 217 texts???) and possibly a little low, given the volume of advertising you receive in exchange for this. I'd also have a concern about the value of such a price-sensitive, fickle audience for advertisers, but hey what do I know?

Interesting to see that they're SIM free though. And I get a little tickled by their refusal to service customers over the age of 24 :)

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