A Firm Grip On Handset Design: "he saw Chinese cell-phone makers on the rise, but he found their handset designs uninspiring."

Playing with that NEC I-mode handset confirmed this for me; the external design and data services on the handset are lovely, but the rest of the UI needs urgent assistance if these guys are going to sell successfully into Europe.

The Fix Online urge you to send banal postcards to dictators: "anyone can send a letter to a dictator saying how dare you do this to fellow humans you disgusting man/men etc,etc…. The UN can try them in the war crimes court but if you really want to get to them. Really punish them, then you need to send them banal postcards for no reason."

Incredibly well-researched and incisive article on casual gaming: "But there’s a growing movement of simpler, smaller, much less flashy games that don’t require long periods of deep gameplay, called casual games, that promise to be even bigger."

See Me TV: "See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of millions.

Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of cash."

Interesting things about this:

1. It's 3 making the most of one of their big differentiators: video.
2. The payments are being made by PayPal, not through the existing billing relationship 3 have with their customers.

But how are they going to stop the inevitable abuse of the service?

More from FPs roving reporter, Thom Hopper, at Orange Code Camp in Opio:

"Today has been long and has had a greater number of sessions than yesterday, or for that matter tomorrow. Saw a lot of cool stuff and managed to glean myself a free Sony Ericsson K600i which is still making me drool, and I have had my SIM in it for almost an hour now. We have no Sudoku for it so I will sort that out when i get back.

Key points:

Symbian, lets not go there. It seems that symbian across multiple devices is not a good thing. For a single customer who needs external hardware to replace, say, an expensive custom device, eg; barcode scanner, then Series 60 (i.e. Symbian on a single target handset) would be a good idea, for mass market products then Java seems to b the way to go, but think we all knew that already. The Symbian signed process for Symbian 9 which i wont go into here seems to be a direct attempt to shaft the independent developer along with the malware developer at the same time. You need to buy a key from somone before you can even submit your apps to
be tested (which costs money).

USIM

The nice people at Gemplus tell me that the future aplications will be installed on the SIM (for which memory will range up to 1 gig). I see this being a wonderful thing for DRM and cirtification but not for any real user applications. I could be wrong on that, it does make it easy to update an app using text messaging for example. Midlets on the handset can communicate with the sim using JSR 177, this could be where the future of SIM apps lies.

I have gleaned contact details from a few people, but key people are:

Savaje. mobile handsets with pure Java environment so: multitasking OS with inherent multi-midlet support. Exact JSR implementations including 177 and 3D, PIM etc.

A guy from a testing company: they do Java verified in the UK, but they are 'all about the Orange'. This means that when Orange start their own signing process for products to be come 'Orange compatible' they do the two in one, making the proces
cheaper.

Cool stuff: net beans designer thing for graphical constuction of midlet interfaces, I can only asume with LCDUI. I have it on cd.

P.S. Point of interest: less biscuits with 'nice' writen on them than previously expected."