MWC09: A Flood of Mobile Statistics

The flood of  press releases from MWC has slowed to a trickle as the show winds down. This has given me a chance to catch up with another flood, the one of mobile statistics released at the show over the last three days. The most interesting numbers come from mobile  advertising network BuzzCity which conducted a survey (PDF) of visitors to the mobile sites of its 2000 publisher partners. The survey was actually conducted ON the mobile web which is … Continue reading

MWC09: Flash Lite Client Finally Free!

Adobe seems to have dropped their brain-dead practice of charging for the Flash client for mobile phones.  I never understood why the far more capable desktop client was free but Adobe expected end-users and OEMs to pay for the mobile client.  In my opinion, if the mobile client had been free from the start Flash would be the dominant mobile application platform today instead of Java ME. At MWC, Adobe  launched  a new distributable player solution that finally brings the … Continue reading

MWC09: What is Opera Turbo?

Yesterday Opera Software announced Opera Turbo which they describe as: “…a cross-platform solution, available for desktop computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-enabled devices. By compressing network traffic by up to 80%, Opera Turbo helps to enable the sustainability and scalability of networks in order to meet traffic demands and ensure a superior browsing experience.” The announcement is short on technical details but it is clear that Turbo is a proxy server that sits between the browser and web sites and … Continue reading

MWC09: TeliaSonera and Bytemobile Inserting Ads Into 3rd Party Content

Bytemobile is a mobile infrastructure services company. One of its products is web to mobile transcoder that it markets  to mobile network operators under the name Web Fidelity.  Competitors include Openwave, Novarra and Infogin.  At the Mobile World Congress today, Bytemobile announced an agreement with Sweden’s TeliaSonera.  It was an occasion to celebrate for Bytemobile as it represents the company’s 100th customer network deployment (press release). While I congratulate Bytemobile on their success, I also found something potentially troubling in … Continue reading

MWC09: Bolt Browser – New Version and Open Beta

Update: Feature list for new version added. At Mobile World Congress, Bitstream, Inc. announced that the Bolt Browser is now in public Beta, freely available to anyone without the need for a Beta code. There’s a new version too, 0.86.  I haven’t been able to find release notes or any indication of what’s new in this release.  I suspect it’s a bug fix release with no new features.  Trying 0.86 on my BlackBerry and N95-3 I immediately  noticed one bug … Continue reading

MWC09 – dotMobi Instant Mobilizer

No, I’m not at MWC (Mobile Web Congress), the huge mobile industry trade show in Barcelona.  I’m following it closely on Twitter and with a Topix search feed that picks up most of the press releases and will be covering  the mobile web news from the show.   Subscribe to the Wap Review RSS feed for reports and commentary on  major mobile web related MWC announcements. First up, DotMobi has released Instant Mobilizer which I believe is based on the Mowser … Continue reading