In a time when almost every big brand out there has some sort of mobile app just for the sake of having one, Orange has come up with one that's actually extremely useful for anyone going to Glastonbury this year. I quite like seeing this festival communication frenzy among mobile operators - and Orange seems to be winning at this point. Remember the Vodafone charging truck announced about 2 weeks ago? Orange has charging tents, but which are available for everyone (not just its customers).

(download)

Click here to download:

glastonbury-mobile-app-GDDFkBFijduedruyefnw.zip (1.3 MB)

The app's features include:

And the moment has finally come - HTC has announced its new line-up of Android devices - and they're good. 5 phones (3 product updates and 2 new ones with heavy Facebook integration), one 7" tablet. They even got Zuckerberg involved in the keynote! Apologies for the lack of diversity regarding the sources...

I'll be aiming for the Incredible S. Will post the full keynote when it goes up.

This is an ubercool use of Foursquare - to get in to this New Year's Eve party in Brooklyn, you'll have to check in on Foursquare to unlock the door.

I've recently decided to shake things up a bit and go for a BlackBerry - behold the Bold 9780. I just wanted a second smartphone with a good physical keyboard, decent battery life (OK, I also wanted BBM) and a fairly long product life cycle (as opposed to the iPhone for example). Here are some first impressions:

• the new OS6 is quite decent - I don't know if it's a massive update, but it's quite fast
  
• the App World is very strange and quite limited (they have a lot of apps that cost more than £20 - slightly different app economy?)
• messaging-wise, it's a very good companion
• compared to the Torch, I think it's a much better choice
  

I'm looking into customized QR codes for an upcoming project and happened to stumble upon this nice little stunt by Audi from Japan (these 2D codes are huge over there). Awesome! (via Content Developer)

Microsoft announced today the range of 10 phones Windows Phone 7, the long-awaited update to the Windows mobile OS, will be launching on:

• 5 of them are, of course, built by leading WinMo device manufacturer HTC
• it seems to be completely different from WinMo 6.x - in a good way
• I find it particularly interesting that Microsoft has successfully managed to impose its hardware restrictions (3 main buttons, camera button, full GUI ownership, etc)
• there's a UI demo (first video in this post) from Waggener Edstrom that I find simply too clumsy for this level

The Android mobile OS is quickly on the rise and that's a fact - but due to a combination of slightly flawed hardware and cocky developers, the Android Market (its application marketplace) is seriously being set back.

"A2SD" is an informal abbreviation for "apps to SD card", born out of some device manufacturers' peculiar decision to allocate very limited internal storage space to recent handsets. Until late Q2 2010, only manufacturers and the people behind the OS itself were to blame, as even though all Android handsets come with memory expansion slots, applications could only be installed to that very limited internal memory. Then Android 2.2 (Froyo) was released and its most significant upgrade addressed just that - it started allowing installations to the SD card.

There was only one slight catch - applications cannot be installed to the SD card by default - developers must opt in to allow their applications to be moved.

So when my HTC Desire got its update in no time (let's remember that it was the first device after Google's own Nexus One to receive that update), I instantly had a go at moving my apps over to the card. I couldn't. At first I thought it was a glitch, but quickly learned of the aforementioned rule - so I assumed it was a slight delay, that it would be just a matter of time until each developer updated their apps to allow this "A2SD". And I waited. And waited.

And then it hit me: you see, when you move an application to your SD card, you won't be able to access it (or have it run in the background) while your device is connected to a computer (be it in 'sync' or 'storage' mode). Some developers were honorable enough to leave that choice to users - so kudos to the likes of Foursquare, Flixster or ZXing Team (the people behind Barcode Scanner).

Most, however, seem to be too arrogant to do so and must somehow believe their apps are truly essential to any user - and to make matters worse, in many cases they also try to enforce obnoxious file sizes. A perfect example (and the catalyst for this hate post) is Skype for Android, which was launched earlier today. I tried to ignore the fact that until now they've been keeping Android users completely in the blue, making the app available only to a privileged few who just happened to be on a network that stuffed the company's pockets for some sort of exclusivity deal (while the iPhone app has been around for ages). Anyway, I install it - and it instantly eats up 14MB of internal storage space, with no option to move it over to that spacious SD card. I instantly removed it and gave it a one star rating on the Market, and won't consider reinstalling until they fix this - even though I do regularly use (paid) Skype Services.

Developers (big and small) are shooting themselves in the foot. Android learned from its mistakes and so did most manufacturers (most Q3-Q4 handsets now have much more generous storage space) - so why oh why am I still noticing apps with scores of desperate comments containing the words "a2sd please"?