LiveGO: One app for IM, Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Back in 2009, I asked for one social network to rule them all because I was tired of following friends, status updates and location check-ins on multiple platforms. That hasn’t happened, and now I have at least a half-dozen apps on my smartphone to navigate the crazy social currents. But there is some smart software that can, at the very least, mildly aggregate social networking activity. LiveGO is one of the newest such apps for iOS, and I took it for a brief spin on my iPod touch this morning.

LiveGO is essentially one app that houses both instant messenger accounts as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ activity. The software actually started up in 2006 as a web-based IM client called MessengerFX, and the web roots show through in the app. From a technical standpoint, the software is mainly an IM client with wrappers for the social network services, so you won’t see redesigned clients for Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Instead, LiveGO integrates the standard web interfaces for each.

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As a result, it offers a single app where you can quickly switch between social networks with the press of a button. Sure, you could run each app individually in iOS and multitask between them, but I find it much faster to just tap a button in LiveGO to move back and forth between networks. And the software is a full-featured IM client that supports MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and GTalk. LiveGO also supports IM notifications, but only for three hours after inactivity or closure of the application.

Again, LiveGO is more of an aggregator and doesn’t add new functionality to social network management, but it’s free and might be a faster way to stay in tune with friends on different networks.

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Gartner: Still no true iPad challengers through 2015

Media tablet sales are set to grow from 17.6 million last year to 326.3 million in 2015, and the bulk of them will continue to be Apple iPads. So says Gartner, which on Thursday put forth a four-year estimate of tablet sales by operating system. The numbers reflect that Apple has a large head start with a mature tablet, as all other competitors are still struggling to catch up. That premise doesn’t surprise, but Gartner’s projected growth of QNX-powered tablets does.

Even over the next four years, as competing tablets and their supporting ecosystems mature, Gartner projects Apple’s iPad will hold a majority share of all tablets sales over the next four years. Android will continue to chase for the No. 2 spot but still manage just over a third of market share by 2015, while QNX and Microsoft slates bring up the rear. HP is considered to be out of the game completely due to abandoning the TouchPad hardware business with a massive inventory fire-sale. I think there’s a very slim chance that situation reverses itself due to speculation of HP replacing its current CEO, Leo Apotheker.

Here’s how Gartner sees the tablet market taking shape, with all figures in thousands:

A few thoughts jump to mind. First, I don’t doubt Apple’s dominance in the tablet market throughout the next few years. If anything, I think it’s understated by the estimates. That’s not to say the iPad is the best tablet for everyone, but it currently has the broadest customer appeal and most mature ecosystem for applications and services. Apple gave itself a good 18-month lead in the market and others are still scrambling to offer a fully comparable tablet experience.

I also wonder how Amazon’s upcoming tablet plays into the estimates as we already know the device is based on Android, even if it’s heavily customized so as to hide Google’s interface. The same holds true for the popular and extensible Barnes & Noble Nook Color, which ought to see a hardware refresh in the near future. I suspect that with weak sales of traditional Android tablets, these combination e-readers / tablets will make up the bulk of Android tablet sales, but Gartner makes no comment on that aspect.

Then there’s QNX. Earlier this week, I noted that Research In Motion shipped a scant 200,000 PlayBook tablets with QNX in the most recent quarter. That figure follows an estimated 500,000 PlayBooks shipped in the quarter prior to that. The data reflects shipped PlayBooks, not actual sales, and even if they were sales, I don’t see how Gartner expects RIM to sell 3 million PlayBooks this year. Even with a software update to add native email and support for Android applications, it appears impossible that RIM will sell 2.3 million tablets or more between now and the end of 2011.

It’s too early to call out any numbers for Microsoft tablets, although a touch-friendly Metro interface and ARM processor support for Windows 8 gets Microsoft in the game. Gartner expects a reasonably quick uptake once Windows tablets arrive, but I’ll wait and see the final product before taking a stab at sales. Regardless, the iPad is still the once and future king of tablets; at least for the next few years.

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Samsung stands to lose, not gain, by open-sourcing bada

Since adopting Google’s Android platform, Samsung has witnessed massive growth in its smartphone sales, currently rivaling Apple for the top spot globally. The company’s march to become the smartphone king began in earnest last year with a solid strategy: Design one great device and tweak it slightly for individual carriers as needed. The Samsung Galaxy S was that one great device last year, and its successor, the Galaxy S II, is already Samsung’s fastest-selling smartphone ever.

But Android is only part one of Samsung’s master plan. Part two is bada, the company’s own proprietary mobile platform. While Android has boosted sales, revenue and market share, it has also allowed Samsung to invest time and money into bada as a platform and an ecosystem complete with its own application store. The upstart operating system is already doing well, reportedly outselling Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform in the first quarter of this year with estimated sales of 3.5 million handsets. So why then would Samsung want to make the mistake of open-sourcing the bada platform?

How did this same approach work out for Nokia?

The talk of turning bada into an open-source project comes by way of a “person familiar with the matter” who spoke with the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper ran the story on Tuesday and reports that Samsung make take this step next year. While one can’t predict the future, it’s easy to look back and learn from the past, and in this case, Samsung need only look to Nokia, which has recently dropped to being the No. 3 global smartphone maker.

There are a number of reasons that Nokia’s Symbian platform eventually failed in the market: a slowness to modernize, a sometimes clumsy user interface and being late to the game with effective touch controls to name a few. But Nokia’s decision to consolidate the platform in 2008 with plans to open-source it and rely on other hardware partners to improve the code didn’t help either. A few niche handset makers such as Fujitsu still use Symbian, but Sony Ericsson, Motorola and even Samsung eventually abandoned the platform and moved to Android. Nokia, too, has moved on by partnering with Microsoft this past February to use Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform going forward.

Given that Samsung is able to grow bada smartphone sales and build up the platform’s application store — prior to adding support for Android in March, the Samsung Apps store already had 13,000 bada titles and enjoyed 100 million app downloads — it simply doesn’t make sense to give up control of the platform. There’s little to gain and much to lose in the smartphone market if Samsung does open-source bada.

Samsung is improving bada quickly by itself

Perhaps bada will mature marginally faster through the efforts of outside companies or developers, but I’d argue that the platform is moving along quite nicely on its own. When bada first debuted in 2010, it looked like a relatively basic mobile operating system – so much so that I thought it was a mistake to launch the platform. Fast-forward to present day, and you’ll see that bada 2.0 has quickly gained more advanced features, and the sales figures have proven me wrong. Last month, Samsung announced capable new bada 2.0 phones and showed off this video of the updated platform, highlighting new multitasking functionality, voice recognition, NFC support and Wi-Fi Direct technology to name just a few:

Keeping control will help market share

With bada 2.0, Samsung has created what it calls a “smartphone for everyone,” meaning it’s a platform for the masses, not the early adopters, and it has done so on its own. What incentive is there to open the platform up to others? If another handset maker wants to use bada, it won’t help Samsung’s hardware sales or market share, although the company could gain marginally through its app store or media hub. There’s just no tangible benefit to take this path, and given the pace of improvement in bada, no reason to give up control of the platform.

The Wall Street Journal article indicates Samsung may use bada to power smart TVs, but in this market too, Samsung is the master of its domain: The company builds and sells its own televisions. Why bother giving competitors such as LG, Sony, Panasonic, Vizio or others the opportunity to use bada in their television sets? All that would do is give up a key differentiator that Samsung now has; it certainly won’t help sell more Samsung televisions.

Another potential pitfall: the F word

If Nokia’s Symbian effort doesn’t scare Samsung off the open-source path, then perhaps a closer look at Android might. Outside of key Google apps such as Gmail and Maps, Android is open for all to use or modify for smartphones, tablets or other devices. I have a treadmill with an embedded Google-powered touchscreen, for example. I can surf the web as I jog, and the treadmill runs custom software showing my speed and pace. This flexibility is great, but it has also helped turn Android into a fragmented mess that required new solutions.

Different devices and manufacturers use different versions of Android, leading to varied user experiences and software incompatibility. And some device makers have used Android without following Google’s guidelines, meaning the expected Google apps or Android Market isn’t on the device at all. By maintaining control of bada, Samsung avoids potential fragmentation issues and ensures an Apple-like stability of experience in terms of user expectations across multiple devices.

Samsung has what others don’t

Simply put, with bada, Samsung has an asset that few competitors can also lay claim to: a viable and growing in-house mobile operating system that’s proving popular. In other words, competing handset makers such as HTC, LG and Motorola, for example, are tied to the Google Android wagon with no chance of breaking away just yet. So far, the Android strategy hasn’t hurt these companies, and instead has brought success to those who embraced it early, and that includes Samsung.

But even as Android becomes more popular, the specter of patent suits loom, both in the case of Java with Oracle and Samsung’s own trials with Apple. And although Samsung is customizing Android phones with its TouchWiz interface, others are doing the same. HTC does this well with Sense, while Motorola’s MotoBlur has shown less success. Regardless of the user interface tweaks, at their core, these different phones all provide very similar experiences because they’re build upon the same underlying Android code.

Why then open-source the one asset that’s not only a decent hedge against such risks but is also selling handsets? It simply doesn’t make sense in my opinion, and if Samsung does open-source bada, I’ll be keen to hear the company’s reasons why it chooses to go that route.

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Need to stress test an iPad app? Build a LEGO robot!

As a former software quality assurance manager in a past life, I have a soft spot for unique application testing methods. Maybe that’s why this story out of Pheromone Labs, an iOS development shop, caught my attention today by way of the NXT Step blog. The team is building a stop-motion iPad application for an unnamed client and was asked to stress test the software by taking 10,000 photos with the app.

Unless you’ve got nothing but time on your hands or don’t mind hiring a temp or intern to tap the iPad screen repeatedly over several days, this is an automated testing situation if I’ve ever heard one. But how do you automate something quickly and cheaply to test the app?

That’s where one of my personal hobbies comes in to play: Building robots out of LEGOs. As Pheromone Labs’ Mathieu Savage explains in this short video, it was a simple matter of cobbling together a small robot equipped with a pair of capacitive stylii to cycle through tens of thousands of screen taps.

The team used an old LEGO RCX set from the 1990′s, which was a precursor to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics kit that I and many others use today. Using two gears with the attached stylii, the robot cycles through snapping an image, previewing it and then returning to take the next image capture. This approach works because the software only has two specific touch points for this particular test; apps that have additional controls wouldn’t be good candidates for a simple robot. But for the Pheromone Labs team, this custom solution is a huge time saver and means that an actual tester won’t go crazy taking 10,000 pictures from an iPad.

What’s even more amazing is the specification comparison between the iPad and the LEGO robot, which is powered by an old 8-bit microprocessor and a scant 32 Kb of memory for firmware and programs. That’s old school!

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Forrester: More than half of enterprises support consumer phones

Enterprises that never expected to support personal consumer devices are slowly changing their minds, with 59 percent now supporting employee-owned smartphones in various ways; something unheard of when I worked in I.T. just a handful of years ago. The growing number, based on data in a Forrester research report published today, is likely to continue rising as the mobile lines between home and work keep blurring. That means more opportunity for device makers and mobile app developers to create solutions that effectively cater to both.

While Apple’s iOS has been making strong headway in enterprises, Forrester’s data shows that Google still has a strong play in the workplace even as companies are wary of both. “[I]n the next 12 months, 83% of firms expect to support iOS and 77% expect to support Android, despite underlying security concerns for these platforms,” the report says. Given how the iPad is still outselling Google Android Honeycomb tablets by many factors, it sounds like businesses are supporting more Android smartphones as opposed to tablets, while iPads and iPhones are both making their way into the workplace.

But one can’t talk about enterprises without mentioning Windows, and in this case, it comes in two flavors: Windows on the desktop and Windows Phone on handsets. Although Forrester doesn’t come out and say it specifically in its report, the possibility of supporting Windows Phone in the workplace is certainly suggested. And that makes sense because there’s definitely room for a third major mobile platform and ecosystem.

After using the new Mango software update on a Windows Phone — and because competitors such as webOS and BlackBerry aren’t showing as much forward momentum — I think Windows Phone will be that third platform. Given the Microsoft Office, Sharepoint and Exchange hooks, it seems a natural fit for the enterprise.

In terms of Windows itself, there’s a mobile aspect worth considering which highlights a broader opportunity: mobile virtualization. As employees shift from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets for work, there’s still a need for desktop-grade software access. That can be handled on mobiles through remote desktop solutions such as LogMeIn Ignition or Citrix Receiver, allowing for secure desktop access from a tablet or smartphone, for example.

Remote desktop access is just one piece of the enterprise puzzle when it comes to consumer devices, however. Personal smartphones and tablets could be used to carry enterprise data, so secure methods are needed. And employees don’t want to see their work software in the way of games, social networking apps and other personal software. Virtualizing a work environment on the phone or tablet can keep the two worlds apart on the same device.

The MyModes software I used on a T-Mobile smartphone attempts to do this at the user interface level with different themes for work and play on the same smartphone, for example, but a truly virtual work environment on consumer devices brings needed security. A solution like the one from VMWare that I pointed out in December could temporarily turn an employee owned phone into an enterprise tool as needed with little to no risk of compromised data.

Regardless of the platform, device or mobile apps involved, it’s clear that enterprises can either embrace consumer devices or suffer unhappy employees that are forced to carry multiple mobiles for both work and personal use.

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