Shore Consulting Group

Barnes & Noble has of late received a great deal of credit from the open source community for standing ground against Microsoft in the battle over patents affecting Android. They’ve also received recognition for allowing the Nook to be so easily rooted. Amazon on the other hand, lost many supporters after remotely removing purchased e-books from users’ Kindles. Now in an unusual twist, Amazon has released the source for both the Kindle Fire’s version of Android, as well as for the formerly proprietary Kindle OS. Is this an attempt to garner more respect from the FOSS community? Is it an attempt to win back users left bitter by the thought that the e-books they own might not be theirs after all? At the very least, it indicates a bright future for the Kindle as an open platform.

Filed under: Shore News, mobile

Amazon released the Kindle Fire today ahead of schedule, but unfortunately the bargain priced tablet doesn’t offer many of the services through Amazon Prime to Canada. At least the recently released Kobo Vox has a similar price point, though it’s not dual core and lacks the hype the Fire is generating from developers.

Filed under: Shore News, mobile

We had a great time over at AndroidTO and wanted to share some thoughts that were top of mind after the show.

The panel presentations on Building a Business on Mobile, and Mobile Champions offered great insight into why companies and organizations find mobile so challenging and what approaches to mobile strategy and app building are most likely to succeed. A big takeaway from these presentations was that mobile apps don’t usually sell themselves (as in the case of Angry Birds); hustling is key to success.

We also delved into some of the exciting technologies just starting to make an impact in the market. One of the newest of these is Near Field Communications (NFC) which, while not yet commonplace, has the potential to profoundly shift the way devices are used in the future. Google, VISA, and Mastercard have all implemented NFC in some way, so there is a lot of momentum in payment systems such as Google Wallet and Paypal. Beside the NFC point of sale systems, NFC can be used for product identification, device-to-device information transfer, and countless other applications, as well using highly localized device sensing. With the tags being so cheap to deploy, it’s something we are sure we will be able to explore further at next year’s AndroidTO.

Filed under: Shore News, mobile

We’re big fans of both the iOS and Android platform here at Shore and we can’t help wondering if there is going to be some big changes coming to Android devices after seeing this data over at The Understatement that shows how fragmented the Android market is. The lack of support beyond initial OS installs let alone trying to keep up with the updates seems to have overwhelmed some (read most) manufacturers and this in turn complicates app development.
Earlier in the year we saw several surveys touting the satisfaction levels of iPhone owners. Though we think the numbers are probably better for Android right now with the latest devices than at the start of the year, this fragmentation and upgrade lag certainly can’t be helping if it keeps happening with the release of Ice Cream Sandwich and beyond.

Filed under: Shore News, mobile

We had an enlightening time at AndroidTO yesterday. With all this talk of mobile platforms, we thought we’d share the results of our informal office poll. Some of us are a little surprised that there weren’t more blackberry users.This graphic, and a couple of others, are also featured on our newly refreshed site (updated this week).

Filed under: Shore News, mobile