I did it.  I quit my BlackBerry Curve 8300.  Gone are emails piped through an Enterprise server, the hard qwerty keyboard, a guaranteed sturdiness.  I’m not an unsatisfied BlackBerry user at all, and breaking up with RIM was very much “it’s not you, its me”.  The chance to upgrade to HTC’s G2 Touch (also known as the Hero) for T-Mobile was too good to pass up.

I can't get mine to stand up like this

The G2  is sleeker than its previous G1 incarnation, with a large touchscreen that takes up most of the front of the phone and a distinctive slight kink at the bottom which definitely helps avoid the screen getting scratched.  The back of the phone is covered in soft plastic, is very comfortable to hold and is a nice weight.  The phone has a proper headphone port as well as a 5 megapixel camera (but sadly no flash).  All other mod cons are included – GPS, gyroscope, wifi connectivity.

Its my first time to play around with Google’s Android OS – the user interface is simple & customisable, the navigation smooth and it has decent processing power (you can have many multiple apps running at once, with no noticeable affect on performance).  The touchscreen functionality is very intuitive, but the virtual keypad is frustrating and has me wishing for actual keys.  That said, anything is better than the fiddly, and frankly rubbish, trackball.

What I am loving is the full integration with Google – the Gmail interface on my phone is seamless, my phone contacts are my Gmail contacts, Google Talk is preinstalled and Google Maps is better than ever.  The only downside is that Google contacts create a contact for every email that comes into your inbox, whether you want it to or not.  Surfing the web is almost desktop quality, has the capability to run full sites rather than just cut down mobile versions, and adjusts the text to the size of the screen where it can.  The data connection leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability – but I’m not sure whether its the phone or T-Mobile’s network.

Android has its own app store, Marketplace, which comes pre-embedded in the G2.  Once you get past T-Mobile’s delightfully annoying content lock, there’s a good selection of free and paid-for apps – although app search is poor, especially considering the people behind it.  Once I got a good selection of apps up and running, I found it all comes at a cost – one working day’s heavy usage (especially of Twitter, browsing and using the GPS) and the battery is completely spent.  There are a few things you can do to combat this, foremost amongst which is installing apps such as TasKiller, which does what it says on the tin and allows you to turn off any and all apps that are running but you’re not using.

The G2 isn’t perfect, but the raft of features and great UI means I’m not going to get back together with BlackBerry – although I hope we can still be friends.

This advert makes me really, seriously uncomfortable.  I don’t know whether its the unnerving CGI, the fact that I can’t help but feel concerned that the babies are going to do themselves some serious physical damage breakdancing on tarmac, or that the ad’s creators were so lazy as to use such an obvious backing song as Rapper’s Delight.

Still, what do I know?  The video’s been watched more than 8.5 million times, putting it firmly in the category ‘viral sensation’, as marketing departments around the world scratch their heads trying to figure out why this one has caught on and theirs hasn’t.  I’m not sure there’s an obvious rhyme or reason as to why certain virals spread (such as the Cadbury’s Gorilla) and others don’t.  I do know that the Gorilla doesn’t directly make me want to eat chocolate and the babies don’t directly make me want to drink water.  The value these videos create is increasing the value/coolness of the brand itself in the minds of people who enjoy them, and make them something they choose to be associated with.

I'm sure you'll find another job straight away

I was directed to the above beautiful piece of facebook failure last night, and while its easy to laugh (I am laughing incidentally) it’s also equally easy to make a slip like this.  Once you’ve plugged yourself in to social media, the golden rule of email etiquette applies – don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of a national newspaper.  Keep the moaning segregated to somewhere it can’t be used to give you the sack.

Giddy from just finishing David Ogilvy’s wonderful book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, I was excited to stumble across AMC and marketing agency Deep Focus’s Mad Men Yourself site.  Launched in preparation for Mad Men season 3 premiere in mid-August, the site allows you to create a personalised avatar for both ’suits’ and ’skirts’ in a variety of cool 50’s Madison Avenue style clothes and accessories.

The end output is an avatar of your character (small & large) as well as a scene of said avatar in a Mad Men setting, such as the bar, Sterling Cooper’s offices or even Don Draper’s House.

Peggy - hold my calls, get me a fresh martini and keep that weasel Pete out of my office

There isn’t anything technologically revolutionary about this at all, but there doesn’t have to be.  This is a well executed viral as it actively made me want to create a character for the setting and to share it with people.  I guess creating something like this is easier when you have a fundamentally cool product like Mad Men, but still – good show.

Whenever I head along to events like Mobile Monday London I always take a few days afterwards to digest what I’ve heard and do some follow-up reading (especially after Google had framed the event by announcing just two days before that the future in this space is mobile web). Last Monday’s event on the future of mobile apps was no different.

MoMo’s main speaker/sponsor was Patrick Mork of European company GetJar, the world’s biggest independent mobile app store (and who I also must confess I had never heard of).  Based on their experience and analysis of their customer base, here are the most interesting bits of data I think they have dug up:

• 75% of their users are under 25 (and therefore not the same age as the majority of people creating apps for them).  The majority of this number are male users who frequently return to the store.
• The biggest factor impacting on whether or not a user becomes a repeat user is the existence of a UX-driven ‘discoverability’ of new apps.
• Apps are not about smartphones – 70% of apps downloaded from their store are Java-based.
• Most apps have a very short lifespan and are seen as “bite-sized pieces of entertainment” unless they are providing long term utility ala Google Maps.
• The most downloaded apps appear to be utility-based, with email and IM aggregators and sharing apps proving to be the most popular.

But what of Google’s jab about apps being a flash in the pan and that mobile web being the eventual winner?  The following panel discussion eventually threw up the general consensus that at present it makes sense for the client to look at the customer and develop a solution on a platform that best serves their needs, handset and habits.  Joachim Hoffman of Fjord summed it up nicely by stating that Nokia’s new Sports Tracker, with its built in heart monitor, is a service that couldn’t be reliably serviced by mobile web.  Conversely Flirtomatic, the mobile flirting network, wouldn’t have the resources to run on anything OTHER than mobile web – the most popular handset amongst Flirto users (the N95) still only comes in at 5%.  The sheer costs of creating and maintaining apps across enough all users’ handsets would be immense, and would stimy the fast changes and turnaround times that are needed to keep the network fresh and up-to-date.  There was also a  feeling that casual gaming is going to catch up fast in terms of downloads and popularity (this prediction is already starting to be reflected in GetJar’s download stats).

As much as I love mobile web, and I do think its the horse with the best legs in the long term, I have to agree with an article that Malcolm Murphy wrote on Mobile Industry review last week - mobile web isn’t there yet. The loading times are poor, the browsers aren’t powerful enough and even though people claim to be using mobile web more on iPhone, and that its changing mobile web usage habits – the very same iPhone users consume a proportionally high level of apps. I like the Google email and maps apps on my BlackBerry, and I much prefer them to their mobile web counterparts.  With Vodafone to react to Apple and Nokia by becoming the first operator to soon launch their own app store, I don’t think that I’m alone in these feelings.

Sadly nobody at the event mentioned the Star Trek communicator app for iPhone, maybe next month?

UPDATE: Excellent Guardian article on the true economics of iPhone apps.

This viral anti-knife crime awareness campaign is a Met Police initiative through their Drop The Weapons website. Click on the video to start the story, and when prompted choose between different options to open up a the video in a new window, “choose your own adventure” style.

A beautiful video, but for those of you looking to do this yourselves good luck getting this stationery requisition through the office manager…

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

I’ve been party to many debates on this one – CGeye-brows (like what I did there?) or are these kids just phenomenal? The balloon scratching is what makes it for me, I think I might even like it better than the Gorilla and definitely more than the airport race. Good skills Fallon.

A Twitter friend of mine (@barneyc) was kind enough to throw me an invite to Spotify’s music streaming service last week. It’s a brilliant piece of kit – download the app onto your computer and from there you can instantly listen to a massive catalogue of songs, create playlists and even scrobble to your last.fm profile using the iTunes-style interface (as you can see below), which should be familiar to even the most technophobic users.

My amazing super created playlist, you can't see but I have a bit of Jay-Z in there too

Gone now are the days when I’ve had to suffer weak internet radio when I get sick of my own music collection.  Gone also is buying an album off the back of a couple of good singles and a couple of 30 second song snippets, as Spotify allows you to listen to songs an unlimited number of times (as well as allowing you to click through to buy of course).  While the song selection isn’t as extensive or as international as I’d like at the moment (the Red Hot Chili Peppers for example have gaping holes in their back catalogue), the service IS still in beta and I’m sure it’ll improve over time.

Spotify has a premium ad-free version (£9.99/month) and a free, invitation only ad-funded version, where the main advertisers at present are Vodafone pushing the Blackberry and DirectGov – which makes sense considering the current early adopter userbase and the fact that UK Sales Director Jon Mitchell has a fine GCap Media pedigree.

There’s pretty fierce competition in the digital music industry, but if Spotify can get a solid mobile service to market they’ll have a serious advantage.  They’ve already started by taking on a heavy-hitting European Yahoo! exec to head up their “portable solutions” division so they certainly seem to be on the right track.

UPDATE:

Spotify have had to restrict their music catalogue and remove some artists due to licensing issues.  FYI artists and labels, I’m MORE likely to buy your tracks if they are on here than not.

I’ve always thought that if I worked in an advertising agency that I’d love to have an automotive client – cool product, nice fat budget and a good chance of winning an award!  For me the majority of car ads generally seem to be slick, movie-quality level affairs that feature 4×4s flying around on roof tops or in deserts or some such.  They are also immensely dull, and seem like such a waste of potential considering the sums of money involved.  There are exceptions of course, one of these these being the new Audi Quattro ad by BBH London (and the Skoda that Fallon made out of cake, but that’s another post).

The whole concept is based around grip; and relating the way in which humans know how much grip to apply in different situations to how the Audi Quattro’s four wheel drive system works.  The imagery they use to illustrate the point is a hand (it could be anyone’s hand, which helps you relate) holding a frog, a cricket ball, a tomato, a hammer etc, and all summed up with the ‘independent grip, intelligently applied’ strapline.  This is how advertising should be – a clear and simple message, intelligently communicated.