Blogger Dana Blankenhorn recently interviewed Symbio’s CEO, Jacob Hsu and posted this entry on SmartPlanet.com, a CBS Interactive blog.  Here’s a copy of his post -

This summer Taiwan will declare its independence.

Not from China. Not from America.

From Microsoft.

Symbio CEO Jacob Hsu has been working with Taiwanese OEMs for 10 years and says they are finally ready to kick off the traces and become their own brands.

This surprised me. I was at last year’s CompuTex show, in Taiwan, looking for Linux, and it just wasn’t there.

While many of the Taiwanese businesspeople I talked with expressed a desire to go outside the Microsoft orbit, every booth featured Windows gear, usually with Intel chips.

But Android, the mobile operating system Google has built on top of Linux, is turning heads. “Google put together a complete package” for Android, Hsu said, with “software Development Kits (SDKs) and other things people could use.”

Working with programmers on the [Continue Reading...]

Nokia and Pearson,  one of the world’s largest education publishing business (they also own the Financial Times and Penguin books) have formed a joint venture in China called Beijing Mobiledu Technologies.  Together, they’re aiming to grow MobilEdu, a wireless education service that provides English-language learning materials and other educational content directly to mobile phones.  MobilEdu was launched in China back in 2007.

Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website plus most of the WAP portals in China.

According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month.  John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s International Education business, said, ““China is the world’s largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.” By combining mobile giant Nokia with UK-based Pearson, this joint venture allows the two companies a fantastic opportunity to capitalize on China’s opportunities.

The new joint venture company will deliver a wide range of services to meet the demand for digital [Continue Reading...]

Everyone and their dog are now in agreement about the importance of user experience quality. At least they should be, as it is evident that at least in the high-end phones it’s the devices that can provide a good user experience that make the most money. RIM has been very successful in creating a good mobile email experience and Apple for media and content distribution and playback. And a good UI, I’ve got to admit.

It’s just marketing really, but marketing that actually has substance. A good user experience is part of the product’s overall promise. One doesn’t even have to try a Mercedes-Benz CL AMG 65 and know that it promises a superior overall user experience to a Toyota Corolla, even though both are very good cars (Granted, Toyota is maybe a bad example since most people are very satisfied with one, but picking on a Lada or a Geely would just have been too easy).

There are now more and more common features shared between automotive and mobile worlds in terms of user experience, as cars get human-machine interfaces that increasingly rely on visual feedback (big LCD screens), one of the latest examples being the 2010 Range Rover joining the exclusive group of cars that have replaced traditional gauges with a big LCD screen. But lest this blog entry become too long, I’ll just stick to mobile phones for now.

The challenge of dealing with user experiences is that there is a huge set of contributing variables. The user experience really [Continue Reading...]