Wednesday, October 24, 2007

4428.aspx

Vodafone Betavine

The Vodafone Betavine site is a open community website created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D with the mission to



...support the wider development community in stimulating ideas, developing, testing and launching great new applications for mobile and Internet communications.



Interesting. Vodafone is huge, so they should have the power to make device manufacturers adhere to the (few) mobile browsing and applications standards that exists. If you are not familiar with developing for mobile devices, you can compare it with the problems we had a decade ago developing for Mozilla and Internet Explorer. But imagine a headache hundreds of times worse as each device has its own peculiarities (even “standard“ software like the Nokia Series Sxx).


The site is open to anyone and I am thrilled to see that Vodafone is not censoring complaints (at least so far).
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Judging from some forums they could have called the site VodafoneBetaWhine…  Vodafone, correctly, get a lot of complaints regarding their Mobile Internet which basically destroys all internet sites that provide their own  mobile rendering. Vodafone Italy goes one step further than the Vodafone operators in other European countries and even imposes their own Vodafone header and footers on some mobile devices making it look like the service is provided by Vodafone. Difficult to explain to customers that pays for picture perfect rendering just to see it garbled by Vodafone...


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Thanks for the link Maurizio.

6 comments:

  1. There may not be any great ideas, but betavine has the potential to become an interesting forum for cross-device developers. Like most forums, I see it more for a place where you can ask for help, than share your latest and greatest money making ideas. Publish a cool app though, and you can reach a lot potential users/testers.



    Mosh and Ovi [ovi.nokia.com], on the other hand, are more of a community site for the end user than for developers if you ask me.



    BTW, do you have a public blog that is not restricted to Reply employees?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The 3rd point look really interesting, I never look at the problem "by the other side", it's a new and good point of view.

    I think I'll try this last solution, also if I don't know how to apply it to the internal blog...I will need a personalized "blog template" and I don't think I can add one... Let me to study a solution. I'll keep you updated if you are interested.

    I'm sorry, I think I'm gonna off-topic whit these comments. The original subject of this entry was another....



    P.S.

    tha captcha code is not always visible. I have to submit the form the view the image, so I wrote the entry once, copy it to the clipboard and then paste it to the textarea to be able to fill the captcha filed. I found this problem both with FF2.0 and IE7.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Found and fixed the captcha problem on my blogs. I also made it larger and easier to read.

    ReplyDelete
  4. DeepFish is really cool, sometime I ask myself if is the software that makse things cool, or if the hardware makes thinks cool.

    A lot of people (me too) talk so good about iPhone, but it's not the iPhone I think, is the user experience that make the difference... this subject need a lot of time to be discussed...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello Egil,



    Here is 0m4r, defeated by TamTamy, or better by the HTTP 302 code... I think I will hate it all my life long!

    I can logon to tamtamy via a Java client that could manage cookies, but when I need to request the page I need (a.k.a. the one with the feeds) a really "nice" HTTP 302 (http/1.0 Moved Temporally - http/1.1 Found) code is returned.

    So, I think there's no way... the admin know their own stuff...



    Ok, I'm not the winner, but now I know how to manage a form-login authentication issue... this should be the lesson I had learn in theese days... Tanks a lot for your support :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. HTTP 302 is a redirect.



    What happens if you make a request to the url specified in the Location http header?

    ReplyDelete