Russ wrote a nice post a month or so back about the splintering of Android.

He's right, I think - we are starting to see fragmentation around Android. When new handsets or versions of the operating system launch, we find ourselves getting occasional small bug reports for our Guardian Anywhere product. Some of these bugs have been down to our not doing things in a standards-based fashion; some are down to differences in handsets (the Tattoo, for instance, has a much smaller screen than most other devices); and some... some we can't quite get to the bottom of.

And of course, it's not just the handset. In an application-rich world, every user has a different combination of apps, and Android's architecture allows them to run many apps at the same time - all of which might interact with one another, leading to difficult-to-reproduce edge cases. I'm also expecting to see issues caused by handset customisation (which operators are doing a great deal of - the T-Mobile Pulse is a nice example of this, and it's still early days)

So there is fragmentation in Android; but I was pleased last year to see Google quietly move from the naive line that "fragmentation won't happen, because it's not in the industry's interest" to "we'll introduce conformance tests for OEMs to avoid fragmentation". This seems to be paying off, so far - in that moving Android applications to new devices, even those with new screen sizes, is orders-of-magnitude less painful than moving between J2ME handsets from different manufacturers. That said, developers still need to do some work to provide graceful degradation.

Apple have done a fantastic job of presenting the iPhone as a single platform. There however, the reality is slightly different: 3 generations of hardware, 26 operating system releases (last time I counted), and a platform which in some incarnations has (or doesn't have) GPS, a loudspeaker, a microphone, or even a SIM card and therefore connectivity. Apple have done a great job of upgrading operating system versions to keep its installed base current, but even there there's some lag. The problem is at least finite, Apple being a closed ecosystem for hardware; and the lack of background apps helps developers avoid issues caused by interactions between applications.

So where does this leave us?

• Fragmentation isn't going away. Not until OEMs stop innovating and differentiating their products;
• Even wunderkinds of the tech industries like Apple and Google can't solve the problem for us. Even their kit - whether it be strictly controlled or lovingly curated - suffers from the issue, whatever you might hear to the contrary;
• As an industry we're getting better at dealing with it: platform vendors are taking more care, developers are evolving techniques and technology to cope;
• For those of us taking mobile products to market, testing across a range of devices is going to be something we continue to do as a matter of course - and we'll still be learning more than we ever wanted to know about weird handset bugs and software versions;

Many thanks to James Hugdroid, who proof-read, sanity-checked, and contributed to this post.

Update: Google have published a really nice analysis of deployed Android versions, implying that developers should be targeting 3 versions of the Android operating system.

• When is it inappropriate to use your iPhone - a romance flowchart;
• All hail the iPod touch; isn't it kinda amusing that one of the most popular mobile devices is completely disconnected from any traditional mobile network? Kinda says something about the telecomms industry I think;
• Is modern web design too like print design: "It feels like we’ve lost the “webness” of web design over an incredibly short period". Absolutely agree. We seem to have falled into a bit of a rut as far as our expectations of web design go...
• Very interesting report of the post-mortem for a large iPhone project;
• Node.js, an asynchronous framework for web applications. Can't decide if this is really cute (performance suggests so), or insanely evil (in that it seems to be retrofitting the WWW with select() calls)...
• If you're a fluent Japanese speaker, perhaps you could tell me what I'm talking about here? It's one of the interviews from my week in Japan...
• Simple and gorgeous - PhotoCard for the iPhone, an app to send email or physical postcards.
• I Blame The Designer: "Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.". Bravo!

• The worlds largest multi-touch wall: "34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers"
• Twitter beard!: "just insert your face"
• Why your friends have more friends than you do: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends"
• Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk: "my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40"
• Opera Face Gestures: "lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures"
• Interesting post on design decisions behind Skype Chat, the best IM out there I reckon
• Differentiated presence on GMail chat status, nice touch: "when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages"
• How rich are you? Humbling.
• Square looks cute - the use of the headphone jack is particularly lovely, and I could see it getting uptake from smartphone owners (particularly if the customer hardware becomes fashionable or desirable), but I wonder how they plan to get the merchant side of the infrastructure rolled out to the extent that it's worthwhile.
• Via Dom, Appvent Calendar - a free iPhone game every day. Cute.
• The two use-cases of mobile - amen;

It's gone quickly. Micro-updates for the last couple of days:

• I actually made it over to Hombu dojo and trained with Kuribayashi sensei. Really good fun, very friendly class (about 25% Westerners as far as I could tell), not as austere as I'd feared. Hombu mats are unusually hard and *really* slippery. I found the class very tough to follow, not speaking a word of Japanese - but everyone was very friendly and I partnered with a succession of grinning yudansha who took pity on me. Sensei came over and used me for uke at one point, commenting that was I too focused on one thing. I'll try and work that one out...
• Kiddyland has eaten my wallet - thanks for dumping that one on me, Julie... it's basically the worlds best toy shop, 7 floors of really cool shit. I particularly enjoyed the Star Wars and Ghibli floors on each of my visits.
• After moving hotel (from the Grand Prince Akasaka to the Diamond) I popped over to Ueno zoological gardens yesterday and meandered around the zoo itself. The giant panda is gone (relatively recently, judging by all the signs apologising for the lack of a giant panda) but there's a good selection of bears (polar and grizzly), a dead cute red panda (think panda/raccoon cross but twice as cute), gorillas and some fun otters.
• Woke up at 3:30am this morning (again) and took advantage of the early start to head down to the fish market at Tsukiji and grab some breakfast. I missed the famous tuna auction, but had a delicious plate of fresh fishness at a little street-side cafe type thing which has set me up nicely for the day. One thing I've noticed on this trip is how much more relaxing it is to wander around an unfamiliar town with a GPS-enabled map... I've had close-to-zero worry of getting lost which makes the whole experience much smoother...

Today's my last day in Tokyo - I have an extremely early start tomorrow, and haven't quite worked out how to make it to Narita airport on time. But chuffing me currently is that I've managed to get back in contact with an old Brighton chum who I last saw on my last visit to Tokyo, 9 years ago. So hopefully beers to follow there...

5 hours into sleepytime, and I started awake at 3:30am on the day of the presentation. I'd not exercised in a few days, so dragged shorts and trainers on, and went for a run - up to the palace, around the moat, getting a little bit lost, thanking my lucky stars I had my phone with me, and carefully navigating back to the hotel. What is it about Tokyo which inevitably involves my getting lost at some point...?

I broke fast, suited myself up, and met Mr Hughes in the lobby to wander over to the embassy - which it turns out is just 10 minutes walk away, and around the edge of the Imperial Moat again. Even by embassy standards, it's really rather nice: once you're through the security there's lots of open space and gardens - though cameras are banned in these areas so you'll just have to take my word for it (I did get a few photos of the rather plush interior of the Ambassador's Residence though).

First things first, we met our interpreters for the day - two extremely helpful Japanese ladies who sat us down and ran through our presentations - to clarify the meaning of certain key phrases and the pronunciation of brand names which may never have been enunced in Japanese before. I was pleasantly surprised at how knowledgeable they were about telecomms in general, and founded myself needing to explain very little.

From there, I was taken to the garden room of the embassy for the two interviews: the first with Yasutaka Yuno and Shuichi Morita of K-tai Watch, a popular telecomms web site over here. Clearly mobile enthusiasts, they quizzed me on the types of Japanese content which might work over in the UK. I was a bit lost really - I don't know very much about what's popular in Japan right now - and could only suggest that one thing we'd *not* seen cross over to the UK was the Japanese practice of writing books on keitai. That seemed to keep Shuichi - and anyone else who asked me the same question that day - happy. The resulting article on K-tai watch can be found here (and a Google translated version here, not sure what "Future home of the president's Purattofomuzu" means tho)).

Another interview followed with Yumiko Egami of the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, a business newspaper; this time around the topics were more general and less focused on the detail of mobile. Both interviews were carried out through my interpreter, who very ably managed to convert my lengthy gabbled ramblings into Japanese.

A relaxing lunch followed in one of the rooms off the embassy gardens with some of the UKTI staff, 50% Brits who were doing a few years posting in Japan, and 50% locals who'd spent some time in England (and not only spoke perfect English but also seemed to have internalised the sense of humour and/or sarcasm very well).

And then we were into the afternoons talks, with headsets on to give us a live translation feed from our interpreters, who were now housed in a glass cage at the back of the room. After an introduction from the ambassador, Takamasa Kishihara of the Mobile Contents Forum gave a general introduction to the Japanese mobile content industry. I took a few notes from this one:

• >100m subscribers, driven by the arrival of 3G and flat rate (seen as being vital for allowing rich media to be consumed at a reasonable cost);
• Japan is generally seen as 5 years ahead of the UK;
• Areas of content break down into mCommerce, digital content sold via operator billing, advertisment/ad-response and social networking;
• Mobile content industry in Japan grew, even during the recession;
• MIDI ringtone industry peaked in 2005 at 100m yen revenue, now at 50m yen;
• 1/4 of the Japanese music market is music delivered to handsets;
• Takamasa spoke about a new frame-by-frame film format which sounded interesting, a cross between films and comics;
• Social networking services ere mentioned as being either ad-driven or supported by gifting;
• Japanese acceptance of the subscription billing model is seen as key to the growth of the mobile market, and many of the content providers there were also keen on this;
• Problems exporting to the UK have included regulatory/commercial issues, the web-based nature of Japanese content, and the language barrier;

Tony Hughes of UKTI then gave his talk. I'll see if I can get permission to upload his slides - it was a fantastic examination of the communications, mobile and digital landscape in the UK.

I followed up with a few case studies of content providers in the UK: Flirtomatic, MobileIQ (particularly their service for The Guardian) and Puzzler. I'd done interviews with the first two companies to prepare me for the talk - you can see slides and notes online here. It was interesting to hear a few familiar themes show themselves between these two, and I'm very thankful to Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic and Shaun Barriball of MobileIQ to the time they graciously gave for these conversations.

Q&A followed, and happily the audience seemed very keen to talk. We had some great questions on differences between the UK and China, the general approach to billing and content provision, and the relative importance of operators. After about half an hour, the questions were drawn to a close and we had a pleasant hour or so networking with attendees and UKTI staff, before heading off for a delicious Japanese meal with a few UKTI folk. Well, the bits *I* ate were delicious, the squidney and fish sperm were less appealing...

A really fun day; I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself, and found the crowd (both organisers and attendees) really enthusiastic, friendly and interesting. Fingers crossed this is not the last time I head to Japan for business, but the first of many...