Articles

                                               The whole idea of these mobile phone oper­at­ing sys­tems like Win­dows Mobile, Sym­bian and Android, made by soft­ware com­pa­nies, is to accel­er­ate time to mar­ket and reduce devel­op­ment costs. Sil­i­con mak­ers also tai­lor their chips for these OSs based on their capabilities/features, so it’s eas­ier for phone man­u­fac­tur­ers to develop devices with these pop­u­lar OSs.

                                Now the deal with Android is that there’s a lot of hype sur­round­ing it. Hype that pro­motes lazi­ness on the part of phone mak­ers to a point where it’s okay to just slap the stock OS as it is, untouched. When look­ing at the line of Android devices, you can’t help but notice that they are extremely sim­i­lar. That’s because of this hype fac­tor; peo­ple are happy enough with a device just because it has Android because Android is ‘cool’. 

                                 On the other hand, HTC does try to put a lot more effort on their Android devices with their Sense UI, but that’s only HTC. The hype-effect goes beyond just the user inter­face — hardware-wise Android devices haven’t offered any­thing new. Many peo­ple expected the Nexus One would be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary device. It has pow­er­ful hard­ware and… that’s about it.

                               The Sym­bian OS(operating sys­tem) has been around for years with Sym­bian v9 being launched in 2005. That was around the same time that Android was acquired by Google, only to be announced some time in 2007 and released on the G1 in 2008. I’m going to cut to chase here, Android is over-hyped and that is prob­a­bly it’s great­est weakness.

                                    For Sym­bian, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Man­u­fac­tur­ers are forced to come up with not only inno­v­a­tive soft­ware, but inno­v­a­tive hard­ware as well to com­pli­ment it. When you think about it, almost all Sym­bian devices have cus­tom inter­faces. Sam­sung has the clever Touch Wiz UI which is spread­ing to other plat­forms, the Sony Eric­s­son phones, the Satio and the Vivaz have cus­tom UIs with the Vivaz tak­ing advan­tage of the accelerom­e­ter with it’s ani­mated wall­pa­pers. Nokia also has the panel of wid­gets for its user inter­face on the n97 devices.

                                       When it comes to inno­v­a­tive hard­ware, the S60v3 Sam­sung i8510 was the first to mar­ket with an 8MP cam­era and the S60v5 Satio was the first with a 12MP and the s60v5 i8910 was the first touch screen phone with an AMOLED dis­play just to name a few. There are also many cus­tom appli­ca­tions that man­u­fac­tures build in to their Sym­bian devices so that they are bet­ter and dif­fer­ent. Take the Omnia HD for instance. It has a cus­tom search fea­ture, music player, com­mu­ni­ties social app, pod­cast­ing app, cus­tom hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion, cus­tom cam­era inter­face, thor­ough codec sup­port,  cus­tom media gallery, busi­ness card reader, Sam­sung LBS nav­i­ga­tion and inte­grated DSNe 2.0 tech­nol­ogy for bet­ter audio just to name a few. It’s packed right out of the box. When it comes to fea­tures, Sym­bian devices set the stan­dard; they paves the way for other plat­forms to follow.

So, what did Android bring to the table for mobile devices? Noth­ing. It’s just another mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem but with the back­ing of one the biggest and most cre­ative com­pa­nies around, Google. 

                                This could be the rea­son why peo­ple get excited; when Google is behind some­thing, they usu­ally do it very well. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a heavy reliance on stock Android to do every­thing, mak­ing the prod­uct mak­ers relax on cre­ativ­ity and focus on just releas­ing that ‘Android device.

10 Techniques For Finding Blog Readers                                                    
                   In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best mate about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

                                             Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

                                                          It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine articles.Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

                              How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

This concept can be confusing so I suggest you take a look at the Carnival of the Cats for an example. You can also find a list of all the carnivals and submit your articles at the Carnival Submit Form.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
                                            This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.
                                 Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be series about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

                                              You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.