Hasta La Gadget!

It’s good for governments to find more ways to connect with their citizens, including the web. As the web goes mobile, open government should too. But governments shouldn’t develop apps for some mobile platforms and not others.

That’s Kevin Curry and Brownell Chalstrom’s problem with Texas.gov’s new iPhone app. The state of Texas recently overhauled its website for the desktop, but doesn’t have a mobile version. It also doesn’t have applications for Android, Blackberry or any other mobile platform.

This heated up discussion at the recent Govfresh Gov 2.0 conference in Manor, Texas. Curry, founder of the open government unconference City Camp, said that by limiting access to one platform and one device — and an expensive device, at that — Texas is empowering the already empowered, rather than broadening access for everyone.

Given the potential use cases and the sheer number of citizens whose only net-capable devices are mobile phones, mobile access to government data is definitely important. The trouble is when governments pick winners and losers, developing a presence on iPhone but not Android, or Facebook but not MySpace.

It’s not only the numbers of iPhone or Facebook users that attract governments. It’s the prestige. According to O’Reilly Radar’s government 2.0 reporter Alex Howard, “government technology shops, judging by their output, have become afflicted with a kind of ’shiny app syndrome,’ given that an app is a substantive accomplishment that can be trotted out for officials and the public.”

Brownell Chalstrom, a Manor Govfresh delegate, says that governments looking to develop for mobile should first look to create open websites using rich web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, and only then look to develop applications for platforms limited to users of an individual device or service. Open standards for open government, if you will.

“The goals that public officials pursue when they create new .gov websites or applications should be based upon civic good,” Howard writes. “If that civic good is to be rendered to a population increasingly connected to one another through smartphones, tablets and cellphones, truly open governments will employ methods that provide access to all citizens, not just the privileged few.”

“Shiny app syndrome” and Gov 2.0 [O’Reilly Radar]

See Also:

• Vote for Your Fave Open Government App
• White House Orders Agencies to Open Up
• New Government Openness Law Not All That Open
• What Obama Is Learning from Facebook, Google and Ideo
• CIA Gets in Your Face(book)
• Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr …
• The Web Is Dead? A Debate

Palm has announced the Pre 2, along with a major update to its webOS. It will be available to buy in France this Friday on SFR and will be available in the United States (Verizon) and in Canada “in the coming months.”

Not much has changed with the hardware. In fact, from the outside, the Pre 2 is almost identical to the Pre, and it still has the slide-out QWERTY of the original. There are a few differences: The camera is now 5 megapixels, up from 3 MP, memory has jumped from 8 GB to 16 GB (although the upgraded Pre Plus already got this boost) and, well, that’s about it. You probably won’t notice the difference in your hand.

Which leaves the interesting stuff to webOS 2.0. The headline feature is “True Multitasking,” which HP and Palm say allows you to switch between apps and then go back to where you left off. This doesn’t actually look anything like “true” multitasking, which keeps the applications open and running, and even rendering unseen graphics, as happens on a PC. In fact, it looks a lot like the Android and iOS versions of multitasking, which effectively pause apps when they’re not in actual use. The presentation is different, though, with an update to the “cards” metaphor that the original webOS used to organize app windows. Now these will be sorted into stacks, grouped by task.

More useful is “Just Type.” This lets you start typing to launch apps, search the phone, send e-mail and other things (Just Type is open to third-party developers, too). If you have used a quick-launcher on your computer, like Quicksilver or Launchbar on the Mac, then you’ll be familiar with just how great this could be.

The Pre’s ability to tie into all your social networks and pull in accounts and contact details remains, only now it’s called “HP Synergy,” after Palm’s new owner.

“Exhibition” is another useful addition. It’s triggered when you stick the Pre to its pebble-like magnetic charging-dock, the Touchstone, and can be configured to show a slideshow, your day’s appointments or anything else a developer might choose to do.

There are also a whole lot of smaller tweaks, but one more thing that Palm snuck in is worth a mention: Adobe Flash. WebOS “now supports a beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 in the browser.” This will only work on the Pre phones, not the Pixi or Pixi Plus, and it is unclear whether it actually comes pre-installed.

Finally, you’ll have to wait for the price. SFR, the French carrier that will launch the Pre 2 this Friday, has taken down its Pre 2 page already. Google’s cache tells us that the handset will have a 1-GHz processor and 512-MB RAM, but that’s about it.

This seems a very pedestrian upgrade in a world where Android handsets grow as powerful as small computers, and the iPhone 4 has leapt ahead of its predecessor in every way. It seems that Palm is still competing with last year’s models of everything. Lets just hope that the team are putting all their time into the upcoming webOS tablets, at least.

Palm Pre 2 [Palm]

Why webOS 2.0 goes to 11 [Palm blog]

HP Introduces webOS 2.0, the Next Generation of Mobile Innovation [HP]

If you think wireless carriers in North America charge too much, you are right. An analysis of cellphone plans worldwide found that consumers in the U.S., Canada and U.K. pay the highest for voice and text service on their phones, while those in India, Hong Kong and Japan pay the least.

Receiving phone calls is free in most countries, except U.S. and Canada–that’s why the rate per minute is doubled for these two countries, say Chiehyu Li and Bincy Ninan in a paper published by the think-tank New America Foundation.

The cheapest postpaid voice plan is available in Hong Kong at $8.50 for 600 minutes a month (a penny a minute), while in Canada the cheapest plan is $38.70 for 250 minutes. By comparison, the least expensive postpaid voice plan in America costs $39.99 for 450 minutes.

Even when it comes to texting services, American and Canadian consumers pay more than almost every one else worldwide.

“The United States tends to fall in a band of countries that charge higher prices to individual wireless consumers for everything except pure voice service where prices are comparable,” say Li and Ninan in their report. “It is essential we consider steps that could be taken to encourage competition or impose regulation such that the U.S. becomes an engine of innovation for better and more competitively priced service offerings.”

This is not the first time that an analysis has shown that American users pay more for service on their mobile devices. In July, an analysis by Tableau Software showed American users pay some of the highest prices in terms of dollars per gigabyte (GB) of data on the iPad. (Check out their amazing interactive chart here.)

The New America Foundation’s analysis threw up some surprising results with respect to texting and data services.

Texting is Expensive But Data is Not

Texting is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. but it comes at a stiff price–though if its any help, U.S. consumers can take heart that their counterparts in the U.K. pay more.

For postpaid text plans, the U.K. provides the most expensive plan at $7.70 for 75 texts a month (10 cents a text). The U.S. is a close second at $5 for 200 texts a month.

The cheapest text rate offered is in Sweden at $17.80 for 5500 texts. India and South Korea charge only a penny for every text sent.

Not surprisingly, when it comes to unlimited data plans on mobile phones, the U.S. does much better –landing in the middle tier of service rates. American users can get $30 a month plan, which is cheaper than Canada’s $72.90 a month for unlimited data.

But Sweden’s unlimited data plans are among the best, coming in around for $13.80 a month, followed by India at $19 a month.

If you want a detailed breakdown of how countries compare for voice, text and data, check out the analysis on New America Foundation’s web site.

See Also:

• How Google Could Have Changed the World With Nexus One — and Still
• Virgin Mobile Offers Unlimited 3G for $40
• Five Ways To Slash Your Cellphone Bill
• Is It Possible to Live Without a Cellphone?

Charts: New America Foundation

The white iPhone 4 has been delayed so long that some of you probably forgot the handset comes in two colors. Tech blog Pocket Lint offers the first plausible explanation for the delay, which comes from a lucky owner of the elusive device.

Pocket Lint spotted a man with a white iPhone 4 at a press event in New York, who explained that Apple HQ is actually swimming with white iPhones, and a friend of his “fixed him up” with his.

The reason for the delay? Asian suppliers shipped white iPhones with a white home button that doesn’t match the color of the face plate, according to Pocket Lint’s tipster. That’s one of those small but significant details that would make Steve Jobs shelve the device until it was done just right.

Indeed, Apple did acknowledge in a July press release that the white iPhone 4 has proven “more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected.”

Though many tech critics have praised the iPhone 4 with glowing reviews, the product’s launch has been rocky at best. Customer reports of an antenna flaw on the device culminated into a frenzy of negative press, which compelled Jobs to hold a conference announcing a free case program to alleviate the issue. The mysterious delay of the white iPhone 4 has also been uncharacteristic of Apple, which is typically solid with meeting its ship dates.

See Also:

• Photo Gallery: Hands-On With the iPhone 4
• Apple: No White iPhones for at Least Three Weeks
• Apple: White iPhone Delayed Until 'Later This Year'

While riding the Subway this week, New York resident Brittany Tucker spotted the band Atomic Tom pulling a musical stunt on the train, jamming out their song “Take Me Out” on their iPhones. Each band member used an iPhone app to play a different part (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocals), and the end result is quite an ear worm.

Imagine if you were on that train. I’d be thinking, “Only in New York. Awesome.”

We’ve seen a number of geeky performers create experiment noises with iOS apps, and Atomic Tom’s performance is one of the better ones. Tune in by playing the video above.

See Also:

• iPhone, iPod Touch Musicians Cover MGMT
• Student Orchestra Performs Music With iPhones
• Hook Your Guitar to Your iPhone and Rock Out with iRig
• Rock Out: Fingerist Turns iPhone into Guitar
• Turn Your iPhone Into an Electric Guitar With iShred