Welcome to MobileKillerApp.com

A web resource on mobile killer applications for Symbian, J2ME, Microsoft mobile, Blackberry and iPhone

This resource is written Christian Borrman, Director of Virtuser Mobile Innovation Consultancy, and was most recently responsible for the Mobile Festival Guides used by Nokia and Orange at recent festivals. He is also a freelance consultant and associate of PIPC and CVL providing services to many companies in the technology space, including mobile applications, On Device Portals as well as mobile payment and mobile marketing applications. Previously Christian was a consultant with Mason Analysys, working on the first commercially successful MVNOs and VISPs in the UK. Christian has spoken at, chaired and sat on expert panels discussing the benefits of Mobile VAS such as ODPs at major international conferences. Contact Christian | Christian's blog

Christian will be Chairing MVNO World Congress 2009 and speaking and/or attending Mobile Advertising 2009, as well as Mobile Internet 2009 and most recently spoke at Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference, 20-21st May 2008 in London.

posted by Christian Borrman 11:25pm 09/03/08 updated 14:35pm 15/01/09

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Nokia Beta apps a year on

Nokia Beta apps page is now over a year old, and has definitely come of age. There are some tremendous applications there and various killer apps or killer apps in the making from just one source. My favourite, after Sports Tracker, which should not really be here having its own page and having been around before the beta programme, but anyway... is Location Tagger. I downloaded and removed Shozu once, and downloaded it again following some threads that mentioned the ability to location tag via this app... if you can I cannot find it. Location Tagger on the other hand does exactly what it says on the box: allows you to geotag photos and video. Why would I want to do that, well here goes:

1. You can tag your photos on holiday and a) send them to friends so they can link straight on Google Earth to the "wish you were here" or you can use them later for finding where your favourite places were.
2. for the "spatially unaware" you can send a photo and a gps tag of the bar or restaurant you are meeting at
3. For sport, its hard to know when you look at a route exactly where it is on a map, and remember the exact corner, curve, climb, etc. with this you can tag it
4. The potential business uses are tremendous, from installations/buildings recording of an image and location of a customer, to bar and restaurant reviews, estate agents (as if we care!), the tourism industry.
5. Real-time traffic jam and accident reports, first aid, ambulance and emergency information...
6. Most of all, however, I remember watching the "google epic 2014" video (just google the words in quotation if you have not seen it) back in 2005 thinking how far away it would be before it were possible for a group of friends to send a video or photo realtime to a group of friends to update each other via mobile of the great (in the park, look at the weather), not so great (look at this traffic, avoid, avoid) or just fun, indifferent (am on top of a mountain!). It seemed longer away than just 3 years, and the video is dated 2014. But you can use this to send

There are many uses, the one below would be great weather, we are in the park, the application opens a little icon in picture/video mode, showing if you have GPS coverage and then you can upload to web (as icon shows in screenshot below) or just email or MMS (would be interesting to see if the GPS data remains in the jpeg header when the image is formatted down for MMS?). To see the full image click here

Sportstracker goes realtime and uses pedometer

Applications are getting better and more available all the time, in many ways thanks to the likes of Mosh and the latest applications from Google, Yahoo, etc. but also due to the weight the handset manufacturers have thrown behind them, the one that impresses me and engages me the most is sportstracker.

If ever there were a killer app, this is it, especially the real-time nature of it and the now ability to use the pedometer. I have used it to refine my mountain bike routes, identify the quickest ways around London, namely my route to work, to find remote beaches, mountain routes and tag restaurants on Google Earth. It has now gone one better and you can upload the data directly to the sportstracker site, where examples such as tracking your dog or tracking a flight have been done. The home starts with a map of the world, so you can track your worldly exploits. you can then even upload geotagged images to be located along the route...

Above is an example of an early morning mountain bike route with friends and lot of stopping... for those of you looking at the pace :-)

posted by Christian Borrman 00:00pm 10/03/08

My Applications

An image or two is worth a good thousand words:

The ones worthy of note, apart from sportstracker, are:

• Fring, lets you VOIP (even with VoIP-stripped Orange N95 and Vodafone N95 8gb) with most talk/voip clients, Skype chat and sometimes talk (wi-fi is best), but not send files
• Sling plug the audio/video out from the N95 into a TV near you and never watch hotel TV again!
• Yahoo! Mobile Beta 3.0: has its uses; mainly maps
• the 3GSM applications, which were good but flawed and quite clearly done on a budget/in a hurry - shame!
• Nokia Internet radio; another killer app from Nokia Research Labs, but sadly neglected (radio station updates please!)
• Gizmo is (used to be?) a VOIP application along the lines of truphone , I had it working with my home PABX but not with any others
• Gizmo 5 is a great demo of what you can do with Java and no access to deep handset/OS APIs, and seems to be the only gizmo available now?
• Screenshot, well, it takes those screenshots above!

posted by Christian Borrman 00:01pm 10/03/08

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posted by Christian Borrman 11:05am 13/10/07, amended 12:47 17/05/08

Nokia Festival Guides, orange Glastonbury festival Guides

The dust has now settled on the Carling Reading and Leeds music festivals, and the press coverage from Nokia's mobile festival guide is astounding, just by Googling "mobile festival guide" you can get an idea. A similar application will be available at Glastonbury 2008 provided by Orange, watch this space for more details.

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posted by Christian Borrman 11:25am 25/09/07, updated 20:24 26/05/08

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