The Download Blog

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you didn't already know that football season was under way, you would after glancing at Yahoo's audacious purple booth at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, where oversize posters and computer monitors advertise Yahoo's fantasy football leagues, and where complementary gelato is scooped into small, plastic football helmets. Across the convention center aisle, mobile widgets company Plusmo has also made a nod to the pigskin with a quiet demo of the beta iPhone app, Pro Football Live.

Released Monday to the iPhone App Store, Pro Football Live beta is a thicket of teams, schedules, seasonal stats, photos, and news. During live games, Plusmo cranks up the social networking features by adding chat, voting elements, play information, and the position of the ball in a virtual stadium. The free app has received mixed user reviews because of known stability issues that hang a screen or crash the app, but Plusmo's team hinted that it wanted to kick out Pro Live Football before the season really took off. Plusmo also expects its college football and pro baseball apps to hit the App Store within the following week, despite the baseball season drawing to a close.

At this stage, Plusmo's battle for sports tracking dominance on the iPhone will be against the free Sportacular, which houses its stats and news in a much neater interface. Sportacular, in Version 1.1, also efficiently shows stats for pro baseball, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, and pro soccer within one app, compared with Plusmo's multiple applications, each specific to its own sport. However, there are enough multimedia extras in Plusmo's football app to keep sports lovers checking back in for improvements. Golf fans can check out the free Plusmo Golf, which debuted in August, and cricket followers should keep an eye out for Cricinfo MobiCast, also forthcoming.

Here at the CTIA Wireless conference in San Francisco, Quickoffice, historically a mobile documents viewer for Nokia phones, is showing off demos for four new iPhone and iPod Touch apps aimed at Apple's contingent of MobileMe users.

The first, called MobileFiles, will let you view e-mail attachments, including Google and Box.net documents from your iPhone, something that iPhones don't currently allow. Quickoffice is expected to launch MobileFiles as a free, view-only app in November.

Following that, Quickoffice plans to release three more applications for reading and editing spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations, respectively. Called Quicksheet, Quickpoint, and Quickword, the three editors will likely go for $10 apiece. On the performance end, Quicksheet and Quickword clearly displayed MobileMe attachments as multipage files and allowed users two ways to edit by tapping the screen. $30 seems like a hefty surcharge for the privilege of editing and saving all three document types back to the MobileMe account from the iPhone, especially when the viewing documents alone will be free. Not all users will need all three editors, but those who do should receive a markdown for purchasing the entire suite.

Unless a competitor steps up to challenge the pricing and app layout, by the time Quickoffice's premium applications launch in Q1, Quickoffice will have the market advantage. We haven't heard much from DataViz, the likeliest contender, about an iPhone play, though with the company fresh off releasing new versions of its flagship viewer, Documents To Go, for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and BlackBerry, iPhone is their next logical platform to conquer.

Yahoo has gotten into the curious habit of releasing a preview version of a mobile app every six months at the CTIA mobility conference. This time around, it's OneConnect for iPhone and iPod Touch, an application that Yahoo hopes will showcase what it's calling its open mobile strategy. In layman's terms, OneConnect is an application that integrates your Yahoo IM account with your social networking accounts and also your iPhone contacts and camera.

(Credit: Yahoo)

OneConnect is following the herd of any number of iPhone application developers offering to post status updates and messages to various social networks, including Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter. However, Yahoo's effort contains some useful features that, along with its established base of Messenger users, could gain it traction in the competitive world of popular iPhone applications.

I got a close look at OneConnect in a sit-down with Yahoo Mobile's communications crew that builds on my colleague Stephen Shankland's coverage of the keynote speech given by Yahoo's Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President of Connected Life.

In its preview form, the social application has three drives: updating photos and a status message to select social networks, sending free IM and SMS messages to contacts via an IP-based protocol, and souping up the device's address book to show the contact's Yahoo presence and stage interactions with them if they're online.

I'm reserving final judgment until OneConnect becomes available from the iTunes App Store, but based on the demo: so far, so good. Yahoo has rightly carried over from its PC-based Messenger and Yahoo Mail a communications feature that sends a text instead of an instant message when a contact is offline. The IM experience is richer than the SMS, of course, with emoticons and an area for quickly inserting URLs, but that's no detriment to the SMS capability. By hooking SMS to the Internet, Yahoo can offer its brand of texting free of charge to iPhone and iPod Touch users. That's a notable advantage to the latter group--since the iPod Touch is not a phone, those users wouldn't otherwise be able to send text messages at all.

Also promising is the favorites feature, a shortcut that lets you surface certain contact details in the application's contact list, like a buddy's cell phone number, so you can send a text or place a call with a tap. There are also a few cosmetic enhancements that add visual luster, but no functional advantage. When you turn to landscape mode from the messaging view, for instance, your avatar and your friends' avatar communicate via speech bubbles. You'll also be able to dress up a pal's avatar for use on your phone.

As a very early preview, Yahoo's OneConnect is off to a good start, and the iPhone platform has been a good choice for quickly and easily sharing Yahoo's vision of integration. While Yahoo's representatives dodged questions of a time line, it's likely we won't be seeing OneConnect in its full glory on other mobile platforms anytime soon.

We hope that we will see OneConnect add other instant messaging protocols, which would round it out as a full-featured social app. This is Yahoo's stated goal, but another dodge to the time line question and a lengthy explanation of Yahoo's difficulty in integrating Windows Live Messenger contacts into Yahoo's desktop messenger suggests that the addition of more networks could be a long time coming. If that's the case, Yahoo users may continue to use an all-in-one IM iPhone application such as Palringo to reach the sum of their friends, and use OneConnect for its other social updating features.

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft still isn't quite ready to release its new mobile browser, but I did get an advance look at Internet Explorer 6 for Windows Mobile at a Microsoft event Wednesday night.

The biggest benefit will be the fact that it is the full IE 6 rendering engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE 6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile. Tim McDonough, a senior director in Microsoft's Windows Mobile unit, showed me the browser running the standard MSN home page.

The current version of mobile Internet Explorer, seen here, leaves a lot to be desired. A new version, based on the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer 6 for the PC, promises Flash support and other improvements.

(Credit: Microsoft)

I saw the browser running on Windows Mobile Standard--meaning on a non-touch-screen device. The browser makes good use of a D-pad controller to go from link to link, but it's still not as elegant as on a touch screen. I'll be interested to see how the browser works on a touch-based Windows Mobile device, but am still not expecting navigation to be up to the iPhone level.

Navigation may be better on the iPhone, but IE 6 will have some advantages, such as full Flash support.

"The market today is really at 'Can I see a page?' Very quickly we're getting to 'Can I do something?'" he said. "That's where we will really shine."

Another interesting option on IE 6 is the ability to quickly shift from a site's mobile page to its standard desktop version. Just because IE 6 can show the full site, doesn't mean that's always what people want. It's particularly true in Europe where even so-called "unlimited" data plans typically have data caps that can easily be reached by loading a lot of standard Web pages. IE 6 toggles between mobile and standard Web pages by sending a different user agent, depending on which page type a user wants to see.

McDonough didn't offer much of an update on timing for IE 6, except to say that "it's still this year."

That's left Windows Mobile device makers scrambling to try to better compete against Apple's browsing experience. To fill the gap, many are turning to Opera's Windows Mobile browsing, which offers better navigation and rendering than the current mobile Internet Explorer.