ŷ������

Apps are a funny thing on smartphones. Despite the fact they have the word “phone�� baked right in, they’re just a portable conduit to a user’s digital life. App coverage is critical for digital life �� if you don’t support the apps a user wants, you’re not going to appeal.

I, and other critics of Windows Phone, have been harsh about the fact that Instagram is not official supported on the platform. But today we find out that it .

Will it make a difference?

Given that the post-...

You probably know that when publishers put out new books, they give out free copies to be reviewed.

You may not know that the number one best way for most publishers to sell books is to get lots of good reviews on Amazon.

The Platform is an independent publisher, so we can do things a little differently. You can get a review copy of Death of the PC if you agree to review the book for us on Amazon.

The review does not have to be good! We wouldn’t make a review conditional on payment. We’re just a...

We now know that . The proposed plan here being to that by creating an end-to-end experience from the hardware up creates an experience that makes life easier for the end user.

The reason why a platform owner would try to own everything from the hardware up do this would be to gain control. If a user creates a document on their Windows 8 laptop and Office 365, actually making that document appear on a Windows Phone smartphone should be ea...

If you’ve ever used eBay, you’ll be familiar with just how terrible the user experience is on “My eBay�� �� the tool that you use to trade with other people on the site. This tool essentially hasn’t changed in 15 years, and it’s always been rope and frustrated.

I’m not sure the eBay team has ever tried to get a handle on what people actually use My eBay for. Every function is clunky to use, and there’s been no concerted effort to drag it into a “Web 2.0�� world. (I’m not a fan of the term “Web 2....

With nearly done and dusted and on Amazon’s servers for all to enjoy, I’m pleased to announced The Platform’s next book.

The next book will be delivered in what I hope will be quite an interesting way. Each year The Platform will publish a new edition of Delivering Mobile Apps. Four “pamphlets�� will be published per year to keep the content in each edition fresh.

It will be a guide to all of the high-level pieces you need to understand in order to deliver mobile apps to consumer...

What’s the opposite of BYOD?

For a while, I’ve been using the term “enterprise-supply��, but it turns out that the industry has already been trying to get at term started for this and it’s COPE, or “corporate-owned, personally enabled��.

What I’ve found in my limited digging is that no one seems to use this term, although it gets lots of hits on Google for it. (Not linked as Google is so changeable.)

It’s a terrible acronym. Repurposing a word for an acronym rarely works. BYOD works because it’s e...

One of the best post-PC, consumer products of recent time is Kindle. Ebooks were nowhere until Amazon got behind them, and it was the boneheaded simplicity of the Kindle devices and services that made it work for normal people. (Also, a great lesson in how to manage the innovator’s dilemma.)

Kindle is, however, a deeply technical product. Amazon managed to reduce the complexity to a point of appliance-like simplicity.

Another hugely successful product of Amazon’s is Amazon Web Services (AWS). T...

One of the easiest types of investments to make in post-PC are those in retail environments. Post-PC devices are all about relationships, so being able to bring technology out onto the retail floor that allows the relationship between customer and employee to be improved should be an easy win.

Sainsbury’s are currently trialling a “mobile scan-and-go�� service in two of their stores. One of them happened to be quite near me, so I went to have a look.

I should say that I am a huge fan of self-ser...

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the word “phablet��, but many people do.

“Phablet��, if you’ve never heard it before, is a portmanteau of “phone�� and “tablet��. It’s used to describe a crossover device which is part-phone, part-tablet. The origins are unclear �� Wikipedia references that claims common usage since 2008. Personally, that feels way too early. Common usage I’d say is more 2011-2012.

I dug around on Twitter to try and find out why people find this word so off...

Pay and display car parks are irritating. I never have change, and I resent having to overpay in order to guarantee I don’t get a ticket. A better option would be to register the car and use auto numberplate recognition (ANPR) to track entering and exiting the car park. Like the London congestion charge with it’s “�� arrangement.

In the UK, the first part of this is being addressed by allowing for parking to be paid for by phone. The two largest companies that provide this service to lo...