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The new year never really sinks in until the AT&T Developer Summit and CES come along. The WIP team was in charge of FUN at the AT&T Registration Reception this year and with close to 600 in attendance, it was a great night with developers and other mobile ecosystem members choosing 3 or 4 buttons that reflected who they are to pin onto their lanyards. With equal number of each button available, the Android one was the first to run out reflecting the large number of Android developers at the Summit. Beer Drinkers, Wine Drinkers, Apple Developers, Cocktail Drinkers Buttons were not far behind. If there's any takeaways from this informal exercise, it's that developers like Android and drinking.

The Buttons allowed for identification of like minded people and provided entry to various activities based on the pins during the evening: Frequent Fliers designed and threw paper airplanes, Red Wine Drinkers received an exclusive wine at the bar, and Music Lovers used their rap skills...

As the rest of the team predicted, it's going to be a crazy year of evolution in the mobile world, especially for consumers. As I watch my parents socialize with their peers about which apps they've downloaded lately, I feel that this quote from last year rings even truer this year: "We are reaching the sweet spot as the penetration of a [mobile] technology reaches [the masses]". It's a sweet time to be in the industry for sure. Here are some specifics I see happening this year:

1. Death of the 'smartphone'
   There was a time when you had to be somebody 'important' to own a smartphone. It was a status symbol aptly named as a phone for 'smarter' people who needed to be more connected than everybody else. Those days are gone. Not only have smartphones warmed up to the masses, but we have more ways to communicate with one another than we ever have. 'Phone calling ' is now only of the many features, and its usage is on a downward trend. In so many ways, it's not just smarter...

(Guest Post by Amit Lubovsky, Co-founder and VP of Business Development and Marketing at tawkon)

Our company tawkon is focused on radiation tracking, specifically on detecting phone radiation emission on mobile devices. Especially as mobile devices are being relied on for more and more, radiation is a growing concern among consumers. When you make calls or browse the web, your phone emits radiation in various levels, depending on your circumstances and even the model of the phone. We monitor those levels and offers suggestions for lowering them before and during calls (disclaimer: while no research on this issue has proven 100% conclusive, increasing studies are pointing to clearer risks).

Since different phone models emit different amounts of radiation, cross-platform development was essential from the get-go. We adapted a critical development strategy in order to launch our application across multiple platforms but we also needed a simple, consistent, and attractive UI that...

Looking at the amount of new Apps that are published for Apple and Android each month, we can roughly estimate a new app comes out every 1-2 minutes.  Obviously, this is a lot to compete with so developers need to keep differentiation on their mind. There are many different ways to differentiate, but one of the most overlooked differentiators is haptic feedback. Haptics also happens to be one of the simplest and effective features to add to your Android application.

Integrating Haptics into an App
Tactile Haptic feedback is the vibration a phone creates, and now Immersion has recently released an Android SDK specifically to take advantage of these vibrations. At the moment it is the only haptic specific SDK to really control all aspects of an Android phones vibrate ability.

How is it different then Google Vibrate API?
Through the Android Vibrator API the only functions that can be controlled are the Google () vibrate motor on/off control.

For example, if you have an...