Refresh and Hands On - Tech Digest

Nokia World: Hands On Mobile talks football, mobile advertising and its Mobizines rival

I wrote about Refresh Mobile and its award-winning Mobizines mobile application yesterday, but it looks like it’s got competition. Another company exhibiting at the Nokia World conference is Hands On Mobile, which you might know from mobile games like Call Of Duty 3 and Spider-Man, but which has moved into other areas of mobile content.

This includes HOMBRE, which might sound like a Mexican condom brand, but actually stands for Hands On Mobile Run-time Environment. And it sounds quite like Mobizines, in that it’s a Java application for your phone which serves up stories, information and other content, and updates regularly using your mobile’s connection to get new stuff.

“If someone’s already got a website, this is an easy way of mobilising that,” says Eric Hobson, president and general manager of Hands On EMEA & SE Asia. “We can take a feed off a website, suck that up into a Java application, and have it dynamically updating, with a lot of the graphics stored in the application itself, so it loads up quite fast.”