This infographic was put together by Android Tablet Fanatic by aggregating publicly available data sources. For those of you looking to travel, these are some of the costs that you’ll be looking forward to. Click on the image to view it full-sized.

Whether you are traveling domestically or internationally, check out the latest pre-paid rates and keep those data costs in mind.

Mobile Active is one of the premier spaces on the Internet to find out what’s happen at the intersection of mobile technology and social movements. They are often releasing case studies and projects based on their findings at this intersection. Their most recent release is the Mobile Media Toolkit. From their release:

The Mobile Media Toolkit helps you make sense of the growing role of mobile tech in media. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, mobile tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media. We cover it all, from basic feature phones to the latest smartphone applications.

The Mobile Media Toolkit is designed to give guidance to those involved as professional or citizen journalists, or engaged in media development or news/media organizations as to how mobile is being used and some of the practices that are developed as its being used in various social engagements.

This isn’t just a listing of case studies either, the Mobile Media Toolkit takes your through creating content on your mobile, sharing mobile media content, delivering content to mobile devices, engaging mobile-enabled audiences, and even securing your content. There are several How-Tos posted which would enable you or your organizing to just jump right into mobile (if you will, getting some use out of some of those mobile features you might always use).

To learn more, visit the Mobile Media Toolkit website.

We come down pretty hard on Bible apps here at MMM. Either they aren’t focused enough, or they have so many features that people get lost in using them (a product focus issue). Nevertheless, there’s always room to talk about what they do well and what can improve from there.

What Mobile Bible Apps Do Well

Its well agreed, even when comparing leading Bible apps to other eBook readers/applications, that Bible applications are well developed for their target. From the handling of notes, to offering different views to compare content. Bible apps seem to run in the lead in respect to having the kind of user experience (UX) that is responsive to many of the needs of the Bible reader.

Footnotes, cross-references, and some even integrate image support better than you’d see on the Nook, Kindle, or other electronic reading devices. Add to that, an large body of content (usually priced appropriately), and you basically have a niche in mobile Bible apps that can pretty much sustain itself – for a little while longer at least.

And then you just have availability. Just look at our Bible apps listing – there’s at least one Bible app (and therefore several Bibles and other religious literature) available for nearly any mobile device. There are even SMS and audio-only options for those folks that would prefer something a bit more responsive to those reading and learning styles. I’ve been around mobile devices and software for a very long time, I don’t know of any genre outside of games that covers such a diverse range of devices and usage types.

What Mobile Bible Apps Don’t Do So Well

Where mobile Bible apps falter, and this is true for just about anything attached to the publishing world, is in two specific areas: access and consistency.

In respect to access, we still have the situation with Bible applications that content is locked to specific applications. Though we are getting better with this – just recently, we saw the release of Simple Bible Pro for HP webOS devices which uses Laridian’s licensed content. Instead of a situation such as a single vendor needing to making an application for (and then support) various mobile platforms, another company has made the application, and there was some cross-licensing able to be done here. This doesn’t happen enough, and therefore Bible software companies are dealing with access the hard way – building platform-centric silos. And in most cases aren’t even taking advantage of respective platform strengths when doing so.

Then there’s consistency. I’ll let Kevin Purcell from Christian Computing Magazine take it form here:

…While all of these are good apps, they have one thing in common. They lag behind their iPad/iPhone counterparts running on iOS in features and sometimes in stability. Let’s take Olive Tree Bible Reader as an example. The iOS version is rock solid and has a lot of great features. It has split screen capability and markup features like book bookmarks and notes. The most recent stable Android version only recently added some of these features, but not all of the iOS features are present yet. Logos has a good iOS app. They haven’t even re-leased an Android version yet, but do have a public beta (see link above). Their beta is little more than a book reader. You cannot compare translations, there is no Passage Guide or Word Study Guide and like the iOS version it has no note taking feature, bookmarking or highlighting. Laridian’s Android app is an alpha, not even a beta. I downloaded it and they have a great start, but it is definitely missing most of the great features of the iPhone version…

Read the rest of his July 2011 article (PDF)

Feature parity is important whether you are doing simple reading, or diving into a more in-depth study with your community. This aspect really hits folks who move to another mobile device and have gotten used ot a specific feature.

How Then to Raise the Bar

This is the part where you make the call. Being that mobile Bible apps have this base, where do they need to improve or become better in your perspective? Let’s hear what you have to say, and maybe the voices can get some of these excellent companies to consider tweaking their offerings in that direction.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and so I threw myself a challenge towards duplicating a friend’s recent effort to create a video that could be easily see with mobile devices. However, instead of using a brand new desktop PC (and the nice power that came with it) as he has, I used my Nokia N8 and it’s little used Video Editor program. In less than an hour, I had a video of reasonable quality that would be compatible with just about any mobile device. Before the early morning was out, I created five videos, keeping only three of them.

That got me thinking about our mobile devices, and how powerful they have truly become in recent years. So let’s throw this question out there for your Sunday thinking: what feature of your mobile device do you use the least?

I’m under the assumption that we are vastly under-utilizing the imaginations and resources of developers and consumers in the bible apps arena. Sure, there are bibles, reading plans, libraries, audio libraries, and video tracts that are solid for building the faith. But, that’s it. There’s nothing else, unless you are looking in the “kids” section and much of what’s there gets little attention from it’s target audience, let alone the genre.

But, I think this is something that can be solved. We’ve got to look at the potential situations we aren’t addressing and then create the opportunity to grow personally and with one another in a way that would be receivable.

To that end, I tossed some thoughts up at twitter hoping to get some conversation and probably poke an imagination or two. Here are the tweets:

At a gathering there were 3 iPads, several iPhones, and a few other smartphones. Bible apps weren’t the topic. Nor was gospel music. If you want mobile to be an intentional response for faith, you’ve got to build something that threads those social moments, like games.

Am honestly shocked that there’s no game that can be played across multiple devices published by Christian/bible developers. Missed [opportunity]? For as much as Taboo, Scrabble, etc are played at gatherings, why not use mobile there too? Folks already have devices out on social net[works during gatherings]

There’s more than enough subject matter in the bible alone to create a solid mobile game. Where’s the imagination and execution for this? Or, is asking for such taking aspects of “fellowship” outside of a comfy space. If games go social+mobile, do [people] connect/mature faith?

If games for religious/community gatherings go social+mobile, does that break/mend social fences?

There are a few things here, and each could be their own conversation. But, I want to know your thoughts. Why aren’t we seeing more social games targeted towards small groups? For all the funds that many churches are spending on mobile apps that are simply brochures (much like their websites and printed programs), why isn’t that energy being put on making social games that engage their communities on existing social networks, or community-specific one’s?

One project that I came across (tweet) is Ebenezer by Old Testament Adventures. From the website:

Ebenezer is a point & click adventure game in the style of Monkey Island based around the Old Testament story in 1 Samuel 8-12, where Saul becomes king. It is currently under development for iPhone and Android.

For more information, including how this is being put together and how you can contribute or get involved can be found on their website.

So far, that (and Bible Navigator X which we talked about before) seem to be it. Do we just not have the imagination to do on mobiles in faith gatherings what people are already doing in faith gatherings, but might have little to nothing to do with the gathering itself?

An article at O’Reilly Radar sparked a memory back towards a previous post on open source in the mobile ministry (#mobmin) space. Here’s a snippet of the Radar article:

So, if all software should be free and open source, who is going to write this code? One argument is that the dentist, or a group of dentists, should underwrite the production of the code. But dentistry, like most things in western society, tends to be a for-profit competitive enterprise. If everyone gets the benefit of the software (since it’s FOSS), but a smaller group pays for it, the rest of the dentists get a competitive advantage. So there is no incentive for a subset of the group to fund the effort.

Another variant is to propose that the software will be developed and given away, and the developers will make their living by charging for support. Leaving alone the cynical idea that this would be a powerful incentive to write hard-to-use software, it also suffers from a couple of major problems. To begin with, software this complex might take a team of 10 people one or more years to produce. Unless they are independently wealthy, or already have a pipeline of supported projects, there’s no way they will be able to pay for food (and college!) while they create the initial product.

Read the rest at O’Reilly Radar.

We’ve been on the side of open source for a long time here at MMM. From Bible+ to Katana to Biblia to Door43, we are extremely supportive of those persons and organizations who see a need for transparent development, free/low-cost applications and content, and the communities that develop from such efforts. We’ve also been on the side of projects that started with a boom but are nothing more than a whimper (for example, Katana). Starting a project with the idea that it will be open source assumes a lot – and unless you are Google-like (Android was purchased by them and then made open source). You’ve got to have certain ducks in a row, and unfortunately, finances and impact are the major ones where some open source projects fail.

But, there’s a place for going open source after a time. Are  there Bible reader applications who have been in a maintenance mode, or are large enough that a critical mass of interested developers, designers, etc. would fill in some of the blanks such as platform support, languages, and reach? Probably. Yet only a few fall into this category – not to mention the fun of the content rights in this domain. It is an answer, and one that could afford to be better explored.

That only makes open source part of the answer. And as the Radar article is really trying to bring into the discussion, just because something is open source doesn’t mean its free to develop, support, or market. There are always costs, and somewhere, someone pays for this. This could be from donors, this could be from fans. But, it has to be a large enough group that open source ‘X’ makes sense over something that isn’t. When that’s not the case, open source is no more a correct answer than ‘C’ on a true/false test.

So, we do a lot of talking about mobile ministry (#mobmin) with various people, ministries, and organizations, and much of this conversation is great. Yet, there’s always this point in the conversation about resources comes up. The questions range from “how to create mobile-formatted resources” to “what are some of the best mobile resources for [insert your topic area].”

The initial answer for this is that most documents and media is already mobile-friendly – just make it available. On-board email applications and office productivity suites (QuickOffice, Documents-To-Go,etc.) have the ability to read items created in Word and Excel – some can even do PDF and PowerPoint documents (with layout being the chief issue on the smaller mobile screen). Office suites have both read and editing abilities, and so that at least makes the “how to create” question easily addressed.

Beyond that, we get into a harder to address question, “what are the best resources?”. Unfortunately, when asked “what are some of the best,” we get into what doesn’t exist or simply hasn’t been made available in the mobile context such that it could offer some sense of comparison (though things are improving all the time). Thankfully, there’s some good work happening in this area. One group is addressing discipleship resources using a open and collaborative  approach. That organization is called Door43.

From their website:

Door43 is a self-selected, online community that believes in the vision of working together to equip the global church with unrestricted discipleship resources, using the technology God has given us… The Door43 project is open and free for anyone or any ministry to use. The project is managed by Distant Shores Media

With Door43, you have a resource creation, engagement, and sharing space where items specifically related to discipleship is being developed and implemented. The primary project being undertaken right now is the Open Bible Stories project. Open Bible Stories is a collection of 30 stories of the Bible in text and mobile-ready audio and video formats. The project is released from copyright restrictions under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (seeDoor43:Copyrights), so that the stories can be legally adapted, translated and used by anyone, in any language and culture. To see the progress of this project, check out Open Bible Stories project page at Door43.

Other pending projects at Door43 include:

Of the initiatives that I’ve seen which are pulling together some specific aspect of mobile ministry and addressing it, Door43 is one of the more open efforts. If you are looking for discipleship resources, or can lend your hand to Open Bible Stories or any other project, get in contact with Door43 (@door43) and add to the wealth of necessary resources.

Because, like I said earlier, making resources is easy. But, making relevant resources takes a community effort.

I was recently invited on a bicycle ride with another brother in the faith and while we only went 10 miles, it was great to have some fellowship and just chat while putting the feet to the pedals. One of the statements that the brother made is that he wishes that there were more believers around him who liked to bike, as he would love to do this as a fellowship activity. I mentioned to him about some groups of believers that I know who do ride, but there were no in his area. It got me thinking, is there a more effective way to combine an activity like bicycling (or hiking, running, etc.) with fellowship?

When I finished that ride, I went to the Sports Tracker website. Having pulled a mobile from the grave, I was interested in getting that software working – and it didn’t before the ride. And then it hit me. Sports Tracker is a social network, and literally, my mobile (and the public rides) would present a means for other believers to connect with me as I ride. It would just be a matter of advertising both to those who use the service, and to those who don’t.

Essentially, I’d just need to ride, and then make sure that my rides are shared publicly with titles that would indicate that those rides were fellowship based. Then, I could use other social networks (online and offline) to talk about the rides. The mental note for me would be to make sure that I turn on Sports Tracker before the ride, so that its being logged. But then, its just about riding and fellowship.

I’m sure that other applications and services could be used for similar. Its just a matter of being creative around some of their abilities. And if you’ve got something that works with a mobile – even in a simpler fashion like sending a group SMS out to your small/cell group a few hours before an outing that some might also want to join – then you’ve made your mobile a catalyst for connecting with others.

I’ll try this and see what happens. In the meantime, have any of you tried something similar with social networking or mobile in order to create a space for fellowship that’s not the usual breakfast/bible study/(gender) group event?

Sports Tracker is available for Nokia Symbian, Google Android, and Apple iOS devices. Its a free download and a free service. For more information, visit the Sports Tracker website.

A recent tweet by the Folks at Audio Bible/Faith Comes by Hearing (@audiobible) got me thinking (again):

If u could carry the Bible around with u in more than 500 languages – like in your pocket – how would u use it? #Hmmmm #GreatCommission

Original tweet.

I used to carry 1, then 2, then 15, and at one time over 100 Bibles around with me on my mobile devices (thanks Bible+). At the time, I justified it because I was (a) reading/studying Scripture a ton more than I do now, and (b) I interacted with several people who “heard” the Scriptures best in the translation they most used. Being that I was also at college during this time, it felt like the right way to approach speaking spiritual matters in a clear and consistent manner (1 Cor 14:1-19).

I don’t carry as many Bibles with me these days. In fact, until recently I didn’t carry any versions on my mobile (still no app, but I’ve got a Bible), and the ones on my iPad are the same in each Bible app or website (ESV, KJV, NET, and a few others). I’ve got less a need to carry as many versions of the Word as I do the onus to live as much of the Word so that when asked, I can give the appropriate answer to my faith (1 Peter 3:15-16). That, and the consistency of being in or near connected spaces allows me to search quickly from a series of websites when needed, or just make a note for something to come back later to.

That’s not the case for all folks. Many of the frequent travelers and missionaries I’ve met would jump at the ability to have Bibles and other texts in as many languages as needed, and at a moment’s notice. Their interactions almost require it of them. And when they are able to have something that speaks right to their audiences, it makes living among mixed groups that much easier to manage. When they don’t have that content, or even the ability to get a clear translation, their relationships to people and environments suffer.

But such use speaks to that end of things – where the tweet asked “how would you use it?” Many of use have libraries of Bibles and other content in print on bookshelves (digital and otherwise), but what have we done with it besides making it decorative? Have we taught someone to read, or took the time to use those resources to tutor people who are studying those subjects we’ve collected? Have we engaged the cultures beyond the pages and held the kinds of conversations that would amplify or change our opinions of those cultures, people, and events? Or, is it just a number?

In grade school, many of us learned about the terms kinetic and potential energy. Kinetic energy is identified by its impetus to move – the energy immediately before movement happens. Potential energy, on the other hand, is energy that is stored and is usually static due to its position or configuration. You’ve got that neat Olive Tree, Logos, YouVersion, or Bible.is app with hundreds of Bibles and other materials ready to be used. Are you in the process of transferring that energy into the lives of others, or are you configured simply to display the potential of what can be?

Over on my personal site, I wrote a pretty long piece talking about me giving away the Nokia N97 that I’ve had for the past two years. I’m quite at peace with giving it away, but not for the reasons I used to give away mobiles. Here’s a snippet:

…Then the N97 leaves my possession. I’ll have only two mobiles, the X6 and my N8. The X6 might stick with me since it has a crack in the screen – unless someone comes along that needs it more than I need to keep it as a backup. I’m not wedded to keeping so many mobiles anymore (as I said in an earlier post). But, I’m also not content in people just getting a mobile for the sake of having it. These devices should enable something more than simply calling or texting someone. It should be more than saying “I’ve got screen, after, screen, after screen of applications that I rarely use.” No. These mobiles should connect us to the things that matter. Educating one another, preventing disease, sharing our spiritual travels. These are the things that matter, and what mobile should foster.

For me, I’m clearly in a phase of life where if it doesn’t improve someone else’s life in those kinds of ways, then mobile doesn’t matter. If all it does is sit as a trinket, then I might as well give it away to someone who can change the world with it much more than I.

Read the rest at Blog.AntoineRJWright.

It has been a good while since we’ve talked about giving devices away and contentment. What are your thoughts on the subject? Do you think that the way we view mobile and technology lends to grow into these kinds of decisions? Or, does some aspect of consumerism or security override those moments?