Russell Beattie

A few years ago I went through all the different carrier websites and manually copy/pasted a bunch of thumbs into an image which I posted online. I did it once at the end of 2004 and again at the end of 2005. Then I took an 18 month break from blogging, and then didn't think about it until just now when I discovered that Best Buy Mobile has an online list of all the phones they carry from all the US carriers complete with thumbnails. Isn't that convenient!

Now that I use Ubuntu and GIMP, my tools are much better than they were when I was on Windows, so it was pretty trivial to save the HTML page along with all the thumbs, then use a contact sheet Python script for GIMP to import all 200+ of the thumbs into one image, which I tweaked a bit. I took out the network access cards, added in the iPhone which was missing and re-arranged accordingly. Even though there were so many phones, there are undoubtedly a few missing, and quite a few duplicates... but even so it was quick and easy to put together, looks pretty good and seems a quite accurate survey of the current US mobile market if you ask me.

I'm going to re-use the image in the Mowser pitch deck (we're doing the rounds, Miker's been in meetings daily for a couple weeks now) as every one of the phones in that picture that can browse the web will benefit from using Mowser content adaption. It's hard cutting through the myopia about this topic in Silicon Valley where everyone has seems to have become iPhone obsessed, but maybe a nice clear image will help prove the point a bit better.

:-)

-Russ

P.S. Feel free to use the image as you feel like it. Sir TBL himself used one of my previous collages in a presentation a couple years ago and I was tickled pink.