Screebl Pro continues to recieve good reviews.  It is now ranked in the top 20 on the Android Market in the Tools category, and in the top 50 overall!  Thanks to everyone that has tweeted, emailed, or otherwise shared your love of Screebl.  Please keep sharing!

It is generally a very challenging and time-consuming endeavor to review a sophisticated piece of software like Screebl, particularly when it involves changing and evaluating phone usage patterns.  The new review site AppRoasters.com recently "roasted" (that's what they call their reviews) Screebl Pro as their first review.  It is a very thorough and accurate review, making some good observations about ways that we can improve the product.  I was also happy to see that the review has decent coverage of the Locale integration.

Nice work AppRoasters!

Promoting a mobile application is not easy.  It's getting more difficult every day as the market gets flooded with new apps, the majority of which are crap.  It's very, very easy to get lost in the market noise.

The basic pattern that most of us follow in releasing a commercial application looks something like this:

1. Create a "Lite" version of an application.  Release to market, promote, get reviewed, tweak, improve, develop strong and loyal user base.
2. At some point in the future, release a "Professional" version of the application and charge for it.  Add compelling features not available in Lite version, and make it easy to upgrade for existing user base.

Screebl Lite has been cranking along for over three months now.  Since it's release a lot has happened, and we've learned a lot about what it takes to nurse a little utility application into a product.  Before I go into what is contained in the next major release of Screebl (it's some pretty cool stuff), let me hit on the highlights of what Screebl Lite has done so far...

• Screebl Lite has been downloaded over 20,000 times, and thousands of you use it every day. 
• I've received hundreds of questions, high-fives, suggestions, and death threats.  Much of that feedback has made its way directly back in to the product.
• Screebl has been localized by native speakers of five different languages. 
• Screebl has been reviewed six times, by a variety of online publications, including AndroidGuys, AndroidTapp, Phandroid, KnowYourMobile, BrightHub, and Octoba.net (Japanese).
• Screebl came in 5th in its category in the Android Developer Challenge 2, just behind a smokin' hot digital secretary.

Now how could things possibly get any better, you might ask?  Well we've been hard at work scraping together Screebl Pro, and there are some really cool things to be excited about...

Let me get right to the point.  Apple and Google are already the two dominate players in the consumer electronics space.  That may be a bold statement, but I don't think that it's to far off.  Many are expecting Android to hold the #2 spot in mobile operating system deployments by 2012.  Most analysts throw Symbian and RIM into the mix based on current market conditions, but I think that things are going to change very rapidly over the next year.

Now that ADC2 is over and Screebl has been polished up for the most part, with the most often requested features added and most of the biggest defects squashed, the question remains:  what to do with Screebl now?

I'm currently shopping Screebl to a number of manufacturers, trying to get the technology behind Screebl bundled with core mobile distributions.  Things are at a very early stage, but there is some interest from a few fronts.  There are a number of reasons that integrating Screebl with the core platform would make sense.

Well, the Android Developer Challenge is over, and unfortunately Screebl was not in the money this year.  We were close, coming in at 5th (prizes were awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in each category).  That at least puts us on the first page of rank ordered finalists.

Google chose to not put a link from the contest results to the developers' web sites, so placing well hasn't helped much in promoting Screebl.  It was a fun ride though, and a lot was learned.  Thanks for all of your votes!