David Pogue, New York Times consumer tech writer, has written a candid article first praising and then trashing the T-Mobile Shadow.
Pogue outlines the newish environment created when T-Mobile and an ex-Apple designer partner to design a device with some great innovative features and then taken the third-party manufacturer (apparently HTC is the manufacturer, if ZDNet is correct) out of the picture and designed their own device; rethinking a few key features. The list of praise is impressive including a rethought click-wheel for scrolling plus directional buttons for up, down, left, right selections and a Blackberry Pearl style keypad licensed from RIM. But then, Pogue says, “you turn it on.” You see, its fatal mistake is it’s running Windows Mobile 6.
Pogues’ rant reminds me of my own review of the Windows Mobile 5 Samsung Blackjack.
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Symbian seems to be in the first stage of grief over Android, Google’s new operating system for mobile. From an article by the BBC: “Google’s dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market, a senior executive at Symbian has said.”
From the Symbian exec:
“About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched.
“It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.”
And two paragraphs later:
“Meanwhile, the head of Nokia in the UK said the firm was in discussions with Google about using the platform.”
Read the BBC News article.
Link via Slashdot.
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The tectonic plates under Earth’s crust are moving very slowly all the time. Yet, we only notice them when enough tension builds up and there’s an earthquake. (Yes, I’m in California, and yes we had a 5.3 the other day.) The analogy applies to the dynamic you get in the mobile industry where there’s progress being made all the time, but where it’s easy to just wish it happened sooner. The trend is moving toward openness and toward user choice, but we don’t feel it until someone makes a big announcement like Google’s this week.
The shift is happening, and thankfully it’s happening faster than plate tectonics. Apple’s iPhone launch was a big deal, proving that a device manufacturer can play first fiddle in the US mobile industry (and AT&T isn’t complaining that 40% of iPhone buyers are new subscribers) and more importantly, proving that a device’s user experience can lead every part of the conversation; within the industry and with consumers.
Google’s announcement feels like a corollary to Apple’s. It adds evidence that a non-carrier can wrangle support from across the mobile industry (handset and chip OEMs, carriers, platform developers) to create an open platform.
Google’s announcement has interesting possibilities. What will device manufacturers come up with if they don’t have to pay Microsoft (or anybody else) for their OS? What will the carriers create if they didn’t have to pick from the pros and cons of the various OSs, but if they had the ability to write their own branded UI for a line of devices? What will the third party application developers be able to do with a more open, internet-powered approach (as is starting to happen on the Apple front, but that’s another debate.) What will content providers create for users if Google can prove an ad-subsidized mobile model will work?
Someday we’ll all look back and remember how cute Google was when it was just a little rainbow logo search field staring at you from a blank page.
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Mobile phones based on Google’s software are not expected to be available until the second half of next year. They will be manufactured by a variety of handset companies, including HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung and be available in the United States through T-Mobile and Sprint.
The phones will also be available through the world’s largest mobile operator, China Telecom, with 332 million subscribers in China, and the leading carriers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, as well as T-Mobile in Germany, Telecom Italia in Italy and Telefónica in Spain.
link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/technology/05cnd-gphone.html?hp
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From the Economist this week (edition: 10/27-11/2):
“Another winner from the launch of the iPhone was AT&T, which is the exclusive carrier for the device in the United States. Its quaterly net-profit rose by 42% compared with the same period last year. Around 40% of iPhone subscribers were new customers to AT&T.”
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Email sent from a desk does not equal email sent from a mobile device.
When you send an SMS text or chat message people understand the casual, quick nature of the medium, and therefore expect a level of casualness when it comes to spelling full words (u versus you, ppl versus people) and forming complete thoughts and sentences. Just as spoken language is conversational, chat and SMS afford a certain level of laxness.
Email has evolved. There was a time when typing in all lowercase (hopefully you never typed in all caps) was normal enough for email. But since it has become the mainstay of corporate communication, it has dressed up accordingly. Although emoticons occasionally find their way into corporate emails, cute misspellings and abbreviations don’t.
New etiquette is needfully emerging. How do recipients know you’re sending an email from a device versus your desktop? When I’m writing a note via email from a mobile device, to a work colleague, must I type in complete thoughts and sentences? Must I capitalize and punctuate?
When I first saw Apple’s “Sent from my iPhone” default signature I thought it just let me show off my cool quotient with an iPhone reference. What they really did was create a disclaimer: forgive the typos and the informality.
(I thought about actually posting this from my phone, but blogging requires a certain level of formality that I wasn’t prepared to take on with a mobile device. That would be more appropriate for my microblog.)
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We like when the mainstream press highlights the right things. It’s a signal that the non-insiders might get a sense of the pains and frustrations felt in the mobile industry. Who else but Walt Mossberg could deliver it to the bad guys with WSJ credibility. Mossberg’s axis of evil includes Steve Jobs’ inked deal with “the devil,” (read the piece to see who that is), it includes 1970s-era AT&T, and the top US carriers whom he calls collectively the Soviet ministries.
My only suggestion for Mr. Mossberg is that he up the production value of his video studio. He speaks with the eloquence of someone who has a speech writer (presumably himself) but his close-up cam, with low quality video comes off a bit like a YouTube “video response.” But, hey, maybe that’s the best way to get heard these days.
Read or watch Mossberg’s Free My Phone rant at All Things D.
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Josh Ulm, Director of User Experience, Adobe spoke at the company’s annual MAX conference in Chicago.
I especially liked his before and after review of Yahoo! Go and Google Maps for mobile.
His comments on “Demonstrating the Brand” were right on — especially his point about the newish Yahoo! Go application. The user interface is a huge improvement over the previous Yahoo! WAP version, but even though the visual branding is much better aligned, the application falls short of the Yahoo! brand promise. Yahoo! is built on bringing me my content, and somehow the Yahoo! Go app manages to deliver merely generic content.
This point is one the mobile industry, and more specifically, the mobile user experience community is not focused enough on. Focusing on getting the usability and the interactions right is only part of the equation. Don’t lose sight of the content. Is it right? And is its delivery true to the brand.
Since a majority of Ulm’s thoughts are shared in Mobile Persuasion I’ve just focused on the highlights.
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The context versus consistency debate is not new, but it certainly doesn’t appear to be over. 37signals adds another argument to the context pile…
I read this interesting (short) article on 37signals.com concerning Apple’s placement of their new iTunes icon on the iPhone home screen. Given that the western world reads from left to right, users would expect this last icon to appear on the left side, right?… Not so says Apple, here’s why:
Read Context over Consistency at 37signals.com.
Although it’s something that the common person might not notice or ‘get’, it shows that the Apple UI folks are never asleep at the wheel and that they spend time thinking about the small details and their resulting implications. Don’t just do things automatically because tradition says we should or because the technology says it should be that way.
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Today at the EuroIA Summit, Barcelona, we will discuss insights from the Punchcut-funded mobile social networking study.
The poster lists the chief insights and provides a visualization of the users ages and their behaviors (text messaging, IM, email, photo sharing, blogging, commenting both using desktop apps and mobile devices).
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