PlexNex

BOLD's Timid Path-Dependency

One question lurking in the subconscious of the gadget cognoscenti is what will Nokia's and RIM's answers to iPhone be like? What will Nokia's & RIM's best efforts at the touchscreen produce?

If last year's HTC Touch being marketed by Sprint -- a telco in freefall -- is any example of iPhone-inspiration, then we are in for some funny-ass cellie punditry.

As Apple rolls out telco partnerships in Europe, iPhone's awesomeness is by now a matter of universal agreement and enters lore as a notch on the tech-timeline. Don't ask me. Edward Tufte, information design guru, characterized the iPhone's humane integration of hard- and soft-ware as a design leap. He called out the iPhone interface as newly, uniquely, devoid of "administrative debris".

Bold looks an attractive package. It's an iPhone with a Hasselblad-like leatherette back that will surely add a luxury feel and make the device easier to grasp.

Bold is an iPhone with a keyboard. This is odd, if hardly surprising. RIM figures Blackberry users must have that keyboard. After all, they are used to that keyboard. The Blackberry interface has been defined by that keyboard.

Ready for irony? That keyboard defeats the purpose of the touchscreen. That keyboard is nothing if not what Tufte called administrative debris. It is all administrative debris. Nothing but administrative debris.

That keyboard crowds out screen real estate to the extent that Bold must be wider and larger than the iPhone to achieve a touchscreen with some, any, utility. This makes Bold something of a hybrid: part touch experience with icons and part text-maniac's-best-friend. Which is to say, something that will not take anything away from the suits but which adds some of the sexy iPhone mojo that the suits would like to have along with the Microsoft Exchange Server access.

Enough mojo, perhaps, to keep the suits from migrating to iPhone. And that's the point: this is a defensive, stop-the-bleeding design strategy manifest as a clock-stopping hot pocket rocket. 

It's all about the Individual v Enterprise market segmentation that is the landscape of the Blackberry v Apple Device War. Apple & iPhone own the house, and RIM & Blackberry own the glass-house. Tension will mount over the next few chapters as to who will penetrate the other's ... house.

RIM have that word 'innovation' on the Bold website, which is unfortunate. I'm reminded of the (excellent & entertaining) DirecTV commercials featuring the guy, a parody of a cable TV exec, in the marketing strategy board room who pretends to have an MBA, some pompous panaceae for killing DirecTV's market penetration and a few slick Kung Fu moves. Cameo by Ed Begley, Jr ...

"Jim! Whip Up Some Numbers"

"Make it Louder"

We'll need to demo Bold to find out if its hybridity is ridiculously contrived or makes some sense for users already accustomed to Blackberry and, more importantly for RIM, for individual users who are native to the iPhone wheel-house.

SMARTPHONES: Snapshot of the Market

Canalys is covering the smartphone market.

Keep in mind that the scale of the smarphone market (which just passed 30 million units) is very small relative to the overall mobile handset market (expected to reach 1 Billion units in 2007 and growing though next year at about 20%).

graphic from mobilephonedevelopment.com and Symbian's 3Q Market Round-Up (PDF).

Note the difference between North America and all else. This reflects Nokia's weaker share position here as well as the RIM's & Windows Mobile's presence. Is this 'diversity'?

Note how Apple's iPhone has about matched either the RIM or the Windows Mobile shares within its first year. This should frighten both camps.

Apple's expansion outside the US will be interesting to follow.

Awash in Valencia Orange, the chart says Symbian is the global juggernaut, (the handset analogue to Windows on the desktop). With Linux being a part of the Android platform and its Open Handset Alliance, I'll be looking for more Red on the chart beginning next year.

iPhone Uber Alles!

Why'd it take half a year for us to recognize the awesomeness of iPhone?

Tells you something about tipping points, and about intrinsic vs perceived quality. Tells you something too about the sameness of nearly all technology, about nearly all products generally.

Actually, it tells you about how long it takes most people to configure, program and use all the features of a smartphone ;-)

Tracking Handset Market Share

I've become interested in the mobile hardware and services markets since writing on smartphones last month -- in which I touched upon the eminence of the iPhone and difficulties of setup in general.

Maija Palmer, covering mobile for FT, had an informative print piece November 28th -- "Motorola loses ground in global handset league" -- in which apparently fresh market share numbers are quoted from Gartner's 3Q07 analysis. Among the interesting factoids: Motorola down to #3, its fall continuing to 13.1%; Samsung, doing nothing much, moves up to #2 at 14.5%. Smartphones: Nokia has 57% of the smartphone segment, RIM (Blackberry) has only 10%; Apple projects selling 10 million in 2008

Notably, Motorola's share of handsets has fallen like a stale hit record and it is therefore not surprising that Motorla CEO, Ed Zander, just announced his retirement plans.

Gartner's own Carolina Milanesi seems the ultimate authority on share. Here is her older 2Q07 table (based upon units sold) ...

                               

Handsets	2Q07	2Q06
Nokia	36.9%	33.7%
Motorola	14.6%	21.9%
Samsung	13.4%	11.2%
Sony Ericsson	9.0%	6.6%
LG	6.8%	6.3%
Others	19.3%	20.1%

FT: Hiser on Smartphones

I wrote on smartphones in the FT yesterday -- "Oh, that syncing feeling..." -- or rather, how some well-known difficulties make giving a smartphone as a Christmas gift a little bit challenging.

Dinner was fun: we used the iPhone to take pictures of everybody around the table and made calls to each other from several feet away.

Mary Branscombe contributes the relevant side-bar: "Ten tips for smartphone users". Here's my favorite of Mary's ...

2 E-mail set-up - You will need details from both your mobile operator and your internet service provider or e-mail provider to set up e-mail on your smartphone. Often, you will need to use your ISP to collect e-mail and your mobile operator to send it. You may also have to install a security certificate.

Does the pregnant irony of depending on TWO DIFFERENT PHONE COMPANIES to get your e-mail on a smartphone make you stop and laugh out loud (sometimes in random public places) like it does me? 

Anyway, the PR agencies -- thanks -- had made it easy for me to check out a number of different phones through their generous demo programs ...

• Nokia N95
• Blackberry Curve 8310
• Blackberry Curve 8320
  
• Samsung Blackjack

... so, I'll be writing about some of my more hilarious escapades with devices I cannot even read. For sure there are a couple of non-starters on that list.

But to be fair, they are each aging platforms, made silly-seeming by the Galilleian leap of the iPhone. Each one is soon to be eclipsed by the next 4th-gen phones (of which the HTC Touch is the first example) which ape the iPhone's touch screen but will only very slowly begin to deliver iPhone's thorough, brilliant design -- characterized by a seamlessness between hard- and software.

Windows Mobile 6 "A Mess"

David Pogue reviews the new T-Mobile Shadow today in The New York Times' Circuits section.

"Looks Good, Feels Good, but Wait..."

Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. Common features require an infinitude of taps and clicks, and the ones you need most are buried in menus. Apparently the Windows Mobile 6 team learned absolutely nothing from Windows Mobile 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

He goes on to catalog a long list of phone software interface design faux pas which could only be possible from a desktop computer company trying to extend its branded metaphors from its home environment, the PC, to the smartphone platform. Trust me, it's a different kind of platform.

I've been testing -- or preparing to test -- a BlackJack with Windows Mobile 5 and quite honestly I can't even get up the appetite to configure it. Using the Samsung Blackjack -- as nice looking and nice feeling this hardware is -- the thought of using a BlackBerry wannabe that's only raison d'etre is to embrace & extend the RIM market position and extend Microsoft-only interop into the mobile sphere makes me feel dirty.

If, after Windows Mobile 5, they are still trying to shoe-horn Windows' hierarchical menu structures into Windows Mobile 6, then Microsoft's mobile personnel need a refresh.