The "smart" in smartphone defined
Companies are only just understanding what a smartphone means in today’s world. I’m reminded of this as I watch Nokia Search take thirty-eight seconds to bring me to a Yahoo! search field.
Thirty-eight seconds is more than long enough to forget what you were searching for in the first place. About 63% of that wait is looking at a screen that says “finding search providers,” a search whose choice is never stored by the app, and is performed every time “search the internet” is selected.
But this is where the problem becomes apparent: Nokia Search isn’t really a web search application, it’s a mobile device search. The app launches quickly and happily, and starts returning video, emails, bookmarks and contacts (and more, even) results immediately as you start typing in your terms.
It says a lot that Nokia feels searching your emails/contacts/documents on your own phone is more important than searching the web. Like many smartphone makers, there’s been a strong emphasis on real computing on the mobile up until now. It’s a big marketing point for Nokia (e.g., the “it’s what computers have become” campaign they ran for the original N95), and it’s been a cultural force in the company that’s been evident in much of their concept and beta work. Windows Mobile is entrenched in mobile computing thanks to business & corporate IT interests, and Palm has always walked the line between users and productivity, balancing their original PDA goals with the needs of the mobile workforce.
Me, I just wanted a web search field.
That’s what was missing until now: finding the things that ordinary users would want to do on a “smart” phone, and focusing only on that. This is usually a matter of returns: it’s hard to retrofit a business platform like WinMo or the Blackberry into a “lifestyle” product. Few companies have the resources and freedom to start from scratch. And no one was comfortable with releasing a phone that did less. Why strip out features, or for that matter, sell to those people who “clearly” didn’t want those features?
The iPhone has been instrumental in putting the writing on the wall: it’s not about “doing things on your phone” anymore… it’s about “doing things with your phone.” And it’s a difference that is reflected in the physical shape of the device and how the software goes straight to making something happen for a user. Who tried to reach me? What is near me? What do I need to do next? Just another task this mutable slab helps you do, just more information it can pull for you. Editing a .doc file? That’s the past. Or at least, it’s not the focus anymore.
It’s a bit frustrating to see the Sidekick get such limited acknowledgment in this evolution of the smartphone. T-Mobile turned Danger’s device into a teenager’s phone in the States, from the webisodes that sold them, all the way down to the illustration of a purple-haired woman that graced the Phone application icon… alienating most adult users and preventing them from discovering its breakthrough features, like push email and OTA synchronization to a web portal where you could access & edit your info on the desktop. Even an (even more) affordable unlimited data plan. All “breakthrough” features or services of today.
Yet, T-Mobile’s research was probably right, that only the youth market was hungry to use those sorts of features at the time the phone was introduced. Could the Sidekick have been a breakthrough success like the iPhone? It was a solid enough product to, sure. But the iPhone did what was hard for the newcomers to do — giving the older market motivation to care about smartphones, by riding in on the perfect storm of iPod frenzy. As Jobs put it, it was an iPod, a Phone, and an internet device. The internet device part, in many ways, was the trojan horse of the set.
As much as it seems like Apple has taken over the market, it says much more about how much potential in this market has been opened up now that consumers care about these kinds of functions on their phone — or more accurately, these functions away from their computer. What is wonderful about the iPhone’s success is that we’re all starting to benefit from it. Not only by proving the viability of these devices, but by setting these baseline experiences.
We don’t always need to edit ID3 tags on our devices, we don’t need to actually do video editing on the device, and we certainly don’t need to run a web server on it — and not ironically, these are all features found in Nokia’s Nseries phones. The core uses for a general consumer are clear now, and simplifying software doesn’t need the hard sell anymore since it’s now evident in the world. Providing distinct solutions can take the place of having to make all solutions possible.
And you can bet that Google and Nokia are more than happy to hear that, too.
