Technology

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.

Daring Fireball does a good job of covering the problems with iTunes ringtones, particularly in how Apple failed to make the “format” truly user-friendly, even while making them much friendlier than they are in most places:

Apple’s own special way of doing ringtones is this: You can only use songs purchased from the iTunes Store; you must pay an additional 99 cents on top of the price of the song itself; only a small subset of the songs at the iTunes Store are eligible; and, if you decide to create a second ringtone using a different segment of the same song which you’ve already paid for twice, you must pay for it again. But you do get to pick which segment of the song to use.

This “special way” seems fair only when compared to the ringtones offered by competitors, which, as Jobs pointed out in his keynote, typically sell for $2.50, which price includes only the ringtone snippet, not the entire original song itself.

Having worked with the record industry for several years here and there, I would pin the pressure on ringtones on two unfortunate realities of the business.

The music industry is a marketing industry

Even if you are an indie-label who claims to be doing it “for the music,” at best your job is still to tell people about those artists. To say “any person who plays music has the right to earn a living doing it” is a very noble thing to say (and why people always go to labels with the idea of “fixing” them) but that doesn’t map to talent. A lot of people know how to play musical instruments, and marketing is very expensive, so you must either be a) sellable or b) sellable and a Genius. Making something sellable is always about working supply and demand into your favor as much as possible, and geniuses are hard to come by. If you’re going to survive as a business, you’re going to have to get very good at actively selling artists.

The thing is, ringtones are the labels’ only opportunity to bring the market dynamics of singles back. Currently you can lead into an album with a pre-release and a few key tracks, but once that album is out, it’s out, and all the tracks with it. But carefully timed releases of singles, with the right marketing behind it, was the stuff that kept an old album fresh and up on the charts for longer than the average consumer’s attention would allow it to be. Done right, they are events.

More importantly, like singles, they are additional purchases on top of the album. Once Apple and iTunes made buying one track a part of the purchase of the album as a whole (particularly with “Complete My Album”), that extra revenue was lost. But sustaining an artificial barrier between a track and a ringtone of the track keeps that model alive.

Creating an artificial scarcity of a product, combined with big press when that scarcity is alleviated, is often what marketing is all about.

The music industry was built around performances, not recordings

Much of what the industry does is still rooted in what it was doing when it was formed — being a representative for live musicians in a new industrial age where mechanical reproduction threatened their livelihood. If you were a song writer and your sheet music was being turned into player piano rolls, or you were the piano player who was being replaced by said player piano, the industry and its representatives were meant to protect your interests and give you fair compensation when that machine was installed, its rolls were sold, etc. etc..

Today, the idea that a ringtone is a separate performance can be true in a certain conceptual sense, but it’s not in a modern sense, not in the way that the average person thinks about music today. (It’s not like we could have had a live band play follow us and play music when the phone rang.) But to the industry, the music is the attraction — it’s what draws you into the store, it’s what makes you tune in to that internet radio station, it’s what keeps you in the bar, it’s what makes you buy that phone even. They are performances that other businesses are using to make money, so hey, where’s their cut already?

(While the iTunes license should specifically cover the performance rights of the tracks, the question is did the previous license cover playback on phones, or did they have to change the terms to add ringtones, possibly to incent the labels to renew their contracts?)

Problem is, the music industry spent decades trying to get people to consume music as a ubiquitous commodity — The newest release! The exclusive remix! In your car, at the diner or from the movies! — but now it’s paying the price as technology has finally gotten to the point where their product really can be bought and consumed like a commodity — massive repositories, instant access, playable anywhere and in practically anything.

The ringtone, like many other RIAA products, is an attempt to keep the status-quo as long as possible, even though most analysts might say those days are already over.

An interesting note on Wikipedia found via Daring Fireball about its particular angle on knowledge. Wikipedia is more interested in verifiability than truth — a point shown when a lead developer of Mac OS 9 tried to remove an false claim about the original plans of the operating system. His correction was redacted because the incorrect info had a source, whereas he did not — only first-hand experience.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. This is meant to keep any Joe from throwing up an opinion as fact, as the additions must be based in something published. Even a lead of a project might tinker with an entry in an opportunistic way. Adam Curry and Podcasting kerfuffle, anyone? No, the scary thing in all of this was that the published source of the Mac OS 9 info was AppleInsider — a self-declared rumor site.

To Wikipedia’s own rules, when faced with a published fact from a rumor site and an unverifiable fact from an first-hand participant that contradicts the other, the smart thing to do would be to omit both. That didn’t happen, and that’s the problem with Wikipedia. As long as users ignore or confuse the rule that sites must be reliable to be cited, Wikipedia will continue to simply persist inaccuracies rather that capture fact.

And as we pointed out at the beginning, fact-checking isn’t what Wikipedia is about.

[Edited 2006-09-01] However, Jimmy Wales’ speech at TED 2006 is essential to understanding what Wikipedia is about.

It seems like Michael Arrington is one of the few who actually likes the Sony mylo. Something that is not immediately evident on the mylo home page is that the device is bundled with Skype. So while the mylo is not a cell phone, it still retains some voice call functionality — even though it is limited by its wi-fi-only nature. Considering that one can have an HTC Wizard model (such as the T-Mobile MDA for less than mylo’s announced price of $350) which uses existing 2.5 or 3G cell data networks and wi-fi and can run Skype for Pocket PC, I can’t say I know who this is actually for besides people who are severe Skype junkies (since the only instant messenger options are Google Talk and Yahoo!) or those eager to stick-it-to-the-cellphone-provider-man; the site touts that the mylo has “no monthly service fees”… that is, as you hobo it around for free wi-fi when out of the house.

Then again, the HTC Wizard runs Windows Mobile, so while it’s cheaper at the counter, you’ll definitely pay for it down the road in usability and boot-up times.

Recently on the Flock blog:

One of the larger obstacles to adoption has been the lack of a consistent, user friendly mechanism for identifying and subscribing to feeds on the web.

Actually, I think it’s because RSS is a power-user feature and of no interest to the average user. For example, my wife has tried using it several times in many ways, but she has no interest in:

• Getting a list of articles that could have just been the page itself
• Mixing two or more sites together
• Being alerted for updates to pages she’s going to visit anyway
• Only getting excerpts of articles (for those feeds that don’t contain full posting)

Basically, she knows where she wants to go, doesn’t need to be continually updated, and doesn’t like extra steps between her and the site itself. I’ve found that this is not all that uncommon. RSS users are the types who want new information continually on their periphery and I don’t think that is a mass-market use. We’ve already seen that most users only visit 6 sites regularly. So why should they use RSS?

(After a bit of interviewing, she admitted that the one application of RSS that she might be interested in was Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. But as far as NetNewsWire, Safari RSS or Flock RSS, it was a no-go.)