Computing

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.

In a previous post from 2005:

37signals’ philosophy to their apps is very similar to the model of UNIX shell commands, and makes it obvious to me that Web 3.0 will be all about piping web applications together—and those apps that become too closed off will be the ones that get left behind.

It looks like Live Mesh might finally kick this Web 3.0 thing off.

Live Mesh is a new Microsoft framework for cloud computing on the internet, providing tools for sharing data between devices and protocols for accessing data without needing to know the underlying providers. It appears to be, in many ways, a “meshing” of feeds that the services publish with synchronization data binding them all together so the platform can modify and republish as need… but much, more powerful in practice.

A few weeks ago, Loic Le Meur blogged about how he wished his social map lived on his blog. Something like Live Mesh would be able to link Facebook content with blog content without there necessarily being an original that controls a number of copies. They would both be equal and after synchronization, only the sync identification could be considered “master” data. (The question is, of course, is who owns that sync data — something I haven’t uncovered from the Live Mesh site yet, but damn, wouldn’t it be amazing if they’d figured out how to make that decentralized as well?)

But what’s most interesting is that this seems to be the first child of Microsoft’s new position of cross-compatibility on internet, and they have promised Live Mesh will be platform-independent.

Private betas are happening now. I can’t wait to hear the first reports. A demo video (using Silverlight sigh) can be found on the site’s Developer page. Not only does it demo photo data being shared over Live Mesh, but complete applications, both live in the browser and saved locally (in a Google Gears-ish manner).

A while ago on their podcast, the editors of Engadget wondered why Palm was still using the same form factor for the Treo that they’ve always been using, and why haven’t they created a thinner one?

They even wondered if Palm continues to do so because Palm believes that the current Treo form factor is what Treo users want. In the end, it only made me wonder what Palm still has left in its Treo line at all. I have to believe that a part of the answer is that Palm doesn’t have much choice in the matter, and has to continue the Treo form factor.

The story of Palm in these later days of the company is a sad one, considering how much lead they have lost since they dominated the PDA market in the mid-90s. But not much has changed in the appeal of devices since then — the user experience of the PDA was what made a PalmOS device win out over most Pocket PCs. Palm never won on hardware capabilities or vendor selection, but they did win on simplicity and relatively bullet-proof synchronization.

The release of a Windows Mobile version of the Treo phone was a necessary evil. PalmOS development had slowed to crawl for reasons too numerous to mention. Simple grew into incapable, and to keep business users, capabilites had be brought in from outside. With Windows Mobile, Palm gave up an aspect of their user experience legacy — how users actually access and use the features of their device — to a product that is entirely out of their control, and often works against the device itself because of its inherent peculiarities. This concession to businesses was a loss to Palm’s ability to redefine itself or create clearer market distinctions for itself in the way consumer leaders like TiVo and Apple do with their custom operating systems and software solutions.

Today, Palm no longer owns the PalmOS (a different company does now) and the Treo runs the Windows Mobile software of its former enemies. So what is the Treo about these days? Unless you buy a PalmOS model, where the core of the software itself hasn’t been updated in many, many years, you’re not getting anything severely different.

Ultimately, the Treo’s strength is the Treo brand itself and the promise of easier and friendlier — just as the company spent a ton of money to buy the Palm name back and drop their old(new?) palmOne moniker. The form factor is a magnet, not just for shoppers, but for people “in the wild.” It can be spotted on the street, or across a crowded train car. Like the name, it is a brand for Palm to leverage. In a way, they are now the AT&T of smartphones — a well-recognized, solid choice, but not the best in any particular category.

Sadly, a company that once led in hardware and software is now leading primarily in marketing only — which is why the long time fans still long for cutting-edge hardware, or a new design, or the return of a new, custom operating system. I certainly do.

So here I am… a NetNewsWire lover with a dissatisfaction with NewsGator Online and NewsGator Mobile. I’m also a little disappointed with FeedDemon (which NewsGator bought as their Windows RSS client) which I use at my office. It’s close to NNW in features, but just not the same in the few ways I use NNW the most. I can’t view any aggregation that happens across all feeds — new items, flagged items, etc. I can’t do that from the mobile reader. I can do it from the web reader, however.

The experience itself is so dissimilar from app to app that what ends up happening is that I rely on the web and mobile clients the most. Even so, the web client can be slow, the views are stuck in a folder-only metaphor, and when viewing at folder levels, feeds that aren’t in those folders are somehow sneaking in. Saving an item makes the “clippings” folder look like there’s something new in it all the time, and there’s no way to make it look unread except for deleting the items themselves. The whole thing feels a bit buggy and off.

So relying on a web client basically means that I’m now seriously considering using Google Reader instead, since I’ve begun using Google Personalized Home instead of Netvibes (I know, I know, but Google’s page is just simpler, which is all I need from a “browser home” page). It’s just that I’ve never used the features that make a local client really worth having, such as keeping zillions of entries local, or reading when my laptop is off-line.

Also, when I needed my local client to auto-download files (re: “podcatching”), NNW would create a system of sub-folders for the files including a default, parent folder. That’s fine for most users, but the apps and scripts I use to folder-watch and act on new files don’t support that, so I ultimately ordered a copy of NewsFire, which auto-downloads everything into whatever folder you specify. Not to mention, these feeds are very few and specific to a single machine, so they don’t need to be integrated in a larger, always-synchronized source like NewsGator.

Now that NNW is subscription based, and it’s married to a NewsGator subscription, I can’t say that I’d pay for it again, which is sad, but I think I’m onto something here. When your needs change, it’s best to find new ways to best fill those needs, and not force old ways into new models.

Normally, I’d say I’ll miss using NNW, but I guess I already do, since I use a PC all day at work. Grrr.

There’s a bunch of people who have switched to Macs that are getting a lot of coverage for doing so. I do enjoy seeing long time PC fans discover the Mac, and it’s interesting to see the backlash that typically comes out of this.

Oddly enough, the backlash isn’t happening, and Daring Fireball’s got some good coverage of the switching that’s happening..

There’s two things that finally clicked into place for the PC folks — The first is obvious: the switch to Intel. While comparing a PC to a Mac is still an apples-and-oranges scenario, there’s less ambiguity. The hardware can be profiled on more equal terms now, and people can see that Macs are, in fact, not any slower than PCs in a general comparison. What’s left over is a much clearer comparison of software, style and ease-of-use.

The second is that the ubiquity of the iPod has removed the elistist image that used to cling to Apple. This is what I’ve called the “Fanboy Factor” — where an overpassionate enthusiast base actively turns-off those interested in joining. It happens with all consumer items, be it a computer or a car or a television series. Apple fans were only the “cult of Mac” once, and very, very anti-Microsoft and anti-Windows. But it’s much easier now to find an Apple fans (thanks to the iPod) that also use Windows, and that balance allows people to consider using a Macintosh without feeling like they’re joining some snobby clique that keeps crowing how they’re better than all of you.

Make no mistake, it’s a good time for Apple and Apple fans — so long as they don’t start acting like selfish rock fans by “blasting the band for selling out.”

It’s not too often MS does something that I wish Apple would, but I’ve mentioned this too often: I want a way to view albums in iTunes as albums. And Windows Media Player 11 in Vista is going to do this.

WMP 11 may not do the other thing that I want it to do, namely group together or visually reflect which albums are complete and which are partial track collections.

I buy albums, so I want to view my collection by them, and I want a quick way to sort the singles and partial rips I’ve made out of that larger list. At the very least, I’d take a report-view in iTunes like the recently added “Show Duplicate Tracks” that would help in managing albums if some fancy cover view like CoverBuddy’s isn’t in the works.