Cellphones

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.

Oh my goodness, Fake Steve Jobs says everything there needs to be said about the Android announcement. I started this thought on Twitter, but didn’t take it to the depths it needed to be taken.

Here’s the point: It doesn’t take 34 companies to build an open platform (just ask Steven Frank). By definition, if you create an open platform, anyone can use it. But Google knows if they created a GPL’d Linux OS for mobiles that no one would care, not just because it isn’t their own proprietary brand (and therefore wouldn’t rake in licensing dollars) but because most of these guys already have Linux-based OSes and it’s not that revolutionary an idea anymore.

More importantly, it takes hardware and an infrastructure to do mobile. Unlike a computer, say an Apple I, that you can build in a garage, program and run locally, a phone needs broadcasters, relays, and all the good stuff that is already owned and controlled by seriously powerful folks. Google didn’t even talk about a mobile hardware reference platform that the OS would power, something that could have unlocked an open mobile platform FOR REALS.

I don’t see a consortium developing Linux, I see one organization. I also see a lot of businesses taking it and creating their own profitable distributions of Linux, and opening up their own refinements back to anyone else running a different distro. But it’s mostly one group and one visionary pushing the message and driving it to places it needs to go. And with the hardware problem solved, anyone can build their own PC box and load Linux on it—it’s messy, painful but it can be done. We simply can’t do this with mobiles.

In a way, this announcement feels like Google has just given up. Gone are the grand schemes of cutting out a wireless band for free and open devices (even though the “open access” US 700MHz auction is still going ahead as planned) and in its place are associations and consortia to keep the big networks and manufacturers interested and let Google have a piece of the pie somehow.

The power is still very much in the hands of companies like Verizon and Samsung, and for an organization as powerful and game-changing as Google, this is just plain disappointing.

I think the first line in the Android FAQ summarizes the disappointment perfectly:

“Android is a complete mobile phone software stack. It includes everything a manufacturer or operator needs to build a mobile phone.”

For everyone else, it’s just another cell phone. Woo.

I like Radar.net. I really do. But I’m kinda torn over the whole service.

On one hand, Radar has more flexible group control and treats pictures like forums. That’s really cool, because it’s become clear that Flickr is not really optimized for this sort of behavior. Let’s say you post 40 photos from vacation, and you get a comment on several of them. You’ll have to visit a special page or two or use the RSS feed to find out because those photos may no longer be on your main page, and they don’t get marked up in any special way. But with Radar, those photos pop to the top, sort by most recently commented on. Instantly, you know when there’s a conversation happening. That’s what they’re optimizing for, and it’s perfect for mobile picture blogging. You can get a number of different alerts, from IM notifications (making it a bit like Twitter for MMS, as some people have been calling it) to email alerts that can be sent daily, weekly or even every-other-day.

On the other hand, Radar is private. Like, no-peeking private. No one can get in and play around with the site’s capabilities unless they create yet another online account. Certain modes of invitation involves some arcane-feeling “invite codes.” All the activity is hidden, and extra effort is needed to convince people to join up. And since it’s totally private, certain features like RSS go missing. If it’s a mobile picture-blogging experience they’re after, it’s not quite complete, since regular blogging has a very public face to it, and folks who do start private blogs leveraged the publicity of the public users to lure their friends into the habit. There’s really no lead to follow when first browsing the site, and it makes it a harder sell than it needs to be.

I think of Flickr as a community of photographers, not a discussion system. I’m happy when people comment on my photos, but I don’t expect it to be anything more than some feedback about the photo itself. It’s not a message to me, it’s a message for the next viewer. Even today, I will find comments or notes on old photos that I’ve never seen before — It’s just not visible enough or real-time enough. In the end, I use it as an online iPhoto.

I don’t want to take my lovely 10 MP DSLR photos and cram in a bunch of 1 or 2 MP flashless cameraphone shots. They’re just two different things to me, and I desperately want to keep them separate. Radar is almost exactly what I wanted for this, but the problem is, will anyone show up?

(Current score: 2 of 11 invites accepted)

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.

Boy, it took me a long time to find this information on the web… So how do you get these to work together? Not easily. Unless you have T-Mobile’s full internet offering, you only have the POP, IMAP and WAP ports open. You can access websites, but only if you can configure a proxy through a T-Mobile server. So basically, you’re out of luck for just about everything else unless you want to pay an extra $15 a month for ancient GPRS speeds.

The bigger problem is that T-Mobile doesn’t run a traditional IMPS server which is data-centric — they route it through SMS, so they can charge you for text messaging plans as part of IM support. Isn’t that thoughtful of them?

However, there is a way to use the Wireless Village client with T-Mobile through their proxy.