Recent Blog Posts

Today has given us two fascinating news items for the U.S. Wireless market: Motorola's Ed Zander is stepping down (and has already been replaced, so the company at least has good succession planning), and Sprint's board declined an offer of $5 billion from SK Telecom and a venture fund, but required former chairman Tim Donahue to become CEO. Oh, and the company is still looking for a CEO - no effective succession planning there.

Both of these companies are ailing. Sprint's investors (and hence board members) act risk-averse, which is not a good idea for a company making a major new technology play in WiMax. Further:

• Customer service has been a "top job" for the past 7 years, but the service continues to be abysmal
• Sprint is losing customers left and right (in fact, they've lost three lines of service from us in the past 10 weeks)
• Few people believe that Sprint is an "entertainment company" as they assert; they would like reliable phone service first

I believe nothing less than Sprint's survival as an independent entity is at risk.

Motorola isn't in better shape. Having dropped from number 2 to number 3 in the world, there is no great new design to come save them. They keep repeating past history: come up with a great product, then milk it for a few years making lower and lower price derivatives until there is no more margin. A single great product every 10 years does not a great company make. Even Apple followed up its iPod with something new in less than that time, with the Nano, Shuffle, Video, and that one phone device people are talking about.

These are interesting times.

One theory that doesn't have fear as a driver for the Sprint board refusal: what if there were another deal that precluded accepting this one?

Bonus U.S. news: Giant U.S. retailer Walmart has opened a web-based mobile content store, integrated with its physical stores as well as a short code. I'm imagining standing in front of the physical shelves and seeing "text 5425 to 40888 to get this on your mobile!" This could prove to be an interesting move, if handled well. I imagine it would eventually expand into the enhancing experience in the rest of the store. And yes, Tesco is doing much the same.

Pundits claimed 2007 to be the year of the widget in several places, such as here, here, here, and slightly more recently, here. Newsweek may have started all this talk.

We're not talking about "web widgets" here, not bits of code on a web site that back in the '90s we may have called a portlet. Not GUI elements either. Or Facebook apps. All of these are nice, but a bit less useful in the limited screen real estate and limited user attention environment of the mobile phone. Our definition:

Mobile widgets are always-on, internet-connected, auto-updated, light-weight applications that reside within an existing OS framework and appear as miniaturized (i.e. never full-screen) display elements within an existing or enclosing GUI.

This space comes complete with business, technical, and design difficulties. First and foremost, the number of widget platforms adds an extra layer to the device proliferation problem found especially in downloadable applications. This immediately leads to the business difficulty: which platform to choose?

Of course, as a design consultancy, our concerns lie in the fact that many widget solutions are simply not compelling for most users. We thus wrote our mobile widget white paper to understand the business and design environment for mobile widgets.

You'll get:

• overview of the state of the mobile widget art
• key design considerations
• a widget design structure
• examples of compelling widgets
• the future of mobile widgets

Sign up to download mobile widget white paper.

mocoNews.net just published a fascinating set of statistics on the US mobile Q3 sales. There is so much interesting data packed into two short paragraphs that you really should go take a look.

Highlights:

• Phone prices are up 40% compared to one year ago
• Smart phones are up from 4% to 11% of units sold in the US (definitions remain tricky, as I discussed in segmenting handheld devices)
• Features with significant advances include MP3 and Bluetooth
• the iPhone came in as the 6th most popular handset in Q3
• Nokia has 11% market share, in 4th place
• Motorola took 31% market share

Some of this advancement is from "the iPhone effect". Basically, users are seeing the iPhone, realizing how useful it can be, but not wanting to get the iPhone directly. So they go to the store and get something that either looks similar, or has similar features.

In a way, this is only good for Nokia as well. Despite the tiny market share, they have been positioning themselves as being a computing company, not a phone company. They are therefore poised to take advantage of the trend if the reinvest in the market.

Oh, and that 11% of devices being smart phones ... keep in mind that very few of those will be Series 60 devices since Nokia has such a small market share. S60s are typically counted as smart phones even when not purchased as such, so the increase of smart phone percent to 11 is by people actually intending smart phone purchase.

I never use the built-in AT&T/Cingular (the terminology varies) Music player (though I cannot uninstall it either, sadly). But it doesn't mean I don't use my phone for music. I have been exclusively using LCG Jukebox. Aside from being a generally good app, it does two things that are of note for all mobile apps.

First, its got a sort of widget. Instead of just making you go back to the app screen — or worse, stay there — the app runs in the background, and the widget tells you what is going on with the music player.

This is especially cool because nothing else does it. I didn't know you could add anything to that bit of the idle screen. Now, you can't get to it, so (as far as I can tell so far) you have to go to the app to pause or switch tracks, but presenting data live here is still really useful. I like it. Now, I want other running apps with useful data to share to do this also.

Second, the lyrics engine. You can search for lyrics, download them, and they they scroll back while the track plays.

This is not just useful and fun and entertaining, but a really neat way of using the network connection to bring text content into the device, join it with (probably sideloaded) media of a different type. This, not video, is what "multimedia" means to me. I hope to see more of it as app developers realize there is a speedy, always-on connection in our pockets.

Yesterday I attended and spoke at the future of mobile event in London. It was a pretty good event, with a lot of discussion about web standards, transcoding, and enriching applications via fonts and Flash. There was plenty of disagreement, which makes for a good exchange of ideas.

I moderated the last session, sharing the stage with mobile user experience experts Tom Hume and Marek Pawlowski. We talked a lot about industry, sales channel, and product development process ways of getting the user experience right, for people of all abilities. It was a good session, with good exchange.

I haven't had too much time to explore the SDK directly, and I'm not really a developer anyway, but others have so I'm stealing their analysis, mostly. Three areas of discussion for today.

1) Protective sessions - As described well in the middle of this post from Mobile opportunity, the OS decides which app deserves its memory. If space is short, or it stops trusting what an app is asking for, it could be shut down without warning. Loss of user data is annoying (especially on mobiles, where it might have taken a bit to get it in there). My S60e3 phone regularly shuts down apps in the background (why?) and its annoying as hell, especially when I am halfway through a form.

2) UI stuff - Engaget has a slideshow from the SDK simulator if you haven't installed it yourself. Some issues and inconsistencies. Too much pretty stuff, too much reliance on side-scrolls and tabs, but its very early so we'll see where it goes. This one exemplifies all my fears of low- and no-affordance UI. The menuish hard-labeled key is sort of a single "options" softkey, but rather tenuously related to the menu that flies up. And very pretty layers appear when you sidescroll to submenus, but they are also only tenuously related to the previous menu. But its still very early.

When I think of open source OS, I think of the range of GUIs (and even ascii shells) for desktop Linux. Not expecting that from Android, but how much individualized GUI customization will we see? Assuming plenty, the good is that some device makers or operators will really excel with their own changes. The bad, of course, is that the GUI is the OS to the everyday user; changes mean itslonger the same for every user, or even if you switch phones and try to stay in the same OS.

3) Marketing - One aspect that hasn't been touched on as much is how to sell this to consumers. I have a fair number of techno friends. The best so far was the friend who was sad that Google hadn't released an actual android. Overall, when I start talking about this, no one I know outside the industry actually cares.

It could be that everyone I know is too young to have a phone, or as old as me, but no one actually downloads applications, or customizes their phone past ringtones and screensavers. Presuming a future where every phone has a neat, computer-like OS, they will not all be the same. Will all the marketing to get share be directed at the operators?