Droid, the new smart phone straight from the ...90s?

A slide out keyboard.

Really? Motorola guys, are you kidding me? Do you ever get out of your office and look around? Have you not seen what is happening in the consumer electronics marketplace? Even laptops and PC use touch screens, let alone a ton of mobile devices. And what do you do? You release yet another hyped iPhone killer with a UX from the 90s. Wow, talk about living in denial.

The iPhone needs competition!
This one goes out to all mobile device manufacturers: please get your acts together, accept what the iPhone did to the industry and...move on! You want to build an iPhone killer? Here is what you need to focus on:

1. get over memory concerns, solid state memory is getting cheaper and cheaper, put plenty of it on it and get over it, you will not make your money playing nickle and dime on memory. Why? Because that ship has sailed, today you need to at least match the iPhone and I am ready to bet 90% of smart phone users could not care less to have an SD card in their phone. Have a look at the iPhone demographics, who do you think the audience is? The cashier at the local grocery store who saves his paychecks for months to buy the flat screen TV at Walmart, that's who. That is how you make the big numbers.
   
2. get over offering a ton of features that make your hardware not backward or forward compatible with Android releases. Fragmentation of your product offering is your death sentence. An iPhone Edge today can run the same OS as an iPhone 3Gs. Beat that. Can't? Good, get a clue and get busy. That means you Erickson!
   
3. superior UX, the device should have the same user guide as an iPhone: none. It is so intuitive to use you do not need one. Don't know how? Hire Interaction Designers and get with it.
   
4. Establish a supported development community and the keyword here is *supported*. You cannot have one store for provider A and one for provider B and ...no, no, no! Developers will not come. They have to spend their time (=money) to embrace your platform, you have to make it as painless as possible!
   
5. A way for app developers to digitally sign their software so piracy is not possible! Sharing is all fine and dandy but at the end of the day money has to exchange hands, developers need to pay rent too. Apple got it and that is why there are anywhere from million dollar software houses to high school students making money selling apps. That is how is done, pay attention. It is really not that hard.

It will cost millions of dollars to do the above but the more time goes by, the more it will cost to close the gap with Apple. Stop spending money on hype (the Droid campaign surely cost more than a pretty penny) and get busy building a valuable alternative or get out of the business.

[Update] rumor has it Google is working on a branded Android based phone that will not have a physical keyboard and that will not have software compatibility issues or product fragmentation. Now that *is* the way to go! Let's hope rumors are true in this case, please see this link.

Hard Disks are dead, so are Blue Rays and DVD

We all know it was just a matter of time and it is finally happening. Solid state storage is a consolidated technology and their pricing will start the downward slope towards commodity very soon. The result? HD will be displaced and they will become a thing of the past. The interesting side effect of that is that, wait for it...., DVD and Blue Ray will become collateral damage in the process, disappearing from the market in the next 36 months.

At the beginning it was Air
Let's go in order, the first clear sign of things to come was Apple's Air laptop. A clear statement that you no longer needed a CD/DVD drive. A closer look would have also told you that if your pocket was deep enough, you did not need an HD either. In fact the only "Air" worthy of that name because it was indeed lightweight was the most expensive version using solid state storage instead of HD. Whereas this was done to save weight it was still a clear sign of things to come.

Here come the net-books
someone finally listened to consumers and they realized that the time was ripe for a portable computer that does not weight more than the kitchen sink. Enter the finally small and lightweight net-books. Yet another proof that web enabled devices (loosely defined as a gizmo that is always online) did not need physical storage media and that solid state storage was clearly the way to go. Case and point: the latest laptops now have memory stick ports. So long DVD, has been nice knowing you.

A moment of silence for Blue Rays
The possibly unintended consequence of the raise of solid state storage is the de facto death sentence handed over to Blue Rays and DVD. The convergence of devices always online and solid state storage makes these media obsolete as well. As technologist I feel sorry for the Blue Rays, they were clearly destined to a short shelf life but I was hoping (and so was Sony) for a fast and furious tale instead of a stagnant and boring one due to the battle with Toshiba and the HD DVD gang. Who won? Nobody. Not even us the consumers as we had to wait for things to settle before enjoying the benefit of high definition media and now it is basically over. Locally I give Sony credit for not crying on spilled milk and moving on already: this week they announced they will partner with NetFlix to deliver movies via IP on the PS3. Yep, that is the way to go boys. Let's all hold hands and let physical media rest in peace.

What is next?
Obviously we can look forward to more lightweight computing devices using solid state storage solutions. We can also expect that multimedia content will be sold on memory sticks for the conceivable future until everybody and their grandma will have internet access 24x7. The advantages of this technology are many but the one that marketing and sales will embrace is that it is cheaper to ship and package since it is considerably smaller and lighter. Just last week I read a press release about one of the Hollywood studios working on this already. It is coming, do not say I did not warn you and stop buying DVD already ;-) Oh and you may want to make sure you do not own stocks of companies who did not get the picture...

Alex reader, how good intention translate into a bad idea

[update: B&N announced their e-reader. It is a dual screen like Alex but they did improve the UX a little. Most if not all of what follows still stands.]

Well I am sorry for the engineers and designer who worked on Alex but that is the way I fell. In case you have not seen photos of Alex, an epaper reader to compete with the Kindle, it has two screens one of top of the other. The top one is pretty much the same size and characteristics of the Kindle and the bottom one is a LCD of sort. Frankly the technical details are irrelevant. The problem is the UX (user experience).

Why is Alex's design wrong:

• people in the western civilization read horizontally. Stacking information vertically goes against the grain of how people consume information. If you need to teach people how to consume information via your device... you may have a problem, a big one in fact.
  
• our vision is wired to continually move the eyes in a span motion. Overall the brain tends to focus on one area (i.e.: the paragraph you are reading) while still capturing cues from what goes around you. Introduce two potential main attention grabbers and you just gave yourself a headache. This is, sadly, the main principle behind web based advertisement, how many of you enjoy being distracted by an animated ad while you are reading the news? Well that is exactly what Alex can do. Oops. So the brain will try to focus on one of the panels actively trying to ignore the other. Not exactly the relaxing experience of reading a book.
• the UX model e-readers replace is a book. If you think about it carefully, that is hard enough, there is no need to get creative adding more features. A book is easy to access, share, browse and it is fault tolerant. Drop it on a concrete floor, pick it up and keep reading. Try any of the above with an electronic device and you will see why I said it is hard to replace a book. Amazon was smart about that and they realized that they should tackle the problem one feature at the time. That is why Kindle is successful, they replicated one of the aspects of a book (reading from paper) while still lacking others. But users forgave them and bought the device en masse. For lacking others I am referring to, for example, browsing a book or browsing your own library is much more complex in Kindle than with physical books but people deal with it because a Kindle weight less than carrying around your library. So what's wrong with Alex? Books have one page per sheet, not two. The interaction with a page does not changes from top to bottom, a page is a page. Ditto for Kindle. Alex is introducing split features, the top and the bottom screen are capable of doing different things and that has nothing to do with the experience of reading a book, browsing a magazine or consulting a manual. All experiences that I am sure Alex will try to replace. See my point at the very beginning on having to teach consumers how to use your device...
  
• manufacturing costs: two screens means more inventory, more electronics, more assembly costs etc. You better have a really good reason to introduce a competing product that costs more to manufacture.
• simplicity: consider the following, Kindle has one screen, a keyboard and a bunch of buttons. Alex has two screens, a touchscreen keyboard (or so I hope) and a bunch of buttons. That is, now you need to learn how to use this thing, for example, how to navigate between screens. Sound unnecessarily complicated, because it is.
  

Wait a minute, what if Alex is a disruptive innovation?
Well, I am sure it is possible that I am missing something here but my point is that there is a better way to build a device that is aimed to replace printed media and that can surpasses the Kindle. That is, a tablet pc with touchscreen controls a la iPhone. One screen, one interaction model very close to paper, no new mental model required. If anything I think B&N will help Apple take over this market if they ever decide to introduce the rumored iTable or iPad or whatever they will decide to call it. In fact Amazon and B&N may very well be solving the pricing problem for them (see previous post here). More in a moment.

So why hasn't anyone done it right?
hold on a minute, someone has done it partially right, Kindle is a good starting point. Why is it not better? Because the technology is not quite there yet, we are close but not close enough. The main problems are:

• refresh rate vs. power consumption of the screen, namely paper like display Vs. your favorite flavor of LCD
  
• color vs. BW (see above)
• weight vs. battery life
• and last but not least, positioning and revenue model

The last one is a show stopper for many players. Before we go there, notice that Alex is a compromise on all of the above, instead of solving the problem, they doubled the solution. Good idea? You decide.

Back to the business model. Think Sony, they were the first to introduce a capable e-reader and yet they are now trailing behind Amazon. The latter outsold them because they own the content and they waited for the convergence of technologies needed to build a better user experience (paper like display, affordable 3G and small lightweight batteries). More importantly, Amazon created an ecosystem in which Kindle makes sense. They learned from iTunes and applied that lesson to books. But if you are Acme inc. and you manufacture devices and you have no access to thousands of e-books, you do not have a business model hence you do not have a product.

Now B&N does have access to the content but their attempt to one up the Kindle look ill advised because of the factors I highlighted above. Not to mention that eventually e-readers will have to take it one step further and replace notepads. And that is a whole other ballgame with a whole other set of technical and financial challenges that Alex just made harder to tackle.

Google Wave

It looks like Google is going in the right direction at least at the conceptual level. A dear friend of mine who works there sent me an invitation as it was released so I had a chance to play with it for a few minutes.
In a nutshell, they are giving us (the users) a new communication tool that is somewhat of an hybrid between a simplified Google doc, a chat room and an email. While I see the benefit of using it to collaborate in the most strict sense of the term, I am a bit disappointed. I was hoping for a slightly different approach focused more on the business end. The focus seems to be on social activities and we all know we do not need another social network to worry about.
What I like about it
it is reasonably simple, you start a wave (a context container that can handle multimedia) and start dragging and dropping people in. You can use it to manage the invite to a party as much as a project brainstorming. Not bad, well done.
What I do not like about it
every body can do anything to any content. While that sounds terrific on paper, in reality it poisons the very spirit of collaboration since only two outcomes are possible:

1. everybody will edit everybody's else content without a common path (note I did not say without a common goal, this is a tool problem not a vision problem). This is otherwise known as chaos :-)
2. nobody touches anything and nothing happens. If people are not engaged in whatever it is that the "wave" represents, they have very little motivation to do anything and a lot of motivation not to. Why? Google Wave *can* easily be mistaken for another social network and people will ask themselves how is this different from Facebook, Evite, MySpace etc.

I am hoping that my first impression is wrong and that I will discover more value. The reader should notice that I purposefully omitted the part where you and all the people you want to interact with all have to be registered users. Take a moment here to let it sink in.

It is easy to argue that this small *detail* will hinder adoption until the case for it becomes clear to everybody. Right now I expect that non Gmail users will resist signing up thinking, somewhat correctly, that they do not need to deal with yet another account. Sigh.

Shaking things up: a new paradigm of online ad consumption breaks the staus quo.

I hate ads. They are annoying. Yet we cannot live without them. Who would want to read a magazine without ads? Case and point, no respectable fashion magazine would ever go to press without advertisement. They are part of the content, they are expected. We want them. Why? They *can* be informative of new products, new trends etc. and we dear not be the last one to know about the latest and greatest. We do not want to be left out.

The same cannot be said for the online ecosystem. The online alter-ego of those printed ads are horribly invasive. The way they are pushed onto us consumers is just plain horrible.

So I tried an experiment with one of my start up. We built a simple app called "Just Ads". As the name clearly suggests, this (iPhone) app does one thing and one thing only, it shows a list of location aware ads. That is it.

What is so innovative about that?

Well, there is no other content but ads. That is, the user is not in the midst of consuming some other content (like reading this blog ;-) so the ads are no longer competing for attention. They are the content. The mind switch is what is innovative. Users of Just Ads are willingly opening an application that shows them (somewhat) targeted ads of things they may want to have. They are in the state of mind of consuming advertisement. Better yet, as if by magic, we have transformed advertisement into content that people want to consume.

Do not rush to your AppStore to download this little magic box though, AdMob (our ad provider) had to pull the plug on us in just 24 hrs so we had to remove the app from the store. Why?

Too much traffic.

You would think that generating a lot of eyeballs and clicks would be a good thing but when you do it in an innovative fashion, the status quo is often unable to cope and it stares back at you like a deer in the headlight of a car. Obviously we hit on something good so we will try to get it back online soon. Wish me luck.

[update] negotiation with AdMob failed, they refuse to serve ads to this app claiming that it does not provide an enjoyable experience for users and advertisers. What do you think?

[update] we signed up with MobClix, JustAds is on its way back to a device near you. Given the difference in content (ad format) we had to make some modifications and rethink this product. We hope you will enjoy it once it is out.

Why Apple cannot build just an iTablet

There is a lot of rumors about a tablet (let's call it iTablet) coming from Apple. I have a problem believing them face value and I question what else is there, that we all missed, that would motivate them to build such device.

Tablet pc are nothing new, there are many on the market and they are not selling well. Why? Positioning and pricing. There is not enough room between a smart phone (iPhone, Pre) and a laptop to justify a tablet PC. And for "room" I am referring to pricing. $90 (and a two year contract) today gets you the phone + portable computer AKA iPhone 3G. $500 will get you a laptop from a name brand other than Apple, of course. So let's say those are our boundaries

>$90 and <$500 Well, it gets worse. Now we need to add Kindle to the equation. After all I would expect that if I buy an iTablet, I can read books with it. The reader should note that this open a whole new problem with display technology that we will omit for the sake of brevity. Let it just be said that paper like display (like Kindle's e-ink) consume a lot less energy and they have no refresh rate making them as comfortable as paper to read. Back to our superficial market analysis. As I was saying, we are not done yet, the dagger in the hearth comes from net-books. Virtually that shrinks our range for an iTablet to >$90 and <$200 (with data plan...) That is a though place to make money in considering the amount of hardware that must go into one of these devices. Namely I would expect that an iTablet must...

• have comparable screen size to a Kindle DX
• have comparable battery life (in read mode) to a Kindle
• have wireless access (3G/wifi)
• have all the bells and whistles of an iPod Touch
• use touch and stylus (so you can actually write on it like you would on a paper notebook)
• and last but not least, have access to a ton of books, movies, music and let's not forget (drum rolls...) games! See yesterday comments during their PR event in San Francisco that their iPod Touch is a PSP competitor.

Perhaps that is too much and some features should be dropped but let's assume for the sake of argument that they can pull all of that off and still not become another Sony/PS3 story. Well if they can do that they may have a killer product that does not replace a smart phone and that does not replaces a laptop but that has its own niche. Niche that is currently occupied mostly by net-books that would instantly become obsolete. So far so good. Who pays for all of this though?

Note: they have done something like this already with the iPod as it virtually killed all MP3 players already on the market by addressing the same need but with a superior user experience. Can they do this for the tablet PC market? Maybe. The question is how do they make money. Let's explore.

A quick glance back to what I just wrote should convince you that this is a monumental challenge as you must do all of the above and still end up in the $200 ballpark, street price. Now we all know that Apple excels in convincing its buyers that their products are worth a premium and let's say they can position it at $500. Let's also say that they pull another AT&T partnership so they can effectively subsidy the iTablet, forcing buyers to subscribe to 3G service. That would be a masterful plan. The question still stands, why go through all of this trouble given the high cost and risks. Where is the money?

My take is as good as antibody's but I hope that this brief post convinced the reader that if Apple does this, they must have more up their sleeve than just a better tablet PC. They must have come up with a better overall experience or even a new ecosystem that perhaps displaces more than just net-books. Perhaps what this is about is a better way to work, play and interact with a digital device that becomes part of our daily lives much as they managed to do with smart phones.

I for once would be very happy to be proven wrong and if they do build it, I look forward to be one of the first to adopt it, use it and exploit the benefit of a well executed tablet PC platform.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated. Tell me, what did I miss!?

Innovation in ubiquitous computing

If you miss the news from Apple PR today, they have added mic and camera capability to their iPod line up. That is a quiet storm brewing if I ever saw one.
Why? You may ask.
Well considering that more than half of the AppStore download comes from iPod Touches (see AdMob report on the matter), I am starting to see a trend emerging. Granted that the iPhone already does what the iPod and iPod Touch does, the message from consumers is clear: "we want more capabilities and we cannot afford to pay $70 per month to get them!"
So what is the storm I see coming? With the introduction of push notification and VOIP there is really little that an iPod Touch device has to envy to an iPhone and...it costs $0 per month. If you are in a urban environment where you can pick up a WiFi signal, well, chances are you really do not miss having an iPhone at all. You can call with VOIP, you can IM instead of SMS and now you have your camera too. The best part, it costs you nada. If you are a student or a teen, that is the right price for you and your parents, is it not?
So, is this the dawn of a new class of devices? Is an iPod Touch device the next "pager" whereas it is a more limited device but considerably cheaper than the full fledge smart phone?
Food for thoughts.

NOTE: why do I always talk of iPod or iPhone and never of the competitors. Because they are the ones breaking new ground. With that said, assume I am referring to an "iPod Touch like" device and an "iPhone like" device from now on. Sooner or later Apple will do what Microsoft did, license the iPhone O/S and then history will repeat itself (see what happened to PC in the 1980s).