Will our mobile phones continue to evolve at the rate they have done over the last fifteen years? Most technology sort of runs out of steam after a while. Computers today aren’t really much better than they were five years ago, for example. Televisions haven’t particularly improved for about ten years. However, there are some reasons to believe that mobiles have a bit more scope for improvement than those things.

Like all the other recent posts, this piece first appeared in the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

I remember the day in (I believe) 2002 when one of my colleagues arrived in the office with one of the first mobile phones with a colour screen. It was the Nokia 3510i. A crowd of us gathered in awe of its one-inch, 12-bit colour display. He then stunned us all by reading out the latest headlines from the BBC, courtesy of the GPRS WAP browser.

Immediately, all our monochrome devices — the standard office issue was the Nokia 3310 — looked like steampunk antiques, relics of a much earlier era.

That’s how it is with technology, particularly if you work in the sector. The new minimum specification seems to have a screen larger than 3-inches, an 8-megapixel camera, gigabytes of storage and a processor that could outplay Deep Blue. Next year, it will respond to thought commands and project a four-metre holographic display. The year after, phones will have become sentient beings and they’ll be telling you who to call.

Or will they? Not the robot uprising thing, but the idea that phones will become ever more powerful devices. Sometimes I am sceptical. There surely comes a point where further improvements actually become gimmicks.

In my opinion, for example, televisions stopped evolving usefully quite some time ago. The innovations in recent years — 3D, yet more speakers, screens bigger than your wall — probably appeal to a lot of people, yet for me, don’t add a lot to the core proposition of watching the TV. Similarly, computer keyboards, mice, desk fans, toasters, kettles and hairdryers. They’ve reached a natural end-point for improvement. People come up with new twists on these things, but they don’t really seem to take off.

The other side of this, though, the more optimistic side, is to make the point that all those things are single-use devices. Smartphones, by their definition, are converged devices. They’re a phone and camera, an entertainment console, a laptop, a television and a music system. When you look at that way, there’s still years to go, even at the breathtaking rate at which the technologies are being improved.

There’s a back-to-basics school of thought which says, “Ian, look, I’ve still got my Nokia 3310 from 2001 and it does the job.” But when I hear that, I pick up my phone, put on my headphones and watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica in HD.

image credit: Tarter Time Photography

The idea of mobile as a media platform is both very modern — by definition, it couldn’t have been conceived of before about 1985 and colour screens didn’t arrive until the mid-90s. But it’s also something that people seem to have been banging on about for ages, without anything in particular happening. At the start of every year, we’ve been reading “this year mobiles become an entertainment and information hub” in everyone’s list of predictions. At the risk of ridicule in a year’s time, I think it’s going to happen in 2011.

It was originally delivered as part of the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

Mobile is widely recognised as being the seventh mass media — after the web, television, cinema, radio, print and sound recordings. It’s also thought to eclipse each of those because of its unique advantages.

Mobile is more widely spread than any other media. There’s already far more mobile phones in circulation than there are televisions or radios. Mobile phones are found in places where they’ve never seen a newspaper.

It’s also a personal and personalisable media channel. Your phone and what appears on it is yours. Many people form intense attachments to their phones, as we’ve discussed before. And it’s always with you and — pretty much — always switched on. Increasingly, we’re discovering ways that mobile content can be contextualised to the time and location in which it’s being viewed.

So it’s very powerful stuff. Potentially.

Sadly, though, when you look at what is actually available, the experience leaves a lot to be desired. Sites that aren’t readable on mobile devices. Sites that are, but have achieved this by stripping out everything that was interesting about the site in the first place. Web-connected apps that take ages to load and don’t do as much as the websites they replicate. Even the really, really good mobile sites offer an experience that’s way behind the other ways that exist to engage with the media they present.

Why’s this? Partly, it’s because mobile is still very new — people haven’t developed the grammar of mobile media in the same way that conventions have been honed over time for other media. It simply takes time and experimentation.

Partly, it’s because of device fragmentation. A mobile site that’s made with the Nokia N8 in mind probably won’t look so good on your Nokia 3210, and vice-versa. And that’s without people’s bizarre insistence on occasionally buying models from other manufacturers…

And partly it’s because mobile is still treated as secondary by media owners. They’ve made a website — and it took a lot of time and money. Rather than starting again for mobile, they’d much prefer to repurpose what they’ve already got.

Exactly the same thing happened when the Web arrived. Media owners took their existing assets, be it words, sounds or pictures, and dumped them into HTML files. It’s taken twenty years for even a handful of websites to start taking advantage of the interaction and personalisation that the Web offers, let alone to start developing interfaces that people can actually use.

So will it take another twenty years for mobile media to develop its potential? Maybe. But the Web has matured a lot faster than it took television to mature — about 30 years. And television matured a lot faster than cinema — 40 years. We’re getting more adaptable, I think, and the inevitability and opportunity presented by new media is becoming welcome rather than feared.

I think that mobile mass media will start reaching maturity in the next two to three years. Exciting times ahead.

image credit: Kapungo

I think it was about this point — maybe six weeks in — that I started to ‘get it’, as they say. To understand why mobile is quite so important. More important than computers and the Internet in many respects. You might disagree: I have, after all, been brainwashed by mysterious Finns in black suits. First published here, I may well come across as a little gushing in this piece, but they are ideas I certainly stand by and will expand on in upcoming pieces.

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A terrific blog post by Steven Hoober of Little Springs Design offered me inspiration this week. He starts:

Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It’s not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.

Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it’s fashionable. It’s not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.

Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people.

And he’s right. Everything that’s good about mobile technology is about the way it enhances our ability to be better human beings. We can communicate more often and more effectively. We can work more efficiently. We need never be alone. None of this technology matters for its own sake: it’s about what it lets us be and do.

I’d rather touch another person than the most incredible device imaginable. But that’s not to discount devices — and this is where I disagree slightly with Mr. Hoober. The amazing thing is that the device allows me to touch others, remotely. We become superhuman in our abilities with the aid of technology, but we don’t stop being human. People talk about the advent of augmented reality, but our reality is already augmented by the way our mobile devices allow us to do things people simply couldn’t twenty years ago.

When you leave your phone at home by mistake, that wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach isn’t because you might miss an important message. It’s because you’ve been stripped of your powers. It’s Superman faced with Kryptonite.

It’s easy to forget that when you work closely with new models and new technologies. We get hung up on how many megapixels or megahertz. And of course those things are important — but it’s like comparing the ability to jump 30 feet into the air with the ability to jump 35 feet. I’d rather have the latter, but hey — did you see how high that guy could jump?

Nokia’s tagline is ‘Connecting People’, because that’s what’s core to what it does. Mobile is not — ultimately — a technology business. It’s a business about making people’s lives better.

image credit: Xurble

It was with some surprise that I discovered that built-in RFID chips aren’t the preserve of high-end smartphones. They’re actually more likely to be found at the bottom-end. It’s a technology that needs to be available to millions, rather than thousands, for the likes of retailers and transport companies to want to support such devices. I wrote a thing about it, which first appeared here.

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There’s not much chance that Nokia is likely to change its brand slogan — ‘Connecting People’ — any time soon. But the scope of what you do with your phone seems to widen with every passing year.

Something that’s getting the alpha-geeks very excited at the moment is the emergence of something rather unglamourously called ‘the web of things’. The idea is that, just as objects on the Internet — pages, files, pictures — all have unique addresses, so this will extend to objects in the real world. More or less anything from shirt on your back to the door of your house can and is likely to be connected to the Internet and have an address like http://you.yourstuff.yourblueshirt. At the moment, it seems most likely that these items will each have a tiny radio chip installed, called an RFID chip. The technology of getting your phone and other devices to interact with these things is called Near-Field-Communications (NFC). There’s a Nokia document explaining it here.

Why is that useful, you might wonder? Well, in the case of your shirt, it would mainly help the people that you bought it from. They could use the technology to track deliveries to individual stores. They might sell you the shirt by you tapping your phone on it. It would also make shoplifting a thing of the past, since they could identify and find items that haven’t been purchased at any point. Activating your door would be more useful to you, though. Again, you might use your phone to unlock it rather than keys. You could tell remotely who was in the house, and tell them to put the kettle on when you’re coming home. Actually, you could probably activate the kettle yourself.

Mobile phones are already very much part of the web of things. Across the world, trials are being conducted to replace tickets on public transport with a wave of your phone across the barrier. So called “smart” posters are created that reveal extra information on your mobile device with a wave. Building entry cards are similarly being replaced with identification using your mobile.

So why isn’t this already widespread? It’s a bit chicken and egg. Manufacturers won’t want to go to the extra cost of installing RFID chips until everyone’s phones support it. Phone manufacturers won’t want to create readers unless there are sufficient ‘things’ with which they can interact. It’s happening, though. Nokia already has three models with NFC, so do a number of other manufacturers. Public transport systems — where ticket machines, finding change and queues are a perpetual problem — are likely to be an early win. The Finnish city of Oulu, for example, has been running such a system for several years.

One of the main bones of contention when it comes to comments on the Nokia blog is product launch dates. Put simply, they are always either too early or too late. Too late because some people want to buy the products as soon as they’re announced, and any launch date thereafter is wrong. Too early, because sometimes there are bugs and they have to be fixed with firmware updates, both of which are, in some people’s minds, evidence of gross negligence. I tried to tackle some of the demands for an early release in this piece, which first appeared here.

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In the world of the Web, the expression “release early and often” has gained a lot of currency. It refers to the way web companies like Google and Yahoo! seem to have a brand new product every week. Smaller companies are in on it too. If you read blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch, you’ll find new, often innovative web services every single day. They’re labelled ‘beta’ — because they might not work the way you expect. But they’re often free, so nobody can complain too much.

Another way this is sometimes put is “fail early, fail often”. The advice makes a lot of sense when it comes to particular types of product. Try to do something. Put it out there. If it works, then great, and if it doesn’t, try again. But keep moving quickly so you can retain first-mover advantage over your competition. If your service isn’t evolving, it’s suggested, then it is decaying.

This philosophy seems to work very well in some markets. It’s probably not great advice when it comes to making phones, though.

When people buy a phone on contract, they’re making a big investment. Currently, 24-month contracts at £30 a month or more are common for smartphones in the UK. That’s £720 for your phone. Depending on the model you choose, there might be an additional payment up-front.

When you’re making that sort of investment, then you don’t want a product that’s been released early. You want something that works as advertised, out of the box. Getting a new phone is a big decision: you want to feel justified that you’ve done the right thing. You want to be able to pat yourself on the back for being so clever, not worry that you may have got it wrong this time.

Then there’s also the fact that phones are made of metal, glass and electronics. If you don’t get those right from the start, then the product is ruined. You can’t download a patch for a wonky catch or a flickering screen. Of course, firmware upgrades can upgrade or improve some aspects of your phone — and they’re very welcome — but getting something that doesn’t work right in the first place is a definite no-no when it comes to big purchases.

But where this Web 2.0 philosophy of continual releases and upgrades does work very well is in extra services. Things you weren’t paying for that you get for free. For example, no-one who bought a Nokia smartphone before January this year expected to be given voice navigation through Ovi Maps for free. But that’s what many of them got. It’s not only nice to be gifted something valuable by the people who made your phone, it makes you like them more and means that you’re more likely to come back to them when the next contract is due.

So yes, release early and often. But only when it comes to the added extras.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

I’ve been blogging a lot, but evidently not here. Instead, I’ve been writing for a wage at Nokia Conversations. That’s a far better arrangement for me in almost every respect, but has left things rather dusty over here on twopointouch.

So, one of the things I write is a bit of a rant for the weekly newsletter. You can subscribe if you want, but my cunning wheeze was to use that content to create some new posts right here. Thanks to Nokia and my employer for allowing me to do that.

This was my first newsletter bit, when I was still young and angry, about six months ago. It first appeared here.

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Let’s get something straight. Mobile email is great. I can be contacted wherever I am; always know what’s going on, and look like I’m hard at work at the same time as meeting a friend for lunch. No problem there. I don’t even worry too much about the email addiction and expectation that I’m available at ungodly hours. It’s worth it for the flexibility.

But it’s not quite right. Not yet.

This is what happens. I sit at my desk in front of my computer in my home office for most of the day, most working days. My email client is sitting open, filling up with the wit, wisdom and legal threats of my colleagues and contacts. My job entails changing focus quite frequently, so I need to check it every few minutes. That’s alright. By the end of the day, there’s no unread messages, though probably quite a few in the ‘action-this’ pile.

Meanwhile, my mobile phone is doing exactly the same thing. Filling up with messages. Buzzing or beeping every few seconds to helpfully remind me what it’s doing.

That’s annoying on its own. Yes, I could switch it off, then switch it on again if I leave the house. But the chances are that I won’t remember to do that, and in any case, it’s a faff to have to go through folders and into settings every time I want to have email on the move.

Then there’s double annoyance that I’ve managed to reach ‘inbox-zero’ on my computer, and yet there’s 106 ‘unread’ messages on my mobile. That shouldn’t happen. I know, I know: there’s clever software available that will synchronise the read/unread state of messages. But I haven’t got that.

So this is my proposal. My phone knows which is my home network. I’ve called it ‘home’, so it couldn’t be easier for it to work that out. So when I’m at home, download emails but don’t announce them. Assume that anything that arrives while you’re connected to this network is already read. Squirrel it away so I can find it on the move, but quietly.

If it isn’t connected to the home network, that means I’ve gone out — so wake up and do your job. Beeps, buzzing and all the rest. I need you then. Oh, and mark the posts I’ve read on the move as read on the server, will you?

Finally, stage three. I’ve been out and then come home. So the phone reconnects to the home network. At this point, it knows it can go to sleep.

So there you go — mobile email done right. Simple, eh? (Cue avalanche of messages from engineers pointing out the multiple flaws in my idea).

image credit: jayfreshuk

The designs range from the batshit-crazy (but, yes, I want one):

to the *cough* aspirational:

to the only-slightly-bizarre:

to the really rather useful. (The Big Thunder is intended for farmers, who might need to work a hundred meters away from wherever they left their phone, rather than teenagers on the bus, I’m hoping).

There is also a semi serious point here.

One of the big ideas raised is that these crazy phones just don’t appear in the West. Manufacturing is so expensive here that only big, serious players can get started. However, in China, these devices can be built to order in tiny batches for a little as $40 a unit; and then sold for $150.

Innovation in product design is really expensive here in the West, and so a lot of would-be inventors have turned to the Web instead as a platform for their creativity. Hence the whole Web 2.0 thing has been a magnet for startups. In China, though, as mad as some of these products may appear, they reflect a raw creativity and inventiveness that we just don’t see here when it comes to the design of electronic devices. Many of these models will, of course, sink without a trace. But how much higher are their chances of coming up with a formula that genuinely catches people’s imagination and meets needs that no-one anticipated? The people behind these phones are rightly described as “hacker entrepreneurs”: next Dysons of the world.

This is not to write off Western phone designers, of course. Our phones are — on almost all measures — ‘better’ than these devices. But the products we have demanded and the market we’re in make this spirit of carefree, creative experimentation (without a care for focus groups, brand continuity or err… electrocution hazards) unlikely to happen very frequently.

(via. Mobile Monday)

Notice anything unusual compared to the normal Nokia/Blackberry fare?

Answer below — but have a close look and a guess first…

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10 points if you spotted it’s got an A-Z keyboard rather than QWERTY. “Who would do a stupid thing like that?” you might ask.

Well, you’d do it if you were creating mobiles for an audience that had never used a typewriter, let alone a PC, like ermm… the 500mn Indian users that still haven’t got a mobile but will probably get one in the next few years. (India already has half a billion mobile users, btw).

Remember, there’s nothing natural or clever about the QWERTY key arrangement. It was supposedly invented to stop users of manual typewriters from mashing up their striking bits (name?) if they became too proficient. Apparently, though, that’s an Urban Myth. Nonetheless, anyone who types will have become used to doing so with a QWERTY layout and find that layout most convenient and easy to get to grips with if they get a button-based mobile. That’s not going to be the case if you live in rural areas in India.

In developing countries, it’s very often mobile-first. Before PCs, or typewriters or televisions or any of the historical progression we’re conditioned by in the West. If it was the first time you ever saw a keyboard — and, quite possibly — you were learning to read at the same time as using your mobile, wouldn’t an A-Z layout work better for you?

Lava’s site is here. You’ll also notice a lot of dual-SIM phones. Different operators offer different rates depending on the type of call and time of day. The cost-conscious with no intention of taking on a contract could make good use of that sort of adaptability. In situations where very impoverished people are involved, then it also allows people — even different families — to share one mobile phone.

We make a lot of assumptions, don’t we, about what is ‘best’ for interfaces to hardware and software? Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more A-Z phones in the worldwide market than QWERTY phones before the end of next year.

(via Unwired View)

Blogs are dead, right? The cool kids are all doing micro-messaging and video instead? They’re missing out on a world of value, if that’s the case.

I’ve been swotting up on mobile as fast as I can — the industry, companies, technology, the apps scene, for obvious reasons. And one of my most valuable sources is Tomi Ahonen’s blog.

Over the last couple of days, a terrific debate has emerged between Tomi and Steve Largent, the president of America’s CTIA, its leading mobile association. Here’s the highlights so far:

• Tomi lambasts the US mobile industry, claiming despotic activity.
• Steve punches right back — Tomi’s facts are wrong, he claims.
• Tomi redoubles his efforts — with a swift right-hook to Largent’s stats and a belly-punch to his argumentation.
• How will Steve come back in the second round? Is the fight over for the plucky Yank? Only time will tell.

This is bloody fascinating. It’s also long-form, packed with facts and learning for people like me and basically a great testimony to the art of the blog. You cannot do this stuff in any other format.

Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18–29 year-old cohort and those aged 30–45. Maybe one thing you might reasonably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expression ‘silent’ come from for over-65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-year-olds.

On a related note, in a research round-up from e-Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-groups, there’s the suggestion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respondents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18–25.

Perhaps comfortingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but nonetheless less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-for-benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.