News from the front

The handheld market is a bitch. And to prove it, here are 3 companies heading for the tubes.

Palm

Palm sadly ate itself. I’ve discussed this before, at some point Palm believed they would rule the handheld world and that obviously, now, didn’t go so well.
Well ahead of the technology Palm come out with a wireless device before 2000 that was able to do very limited browsing on the pre dot-com Web (which was itself limited). The early PalmVII success, the dot-com times and some PalmOS licensing deals put some high hopes on Palm’s exec heads and it went ahead spinning off Palmsource as a separate company to develop and license the next generation of PalmOS while palmOne focused on the hardware side. A couple of years latter it was pretty obvious Palmsource couldn’t develop a cross-platform new-gen OS and palmOne couldn’t develop nice hardware cheap enough to compete with the new competition. Oddly enough it was during this period what I consider to be the best palm ever, T2 came out. Shortly after the split palmOne merged in Handspring, a splinter group from the original Palm. Handspring designed really interesting hardware and efectivelly invented the smartphone with the GSM springboard for the Visor (which then was integrated as the Treo180). On the other hand Handspring was utterly unable to extend PalmOS properly and support the developer community so the Treo line never picked up enough steam (hear that Apple ?).
So eventually Palmsource capsized, got bought out by Access and palmOne took a nasty hit acquiring back the exclusive rights to the Palm brand. Soon after, with the market fully focused on smartphones and faced with an old OS plagged by Handspring leftovers, Palm destroyed the hard earned brand by releasing Treos with Windows CE instead of PalmOS. Loyal fans were shocked, casual buyers were confused and nobody understood why buy a CE Treo when he could buy cheaper hardware from a competing vendor and get exactly the same crappy experience.
Eventually, Palm pulled a play from the old book and went ahead of the times inventing the netbook. Sadly, it was expensive and useless and the Folio never went on sale. To this day Palm is still pinning and longing for Access to develop PalmOS6 which is actually Linux based and called PalmOS2 now.
Palm, have you ever heard about Android ? It’s supposed to be hell-u-va cool and stuff.

Motorola Mobile

Do you have a motophone ? Yeah, me neither. That’s a bit of a problem for Motorola. The problem is Motorola can create 2 types of phones, cheap and expensive. Sadly both types are ugly and have ugliers user interfaces. The only decent motophone is the razor but then you open it up and try to use it.
But Moto turned to Android, so lets hope google tells them about designers. And UI specialists. And testers. Oh well.

Sony-Ericsson

You probably remember when Ericsson phones were butt ugly, had crappy UIs and were built like small GSM bricks. Then Sony came along and made them considerably less ugly, redid the UI and kept the very decent radios. Those were the days of K600 and P900. But the SE that kept UIQ alive reared its ugly head on the M600 and infected the whole line to generate depressing phones like K850i.
Lets see if SE turns it around with the X1 or if, most likely, becomes HTC.

Today Nokia presented their first S60 touchscreen phone, the 5800 “Tube”. As usual there wasn’t a lot of surprise on account of the leaked photos. Being a MusicXpress instead of a N or E I was a bit uneasy about the specs as 5000 phones don’t usually pack a lot of punch. Nokia however threw in the usual goodies this days including WiFi and A-GPS (fairly surprising) and a not so hot 3.2Mpx camera (take that iPhone!). The punchline of the specs is obviously the 3.2” screen with a wopin 640x360 pixels which pretty much tramples the iPhone’s and G1’s 480x320. On the other hand the iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen wins hands down against the 5800’s resistive touchscreen and Nokia signalled defeat there by including a pen and a fashion guitar pick. The 81M “internal memory” should be enough for the job.

The S60v5 UI isn’t revolutionary, big thumbable buttons and making things slide across the screen. The onscreen keyboard looks decent (I’m holding out till I see the localized keyboards) and it include handwriting recognition (decent enough excuse for the pen) which brings a joyful tear to PalmIII affictionados like myself.

Nokia did a steady job on the connectors with a 3.5mm headset connector, micro-usb and TV-out as opposed to HTC’s extUSB brainfart for instance. We really should congratulate makers for not succumbing to fake shine of the crappy accessory’s revenue stream. Surprisingly we get WiFi b/g and unsurprisingly we get HSDPA. The 1.3Ah battery should up for the job and Nokia claims it’s good for a bit over 5h of 640x360 “nHD” (eheh) MPEG4, which means MPEG4-SP which is not h.264 but more like xvid/divx so get ready to transcode your stuff if you want it to play on the 5800 (or any other mobile anyway …).

Media claims it will show up on the street unlocked under 300 EUR so Nokia is really taking the iPhone serious and pulling no punches. For that price I’m sure to retire my N80 as soon as the 5800 is available.

Links:

• Nokia’s official 5800 page
• appleinsider’s take on 5800
• Engadget hands on
• Gizmodo hands on

Unless you live in a dark damp cave somewhere you’re aware of the launch what mainstream press calls the t-mobile google phone. This really is three different things. The first, the hardware, is obvious and less important as it’s just the first of supposedly many models. It’s a fairly normal HTC phone, seems interesting except the brain fart called ExtUSB but I’m holding out my vote till I have a chance to try the keyboard. It noticeably lacks multitouch and video conf camera.

The second part is, it’s a T-Mo phone and it’s crippled like a T-Mo phone. No Bluetooth OBEX so no chance in hell of easy syncing for 3rd party apps, file transfer or internet sharing. Yes, teetering is only important in the boonies, cool kids dial up their HSDPA over bluetooth. I won’t even go into plans but the $399 no-contract option is well in line with market prices so no big surprises there.

The third part is Android itself. The interface is snappy enough and while quite a lot of people noticed the T-Mo promotional stuff is photoshoped together and shows a wildly inconsistent UI I believe the real live UI is better (from the emulator) and can be ironed out easily over the air. The G1 lacks multitouch and I’m not exactly sure how the UI will incorporate those events in the future (I’m really not an Android expert, I bet google knows how that will work). A well debated sore spot for Android is lack of business environment type functionality like good MSOffice format support and MSExchange connectors. There it’s being beat hard by iPhone and steamrolled (by sheer scale) by Nokia and Google says that bit will be filled by 3rd party. I’m not sure how well that will work (it will surely bring developers in) but I’m sure Google doesn’t really care about that. What Google cares about is moving people into googleplex and truth is if your company uses google hosted apps you get an Android and it just works. No MobileMe snafus, no Exchange weirdness, it just works on a level that didn’t exist before. The main feature it lacks is split personality, the possibility of having a corporate hosted account and a personal gmail account in parallel. Nothing more annoying than not being able to go off the clock.

A rather underplayed point is Android is the beginning of the end of traditional telcos and phone numbers. SMS is legacy, instant messaging is in. My guess is circuit switched calls are next.

But the punch line here is, the T-Mobile G1 is not the Google Phone. There will be no Google Phone on the US market in the foreseeable future simply cause the US market doesn’t allow for a really interesting iPhone or a truly open GPhone. If Google wants to do a real GPhone it has two paths. One is bringing it to Europe, setting up a production chain with HTC, setting up a retail channel with a large chain like PhoneHouse or a carrier like Vodafone and have a lot more control over the the final product. The other is using all that spectrum effort to good use and start it’s own mobile carrier (mvno, 700MHz, whatever) in the US.

iPhone, for all the jesusness it has, is definitely not a social phone. The apps’s access to the network and the outside world is too crippled to allow really interesting real-time social things. Sure, it can do Facebook apps but until sync services come into full effect and actually deliver over the air sync and data push nothing is going to happen on that side.

Android, on the other hand, is everything iPhone is not. It’s open, allows full network side and proximity networks. Or will, somewhere after 1.0.
Google’s decision to ship minimal bluetooth and no xmpp on 1.0 makes sense from a platform engineering standpoint but kills a lot of the launch buzz for 1.0. No flash mobs, no meme p2p, no real life mmorg.
Pah.

Nobody cares. Really. It’s just another crappy winmo phone and it’s more expensive than an htc.

You blew it Palm.

In the wake of the movements of T’Mo and HTC around Dream and the announcement of an A-Phone about a month from now I was starting to write about Google wasn’t making with the software. And just to prove me wrong Google drops the v0.9 SDK which actually might look like the finished thing.

The UI is definitely OK and usable both with a touchscreen and hard keys. Apple here clearly has an advantage by controlling the hardware, Android tries to accommodate all the imaginable phones and that usually doesn’t end well. It’s kind of ironic the way two of most prominent features on both Android and iPhoneOS, the browser and maps are pretty much the same on both sides. Both use a browser based on Apple’s WebKit (even higher irony, the lean webkit was seeded by Nokia) and both use Google Maps. On Android’s side using Google Maps is part of the whole google-in-your-hand approach which on the iPhone using Google Maps is underplayed. The same way, Google is pretty happy with WebKit but doesn’t go into big efforts to make sure everybody knows the code comes mainly from Apple. So, what’s actually different ? Each side plays on it’s strengths, the iPhone is quite obviously a mobile phone strapped onto an iPod while Android enables people to access the Google cloud from anywhere and eventually make some phone calls too.

At the end of the day the iPhone is much more all around polished and Android will allow a lot more stuff but users on both platforms will be starting the same browser to check gmail and google reader and find something on google maps. Gmail/Gtalk/Gcal is be better than mobileme while the iTunes experience will be excellent until someone does an app for Android that grabs music right off amazon. iPhone will sync seamlessly, Android will have a bunch of sync and push and pull apps for different and sometimes amazing things while iPhone will be stuck with an apparently crippled push service. Oh well.

I wish Google didn’t chose Java for Android. It’s just damn annoying. Google owed it to us to make things much more interesting by using something like Python or, to make things really interesting, Javascript. Relearning Java for Android is almost as annoying as learning ObjC for iPhoneOS.

On a final note, where’s search ? Palm invented 10 years ago. I pressed search on my PalmIII and it searched all through my apps. How can that not be possible in 2008 ? Apple, you got spotlight. Google, well, you are google. This shouldn’t be all that difficult!

The only operator in Portugal that’s not selling the iPhone is trying to make up for it by touting stuff like the Samsung Omnia as much much better. That’s kind of like starting with a lame donkey, slaping a red saddle on it and trying to pass it on as a racing horse.

This may seem a bit harsh but if you look closely it’s pretty much what Samsung did, they started with a pen pointer based UI, slapped a fancy front screen with large icons on it and passed it on as an “iphone killer”. This is just as true of Samsung as it is of all the other makers (still) trying to do the same 1 year after the original iPhone. The first screen looks fine and dandy and the hardware seems to actually have been designed this century (2Mpx camera, ohhh pulese) but underneath there’s the same old crusty windows mobile UI with 5x5 pixel ‘ok’ buttons and apps pretending to be a desktop. And a sad sad sad excuse for a web browser. Sad sad.

So people, this isn’t hard. Make a consistent effort at designing a confortable, consistent, quick UI. It’s not about the “touch” part, really. All my phones have been tactile so far. They have this things called buttons which I press with my fingers and they’re even haptic (which is a word I swear didn’t even exist last year). I press them to dial numbers and they go down and make a satisfying “click”. So people obviously aren’t all hyped about touching stuff.
The only ones apparently doing a reasonable effort at this are the good folks at Nokia. Instead of slaping a touch screen on their phones (why oh why SonyEricsson ??) and calling it an “iphone killer” they’re back to the drawing board working on a touch interface for Symbian S60, although I see quite a lot of penning on the early videos. Pen bbbaaadddd ok Nokia ?

So I’ll repeat, this isn’t too hard. It’s not about dialer apps with large buttons. I had that on my Treo180 in 2000. Yes, I could dial with my thumb on a touch screen on a smartphone in 2000. I could also take or reject calls too. It actually worked back then. I can remove my phone from my pocket, dial a number with my thumb and disconnect with my thumb, single handedly on any phone on the market today. It’s not about that m’kay.
Let me illustrate with something out of the laptop world. I used to only use the laptop built in pointing device only in the most dire circumstances. That was before I started using the MBP. The MBP touchpad is about twice the area of the touchpad on the pece I was using before so I can actually get a decent accuracy and on it. It’s also conductive instead of pressure based so it has a decent touch. And I can do a number of things like right click and zooming on it. So I have no reason to use an external mouse and in fact I spare myself the hassle of carrying one around. (after using the multitouch pads on recent MBPs I felt like sending mine on a long walk off a short pier. oh well, I digress)
This is the kind of detail that usually gets left out making human interfaces and it’s the kind of detail that makes all the diference.

As Nokia is taking extra sweet care fixing my N80 I defaulted back to my trusty SE T68i. It doesn’t have a camera, it doesn’t play music, it barely has a screen, but for connecting people and computers to a GPRS network (3G wasn’t there yet back then) it’s as good as it gets.

I wish SE still made good phones.

Cause Apple knows market theory and I don’t have money to waste on early adopter premiums.

Damn you Apple!!

iphone 8G vodafone pay-as-you-go = 499EUR
nokia N95 8G vodafone pay-as-you-go = 499EUR
nokia E71 + 8G SDHC, unlocked = 470EUR

not looking good for you iphone!