Tech IT Easy » iPhone

Swedes know how to connect with music – or how to stream Spotify to the living room

Kari Silvennoinen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:33:19 +0000

ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify.

However, in a modern home, the other problem with music is that today most people have their music inside their computer – which, more often than, is a laptop instead of a bulky desktop and anyway probably not stationed anywhere near one’s stereo setup. There are many solutions to this problem, Apple has its Airport Express but it only supports playback from iTunes out of the box. So, if you want to stream Spotify from a bigger set of speakers and without cables this is not a good solution.

For a long time, I was looking for such a solution – no additional cables or stuff to just play audio from my Mac to my living room. I did find a bunch, but most of them were complex and riddled with lots of strange limitations (like cost). I was sure that there had to be an easier way to enjoy Spotify further than 2 meters from my laptop. Many A/V manufacturers sidestep the issue by adding a WLAN, Ethernet and/or USB capability to their hardware, so one can play music out of a shared hard drive but this rules all streaming services, like Spotify, out.

Maybe in the future Spotify might be inside our radio tuners and televisions. The latter is possible already in Sweden and Finland, where you can get Spotify on your digital television thanks to the Swedish-Finnish ISP and mobile operator TeliaSonera. Changing my internet and cable operator just for Spotify sounded a bit too complex solution so that wasn’t for me. But it might be a nice setup for one’s parents – if they weren’t just fine with their CDs, probably. Is it really this difficult to just stream arbitrary audio from one’s laptop to speakers wirelessly?

So, more Swedes to the rescue. The good folks at the hi-fi spekaer company Audio Pro have come up with probably one of the simplest and cross-platform solutions with their wireless offering. But, it’s an USB dongle. Aren’t there enough wireless transmitters inside my MacBook Pro to do the job? Well, thanks to yet another Swedish company, Ericsson, and their Bluetooth technology (with AD2P-profile), streaming audio wirelessly should be simple. So, why not just add Bluetooth inside a radio and then things should work with no wires or restrictions, right?

However, this, like many other Bluetooth applications, hasn’t really caught on. Sony has some setups with Bluetooth, but I went with Audio Pro Radio One. Sure, it looks like any Tivoli Audio’s radio and Tivoli Audios are really nice, but the only “modern” one with any connectivity (and radio presets!) is NetWorks and that one costs an arm and a leg – and even that one can’t stream music from a computer in a simple way. Radio One, on the other hand can, because the smart folks at Audio Pro put a Bluetooth receiver in it.

And so, with Radio One, Spotify and a Mac things are quite straightforward. Because the Radio One acts like an ordinary output device which means you can stream any audio to it. No need for Airport Express or Airfoil, things work even simpler than that. Setting up a Windows-machine should be equally easy as long as you have correct Bluetooth-drivers that have the A2DP profile. Connecting your iPhone – or any other mobile phone with BT – to Radio One? Thanks to Bluetooth, really easy. However, because there’s no iPod or USB dock in Radio One, you’d better watch battery usage or use a stereo cable instead.

So, thanks to a bunch of ingenious Swedes, I can finally stream music from my laptop to my living room. The only limits are that Bluetooth’s range is relatively short and it does consume battery. But no artificial limits like with oh so many other solutions. Aren’t standards and simple solutions a fun thing?

A sidenote: Americans and other developing mobile countries take note, Bluetooth does not mean a wireless headset. Bluetooth can do a lot of pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately introduction of cheap mobile broadband and before that Nokia’s and then Apple’s reluctance to actually support any interesting profile (without crippling them beyond any recognition) on their handsets have meant that Bluetooth is not in the spotlight anymore and is mostly in hands-free headsets and wireless keyboards and mice.

On Interface Design: Why Digg is the best News interface on the iPhone

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:12:18 +0000

My first post about the iPhone was on why I thought app developers should forget about “apps” for the iPhone and develop Games exclusively. It’s a touch interface and as such inferior to tactile feedback interfaces. I’m hearing rumours that the touch keyboard on the iPad actually works quite well for full-speed typing, but that’s another story.

Putting Digg in the topic title is a trick to get you to read the post. My point is that there is a logic to designing software for a certain interface and, as far as news-interfaces go, Digg is pretty good. Now that I think about it, there is a different interface that perhaps works better, and that is browsing news via pictures (more on that later).

On my PC/Mac, I use Netvibes pretty exclusively for browsing the news. I tried Google Reader and other RSS readers for a while, but linear readers don’t make sense for a waterfall of news. Twitter is perhaps a counter-example to it, but I generally don’t read more than the top-5 posts / or the last 5 posts for close friends on Twitter.

Where Netvibes has the advantage is in presenting you multiple widgets at the same time and your eyes can easily glance from one feed to the next, cherry picking the best of the crop. Do the same in Google Reader and I get the same feeling as in Twitter, only the top 5 items or so matter.

The iPhone with its 5 x 8cm screen is very different and it’s best noticed when doing something that requires a lot of screen-real estate, like working in Excel or looking at a window with a lot of info. Netvibes wouldn’t work at all in it, which is why they also developed their reader interface, which in turn is inferior to Google Reader.

But my point about iPhones and Gaming remains unchanged. The reason that gaming reigns on this platform (more so than is healthy for anyone) is because it is not a text-input device. It is a media-consumption device that has less screen-real estate than a PC (or an iPad for that matter).

Therefore, reading things in a list format makes much more sense. And, because inputting text kind of sucks (well, apart from short brain dumps), Digg is actually the best news-interface that I’ve come across. You couldn’t put a gun to my head to get me to use it on the PC, but it feels natural to “shovel” through it (via the app called “Shovel“) on this small screen. Not only because it’s a list-based interface, but because the user’s interaction with the information is limited to “digging,” while the content is pushed up by everyone.

Minimal interaction required is why Digg works on the iPhone.

Now, a second interface to consider for news is certainly to browse via pictures, which works on the AP Mobile app and the World News app (an interface for BBC news). But for text-junkies, it certainly is slower as you have to slide from item to item.

With the iPad, we are entering new territory, and I unfortunately haven’t tested it to find out how it works exactly. But what is certain is that due to the larger screen-real estate available to display information and to the relative improvement of the touch keyboard, the dynamic very much changes. This is the kind of interface where widget-news makes sense again.

And that also leads me to reiterate a point I made last time writing about the iPad. The best way to display certain apps again is the often-forgotten Dashboard interface on the Mac. Widget apps like calculator or weather already exist in Dashboard as do many other clones of iPhone apps.

I’m very curious what will be announced tomorrow at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event as there are many questionmarks regarding multitasking and building interfaces that use the hardware keyboard (without a mouse?). But that’s the fun of Apple and the right way to run a company: keep your audience engaged and/or enraged, day in and day out!

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Where is the Logic in Segmented (!) European Licensing of iTunes Apps ?

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:53:25 +0000

Maybe I’m a case apart, but I have become both a consumer of iTunes Apps and have recently moved between two countries, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Until recently, my account used for consuming iTunes content was Dutch. Now, I decided to switch the payment to a Luxembourg credit card, which required me to change the address in Itunes to Luxembourg as well.

And guess what, when you purchase an app in the Netherlands and then change the residence to Luxembourg, all or most of your content becomes invalid and gets deleted from the device you purchased it for. It doesn’t matter if the app was free or not, it’s just gone, even though your purchase history clearly states that you did pay for that app!

I have written to Apple to report this problem, but in the mean time I worry every time that the apps, in which I also produce content, may get deleted the next time I sync my content.

I’ve previously written about Media being the most “unflat” industry on our planet, but I really wasn’t expecting this to be the case for Software, which I thought was produced by hip, non-conformist guys like you and me, that sell to everyone over the internet and don’t care about national borders.

Can someone, an app developer perhaps, explain to me the reason for having a different license for different countries? I understand currency and language differences, but many apps are just in English and the whole of the EU uses the Euro?

If alternatively, you happen to know of a solution to keeping your apps while changing residence, please let me know!

All that aside, have a great New Year, everyone!

Vincent

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Think different – Nokia was the Apple of mobile phones

Kari Silvennoinen — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:00:13 +0000

What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former executive at Nokia, and it tells the story how Nokia was able to challenge Motorola, Ericsson and other big players of yesteryear.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ‘s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

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Summary of visit to Silicon Valley

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:10:01 +0000

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there.

UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies.

Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the x- and y-axis and pressure modified that loop. It was an interesting idea, because it didn’t look like just pushing buttons to make sound.

Fail whale at LHS

UCB: Raymond Yee, “Mixing and Re-mixing Information”

A lecture from a course on web mashups. Yee has written the book, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The students need to plan and work on a mashup project. There were lots of interesting ideas, but I was worried that most of them were remixing for remixing’s sake and didn’t add value along the way.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Our contact at UC Berkeley had warned this place was mostly for children, and sure enough, this is a place to avoid unless you’re 7 years or less. Almost as complete waste of time as our Google visit.

We had also pizza available for but no-one from UC Berkeley came (we were too scary). Except one guy, whose name I forget. But he took some of us for drinks downtown, so that was great.

Digital Chocolate / Trip Hawkins

Hawkins really loved "Bowling alone"

Trip Hawkins talked a lot about how leverage is the key to successful business and what are the differences between the supply chain in when he was at EA and in operator-controlled world of mobile gaming. He told how he built EA so that it was NFL who wanted them to use their brand, not the other way around. This is why he sees that his competitors who just put out license games based on movies will ultimately be driven off the market, because they do not control the IP.

He thinks that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and how the rest don’t get it: “If you’ve played around with Storm or Android you know, wow, these suck”. In his view, the others had focused in Features (“What it is”) and not on Advantages (“What it does”) and not at all at Benefits (“Who cares?”).

Digital Chocolate’s game development doesn’t depend on the device, because they change all the time and they can publish all their games in every device. This is the only way to make the business work in the mobile space. Hawkins doesn’t see that there will be any standardization, because that would move the leverage away from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.

He also believes that the social starving that began around 1950′s because of TV is the reason people are so keen on the social gaming and internet services and is the driver for “omnimedia”. His suggested reading are The Innvator’s Solution and Bowling Alone. Even in the old days, he didn’t see gaming as waste of time. When playing, he said that “I was thinking, learning and motivated”.

He recommended that we try Tower Bloxx, their Facebook game. I was a bit disappointed, the game itself isn’t that bad if you want to kill time, but it is really spammy. Not only is more screen real estate spent on questionable ads than on the game, not only does it notify your timeline every time you play the game, not only the “social aspect” is just a high score table of your friends, but it also spams your friends every time you play to add the game. Not exactly what I’d expect from the guy who’s partly responsible for the great games EA pushed out in the early days. I asked why is it that as a former hardcore gamer, the only interesting game I played last year was World of Goo. In his opinion this down to how big corporations work and can’t innovate. If Tower Bloxx is Digital Chocolate’s answer to this, I don’t think it’s just big corporations.

Sun Microsystems / Mårten Mickos

FAQ: "If heating is a problem, why is it black?"

We were given the tour at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. They showed the SunRays and other stuff and it was pretty nice to see up close the Black Box.

Afterwards, Mickos gave us a presentation about open source development and MySQL. He said that MySQL is like “New Orleans” of web apps in that if you want to control an important river, you need to control the important cities and this was the reason Sun acquired them. He also anticipated the question about superiority of Postgres, which is probably asked from him all the time. “When I joined MySQL, Postgres was better. Some say it still is. But who cares?”

He also started a discussion about “Why are web companies so closed?” – a poke directed among others Google, who benefit a lot from GPL software, but due to a loophole in the agreement can get away without publishing their improvements because the software isn’t redistributed. This is what he calls the hypocrisy of open source: “People just want to get stuff for free”.

Like Hawkins, he said that the most important thing for startup business is category-leadership. One advice he gave for Finnish start-ups was “not to be Finnish”: MySQL didn’t have sales offices in Nordics, only in the US. Other thing was that if something sounds good in Finland, it takes 10-15 years for until it’s widely accepted as a good thing, so don’t go to market too early. “There’s still time to make a Google-killer”, he said.

This was one of the best sessions we had, not only because Mickos isn’t there anymore and looks like Sun won’t be either but also because we got vodka and swag. You could see there was an economic crisis, because elsewhere we didn’t get anything.

Nexit Ventures / Michel Wendell

Wendell, from Nexit Ventures, a VC firm interested in Nordic IT startups, told how the VC market works and what kind of mistakes Finnish companies usually make. He told how he ended up in the business of helping Nordic companies make it in the US. Being a VC has lot to do with knowing people.

Lots of interesting discussion, but it was late in the evening and it’s pretty hard to upstage either Hawkins or Mickos.

IDEO

We got a standard theme park tour at IDEO. If you have seen the documentaries on TV or at YouTube, there’s not much to see. I was surprised that they actually avoid any systematic or analytical approach to design and focus more on a holistic, iterative and therefore probably pretty expensive (to the client) approach. As a case study they presented Nokia N-Gage platform they did concept work for. A surprising choice, because not only being old was also a spectacular flop. I guess they thought that being from Finland and the course given by ex-CTO of Nokia, we’d be interested in Nokia or something. If we were, we probably didn’t need to come all the way to Palo Alto for that.

Stanford University / VHIL

At Stanford, we got a nice presentation from Jeremy Bailenson from Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He was talking about the Proteus Effect, or how avatars change humans and their behaviour. For example, even though Blizzard has nothing in World of Warcraft code that gives advantage to taller avatars, they nevertheless level up faster than shorter ones. Also, taller avatars get better results in the Ultimatum Game, the real world height of the human is irrelevant. As I’m interested in behavioral decision making, it was nice to see that it might be possible to do empirical studies in virtual worlds, where we can control many variables that social sciences haven’t been in the real world.

Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto

First NDA of the tour. They showed us some research projects they were working on and had the worst slides of the tour. Most of us came out there frightened how out of touch Nokia can be.

Stanford University / Entrepreneurship Week / “Next Big Thing” Panel

Tim Draper, Tony Perkins and Michael Moe talked mostly about Twitter and iPhone and how making revenue is irrelevant. Draper really loves the free trade. Apparently ad-supported business model is the next big thing.

These guys were either drunk or lived in a bubble of their own. Probably both.

IBM Almaden Research Center / Ray Strong

There's pr0n in it, I'm sure.

Strong talked about how IBM tries to predict the future. First of all, the Almaden Research Center looks like a super-villain’s secret lair from Bond movies (it didn’t help that the guy we met had a Bond-esque name). Forget Google, this is the place to visit. There was the world’s first hard drive in the lobby, which was a nice monument to how long IBM has been in the game.

The main thing Strong told was that it isn’t possible to predict technology in to deep future, only in to the business horizon of up to 5 years. This is what they told to an unnamed government agency that wanted them to do so. As government usually gets what it wants, IBM decided to find a way to do it. They brought in people from academy, futurologists and social scientists. Their approach is half scenarios and half technology landscapes, but their ideation emphasizes backcasting from deep future (>50 years) using trends that can be with high probability assumed to continue.

One problem with scenarios has been that it’s really hard to transform them into strategic actions a company should take. IBM tries to close this gap between scenario planning and strategy by using what they call signposts. These signposts are future events that are both recognizable (when they happen) and actionable.

Strong also talked about how predicting future, it’s important to stay in the qualitative side of things, not only because quantitative side of things usually doesn’t work and might be harmful because of the tendency to use numbers to calculate expected values or other figures, even though they are full of uncertainty and can be harmful.

This was by far the best visit during the tour.

Google

NDA. It was a standard theme park tour. It was pretty clear that Google is exactly as “open” as SEC demands it to be, not an inch more. I guess many for many of us the myth of Google was totally burst.

To be fair, this was the only place where our contact wasn’t executive level so we might have gotten a better experience with a more suitable contact. Even though our host was great and all that, he probably wasn’t the right one for our group.

HP Labs

Runner-up in best architecture for a research lab.

NDA, but they mostly showed published academic research about nanophotovoltaics or something to that end. Our guess is that they didn’t want to tell us anything but out of courtesy showed something. When they talked about things I could understand, they talked about MagCloud and how HP is transforming from a printer and computer company into printing and computing company.

Next day, couple of us went to see the garage (more like a shack) Hewlett and Packard started from and what is considered as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Not much to see, but at least it had some historical value.

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The only way I would buy an iPhone…

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:51:45 +0000

…Is if this were possible on it (apologies for the deformation, apparently Windows isn’t good for everything):

Concept iPhone keyboard – a composite made out of an iPhone + a Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

I’m actually quite surprised that something like this isn’t possible. The iPhone screen would make a fine portable screen and the touch keyboard is pretty terrible for typers (at least my polls have revealed). With the current bluetooth keyboad even, I would think a simple synergy was possible and I don’t at all get why Apple does not allow for this to work.

Let’s make some noise!!!

Vincent

The iPhone's hardware and software capabilities are misaligned

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:06:44 +0000

I spent quite a lot of time evaluating smart-phones this last week, including having hands-on time with the Nokia E71, the Blackberry 8900, the iPhone & iPod Touch, with a firm eye on their capabilities as a mobile computer, more so than a mobile phone or a mobile entertainment device.

My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

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OK you cheapskates, what do you think of the iPhone now?

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:53:03 +0000

Bear in mind that by calling you cheapskates, I also call myself the same (plus, I’m Dutch…). Remember that I was the one raving about a €30 contract-less phone not too long ago, the Motorola Motophone (which I have since given to my mother, who hates it). Since moving to Luxembourg, less than a month ago, I’m shopping for a new phone and am considering the iPhone.

At the same time, do the math! To get the 16GB version, I have to shell over €99 + €50 per month for the next two years. That’s €1300 as a base price for the iPhone, not including the cost of getting hooked to paying such prices in the future.

Some other factors to consider:

There’s is city-wide, free WiFi in Luxembourg (at least one good thing about this small city, apart from me being there )
Skype was just released in the app-store, making calling on the iPod Touch + Wifi a viable option.
Signing a 2 year contract seems like a big deal, considering I just started the job and still need to be able to keep it.
The country of Luxembourg is so small, that I ‘ll be in international roaming mode before I know it (Mobile in Europe sucks, did you know that?)
Taking a 32GB iPod Touch + a internet-less phone, would be ca. €400 + €30 per month = ok, €1120 for 2 years (bearing in mind that I usually NEVER take 2 year contracts on anything!)
I already have an excellent portable camera, the IXUS 870 IS
I also expect an upgraded iPhone to come around, hopefully within the next 6 months, but too long for me to wait.

So, it’s a tough decision for a cheapskate like me.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of wanting to use a touch-screen, which I considered an inferior typing solution, until… I watched this video. It’s amazing that this guy, sitting in a moving vehicle shaking like a bull on steroids, can type intelligible words on his iPhone, and nothing at all on a regular button-based keyboard.

Take that together with the iPhone OS 3, due to come out within the next 1-3 months, and it sounds like an interesting option. But €1300 for a phone? Man!

What do you say, cheapskates, buy or don’t buy?

Vincent

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Three (4) reasons why you should be developing games, not apps, for the iPhone

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:10:22 +0000

With both the launch of the app-store and the “global” (western) release of an affordable iPhone 3G, it is clear that the rules of the game are changing a little as far as adoptability of software is concerned. While, if you hang around the blogosphere, you’re exposed to a tech-crowd in a tech-world, many of which are anglophiles also, this is no longer so when you’re dealing with a consumer-targetted electronic device, like the iPhone, available in many countries, in all the major stores, and at a fairly appealing price & cool-factor.

No, instead you’ll be dealing with customers from countries like Germany, France, Spain, Italy, etc. many of which prefer to think in their own language. And you’ll be dealing with mainstream users of telephones, who are, let’s face it, often of a younger generation.

So the implication is: how do I, as an app-developer, reach out to both a global, non-english audience? And how do I appeal to the typical demographic (age, income, etc.) that will buy this phone?

The answer seems fairly straightforward: Games !

Games have the advantage that they can easily bridge the language-gap, by mostly focussing on visual communication.
Games appeal to the younger crowd.
And, let’s face it, the iPhone is not (yet) a business-phone, and hence again not aimed at the typical blog-reader & app-user.

Addendum: a possible fourth reason is that I’m personally not so impressed with the iPhone/iTouch keyboard; i.e. I won’t be writing a blogpost on it any time soon. Games are another matter.

So, if you ask me, all you people aiming to create or invest in the next “productivity” app, I would think again and focus on what the lowest common denominator is between your skills and demand.

Inspiration for this quick post: Fred Wilson on the iPhone app-ecosystem.

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to check out some of the smart comments this post is receiving.

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Smartphone misconceptions

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:20:13 +0000

Judging from Vincent’s latest post (and the comments!) about why he thinks Android will suck, there are many misunderstandings about global smartphone markets. First of all, they are a small subset of all handset market – just about 10%. There are many who are blinded by their US-centric power-user views. The echo chamber of blogs doesn’t help much, especially because most blogs are also U.S.-based. This smartphone market share graph by Volker Weber is one of the best to illustrate that North America is totally different than other markets. The differences do not limit to smartphones, there are huge differences in mobile usage also.

The other thing to note is that the dominating player right now with more than two thirds of the market is Symbian, which is backed by, among others, the number one mobile manufacturer, Nokia. Both have summarily dismissed iPhone and Android as nothing more than niche (“iPhone is nice, but that’s about it”, “Just another Linux phone”?). They are also both usually missing from all reporting concerning Android and iPhone. Not taking them into account is like talking about PC industry and forgetting about Windows and Dell.

It’s always a good reminder that Nokia is also the world’s largest MP3 player and digital camera manufacturer. They also have more than half of the smartphone market. From a U.S. perspective this might not be so visible, because in the U.S. market the best selling smartphones are Blackberry Pearl, Motorola Q and Apple iPhone. If these are your idea of smartphones, do yourself a favour and familiarise yourself with Nokia’s Nseries (for consumers) and Eseries (for enterprise).

In the Open Handset Alliance’s FAQ, the alliance says that the benefits of an open platform for operators and manufacturers are lower costs and flexibility to offer services. For consumers, they promise cheaper prices, but given that most phones are given free by the operator or that it doesn’t actually make any business-sense to do give phones on a discount without a reason, this is probably a joke. Also, do not read too much into the “partnerships” in OHA, as many of those companies are also involved with Symbian and many other mobile initiatives.

The business model of your average mobile carrier is to make money out of you by offering you value-added services. The problem in the marketplace is that most people are just fine with voice and SMS. In the EU, many people feel that mobile data is still too expensive to the extent that the EU will probably mandate some price limits. Seriously, this is an industry that thought WAP and walled gardens were the future. Open competition is an anathema for them.

What the carriers with their monopoly mindset didn’t see coming was that internet is everywhere for far more competitive price and experience than what they can deliver. A surprise hit in Finland is a USB-device with 3G connection with gives you mobile broadband to your laptop with fixed monthly price. Why not just use your mobile’s Bluetooth instead is something a more technically oriented guy would think. But that’s why this guy can’t understand either why Google sees more search activity from an iPhone than from other handsets.

Many ISPs have started to adopt the mobile operators’ tactics now that the basic service is so low-margin. Of course, they can’t go as far as they’d love – you can’t imagine your ISP mandating what kind of computer you can use to connect to the net. In part, this is what the net neutrality discussion is about.

Google reported some time ago, that iPhone is by far the most used mobile user-agent. You can take this as a success story to Apple (and AT&T), but you could also see the sorry state of internet on mobile. A device with a tiny market share dominates internet usage? This is of course good news for iPhone carriers, who would love to have more customers like that. The question is, is the reason that using the web is so easy on an iPhone or because the iPhone owners behave differently? A little bit of both is always the easy way out, but whatever, the bottom line is that it brings more internet traffic revenue to mobile carriers. One point of warning, though, one reason for iPhone’s search dominance to keep in mind is only hinted in the article – the default search engine for many mobiles isn’t Google, but Yahoo! or even an operator’s own.

Then there’s the talk about the open platform of Android. One problem when talking about iPhone SDK and Android is that, right now, neither are “real” in the sense that so far all we have seen is hype. As a Symbian boss said, “We take [Android] seriously but we are the ones with real phones, real phone platforms and a wealth of volume built up over years”. In 2007, 141 different models and 77,3 million Symbian phones were sold. The fight between Android and iPhone SDK is pointless if you don’t include Symbian in it. It is open (to an extent), it’s free, there’s no AppStore (which is good and bad), there’s digital signatures (which is good and bad). And there are almost 9,000 third-party applications.

Want IM and VoIP on your smartphone today? Here’s a Gizmo client for Symbian S60 -platforms by Nokia (See the site for other cool apps if you happen to have a compatible phone). Do not forget the power mobile operators have over their networks, even that app can’t use VoIP on 3G, just on WLAN. Apple and Google are not mobile companies and that’s why they try to change the rules more to the their liking. This is a good thing, but history has proved these efforts have so far been very futile.

This Wired article on Motorola ROKR couple years back is a good reminder of some laws of the mobile market. Of course, the article didn’t age that well (which seems to be quite common at Wired), but the middle part with Nokia’s Vanjoki is worth a second read, especially now that Nokia is busy with Ovi.

PS. I’m a low-profit customer for my mobile operator, I have a simple SonyEricsson K610i with Opera Mini that I use web with like three times a year. I tried to use mobile internet while “outside the grid” (e.g. WLAN or DSL), but because I happened to be outside a major city (and 3G connectivity), the experience sucked a lot. We wanted to see a YouTube movie but were unable to. And this was 2008.

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