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Technology

What Phone Is Right For You? 3 – Enter The Gladiators

When you buy an advanced smartphone, the choice is less about the manufacturer than it is about the operating system (OS), the software framework that manages the phone and its apps. Each of the contenders has its way of doing things, each its benefits and pitfalls. Right now, you basically have a choice between these six:

Android – On an ever-increasing range of phones, most notably those from HTC and Samsung.

BlackBerry OS – On RIM‘s BlackBerry devices.

iOS – Apple’s iPhone (As well as the iPad and iPod Touch)

Symbian – Particularly on Nokia’s high-end phones, but also ones from Sony Ericsson and various Japanese manufacturers.

Windows Phone 7 – Currently found mainly on phones from HTC, but should be appearing on Nokias later this year.

Windows Mobile –  On many devices, again perhaps most notably those from HTC.

There are a couple of others like HP’s WebOS and Samsung’s Bada, but these are the ones you are likely to meet. How then do they differ – and where do they excel? We’ll begin, later today, with the more business-orientated. You know, the ones you can justify buying by pretending they’re for work.

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Technology

What Phone Is Right For You? 1 – The Scene

Image via Wikipedia
It's really time for a new one

As I was saying, it’s never been as hard to choose a phone as it is now. This is far from a bad thing though; we’ve never had so many incredible choices. Phones have changed almost beyond recognition, from fairly straightforward communication devices into something we don’t even quite have a name for yet.

Certainly the term ‘smartphone’ no longer seems adequate. Though there were earlier experiments¹, the smartphone came into its own all of ten years ago now, when the mobile phone and the PDA were successfully merged by companies like Nokia and Microsoft. The magic ingredient: A proper operating system that allowed you to install software.

Since then, other functions have accrued continually. Cameras, Web browsers, e-mail, media players, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi… Keypads became tiny to make room for Internet-friendly screens. Some – Microsoft in particular – introduced touch interfaces, but made them so crowded that they had to be navigated with a PDA-type stylus. The smartphone seemed full to the point of bursting.

Then Apple made the next great breakthrough, by introducing an interface that was not only sensitive to broad gestures, but which was utterly reconfigurable by whatever program was in use. At a stroke they solved the problem of the smartphone trying to be too many things, by reinventing it as an almost neutral object that could be reconfigured for an endless variety of tasks.

At the same time, they realised that what was essentially an Internet-connected iPod was a fantastic tool for selling things to people; music, video, the software “apps” it would run, and the services those apps could interface with. It was a goldmine. The other main players were slow to recognise this; Nokia and Microsoft so tardy that eventually they had to join forces. Only Google, the one with no previous involvement in phones, could see what was happening and knew what was to be done. They produced Android, now the leading rival to the iPhone.

But far from the only one; there are four or five competing systems, all with their strengths and weaknesses. So though we have great choices, they are real choices. Where once we might have chosen based on fairly trivial factors like appearance, buying a phone now means buying into a system – an ‘ecosystem’ as some call it – of software apps and services. It’s quite a commitment.

By weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of the various offerings however, it shouldn’t be too hard to tell which is the one that suits your needs. These we will look at in more detail tomorrow.

  1. The first real smartphone? Probably the Simon from quiet innovator IBM (pictured above). It may have been an ugly brick, but it was an ugly brick that was years ahead of its time.
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Technology

Microsoft and Nokia: A No-Win Situation? (Part 2)

NoWin CartoonYesterday I speculated that the smartphone market could devolve into a straight fight between Apple and Nokia-Microsoft. This would depend of course on people actually liking what the latter two companies have to offer. If they manage to combine the best of what they can do, the results should be impressive. But will they? Until the first phones come out, which will be October at the very soonest, we can only wait with bated breath. Windows Phone on Nokia has a lot to live up to.

Or perhaps, to live down. At a stroke, this deal effectively eliminated not only the world’s most popular smartphone OS, but also a promising alternative.

There were reasons for this. Symbian, with its pedigree stretching back to the very first handheld computers, was unwieldy when compared to the radical interface-orientation of its new rivals. To take one example, an operation as trivial as creating a screen icon for a newly installed app required digging down through menus within menus to find one called, of all things, “Standby Mode”. That just wasn’t good enough anymore.

To deliver a slick modern experience, Symbian needed to be drastically rebuilt. Nokia dithered about this, working on both an improved form (Symbian^3) and its slated successor (MeeGo) in parallel. And so ended up with one system that was serviceable but unimpressive and another that was impressive but unserviceable. Meanwhile, Apple and Google were eating their market share alive.

But there was another company that knew its smartphone OS needed to be replaced, and it pulled the trick off with surprising alacrity. This of course was Microsoft.

The case for simply adopting the software giant’s solution seems compelling now, but few predicted it. Even when former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop became Nokia’s CEO last September, rumours that he planned to move his old office furniture in with him seemed merely mischievous. Abandoning their own OS development would be a move Nokia could never take back, and so lead to almost irrevocable dependence on a company that had up till then been a bitter rival.

It was only with the recent leak of Elop’s harsh memo that the hints became impossible to ignore. In it he used the metaphor of a “burning platform” – as in, you don’t jump into the cold ocean until you realise your oil rig is on fire – to illustrate just how drastically Nokia needed to change. But the language was hardly even coded; platform in computing terms means the combination of hardware and operating system a program runs on. In fact Nokia had only recently rebranded Symbian as the “Symbian Platform”. The writing was on the wall for an OS that, with its roots in the Psion Organiser of the 80s, is almost a cultural artefact.

But it may be missed by more than just a few sentimental geeks. A mobile OS from the start, Symbian was designed with security and frugal energy demands as priorities, and decades of development have given it considerable depth. Too much perhaps, if you’re trying to find a particular facility within its maze of menus, but there is little you might want a phone to do that isn’t there. And this includes many features that are not yet in Windows Phone 7. Well-loved old ones, like tethering, swapping data cards, full multitasking, compatibility with a vast range of media formats. New ones well in advance of its rivals, like USB On-The-Go which allows you to connect a phone directly to flash drives and hard disks.

Features that may never return if, like the iPhone, it is developed primarily as a system for delivering services and digitally managed content. Unless much happens between now and the first Nokia with Windows, former Symbian users may consider it limited and disappointing. Don’t be surprised if they dub it the No-Win.

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Technology

Microsoft and Nokia: A No-Win Situation? (Part 1)

This is an article I wrote on the Microsoft-Nokia deal, and to some extent it reworks material in earlier posts. If you’ve read those you could skip this. If you’ve heard enough about the damn deal already, you could skip this. I wouldn’t blame you. I’ll put up something else less techy later.

MacPC CartoonOver the last few years we have enjoyed astonishing innovation in the smartphone field, with competing systems from Apple, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, RIM, and more. A technology market has rarely been so open to all comers, certainly not since the home computer explosion of the early 80s. It’s been an extraordinary time.

And now it’s over. The partnership between Nokia and Microsoft probably signals the end of the expansive phase and the beginning of shake-out. But this may not be a bad thing. In one view they are the dream team to create a credible third force in a vital market. That should improve competition, drive up the creativity and drive down prices. From another it’s a dinosaur wedding: When giants get into bed together, they push everyone else out.

Are we to be offered fewer, better choices – or simply fewer?

A “third ecosystem”, as Nokia CEO Stephen Elop calls it, means a third major platform for app developers, far more likely to succeed where Microsoft and Nokia individually were lagging. Almost certainly, it also means a second giant media delivery system alongside Apple’s iTunes, and far greater penetration for Microsoft services that mainly rival Google’s.¹ Between them, Nokia and Microsoft have just about every angle covered.

Which, interestingly, would put them on a similar footing to Apple. Google suddenly looks like a weaker player here. With no real hardware of its own, and with little control over what people do with its open-source Android OS, they risk seeing their app market become fragmented into various flavours and their name dragged through some appalling hardware. Close integration with the desktop version of Windows should make it a compelling tool in the business segment too, putting severe pressure on RIM’s Blackberry.

This then is the danger: The market shrinking to just three, perhaps only two, real players. It would be particularly sad if those two turned out to be old stagers Apple and Microsoft.

(Continues tomorrow.)

  1. Though on the other hand it means one rival fewer for Google Maps, as both Microsoft and Nokia have products there.
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Technology

500-pound Gorillas In The Mist

Microsoft is in a tough position, though, too. Win Phone 7 isn’t selling for crap right now, and they have no actual tablet strategy. As computing rapidly moves to tablets and smartphones, Microsoft becomes less and less important. It isn’t hard at all to imagine that 10 years from now — and to a certain extent in just 5 — the only people who will need desktop-class computing will be those in science, engineering, and the people making software for all of the tablets and smartphones and such.

If even they need such things, since tablets (especially down the road) make perfectly great front-ends for truly powerful computers off in the cloud somewhere.

If I owned stock in either company, I’d sell all it tomorrow.

Submitted as comment by Matthew Frederick on 2011/02/13 at 11:01 pm

I think Microsoft have more strategy than you allow, Matthew. While it seems highly unlikely that they’ll ever reattain the dominance they once had, they remain surprisingly nimble for such a vast company. Nobody expected them to come out with something as good as Windows Phone 7 in so little time, and though it isn’t selling yet it is early days, especially considering that there are two established competitors. This deal will certainly make it seem a lot more credible.

It’s not clear to outsiders yet of course, but elements of an integrated desktop-tablet-phone strategy seem to be materializing out of the mist. On one hand, Microsoft has happily been selling software for tablet devices for almost ten years now. OneNote, which I use every day, is actually available for the iPad. (Free for the time being too.) Widows 7 is by far the best OS available for a more heavy-duty class of tablet orientated towards content creation rather than consumption.

It’s the consumption that the new market is all about though, and here Windows 7 devices, with their greater energy demands, weight, and cost, are obviously at a huge disadvantage. It’s a no-brainer to bring out a version of Win Phone 7 tweaked for bigger screens just like iOS or Android was. Some think that Microsoft don’t want to do that because it will compete with Windows 7 on tablets, but I doubt that’s the case. I think we’ll see it just as soon as MS thinks the time is ripe. That is, when there are things ready to sell on it. The phone will lead the way just as with the others.

Alongside that then is the intriguing appearance of Windows for ARM.¹ Whether there will ever actually be an ARM version or this is just meant to galvanize the energy-efficiency efforts of Intel and AMD, expect full Windows 7 devices with much lower power demands.²

I expect that, like Apple with Lion, they will soon mate the two OSes together to make a class of portable computers that get more flexible as more energy becomes available. Using cloud processing on the move, powerful processors in their own right when plugged in. That would be pretty nice.

  1. A microprocessor family designed for extreme power efficiency, used on the overwhelming majority of phone and tablet devices, as opposed to the more general-purpose x86 family that Windows only runs on now.
  2. What’s the betting they’ll be releasing tools to help software makers port their products from x86 to ARM? Though not before their own apps have had a good head start of course.
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Technology

Waking Up To The Nightmare

Dinosaur Wedding CartoonWell it looks like my worst fears came true, literally overnight. Maybe insiders at Microsoft and Nokia will be able to convince themselves that this is a refreshing, innovative alliance, but I think most others will see it as a dinosaur wedding. Two giant market leaders getting into bed together – and very likely pushing everyone else out.

It needn’t be. These may not be the most fashionable companies right now, but they each have histories of innovation. If we saw the best of them combined in one smartphone system it could be something to behold. But will we? It is hard to be sanguine. A move like this seems almost the opposite of a brave, independent vision.

I have argued that Apple are actually not a particularly innovative company, but here they did something that was truly game-changing. What Nokia and Microsoft seem to be doing though is not changing the game again, but trying to grab as much as possible of the game as it is. Between them, they reckon they have the hardware and software to go head-to-head with Apple. Well and good from a profit point of view, but it borders on the anti-competitive.

At the moment in the smartphone world we have winning products from Apple, Nokia, Google, Microsoft and RIM (Blackberry), as well as interesting outsiders like HP’s WebOS and various other adaptations of Linux and Java. When was any branch of the computer industry as open as that? Certainly not since the home computer explosion of the 80s; probably not since IBM’s rise to dominance. This is an extraordinary time for choice and innovation. Yes, it has to shake out and consolidate. Leaders must emerge. But when the people who are already the market leaders band together to protect their position, that is disappointing.

Nokia have said that they will continue to work with their own Symbian operating system for now, as well as MeeGo, the promising mobile version of Linux they’ve been working on with Intel and others, but it is hard to seriously imagine them putting their hearts into it when they are in partnership with the maker of a product competing with both. It seems more likely that they will atrophy, and the available choices will shrink. A Nokia-Microsoft product will almost inevitably rise to a dominant position. Not because it is better – Windows Phone 7 is still largely untried – but simply because of economies of scale. Because they are big.

In just a couple of years we may see a smartphone market that consists of little more than two giants – Apple and Nokia-Microsoft – and a plethora of minor competitors using Android. This will be a particular shame because it is so unnecessary. Unlike the desktop computer market there was no real argument for a natural monopoly here. Document compatibility and intercommunication are non-issues. It will just be too hard for smaller companies to get a look-in when giant competitors can work on graphene margins. So competition, and innovation, slowly dies.

And there is little we can do about it. Except of course refuse to buy the phones.

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Technology

Nokia’s Nemesis

Nokia Windows CartoonNokia’s new CEO Stephen Elop has made his presence felt – by giving his troops a good bawling out. According to a leaked memo, he told them what was wrong with them in no uncertain terms. And well he might. While there is a hell of a lot I admire about the Finnish company, they have lost their sense of direction so comprehensively in the last few years that I’m scared to use Ovi maps.

This of course dates back precisely to the launch of the iPhone. With an effort of imagination, you can kinda see why Nokia failed to spot the threat. Apple had never made a phone before¹, they were launching just a single model, it was crazy expensive, the operating system was a drastically cut-down version of a desktop one and couldn’t multitask or even cut-and-paste, the camera was well below par, it was restricted to one network, and it wasn’t even 3G for God’s sake! Nokia had a vast range of phones, some of them running the mature, multitasking Symbian OS with a pedigree stretching back to the very first handheld computers. Nobody knew as much about phone hardware or phone software as they did. Apple’s gimmicky thing almost seemed like a joke.

A joke that changed the game. Most obviously, because the phone’s interface was simply an evolutionary leap. More subtly, because Apple were not even selling a phone. They were selling music, applications, video, computers, content. The phone was just a part – albeit a pivotal one – of a new marketplace, or as Elop calls it in the memo, an ecosystem. Suddenly, just selling phones seemed like a dumb thing to do. Nokia were really good at a dumb thing.

And to make them look all the dumber, they didn’t seem to realise this. Their attempts to draw back market share looked clumsy and half-assed. A touch interface kludged onto the Symbian OS, some special music-playing models (because iPhones are a sort of iPod, right?), their attempt to create an ecosystem with the lacklustre Ovi – Finnish for door, betraying the fact that they’re still thinking in the restricting terms of a portal rather than the openness of a marketplace. They were really not getting it.

So Elop gave it to them:

Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

He uses a metaphor of a “burning platform” – as in, you don’t jump into the cold ocean until you realise your oil rig is on fire. But the choice of word is interesting. “Platform” in computing terms means the combination of hardware and software that programs are written for. Thus a PC with Windows is one platform, a Mac with OS X another. What it all strongly hints at is that he’s preparing Nokia to ditch Symbian.

A shame, some say. Symbian was the first real smartphone OS, descended from Psion’s PDAs, and is loved for many reasons. It was designed from the very beginning as a mobile system, which may explain why Nokia devices can use more modest processors than their competitors and thus have very good battery life.

About time, others say; it’s dated and it’s been holding Nokia back.

I personally do not know if there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the Symbian OS, or if it’s just the interface that lets it down, whether it’s hard to develop for or it’s just that there isn’t enough incentive. It’s an argument that rages among specialists. But much like the old Windows Mobile for phones, Symbian has accumulated “legacy” which makes its once-advanced features seem clunky hangovers. Things have become quirky and confusing. If I install a new app on my Nokia and want to have a shortcut to it on the home screen I have to dig down through menus within menus looking for one called, of all things, “Standby Mode”. That just isn’t good enough anymore. At the very least, they need to revamp it as utterly as Microsoft did theirs.

Or… Simply adopt Microsoft’s solution? Rumours abound that there is a partnership deal brewing. Stephen Elop came to Nokia from Microsoft, so naturally people suspect that he wants to move some of his old furniture in. And in a lot of ways this would make sense. The OS is, by most accounts, looking good. A partnership of the companies that are still the leading desktop and mobile players would be terrifically strong.

But I don’t like it. Certainly, make Nokias that run Windows Phone 7. Why not do that? But don’t get married. Nokia is a lot of eggs, and Windows Phone 7 is a rather small and untried basket. It looks good now, but Microsoft often change their minds about – or simply forget to concentrate on – what seem like promising ideas. Microsoft is enormous.

And it’s… too neat. Both were the absolute master of their respective niche, both are now threatened by innovative incursions. It would be the heavyweight incumbents ganging up against the upstarts. The danger is that they would use their inertia to resist innovation from Apple and Google, and that would benefit nobody.

And what about Google anyway? Some saw a round of name-calling between them and Nokia as burning bridges, but in the business school yard that could equally mean they secretly fancy each other. And there’s a lot to be said for the Android solution. For one it’s open source, so Nokia can adopt it – and adapt it – without making any deals with Google. Nokia have the resources and experience to advance Android perhaps even as much as Google itself does, and could certainly set new standards in its implementation.

Which brings us to HTC, the brilliant Taiwanese company currently leading that field. They have no problem producing both Windows and Android models. Why can’t Nokia? Potentially, they could beat HTC at their own game. They can make hardware that is as good and better, they make a far wider range of models at both higher and lower price points, they could bring a range of Ovi services to the party as well, available exclusively on Nokia phones of either flavour.

Or perhaps they could simply leave that to the competing ecologies of Windows and Android, and go back to concentrating on what they do best – making phones that work very well.

Something like this is what I hope to see. What I fear we will see is a deal where they ditch their own operating system research, spurn Android, and become strategic life-partners with Microsoft. Nokia are more than that.

  1. Unless you count this monstrosity, which history has done its best to forget. But that was mostly made by Motorola.

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Humour Technology

Some days I Even Like Microsoft

Why the hell is insomnia the opposite of sleeping in?

Sorry, I am wrecked because in the last three days I’ve repaired three different laptops. The thing is, they each took more than a day to fix. Not a lot of sleep was had, is basically what I’m saying here. If you’re reading this it means I did by some miracle manage to get up on Wednesday morning. If you’re not reading this, come and wake me quick.

There They Are, Fixed

Of the three, by far the most tricky was a friend’s Mac – an iBook G4 1.33GHz, for those of you who care. Apple are rightly famed for design simplicity, but that applies to the outside only. They seem deliberately hard to repair. Probably so that you’ll have to take it to Apple’s specialists, who are trained to raise their eyebrows and explain to you how much better off you’d be with a new one. Take the hard drive; this is a disk that spends most of its time spinning at several thousand revs a minute, and so is the part of a computer most likely to fail. Usually therefore it’s fairly easy to take out. Even a crappy laptop from the likes of say Compaq has only about six screws to undo. On a Thinkpad it can be just one, and with a Toughbook you simply open a latch. This iBook?

You have to take the entire feckin’ thing apart.

But it wasn’t the hard drive this time. In another sure sign that Jonathan Ive leaves the insides to his secretary, the little circuit board for Airport (Apple’s cute name for Wi-Fi) is mounted in such a way that it can – and given enough time, will – work its way lose. That doesn’t just mean you lose your wireless sometimes, it means that you have a short circuit. So at unpredictable intervals, the computer crashes¹. It took me two days just to work out what was going on here.

The Wi-Fi card on Mac laptops is often just under the keyboard like the RAM. On this particular one however it’s buried right in the heart – just alongside that hard drive. If you want to repair it, you basically have to reduce the machine to its constituent minerals. Which is no fun. I’m an artist, I do have a reasonably delicate touch, but inside this iBook I felt like a gorilla doing the Japanese tea ceremony. It’s finicky and delicate, featuring the lovely innovation of sockets that attach to the circuit board far more weakly than they do to the plugs that go into them. So it is not merely probable but nearly inevitable that in the process of trying to unplug a tiny cable you’ll pull the socket clean off. To repair this, you have to do a soldering job right on the motherboard, on components barely big enough to see.

I actually used a needle for a soldering iron. It took longer to fix this than it did to repair the original problem.

To help prevent the Wi-Fi card working loose again I needed something to pad out the clamp holding it, make the grip tighter. So I found a nice pale grey piece of card, cut neatly rounded corners, got a pen and wrote “iPad”.

Because Apple design is all about attention to detail.

  1. Oh I’m sorry, Macs don’t crash. They have a “kernel panic”, which sounds more like a reaction you might have to peanuts.
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