Archive for the 'Editorials' Category

About the smartphone category called iPhone-like

January 8, 2010

From an email exchange with a friend asking about the Nexus One (the ‘Google phone’) launch.

Thoughts about the Nexus One’s prospects

Does it have better hardware, a better screen, better battery life, better price, more freedom, better apps, better multitasking, better camera than the iPhone? Yes. Is it the iPhone? No.

People who’ll buy the Nexus One say they want to buy something like the iPhone that isn’t the iPhone, and they’re lying even though they don’t know it. They want the iPhone because it’s the iPhone. And nothing else. When you create in your mind a category called iPhone-like, there’s only one member that’s ever going to be a full, incontrovertible member of that category.

These buyers are going to be disappointed even though they won’t know quite why. They’ll blame it on the phone instead of their own expectations, and demand won’t spike the way it did for the iPhone.

Would I buy it?

I don’t like the iPhone, but I like this current crop of Android devices even less. If, in a (thankfully) fictional dystopian universe I had to choose only between the iPhone and the Nexus, I’d take Apple’s baby (and lament long and hard about the lack of alternatives).

Reason #3: form factor wise no Android device has nailed the iPhone. This is HTC and Motorola and Samsung, not Apple we’re talking about. So there. These firms are known for specs, not sex.

Reason #2: I will not buy a phone with a trackball. Ever. Would you buy a Skoda that featured a manually-operated crank to start the engine? Heck, even Blackberrys have moved on.

Reason #1: Polish. I posit that no one has been able to nail the touchscreen experience other than Apple. Not Palm, Not Android. Not (shudder) RIM and most certainly not Microsoft. Since 2007, for instance, Android phones have been underpowered and have had user experience (UX) issues where the phone hasn’t been able to keep up with text or touch input. Now three years later,

Some animations are very smooth, some are janky as hell. The Nexus One has a faster processor than the iPhone 3GS and has twice the RAM, and yet it still cannot have as fluid a UI as the iPhone OS. This is great proof that your software is key—throwing raw power at things won’t necessarily make them better.

And it doesn’t even have to run Android. Every touchscreen phone apart from iPhone suffers from this.

I think it’s worth demonstrating how Apple nails the experience with an example.

In Mobile Safari, the iPhone browser, if you scroll (swipe) too fast, instead of text you’ll see a chequered pattern – the processor can’t render the text fast enough – but the scrolling experience itself is smooth as ever. Once you stop scrolling, text will eventually appear. On any other mobile browser, the scrolling itself will stutter as the processor tries to render everything.

When you’re using a device all day every day as essentially an extension of your body and mind, stuff like this matters more than features.

I’d pick the iPhone. As, sadly, will folks who upgrade from the Nexus One eventually.

Update (10 Jan 2010): Another example of polish in design:

Other issues that I can’t live with day to day? How do I copy text from non-editable field like an email, webpage, or SMS, or even a 3rd party application? Oh, I can’t. Say what you want about the iPhone not having copy and paste for two years — a joke — it’s the single best implementation on the planet for a smartphone and Google’s approach is almost as bad as RIM’s with the Storm-series.

(From Boy Genius Report, via John Gruber)

Pieces of Blog

December 26, 2009

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame on how the different parts of a blogging system could be decoupled and run off specialized web applications: authoring by desktop apps, storage of raw posts and hosting on Amazon S3, templates by WordPress, feeds by FeedBurner and comments by Disqus/others.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress/Movable Type blog, you’re already there. Instead of S3, you’re hosting it on your hosting provider’s space (which could well be S3). In fact, this is how rahulgaitonde dot org works.

Now Joshua only alludes to this, but these pieces aren’t coupled loosely enough to move to plug out one component and fit another in. For example, I can’t take the Feedburner RSS component out and replace with another – my RSS feed URL is tied to Feedburner. I can’t move my template transparently between Blogger and Movable Type.

Back in May 2008, I had similar thoughts about separating the email interface from email storage:

There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.

I wonder whether in the future we’ll eventually build such a decoupled email system, or find an alternative to email altogether.

About Yahoo!'s home page redesign this week

July 23, 2009

Yahoo! just redesigned the Yahoo.com home page, its crown jewel for a decade. The big change is a bar on the left with widgets that display updates from Facebook, Gmail, New York Times and some 60 other sources. The company made a big deal of it, but on the whole it’s failed to impress.

I won’t regurgitate the bucketfuls of painstakingly-written criticism of the redesign itself that I’ve read over the past few days. In any case it’s too early to measure the impact of this change. I think the problem with the lukewarm, even negative reviews was with how Yahoo! announced the change to the world. In other words, this was a communications, not an execution problem.

The new Yahoo! home page

Why everyone said “Ho-Hum”
The verdict is that this is old hat, and too little to make a difference – and there’s reason to be skeptical. The web has seen at least two major paradigm shifts since the late 1990s (first search and then social media), but Yahoo! has persisted with the original portal paradigm – making money off visitors to its home page by keeping them on its properties. But Yahoo! now ranks 2nd behind Google as the most visited property on the web – and Google makes money by sending people away from its search page!

Yahoo! is under tremendous pressure to 1. innovate and 2. stay relevant in the future. Any move by the company needs to score very well on these two parameters. Redesigning a home page, however dramatically, is not such a move.

Let your users say how great it is
Any pragmatist at Yahoo! would have anticipated that news of a home page redesign would not be seen as game-changing by itself – either by Yahoo’s users or by its advertisers [1].

That’s why it probably made more sense to simply spread awareness of the impending redesign than to generate buzz and create hype. CEO Carol Bartz called it “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception”. So what? While the redesign effort was probably significant internally (money, time, CEO attention), it’s presumptious to assume users will find it just as significant. Bring out the tom-tom drums after your users have given you the thumbs-up.

As for advertisers, Yahoo! would probably have been far better off sharing metrics with them on a one-on-one basis after the launch. Display new targeting capabilities. Show user adoption rates. Show clickthrough statistics. Things that will bring a grin to advertisers’ faces, especially when they’re under pressure to get the most bang for buck with dramatically reduced budgets. Of course, all this is only if the redesign really works.

In other words, it’s time for Yahoo!, in an infinitely more transparent world, to put its money where its mouth is.

[1] No kidding. Tapan Bhat, Sr. Vice President at Yahoo, crowned himself Supreme Emperor of Unintentional Irony by declaring that the new home page would put Yahoo! at the “center point of people’s lives online.”

Building a large Internet business in India (in the incumbents' face)

July 2, 2009

When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).

Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.

Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].

Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.

There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.

Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)

[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.

[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.

[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.

What you need to do to be the next Google/Twitter/Facebook

June 30, 2009

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

Who will archive when you die?

October 6, 2008

So you blog, post comments, use Twitter, post photos on Flickr, videos on Youtube, talk with friends on half-a-dozen networking sites, and yes, send and receive tons of email. 

Which is all very fine. Until the day you die.

What happens to your digital possessions after you’re no longer around? It’s a question without a good answer, mostly because it hasn’t been asked often enough. Understandably. The Internet’s only been around some 15 years, and we’ve only begun putting personal info on the Web (Here’s a broad list) for about 5 or 6 years. In other words, very few of us from the Internet Age are dead yet.

But we’ll need answers in the next few years. Archiving and preserving a departed loved one’s online possessions is going to be a huge opportunity not so long from now. I say opportunity because things aren’t as straightforward in the online realm as in the physical, and there’s plenty of scope for smart thinking and innovative solutions.

Imagine you’re a startup that specializes in archiving digital creations. You’ve been commissioned by the departed’s relatives to preserve digital memories. Consider three issues you’d face:

Tracking:

What did your client (well, client’s loved one anyway, let’s just call him/her the client) create on the Internet? You can cover the obvious - email/chat/blog/microblog/photos/videos/social network. Then you get to the hard stuff: all the comments he/she’s posted on websites, forums he/she’s been active on, scraps/wall posts on friends’ social network pages, old email accounts he/she might have had in the past. and so on. 

Right now there is no reliable way of tracking this. How will you go about this?

Ownership:

Who owns data that your client had put up? The answers for some of these are straightforward - does Google own your videos on YouTube? Does Yahoo own your photos from Flickr? Read the fine 
print. But what about the scraps/wall posts your client wrote on his/her friend’s Orkut/Facebook profile? Comments on his/her friend’s blog? One view is that since they’re on the friend’s Orkut profile, they belong to the friend. The counterview is that scraps belong to whoever wrote them. 

Matters are further complicated if the client had stated before death that he/she wanted this sort of data deleted post-death. Will the owner of the blog that your client had commented on allow it?

Another question is about transfer of ownership. If Alice has had an email conversation with Bob that she would not want anyone other than Bob to view, should she have the right to veto the transfer of his email account to his next of kin? Perhaps she revealed her birthday and birth year to Bob. Could she veto the archival of his calendar?

Context:

This is closely related to ownership. Often, data by itself is useless without the context it was originally created it. A comment your client left on a blog post has very little value without its original blog post. A scrap/wall post or a “reply” tweet even less so. A pretty picture your client clicked and uploaded on Flickr is greatly diminished in value, significance and memory without the comments it sparked. A social network profile without the accompanying network is hardly social. But archiving the context along with your client’s content will raise the above ownership issues.

These are problems we haven’t faced with physical possessions because these problems never applied to them. How we sort them out is a both a tricky business and a business opportunity.

What do Apple's App Store rejections mean for you users and startups?

September 13, 2008

Yesterday, Apple pulled an application named Podcaster from the iPhone App Store. With Podcaster, iPhone/iPod Touch users could “update podcasts directly on the device over wifi.” Apple rejected the application because

Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

This is about as anti-competitive as it gets – applications that threaten iTunes’s monopoly over loading content to/from iPhone/iPod Touch will not be allowed on to Apple’s iPhone App Store. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has more to say about Apple’s exclusionary policies.

So some apps are banned. So what?

This is a big deal because App Stores are becoming an important way (and for iPhone/iPod Touch, the only way) to add functionality to a mobile device – whether it’s from Apple or Nokia or Android. Installing applications on your mobile phone is tricky at best and throw-your-hands-up-it’s-impossible at worst, which is why such App Stores (which make the job much simpler) will gain a lot of traction in the months to come. This places enormous power in the hands of App Store owner – either the handset or mobile OS manufacturer.

Simultaneously, as mobile devices become ubiquitous, more capable and more functional (because of these apps), an application ecosystem will begin to form – there are already over 3000 applications for iPhone/iPod Touch on Apple’s App Store, with small startups entirely dependent on the money they make from sales through the Store. Indeed, Kleiner Perkins has set up an iFund to invest in startups that make apps for iPhone, and there’s a RIM-backed Blackberry Fund too. How much longer before we start seeing the same interest in Nokia/Android application startups?

But this rosy picture could be in jeopardy if such rejections – either arbitrary or anti-competitive – become more commonplace. It’ll scare application developers, and drive away investors. And a multi-billion dollar (because of the sheer numbers of mobile devices) global opportunity could be lost, lost even to the party behind the App Store itself.

What are mobile app startups and users likely to do?

There are two things, both of which are likely to happen:

1.) Web apps that try to offer the same functionality will pick up speed. No App Store will be able to restrict what web-based applications users choose to use. Tomorrow, the Twitter client Twitterrific might be in the soup (because it has a built-in browser and mimics the functionality of Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser – you never know),  but the web-based Hahlo twitter client for iPhone/iPod Touch will face no such problems because Apple has nothing to do with it (and vice versa).

Ordinarily, I’m a strong proponent of native applications for mobile devices (at this stage of the industry). But circumstances are going to push app developers harder to write Good Web Apps.

2.) More jailbroken iPhones. Ironically, this warranty-voiding way of installing third-party applications is also the most open, offering several more native applications with fewer Apple-enforced restrictions. Developers will work harder to make it easier for customers to jailbreak their iPhones and iPods Touch.

Both these trends will represent a move away from the App Store.

Conclusion

As the technology industry becomes more open than ever (open software and hardware standards, community-based platforms for communication, convergence of desktop and mobile), this move towards closed application ecosystems is an anachronism.

More restrictions will mean more effotrs to circumvent (or just abandon) the App Store – whether from Apple or Nokia or Google’s Android. From the App Store owner’s ponit of view, this will be killing the golden goose – and the loss of possibly billions of dollars in revenue.

Samsung needs a brand strategy to take on Nokia's smartphones

August 14, 2008

Recent smartphones from Samsung, HTC and LG indicate that Nokia’s finally got competition in the high-end space. However, it’s going to take more than engineering skills to succeed in India’s tough mobile market. Consistent phone branding, clear messaging and a solid distribution network are as important, and that’s where Nokia’s streets ahead. Can the competition catch up?

It isn’t about features

There was a time when the only competition Nokia’s smartphones had was from the odd, super-expensive PDA-phone that was more the former than the latter. Over the last year though, the competition has dramatically upped the ante in terms of what it packs into a handset.

A case in point is the near-simultaneous release of Nokia’s new flagship phone, the N96, and Samsung’s Innov8. The Innov8 outclasses the N96 on nearly every count, making it a widely-awaited contest. And that’s not the only notable example: the Samsung Blackjack II is a very capable Windows Mobile QWERTY phone, matching Nokia’s E61i. The Samsung Instinct was hailed the iPhone killer, offering a full-face touchscreen with touch feedback – touchscreens are something Nokia doesn’t even have in the market yet. LG’s not far behind in the race either. The LG Viewty, released around the same time as the N95 sported a 5MP camera with “image stabilization”, and a touchscreen.

Yet, in spite of these releases, both Samsung and LG lag far, far behind Nokia in the Indian smartphone market. Admob’s June 2008 Mobile Metrics review states that 97% of ad requests from smartphones were from Nokia handsets. It’s more or less clear that Nokia’s built a solid reputation in India as *the* smartphone brand. And at the heart of that is its N and E series branding strategy.

Nokia’s smartphone strategy: Product, Brand, Distribution

Nokia’s strategy of creating two lines of positioning for entertainment (Nseries, with advanced imaging, video, internet and gaming capabilities) and business (Eseries, with focus on connectivity, productivity and email) certainly seems to have paid off over the last 3 years.

Nokia’s used these brands to create multiple, successive communications campaigns around the terms “Nseries” and “Eseries”, which marked a break from the number-oriented labeling custom. Consider Nokia’s own phones; could you infer anything at all about the 3650 from its name? The 7610? The 9200? Contrast that with, say, the N81 – I can tell at a minimum (because its an Nseries) that it’s a phone with reasonably good looks, stereo music, large storage capacity and a 2MP+ camera. Here’s a decent article about Nokia’s efforts to build the Nseries brand. Ditto for the Eseries.

Finally, think about the massive investment Nokia’s made in its dedicated priority and concept stores. While it already has an extensive distribution network for its low-end line (see the section “The Distribution Edge” in this article on Knowledge@Wharton – free reg. req’d), these stores are a great way of showcasing your top-line phones to people for whom the purchase is a high-involvement decision.

Samsung’s strategy (or the lack of it)

While this is a discussion about Samsung, it holds equally – if not more – true for other handset manufacturers.

In contrast, Samsung’s strategy seems to be all over the place. No, let me correct that – I don’t think they have a strategy. They know at a minimum that their phones need to do music, video, photos, the Internet, and that touchscreens are good to have. That’s about it.

From a product perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any great deal of thought on timing launches (relative to market conditions or relative to previous releases). Further up the development cycle, what features go into which product (or, more importantly, what features to leave out). Or even further up the cycle, what OS to use on their phone (they use several).

On the marketing side, from a branding perspective, each phone seems to be a brand unto itself. What can explain names like Innov8, Instinct, Glyde, Blackjack, F-480, SGH-i780, U900 Soul? (All are recent releases packed with features). There’s no consistent product look (you can, in one look “tell” that a phone is an Eseries device, can’t you), color or name.

If your phones don’t use a consistent Operating System (the way Nokia uses Symbian+S60), it’s impossible to develop an active developer community. If you don’t have a consistent brand identity, it’s difficult to develop ambassadors for your phones. If you keep developing a different website for each of your phones, its impossible to build communities online.

What markets is Samsung chasing? What positioning is it considering for its phones to gain share in these markets? More abstractly, what do Samsung’s phones “stand for”? What is the message they’re trying to get out? Even SonyEricsson has a rudimentary strategy that says “We make entertainment-centric phones. Some of them make great music devices – the Walkman series, other are great for photography – the Cybershot series”. HTC has a less clear strategy around its Touch line of phones, but at least they’ve got a consistent name and OS in place.

From an advertising perspective, the only shred of consistency I’ve seen over the past months is the “Next is What?” Samsung campaign. However, I don’t see the campaign tied to a product that anyone will remember. Nokia, on the other hand, has run periodic campaigns for each generation of devices it releases – in print, on TV, online.

From a distribution perspective, I don’t see why Samsung doesn’t leverage its extensive distribution network for its home appliances and entertainment devices – it’s a channel where it has one heck of a headstart on Nokia. I see digital cameras and Indian-manufactured laptops sold in those sorts of electronics stores. Phones seem to make just as much sense.

Conclusion

While the Indian mobile market is (still) seeing explosive growth, the high-end of the market is maturing. The implication is that features are no longer the USP for a smartphone; brand is. And how well you communicate that brand to your audience. Nokia has done a stellar job since 2005 by investing in its Nseries and Eseries strategy – in product design, marketing and branding, advertising and distribution. The competition seems to already have the engineering capability to match Nokia. But it needs to get its act together if it needs to take on Nokia in the marketplace.

The Mobile Internet Lifestyle

August 9, 2008

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Why I won't be buying the iPhone 3G

August 8, 2008

iPhone 3G, finally, will be available in India on August 22nd through Airtel. While I’m excited about the world’s most revolutionary phone meeting the world’s fastest growing market, I’m not buying one for myself. Instead, last month I purchased a Nokia N82 Black, having decided that iPhone 3G was not for me. Why would I pass up the chance to own perhaps the sexiest piece of electronic hardware in the country?

In a nutshell, iPhone is peculiar. It is generations ahead of its peers when it comes to user experience, but has inexplicably glaring flaws. Some of these are deal-killers for my usage pattern. Nokia’s Nseries phones, specifically the N82, fit my mobile lifestyle like a glove. Well, almost. But this post isn’t about the N82. Here’s what struck iPhone off my list:

Applications cannot run in the background

This is the number one flaw that clinched it for me. This article on Mashable about the release of Google Talk for iPhone first alerted me to it:

Therefore, you can’t have Google Talk sit idly in the back and have a conversation every now and then – which is the default pattern of usage for most users, I believe. This limitation is due to Apple’s silly “apps can’t run in the background” rule, the official explanation of which goes along the lines of “we can’t let people do that, it would consume too much battery.”

In fact, Google’s blog post about this said

“…in order to receive instant messages with Google Talk on your iPhone, the application needs to be open in your Safari browser. When you navigate away to another browser window or application, your status will be changed to “unavailable” and your Google Talk session will be restarted when you return.”

This is shocking. For instance, during my commute, I use the S60 browser, Google Maps, the Gmail App and the music player simultaneously. I also cycle between these applications pretty frequently. Having to shut down an active application and start another one is simply unacceptable.

Poor battery life; no replaceable battery

Paul Stamatiou, who knows a thing or two about iPhone, has this to say about the battery:

The battery life is excruciatingly horrible. I woke up at 2pm today, unplugged my iPhone from the charger, went about my day, came home at 2am and received a 10% battery warning. It should come with a car charger for free.

This would be tolerable if you could purchase a second battery to pop into your iPhone while on the road. But no go; the battery cannot be replaced (by the average user at least). The N82, on the other hand, only needs to be charged every 3 days. This is with 45 minutes of music playback, one hour of web browsing on EDGE, several hours of Fring in the background and 15 minutes of Google Maps for mobile. Daily.

Touchscreen keyboard

For a heavy text user like me, the lack of a physical keyboard is serious. I send up to 20 messages a day, compose email and the occasional blog post draft. And this is on a 9-key dialpad.

I’ve tried using the iPhone keyboard, and while I’m a huge fan of the autocorrect mechanism, the overall experience is still not good enough. I might even consider it if you could use the keyboard in landscape mode, but iPhone is incapable of even that.

No copy-paste out-of-the-box

While there is an application on the iPhone App Store that enables copy and paste, I am once again apalled at the lack of native support for this. My Nokia 6670 could copy and paste text back in 2005, and now it’s ubiquitous. No one would even call it a feature any longer. Copying phone numbers, addresses, names, conversations snippets, text from web pages, into other apps are things I do almost daily. I do not want to rely on a third-party app to give me this functionality.

Poor camera

Users forgave the sub-par camera on the original iPhone, but to continue to ship with the exact same camera a year later is unforgivable. iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera does not have either a flash or autofocus. Most of Samsung’s and Nokia’s high-end phones ship with 3MP cameras with LED flash. Nokia’s flagship phone, the N96, ships with a 5MP camera with Xenon flash (the same one as on the N82). Samsung’s Innov8 sports a monstrous 8MP camera (which, arguably, is overkill).

In addition, iPhone cannot record video. At all. In contrast, the N82 can record video at a smooth 30fps.

No modem capabilities

iPhone cannot be used as a modem for your computer out-of-the-box. The iPhone App Store (the only place from where you can legally install third-party applications) hosted Netshare, an application to do just that – “tether” your iPhone to your computer. Only briefly, though. It was pulled down in two hours. The only way to use iPhone as a modem is to “jailbreak” it (install a firmware hack) and install alternative applications. On the other hand, I’ve been able to use my Nokia phones as a modem since 2005.

Operator Bundling

There is still no clarity on whether existing Airtel users will be allowed to migrate their current tariff plans to iPhone 3G. The current plans in the U.S. charge an awful lot of money for data. 

Conclusion

In summary, although iPhone 3G offers a compelling user interface, large screen and gobs of storage, it has a few fatal flaws in its design, intentional or not. On the other hand, the Nokia N82, while not perfect, fits into my mobile usage lifestyle perfectly. Consequently, I have decided in favor of the N82.

What will you choose on August 22nd?

Update:

More recent developments add to my reasons to not purchase iPhone 3G:

Steve Jobs admitted to the Wall Street Journal that Apple has the ability to remotely disable software it deems malicious on an iPhone 3G. I am not comfortable with Apple (or any other company) retaining control of what I can do with my iPhone after I have purchased it.

The performance of the 3G chip on iPhone 3G seems to be below customers’ expectations. So low, in fact, that there have been strong rumours circulating about a device recall. This is not encouraging news for someone who’s been awaiting 3G rollout in India for over a year now.

The price of iPhone 3G in India is about Rs. 31000 for the 8GB model and Rs. 37000 for the 16GB one, which is inordinately high. I would be willing to pay about Rs. 16000 for the 8GB model and Rs. 18000 for the 16GB model, without an operator contract subsidy). I wonder how many potential customers Apple will lose by pricing iPhone 3G that high.

Tarek writes about what he can do with his Nokia S60 phone that he can’t with his iPhone.