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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)

For the longest time, the only two entities that made money from a mobile phone were the carrier and the handset manufacturer. Open and shut [1].

No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is

- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer

- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity

- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]

- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]

- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store

- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store

Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.

 

Open or closed?

The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up”  the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.

“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.

 

[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone. 

[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.

[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.

[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market). 

iPhone is revolutionary not just because of its (multi-touch) touchscreen. There are, after all, other touchscreen phones on the market, and none have achieved iPhone’s popularity. Why?

iPhone is revolutionary not because of its Internet browser. Mobile Safari has limitations that other browsers don’t – most notably the lack of Flash support, no text search, no scrolling to the end, among others. But iPhone users are among the most heavy users of the web. Why?

It turns out that when you put both these features together, you end up with something very different.

The web browser is one of the most mouse-heavy applications on your (desktop/laptop) computer. Maintaining that experience on the mobile phone is tough when you have to manipulate physical keys. Open a web page in a browser on your computer and imagine moving the cursor using only the arrow keys.

Your finger on a touchscreen is the best proxy for a mouse on a mobile phone.

This is, in essence, what makes iPhone so compelling. There are awesome touchscreen phones with average browsers, and great browsers trapped in keypad-based phones. iPhone has managed to bridge that gap. And how.

On my N82: spent some time with Opera Mini after a while – had been using Nokia’s built-in S60 Browser exclusively over  the past few months.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

 

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

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.

At the outset, I’d like to clarify I’m no iPhone or Apple zealot. My interest in mobile touchscreen interfaces has been piqued by my recent purchase of an iPod Touch.

I was playing around with a colleague’s HTC Touch Cruise the other day. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and, in summary, is a full-featured smartphone with decent multimedia capabilities. That’s not what this post about though.

It’s about two clear observations I made – that we’re stuck in the late 90s when it comes to mobile touch-based input devices, and that UI designers still use the desktop paradigm when designing for mobile touch screens. While Windows Mobile is what triggered this post, with PalmOS, and UIQ too.

Poke, poke

Turns out that it’s a huge pain navigating the WinMobile interface on the 2.8″ touchscreen with your fingers. The buttons are tiny, the menu options are awkward, and it’s next to impossible to grab and drag a scrollbar. I gave up.  It’s clear – the best way to navigate a Windows Mobile is using the accompanying stylus. 

But a stylus is a hopelessly outdated tool. Along with the physical QWERTY keyboard for desktops/laptops, the stylus is a tool for mobiles that stubbornly refuses to die. Perhaps it’s easier – and commercially attractive – for touchscreen phone manufacturers to add applications and features than to rework a familiar, though suboptimal interface.

iPhone/iPod Touch have changed that. iPhone may not pack the sheer number of applications the HTC Touch Cruise does, but its interface is revolutionary. It lost the stylus. In fact, with multitouch – flicking, pinching, dragging with multiple fingertips – your hand is more effective than a stylus. You may not agree with iPhone the device (I don’t) – but you have to admit iPhone’s set the benchmark for all touchscreen interfaces.

Honey, I shrunk the desktop

Windows Mobile 6.1 has a task bar, a system tray, a Start button and a drop-down Start Menu. With nested menus. On that tiny 240×320 pixel screen.  

After spending a while with the device, I realized that Windows Mobile is essentially a shrunk-down version of the desktop Windows interface. The widgets are smaller, but the paradigm is the same. The result is a cluttered interface and a frustrating navigation experience.

Someone’s psyched the WinMobile team into believing that their biggest strength is that their mobile interface looks just like their desktop interface. That may have been true when mobile applications were very simple, but it doesn’t hold true any longer. It’s hurting usability and innovation.

There have been several calls for this, and I’m going to say it here again – the WinMobile team will do themselves and their legions of developers and enterprise customers a world of good if they rethink their interface. 
 

Note: I think Samsung and LG also have very good touchscreen interfaces. But this is merely an observation from Google Image Search results. Haven’t tried them out first-hand, so no comparisons.

A while ago I wrote about why it did not make sense for me to buy an iPhone 3G in India, and why I purchased a Nokia N82 instead. However, a combination of the N82 and the iPod Touch is a different matter altogether. It costs about the same as the iPhone in India and offers a far, far better overall experience.

In a nutshell, iPod Touch is iPhone without the phone, SMS, camera and Bluetooth. Which is great, because those were the very features that iPhone was criticized for. Fortunately, the N82 excels at all of these. Here’s my take on using the 16GB iPod Touch and the Nokia N82.

Price

8GB iPod Touch + 2GB Nokia N82 = Rs. 17000 + Rs. 19000 = Rs. 36000. 8GB iPhone = Rs. 31000.
16GB iPod Touch + 2GB Nokia N82 = Rs. 22000 + Rs. 19000 = Rs. 41000. 16GB iPhone = Rs. 36000.

So the combination costs Rs. 5000 more than the equivalent iPhone. We’ll see what you get in return for that amount of extra money.

Connecting the iPod Touch to the Internet via the N82

The chief difference between the Touch and its iPod predecessors is Wifi. This transforms the Touch from a music and video player into a full-fledged Internet access device that also happens to do music and video. In fact, there’s evidence to show that iPod Touch owners rarely use the device for music. The corollary is that if you don’t have a Wifi signal, your iPod Touch is little more than a very expensive iPod with (comparatively) tiny amounts of storage.

Enter Joikuspot. This marvelous application converts your GPRS/EDGE/3G-capable Nokia phone into a WiFi hotspot. Most recent Nseries and Eseries phones have Wifi capability, including the N82. This means that I can connect to the Internet by simply selecting the N82 Wifi hotspot from my iPod Touch.

This give your iPod Touch a whole new lease of life. No mobile device matches the Internet experience on an iPhone/iPod Touch. I can’t quantify this, but mobile Safari renders pages in a way that makes the Internet connection seem faster than on the N82 browser.

Finally, the $9.95 iPod Touch software upgrade gives you access to the iPhone App Store, where you can install anything ranging from the Twitterific twitter client to the New York Times news reader app, to iPhone Wordpress client to literally hundreds of free and paid applications and games.

What’s better on the N82

The N82 does a splendid job at whatever the iPhone is poor at. The best example is the superb 5MP camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. The camera can also record videos at up to 30 frames per second. Check out the quality of photos and videos from the N82 on my Flickr stream.

I can use Bluetooth on the N82 to transfer files, sync with my PC over the air and pair with hands-free headsets. The crippled iPhone Bluetooth implementation only does headset pairing. Nothing else. The N82 can be used as a modem for my PC. For reasons unknown, iPhone cannot do this. The only third-party app that could do this was pulled from the App Store within a day. The N82 also supports copy-and-paste and can forward text messages, features inexplicably left out of iPhone.

There are thousands of S60 applications that aren’t part of the iPhone App Store. Nokia’s Sports Tracker and Nokia’s Map Loader come immediately to mind, as does Fring (which only runs on jailbroken iPhones/iPods Touch).

Finally, there have been no reported performance issues with the N82 3G chip. Not so for iPhone, that has had issues so severe with the onboard 3G chip that it has spawned rumors of a handset recall.

What’s better on the iPod Touch

Internet Experience, iPhone App Store – I’ve already spoken about this earlier. Once you’ve experienced the Internet on iPhone/iPod Touch, nothing – nothing – will make you go back to any other mobile device. Its crisp colors, smooth fonts, elegant multi-touch controls are streets ahead of the competition.

The iPod Touch is also a very elegant, capable PDA, comprising Contacts, Calendar (with support for multiple calendars), Tasks and a Mail client capable of displaying rich text/HTML. The Contacts and Calendar sync with Outlook. The Mail client, in addition to supporting POP3 and IMAP accounts, can also connect to a corporate Microsoft Exchange setup.

Lest we forget, the iPod Touch is also an iPod. With 8GB or 16GB of storage, it can hold a big chunk of most music collections. Because of the high-quality display, video playback is exquisite – you forget you’re using a mobile device. Videos also begin playing from the point you left off last time. And yes, almost as a footnote, it’s great for viewing large photo collections too. The iPod Touch multimedia experience is a generation ahead of what the N82 offers.

Conclusion

For Rs. 5000 and one gadget extra, you a great camera, video recording, functional Bluetooth, functional SMS, 2GB extra storage, ability to use your GPRS/EDGE/3G connection from your computer, access to thousands of S60 apps and reliable 3G. As with the iPhone you also get a top-of-the-line PDA and a gorgeous multimedia device.

Sounds like a good deal? To me, it was a no-brainer. What do you think?

Arrington on Techcrunch talks about the possibility of Amazon licensing its Kindle ebook reader hardware specs and trademark to third-party manufacturers:

…a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.

Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.

Techcrunch has put into words what I’ve felt since the day the Kindle was announced. After all, Amazon isn’t in the hardware business at all; it’s in the product and content retail business. I can imagine that in the initial days of the Kindle launch, Amazon needed its own device to build a strong association between Amazon’s brand and the mobile ebook model. Now that that purpose is served, manufacturing and selling the Kindle hardware is an overhead that Amazon could avoid.

Just like Associates?

This isn’t very different from the masterstroke that Amazon played years ago with its Associates affiliate program. Before Affiliate Marketing became the wild jungle that it is today, Amazon launched a series of innovative tools – aStore, Omakase Links, Product Previews – to let publishers (people who owned websites/blogs/suchlike) add links to Amazon’s content onto their web pages. These publishers then earned a cut of the sale generated by clicks from the links on their web pages.

Kindle is Associates all over again, except instead of web-based tools, we’re talking hardware specs.

For instance, Amazon’s aStore let developers build their own focused online “stores” (which displayed Amazon’s books). (A religion-focused website would be able to draw viewers and sell that category of books better than Amazon.com itself.) In the same vein, a student version of Kindle with access to e-textbooks and additional bookmarking features would be better marketed and sold by a third party which is focused on only that market.

With such an Affiliate/Franchise/Licensing model, manufacturers would fall over themselves for a chance to access Amazon’s massive ebook and newspapers database – and a cut of the subsequent revenues.

The Mobile Opportunity

Once third party manufacturers have licensed the Kindle specs, they are no longer restricted to building anything that looks like the Kindle today. I can readily think of well-designed iPhone/iPod Touch ebook applications like the New York Times app. This fits in with American universities doling out iPods Touch and iPhones to their incoming freshmen.  A market for Nokia’s S60 devices would be many times larger.

What do you think? Would you purchase a Kindle application for your mobile device?

Aside: Of course, manufacturers would then be free to choose the carrier of their choice for wireless content delivery. That sure isn’t going to make Sprint-Nextel happy.

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:

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.

(This post is a follow-up to “Why did Mowser fail?“)

An iPhone in every hand will not ignite a mobile web revolution. That much is certain.

Both Michael Arrington and Russell Beattie make this mistake. Perhaps that comes from living in a echo chamber for too long – both likely have iPhones, are heavy web users on their devices, have friends who have iPhones, and therefore think all would be well if only everyone had one like them. Arrington is shockingly naïve when he says “…it will be much better to push prices down so that today’s iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world.” Of course, I bet he hasn’t lived for too long in the “third world”.

Blaming puny hardware and tiny screens as the primary causes for poor mobile web adoption is thinking along very narrow lines indeed. As I outlined in the previous post, we could build much better applications today, using hardware and screen sizes available today – we aren’t building software that’s good enough because we haven’t yet understood how people use the web on their phones.

But that’s not all. Russell points out that “…in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market” and uses that to conclude that as iPhone reaches more users, all problems will vanish (“better devices and full browsers”, as he says).

That’s not necessarily true and it more likely isn’t. iPhone targets a specific segment of the mobile user market – users who were likely to be heavy users of the Internet on their phones – people who would use their phone to browse the Internet. (Not that these users purchased a phone just for the Internet experience). It will continue to capture that market as it’s introduced in more countries.  Therefore it’s unlikely that those numbers Russell quoted would jump up substantially if everyone had an iPhone.

What does iPhone mean for the future of the mobile phone? I predict that while it’ll be a strong influence on broad design principles, it’s unlikely that every phone of the future will be like iPhone. For instance, Apple has shown how to design software that truly takes advantage of a touchscreen. More phones will have touchscreens in the future than they would have if it weren’t for iPhone, but maybe not with pinch-drag features. More phones will have full-screen applications. More phones will have smarter menus and make more data available across applications. And so on.

But the verdict is clear. It is designing better software, not praying for better hardware, that will truly get the mobile web rolling.

… but he doesn’t seem to have gotten things bang-on either, with regard to the supposed “closed” nature of the iPhone.