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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). 

At an engagement ceremony I attended this October, every one of the guests was a photographer, clicking away at this, that or the other all the time. Not only have you seen this; over the past couple of years you’ve clicked your way through a few ceremonies/parties/gatherings too.

Except that things have changed somewhat: in 2006, your fellow shutterbugs probably used point-and-shoot digital cameras. Chances are they were using their mobile phones at that last ceremony. Chances are that you were too.

No surprise; consider this. The current installed base of mobile phone cameras is 1.9 billion, up from nearly zero 5 years ago. In contrast, the camera industry only ships 100 million (one-tenth of a billion) devices a year.

Whatever happened to the standalone camera industry? And how long, you might also ask, before they fade into oblivion?

I think the answer to the first, discussed in this post, is that the camera industry stopped innovating.

For years, the Megapixel ruled. Consumers bought a new digital camera based solely on “how many MP it had”, fed by copious advertising  by manufacturers promoting this very lust. So, roughly, 3 Megapixels in 2002 went to 5 in 2004 to 7 in 2006 to 8 now (perhaps even 10) – and stopped.

At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago – folks began to realize that the pictures they were clicking with their existing digital camera were good enough. When they wanted an upgrade and looked around, all they saw were more Megapixels. Clearly, no one was listening to them. Camera manufacturers – Sony, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus and others – probably thought they didn’t have to. Even if existing owners didn’t upgrade, there were so many first-time camera buyers out there. You didn’t have to own a larger slide of the pie if the pie itself was expanding.

This is where the camera manufacturers made their big mistake. At that very time, mobile phone manufacturers were busy embedding tiny 1 and 2 megapixels cameras into their devices. Millions of would-be-first-time-digital-camera buyers bought Rs. 9000 phones and suddenly found themselves with a ready digital camera. The photos were grainy and often out-of-focus, but hey – the camera now fit into their pocket, and was always with them to capture moments with friends, on the bus, in the train, on the street, at home, at outings, gatherings, ceremonies, parties, everywhere. Suddenly, the lure of the Megapixel didn’t hold sway at all. What mattered was that this little camera was always there. It also helped that the same block of plastic was, often, a music player, video player and recorder, radio and, occasionally, Internet browser.

Guts.

By this time, the camera manufacturers had had their first “uh-oh” moment, as sales of phone-enabled cameras shot through the roof. They scrambled back to appeal to their base of existing owners, attempting to sell them on something other than MP. So you began to hear noises about everything ranging from image stabilization to multiple face-recognition.

But the mobile phone industry wasn’t idle either. While the first generation of mobile phone cameras were dreadful, the second wasn’t. Mobile phones that cost around Rs. 15000 to Rs. 20000 – the price range of a good point-and-shoot digital camera – were now sporting 5 megapixel cameras (more than what consumers wanted), advanced lens technology (for instance, the Carl-Zeiss lenses in the top-end Nokia Nseries cameras), great flash (the Xenon flash in the Nokia N82) and customizable settings on par with their standalone counterparts. In other words, phone cameras were as good as standalone digital point-and-shoot cameras. The choice for buyers was now between i.) their existing camera plus a few incremental features, and ii.) their existing camera +  music + web + maps + video + kitchen sink. Making that choice was easy.

The female of the species is deadlier than the male. Unquestionably.

Next – what the camera industry can do to stay relevant in the coming years.

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.

Last week Nokia announced that its Mail for Exchange application would now be available for any Nokia phone that ran the Series60 3rd Edition platform. Immediately, about 80 million users across forty-three S60v3 phones can now integrate into a Microsoft Exchange environment.

Also, a few months ago, Nokia released the E71 smartphone. Sporting a QWERTY keyboard, a thin form factor, and attractive metal casing, the E71 is Nokia’s first serious enterprise phone. Its predecessor, the E61i, was a capable phone hobbled by a miserable plastic body, poor build quality and bad branding (the E61, E61i, E62 [1]). The E71, in contrast, is simply beautiful.

A combination of the application and the phone, then, is supposed to demonstrate that Nokia is now serious about the Enterprise. That it is the first choice when a company’s IT department chooses a smartphone to mobilize its workforce.

Not so fast. Research in Motion’s Blackberry series of phones rule the roost in that space. And it doesn’t look like Nokia’s in a position yet to unseat RIM.

Nokia’s Enterprise Problem

 

 

Nokia’s problem are two-fold. One, any enterprise phone has to have a physical QWERTY keyboard, since it’ll mostly be used for email on the go. Nokia only has one device in this form factor. Its history with such phones, as we saw, doesn’t inspire confidence. And it doesn’t have a product roadmap around its QWERTY phones. No organization’s IT department is going to fit its executives with a phone like that. Not when the alternative is Blackberry [2].

Nokia has also never tried to seriously sell to the Enterprise. Sources tell me that in India, the phone is mostly being sold via the retail channel; corporate deals have been non-existent. It doesn’t surprise me. Most of Nokia’s previous Eseries phones had been pretty, Wifi-equipped toys with all sorts of form factors (candybar, clamshell, slider), and tiny 9-button dialpads [3]. Not the sort of product line a sales guy would be proud demonstrating to a firm’s CIO.

Blackberry’s massive brand is also going to be tough to compete with. As things stand today, given a choice, an executive would almost always choose a Blackberry over an E71. Features don’t even matter; just that he/she wants to be seen carrying a Blackberry. RIM has achieved what even Apple hasn’t been able to – ubiquity as well as desirability.

How can Nokia compete in the Enterprise?

1. Concentrate on winning accounts at companies that haven’t set up a mobile device infrastructure for their workforce, instead of converting existing WinMobile/Blackberry accounts. Few IT departments want to support more than one device family. But a surprising number of large firms haven’t gone mobile yet, and there’s where Nokia can leverage one crucial advantage: Price.

2. Reduce price through reduced margins. Nokia commands massive margins on its Eseries phones currently, I’ve learnt. It could win any bidding war by cutting those margins. Blackberry will make it a neck-and-neck affair on features, but Nokia could win on price.

3. Over the next 18 months, build a product portfolio around mobile devices with QWERTY keypads, with a 3-tier low-end, medium and flagship strategy. Nokia’s own Nseries 7x, 8x and 9x models are a good example of this. And retire the 9-button keypad Eseries models [4]. They aren’t going to win Nokia any accounts.

Conclusion

Nokia’s crafted a brilliant entertainment devices strategy around its Nseries branded phones. Not so with its enterprise strategy. While the Eseries brand is strong, Nokia has problems both with its Eseries phones as well as the marketing around them.

Either the company can pull along anaemically, selling “business” phones through its retail channels, or it can take on Blackberry by winning more corporate accounts. That’s going to require changes in its product, pricing and marketing strategy. Tall ask, tall results.

 

Footnotes:

[1] There were 3 models, nearly indistinguishable externally. The E61 did not sport a camera but had WiFi and 3G. The E62 had neither a camera nor WiFi/3G. The E61i had both. And all 3 were ugly. (back)

[2] Of course there’s Windows Mobile, which runs QWERTY phones by Samsung, Motorola and Palm. Nokia’s E71, in my opinion, trumps Samsung’s Blackjack II and Motorola’s Q9c. Palm practically invented the smartphone market but is now in a dead slump. Then there’s iPhone. Unless it gets a physical keyboard, Apple isn’t winning any deals. Open and shut. I’ve used both the iPod Touch and the Blackberry Curve, and there’s no contest when it comes to doing email. Neither of these are game-changers in the Enterprise smartphone market. (back)

[3] Ironically, with the release of the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, RIM has decided to go the other way and test the clamshell market. (back)

[4] There have been repeated calls among the Nokia enthusiast community to bring some Eseries-only features to Nseries devices, notably the ability to display additional information and notifications on the home screen, ability to define “modes” – a collection of active standby shortcuts and themes, the enhanced calendar, a fully functional version of Quickoffice, among others. The E51 and E66 with enhanced cameras (they’re cheap to put into a phone) and standard 3.5mm audio jacks could function admirably as Nseries devices with the above features.

Alternatively (and controversially), it could create another brand for small businesses, (Eseries Lite? Ugh.) that need the business capabilities of Eseries, but for whom the E71 and its ilk are too expensive. (back)

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.

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?

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.

(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?

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.

Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

So I moved from Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird this weekend. Though I’d been looking for an Outlook replacement for a while, the Nokia Synchronizer app (which I use heavily) worked only with Outlook, so that kept me from moving.

Things came to a head Saturday morning, though, when Outlook 2007 took 15 minutes to download 45 pure-text messages, keeping my (admittedly puny 4200rpm) hard drive spinning all the while. Yes, I auto-archive to a separate archive PST every month and de-fragment my hard drive every couple of months, but performance has been terrible from day one. This could not go on.

Moving to Thunderbird is not an easy task. You need to export all your PST to Outlook Express (which takes forever) and then import all of that into Thunderbird (which doesn’t take all that long). I’m pleased with the results, though.

What’s improved?
* Performance has been very good indeed (and we’re talking well over 10000 emails, most of which are in one massive “Archive” folder).
* Spam filtering is much, much better (Outlook had too many false positives and *yet* spam occasionally landed up in my inbox).
* Less UI clutter. Thunderbird’s interface is far more customizable than Outlook’s. The new Ribbon UI in Office 12 is very useful on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but is just clutter on Outlook. I longed for the Outlook 2003 look all the time – far less clunky.
* Extensibility. I added the GmailUI, Lightning, Nokia Synchronizer and Duplicate Contact Manager extensions immediately.

What have I had to give up?
* Interoperability with Nokia’s PC Suite! That was the *only* reason I stuck with Outlook for so long. Thunderbird’s Nokia Synchronizer can only sync contacts. I need ToDo lists, Calendar events and Notes.
* The Today, Yesterday, Last Week list views. They were incredibly useful, and I hope Thunderbird 3 incorporates that.
* Flagging messages as tasks.
* The ToDo pane, which listed upcoming calendar events and ToDo tasks.

Will post updates in the weeks to come whether the move’s been successful.

I am very close to dropping Outlook as my email client of choice for my institute mailbox. It is slow, incredibly disk-intensive and requires too much maintenance – the same problems I had with Lotus Notes during my time at IBM.

However, Outlook is a very important tool for me.

It is the only application (apart from Lotus Notes) that will sync contacts, tasks and events with my Nokia Series60 phone (the N73). I use this feature extensively – Outlook today holds my master calendar and contacts database.

There are a few hacks that sync Thunderbird’s contacts with Nokia’s phones, but none for calendar events and tasks.

Can you, dear reader, suggest a way out? Comment or drop me an email at rahul@rahulgaitonde.org.

The Nokia 6670 I bought recently has turned out to be a computer in itself. I’ve found myself using my ThinkPad less and less as the week’s gone by.

Email:
I’ve configured both my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org POP3 accounts on the phone. The built-in email client does a very good job at retrieving, composing and displaying messages and their attachments. It’s also well integrated with the rest of the system, so I can click on most files and select “Send as email”. I’ve heard that Profimail’s the best email client out there, but i.) it isn’t nearly as integrated as the default mail client, and ii.) it isn’t free! After spending nearly Rs. 13000 for this beast, I’m not spending a paisa more

Internet Browsing:
Netfront is a decent browser. It loads reasonably fast, has Javascript support, renders pages quite well, supports SSL. All-in-all, I’m happy. The only thing is, it’s a pretty big application – if you’re running Netfront, you might not be able to open other heavy apps like RealPlayer. According to TaskSpy, while it itself is using 104KB of memory, Netfront (without loading any web page) is taking up 5104KB! I use Netfront and Opera alternately. Both are neck-and-neck in terms of features and usability, but then again, Opera’s only a 14-day evaulation. I don’t see why. Opera is now a free download for Windows and Linux, without the ads, so why not for Series 60? How long before browsers on mobiles outnumber those on desktops? Think issue: Business models for broswer-based ISVs.

In any case, having an Internet browser on your mobile phone is a great timesaver. It takes my bus about 30 minutes to reach my workplace. I use that time to catch up on my personal email, daily news and blogs. By the time I’m at work, I can be productive right away.

The Nokia PC Suite is a wonderful way of connecting to your phone. You can use either the provided data cable, or Infrared (which newer phones such as this one don’t support aynmore), or Bluetooth.

I use the Nokia Phone Browser all the time to manage documents and contacts on my phone, through an Explorer-like interface:

Another fantastic component is the Nokia PC Sync. I can sync my Lotus Notes calendar, address book and TODO list with my phone.

No more typing in stuff into my phone. Simply use Lotus Notes and hit “Synchronise”.

Speaking of not typing in stuff, you can send SMSes via Nokia’s Text Editor. It even integrates with your Address Book.