By Troed Sångberg | Published: November 19th, 2009
Sony Ericsson Web 2.0 Expo New York booth
As you might’ve seen if you follow me on Twitter – @troed – I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York this week. While some of my thoughts on the conference are in my tweets, more will come when my hotel gets the Internet back up working (or I get back home) – but until then there’s one observation I’d like to share.
I now know why some believed teenagers weren’t using Twitter.
By Troed Sångberg | Published: November 3rd, 2009
A basic problem when trying to project a possible future is defining some sort of metric relevant to the area you’re researching. In this post, I’m going to detail one such metric that I find interesting when looking at the future of [mobile] software platforms – Speed of Innovation.
No matter where you happen to work, it’s a sure bet to claim that the majority of innovation in operating system features (scheduler advances, memory allocation algorithms), applications (music players, games) and services (location based wikis, streaming media) comes from others. When not affiliated in a way that makes the choice of for you, you tend to choose a system where you have easy access to make modifications – often Linux and other unix derivates.
Open source is a bit like basic research in that there’s no immideate economical benefit for the person(s) sharing innovations with others, but everyone knows that building a better common base allows for greater later innovations (similar to applied research).
Thus, once innovation has happened – and it’s likely it will have happened on an open source system – it will spread to similar or compatible systems. If someone were to publish a better process scheduler, it would quickly spread to platforms where no or very small changes to the original invention are needed.
These platforms would score higher on the Speed of Innovation criteria.
Now, of course it’s possible to duplicate all the innovation (according to some measure of relevance) to a proprietary platform, but it’s quite expensive (and more so the larger the differences from the original). This can be quite hard to accept if you’re a company with an existing large investment into a proprietary system, but as Seth Godin says – we must ignore sunk costs.
Now, not everything has to do with low level operating system APIs. There’s been a shift towards open third party development lately, especially on the smartphones-that-aren’t-smartphones. This has happened partly due to a change in turnaround times from development to getting the application into the hands of actual users (via app stores) but also due to an increase in platform capabilities and better development environments. The future in this area is projected to be what’s called web application development, web apps, and thus in the Speed of Innovation metric we need to take that change into account as well.
Interestingly, it’s the same thing. There’s one web component available, open source, where much of the innovation in the field tends to happen – Webkit. As detailed above, that component is available on unix platforms and if you’re already working with such a platform all new developments benefit your system with no or minimal changes.
Combining an open platform where much code already exists with a modern web engine and display framework and you get a platform where third party innovation will happen at a rapid pace. So rapid, it suddenly becomes less interesting to look at actual support for feature X today, and instead plot a trajectory where feature X is likely to have been supplied by someone, within a certain time frame.
It’s thus less a game of writing long lists of requirements, and more a game of simply (hah) projecting general technological development. Us futurists love to do that. For everyone else:
If you’re a developer, you want to be where you can fulfill your vision.
If you’re a consumer, you want to be where you can do what you want to do.
If you’re a handset manufacturer, you need to be where that innovation happens.
Android™ by Sony Ericsson – the XPERIA™ X10
Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Use of this trademark is subject to Google Permissions.
By Troed Sångberg | Published: September 2nd, 2009
For a long time we (meaning manufacturers, analysts and marketing entities) have divided mobile phone devices up into two categories, so called feature phones and smartphones. There’s also been an implicit “budget” category consisting of feature phones with, less, features.
Since some time back, I’d claim this has changed. There are now devices on the market that are used in a different way, signifying a disruptive shift in what’s usually known as the mobile phone industry. The common denominator between the categories I just brought up is the word phone, while these new devices are seen as something else.
Enter well known usability expert Jakob Nielsen, whose research into mobile web experience divides the device market up into three categories instead; feature phones, smartphones and touch phones.
While touch phones as a name indeed describes most of these devices on the market today, most existing touch devices haven’t got the usability Nielsen is referring to and it’s also likely that other forms of navigation than strictly touch is possible. Thus, there ought to be a better name for them. I like MID, short for Mobile Internet Device, since I believe these new devices to have shifted the primary use case from being phones to being windows to the Internet.
The addition of a new category, where the dividing line is both the usability [of the web] as well as a new primary purpose [Internet, not phone calls] causes some change looking at the existing industry. These devices are still viewed from an analyst perspective as being smartphones, and thus we see interesting headlines on who sells the most smartphones on the market vs who makes the most money on these devices, without realising that it’s an apples vs oranges thing [slight pun intended].
I was one of the original designers of the Sony Ericsson P800, a device that with the tech available then (2002) could be seen as being one of the first to [try to] create this new experience, but they would still not be in the same category. Something else has changed.
Working at a mobile manufacturer, especially with research, means you sometimes find yourself using a device that might be a bit, ehrm, unstable. That recently happened to me, and I found myself in the pretty interesting situation of carrying a device that restarted itself in the middle of phone calls. All of them.
Still, I kept using the device – something I wouldn’t have done a few years ago. It turns out my primary purpose of carrying a small digital device with me is not about making phone calls any more, it’s about being connected to the Internet at large – in a way that is both easy to use and optimized for an Internet/web experience.
This also indicates another problem with naming them just touch phones, or touch devices. To be able to be a true window to the Internet means that I should be able to perform all the activities I’m used to, while mobile. Adding touch to what is otherwise a feature phone, or just using a smartphone, doesn’t give me the same experience since the device limits what I’m able to do, in one way or another (lack of third party applications, or restricted third party applications). Openness, is the last dividing factor.
These devices have an active aftermarket experience. I can count on – even expect – the Internet services I’m using to be reachable with excellent usability either through the web or through low-cost (even free) applications, produced by anyone with a minimum of creation and publishing effort.
Thus, a new category of devices has been born. They’re not smartphones, they’re something else. And we love them.
For more on how open source and openness will enable a shift in speed of innovation in the mobile arena, please come and listen to my presentation on the Future of Open Source in Mobile, at OSiM Amsterdam 15-16 of September