[sc:mobile-category ]I recently had an interesting conversation with some friends around the “right” size of a tablet.

Some were adamant that 10″ tablets were too big to cart around all the time and that they might as well take their notebook with them.

Other’s said that 7″ tablets were too small to be useful and they’d rather have a larger display to work with.

A similar discussion started around phones, where’s the line between a phone and a tablet?  (This site is a nice way to visualize how big phones have become)

I personally like the 10″ tablets, but I would never carry one with me all the time, even the 7″ tablets are too big for that.  Likewise large phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note are really too big to call phones, they’re small tablets.  To that extent, they’re too cumbersome to carry with you all the time as well.

A phone like the HTC Titan seems to be as large as you can go and still be able to think of it as a phone that you want to always have on you.

A tablet seems to be useful around the house, or when you are traveling somewhere in a car or plane.  In that case, the 10″ tablets seem like a better fit.

Then comes the question of thickness.  Many phone manufacture’s have been on a crash diet to get their phones as thin as possible (many under 7mm now), but is that the best way to go?  If you could double your battery life at the cost of having a 14mm phone would you?

I know I would, but I don’ want some third party add-on back that looks like some kind of cancerous lump.  And finding cases that support non-factory form factors is just about impossible.

Many of the frontier’s of phone design are coming to their logical end points, could we see a major shift in design from how small/fast/resolution to functional/time/quality?

[sc:mobile-category ]Yesterday there was an article on The Register that was an opinion piece on what Microsoft could due to “save” Windows Phone.

It boiled down to five points:

1. It’s a device business, stupid
2. Growing up
3. We need to talk about the UI
4. Give it all away?
5. Telco’s hate smartphones. They don’t have to hate yours.

Let’s look at these a little more…

It’s a device business, stupid

The article is saying that phones sell when they are front and center in the store and that variation is key.  I think neither of those assertions are particularly accurate…

Does anyone believe that if every retail outlet stopped displaying the iPhone that suddenly nobody would buy it?  Of course not,  they sell and therefore retails put them at the front of the shop.  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Yes, being front and center will get a small percentage of naive shoppers to by that phone, but the cost of the phones and the length of the contract terms tend to make smart phones less of an impulse purchase.

Likewise the iPhone hasn’t changed its form factor in any significant way since it came on the market, but still sells like hotcakes.  Clearly variation is not required to have a successful line of phones.  In fact take a look at the majority of Android devices, they all have the same basic form factor and layout.  In fact the biggest differences (other than the internals) is often just how thin they are.  There’s nothing stopping any WP licensee from doing the same thing.

The real difference is core’s and screen resolution/size and yes MS has some catching up to do here, but it’s not a make or break for most users.

Growing up

This point boils down “keep doing what your doing” due to the fact that OS’s take time to mature, iPhone and Android have both taken 4 revisions to become the juggernauts they are and WP is really only at version 1.5.  But Microsoft has never been a quitter and it looks like WP8 is going to be a big step forward in maturing the OS.

We need to talk about the UI

Microsoft makes a lot of noise about the glance and go nature of the OS and this article is basically saying that’s good, but it sacrifices having lots of detail on the screen.

And?

I’m sorry but most users (not techies… users) don’t want lots of details.  I know several people (in the tech industry but not techies) that still have old phones because “it has a big font”!

I’m serious here though, some people live by how much data they can get on their screen, but most don’t and that’s what you target for the device.  Microsoft has it right in a larger consumer sense, even if that doesn’t satisfy everyone.

And let’s face it, the example of the third-party app isn’t a good one because the third-party developer didn’t have to use the Metro design, they could have designed the app to be more “dense”, but they built what they thought would sell.

Likewise he bring up the white on black color scheme, but you could always just change to the black on white scheme.  Just saying .  Heck maybe that’s why e-mail only supports black on white!

“There’s too much thumbing going on.”, you do realize your using a touch screen device with a, relatively speaking, tiny screen right?

Yes, Microsoft could stand to allow some more options in to Windows Phone, but the vast majority of people would be unlikely to change them so they dedicate their resources to, hopefully, more important things.

Give it all away?

I really don’t know what the author was trying to get at here, maybe that Microsoft should be trying other ways to generate revenue from the OS than charging OEM directly for the license, but that doesn’t really seem to be a problem as they have multiple hardware OEMs and more coming on as time goes by.

Telco’s hate smartphones. They don’t have to hate yours

Telco’s don’t want to be dump pipes, they fear it more than anything.  They have seen their profits from traditional landlines fall through the floor because they lost control to the modem and eventually the Internet.

Telco’s LOVE smartphones, as long as they can get “exclusive” phones on their networks they know that people will buy their service even when they charge more for it.  They HATE giving up revenue they thing they should have to other companies.  Most come from a monopoly background and have a culture entrenched in the idea that they are the only ones that should make money from their services.

Over the long term, when phones plateau in features they will no longer be the draw they are and wireless vendors will have to scramble to find another way to lock customers in.

The idea of Microsoft making Skype (or other services) exclusive (or cost more on other platforms) is a dangerous idea.  Making Skype available as widely as possible increases the value of Skype, reducing it to being only on WP would drastically reduce its value overall.  It would leave the market open to competitors that were not tied to WP and Skype would be replaced by someone else as the king of VOIP.

Microsoft has a diverse portfolio, Windows Phone is just one part of that and they shouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot to chase after just one market.  There is a balance that can be struck to make the Windows Phone  versions of their other properties the best way to experience them, but to limit those properties to just Windows Phone would be a disservice to the entire company.

The verdict

The title of the article was “Five ways Microsoft can rescue Windows Phone”, but really the author doesn’t give even one concrete suggestion that Microsoft could use to “save” Windows Phone.

And I’ll argue it doesn’t need to be saved, what it needs is time.  Just like they did with the Xbox, they have to give it time to get in to the mainstream.  Microsoft is committed to this as you can tell there NO discussion of discontinuing Windows Phone from MS, in fact they talk it up all the time and have even started talking about WP8.

Many people fail to remember the Microsoft is seldom first to market with their products.  There were other OS’s before Windows and DOS, Word and Excel entered a market dominated by WordPerfect and Lotus 123, Exchange (and MS Mail) fought Notes and Groupwise.  But Microsoft has an uncanny knack of making their products dominate over time because they don’t give up just because it didn’t succeed beyond everyone’s expectations on the first try.

Five ways to make Windows Phone the consumers choice

So what are my “Five ways to make Windows Phone the consumers choice”?

1. Get ahead of the hardware curve, if Android is supporting quad cores, Windows Phone had better support 8 cores.  It doesn’t matter if the hardware exists or not, the OS had better be ready for it when it does exist.
2. Open up the OS more, Live Tiles are a perfect example of code that is on the phone but only Microsoft can access.  A third-party app can only make one type of Live Tile (the default square one), but Microsoft can make rectangular ones, animated ones, etc.  If the code is available to MS developers, it should be accessible to third party developers.
3. Marketing.  MS hasn’t done a good enough job of getting its fans organized.  They should be sending out bumper stickers, posters, shirts and anything else they can think of to everyone who buys a phone or ask for them.
4. Make unlocked phones available at the MS stores.  I should be able to pick up the latest and greatest right from MS even if my carrier of choice decides not to carry it, delays putting it on sale or is a small player and can’t carry every phone under the sun.
5. Make the OS more modular.  By this I mean make the applications separate from the ROM image.  Imagine if Outlook was a separate app instead of baked in to the ROM.  The issue with Exchange 2003 would have been solved and deployed through the Marketplace instead of waiting for carries to eventually deploy one of several different OS versions that had the fix implemented with it.  Microsoft is still using a monolith development model for the OS, separating it out would make new features appear faster and not be as dependent on the carriers.

Well that’s my rant for the day .

[sc:mobile-category ]It’s been known for quite a while that Windows Phone 8 (Apollo), would be coming later in 2012, but details had remained very sketchy as to what would be included in it.  Today some details have finally leaked out!

Engadget has done a nice job of summarizing the list of what’s now known, which is:

1. Support for dual cores
2. Support for four different resolutions, though no specifics were given
3. NFC support added, including payment and content sharing with WP8 and Windows 8 machines
4. Carrier control and branding of “wallet” element is possible via SIM or phone hardware
5. MicroSD support added for expandable storage
6. Transitions to core components from desktop, including kernel, network stack, security components and media support
7. Simplified porting of desktop apps to mobile
8. Zune desktop integration scrapped in favor of new, unnamed syncing app
9. Deeper Skydrive integration, including ability to sync data such as music collections
10. Xbox Companion app will get Windows 8 partner client
11. Native code support, simplified porting from Android and iOS
12. App-to-app communication and integration
13. Skype client with deep OS hooks that will make it almost identical to placing standard voice calls
14. Camera app now supports “lenses” which allow third parties to skin and add features to camera interface
15. DataSmart tracks and reports usage via app and live tile
16. Gives preferential treatment to WiFi, can automatically connect to carrier-owned hotspots
17. Proxy server will compress websites in Internet Explorer 10 up to 30 percent
18. Native Bitlocker encryption
19. Support for proprietary, custom built apps to be deployed behind company firewalls

Let’s go through them one at a time:

1. Yea, let’s suck some more battery!  Really though by the end of the year quad core will be available, so we can only hope that WP8 won’t be limited to dual core and will be able to support more.
2. More resolutions?  Let’s take a guess at the four and see how close I am: 480×800 (that’s the easy one), 720×1280, 920×1600 and I’m going to go the other way, with a 480×400 option.
3. Who cares about NFC really, yea it’s a cool tech demo at this point but it’s going to take a long time for it to become common place.
4. Carrier control, just what you didn’t want to hear.
5. Yea!  Expandable storage, let’s home they support 64+gig cards!
6. Using the Windows desktop kernel and components makes sense is so many ways and was obviously been pursued months ago.  Current phone hardware is pretty powerful and as long as MS can deal with the power requirements, this will be a great move.
7. Well duh, if you’re using the kernel and components from the desktop, porting becomes much more straight froward.
8. I have to admit that I actually like the Zune desktop app, I hope they don’t dump it completely but instead just make it optional.
9. I know they have to do it to complete with Google and Apple, I really don’t like storing all my stuff on other people’s servers so as long as it can disable it.
10. Xbox integration is good.
11. YES!  Native code support is critical to getting apps like Opera and other’s on the platform.
12. This should have been part of the original design, period.
13. Skype is good and all, but I don’t use it.  I want to see this kind of integration for VOIP/SIP as well.
14. More camera features are always nice.
15. More control of data usage is good.
16. WiFi is your friend, data plans are expensive.
17. I really don’t want MS to know everything about my browsing habits, privacy will be key to this feature and again, hopefully it will be able to be disabled.
18. Encryption is good.
19. Many company’s will find this very good, but let’s extend it allow anyone to install their own apps.

WP8 is looking to be very desirable and we can only assume the list of features will grow significantly by the time it is released.

Source: Pocketnow via Engadget

[sc:mobile-category ]Over the Christmas holidays I was over at some relatives who are in their late 70’s, sitting on their counter was their new cordless phone (the land line ones, they don’t have a cell phone) and right beside it was their Bell caller-id box.  You know the ones that came out when caller ID was first introduced, small (for the time), white with a two-line display on it.

It started me thinking about the history of the landline in comparison to the wireless providers.

Many years ago, when I bought my first modem (in all of its 300 baud acoustic coupler glory I might add), Bell controlled just about everything about the landline.  They was a court case going to the Supreme Court of Canada where Bell was fighting for the right to control if you could use a modem on your standard residential phone line.  Bell wanted to sell you a dedicated data line at 10 times the cost with no other features.

Bell lost and rest is history.  But this fight was just one of many over the years since phone service was first introduced.  At one point (not even that long ago) you couldn’t use your own phone, you had to rent one from Bell.

That kind of sounds like where we are with wireless today.  The wireless providers are fighting tooth and nail to not lose this fight like they did with the phone system, but should they?

Opening up the phone system to modems, faxes and other devices created an explosion of demand for phone lines and increased their profits exponentially.

Could the same kind of thing happen if the wireless providers opened up their network?  Allowed all kinds of devices on to their networks could certainly increase the demand for network access and likewise increase the profits of the providers.

Likewise if all cell phones were unlocked by default, mobility between the providers would be easier and increase competition.

Of course there are a few drawbacks, the cost of smart phones is still pretty high for most people to be able to afford without carrier financing (let’s not call it subsidies, the customer is paying for it with higher plan costs after all).  However that seems like a temporary circumstance as smart phone functionality will soon peak and then you should see real prices start to drop.

Perhaps the most confusing issue for the customer will be different frequencies between the carriers, but that could be handled through labeling.

I know the wireless providers will be fighting it tooth and nail, but in the long run it seems like the inevitable end state for all communications companies, it’s only how much time and money they will waste before getting there.