smartphone

...now browsing by tag

Why Talent is Limiting Supply in the Smartphone OS Market

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

How many smartphone mobile operating systems can the market support? Wrong question. In a market of billions of potential devices with limited network effects [1] and hyper-growth demand the market could support lots of smartphone mobile operating systems – where lots is defined as greater than six and less than twenty. The limiting factor is not demand but rather supply. How many companies can build a competitive mobile OS? The fire sale of Palm and the launch of Blackberry Torch makes it clear that the list of companies that have the skills and resources to build, launch, and sustain a competitive mobile OS is getting smaller each month. Watching this playout feels like watching the top riders in the Tour de France fight their way to the top of Col du Tourmalet — each and every year only the most talented riders keep pace as the ride becomes absolutely grueling.

Companies are starting to fall by the wayside as the stacked teams of Apple, Google, and soon Microsoft take firm control of the race.
Lets look at a checklist of capabilities one needs to launch a competitive mobile OS. Half way down this list you will realize that very few companies have assembled a deep and wide enough talent pool to execute a smartphone mobile os on a global scale.

What you need	What it gets you
User Experience
Multi-touch interface	Parity
Visual appeal	Potential differentiation
Multi-tasking	Parity
Apps
Games, Games, and Games	(1) Acquisition (great games sell devices) (2) Lock-In (spend creates switching costs)
20,000 Quality Apps	Parity
Discovery & Merchandising	Easy & trust worthy
Media
Music	Lock-In (spend creates switching costs)
Movie rentals	Engagement
TV show rentals	Engagement
Browser
HTML5 + CSS3 Compliant Browser	Parity
Information Finding
Search	Utility Carrier financial incentive via revenue share
Voice Search	Cool demo
Maps (limited number of suppliers)	Utility + parity
Navigation (limited number of suppliers)	Utility + parity
Communication Cloud
Mail	Utility + parity
Voice Transcription	Diffentriated
PIM Services	Utility + parity
Payments
One Click Buy (micro transactions)	Parity + Frictionless commerce
Global (90+ markets)	Utility + parity
Fraud Mgmt	Utility + parity
Launch Marketing
$250M consumer marketing	Consumer awareness. Percieved momentum for developers
$50M App developer launch	Studio compensation to seed app library and app competitions
Devices & Distribution
#1 and/or #2 Carrier in top 20 markets (first yr)	Market coverage
3 to 4 OEM’s building 8 million devices (first yr)	Consumer choice of mid to high-end devices
Developers, Developers, Developers!
Popular IDE	App quality Time to market Developer happiness
Deep SDK	Device access (e.g. camera, acceleramator) UI (e.g. animation, controls) Service access (e.g. maps, contacts, mails)
Enterprise
Security	Parity
Employee device & app provisioning	Parity

[1] Limited Network Effects: During the PC war application developers propelled Windows PC to its monopoly position – users adopted the OS with the widest range of applications and developers adopted the platform with the most users. In the mobile smartphone OS war the top 20,000 apps that matter will be replicated to the top five mobile os platforms in each market or region muting the possible network effects because the development costs are relatively low.

Posted in Mobile, Product, Strategy | No Responses »
Tags: android, blackberry, google, iphone, product strategy, smartphone

My iPhone Monthly Data Usage: 50MB Above Average

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

The graph below charts my iPhone data usage from December 2009 thru April 2010. Since I am on an unlimited data plan pricing does not effect my usage (clearly). For these four months my average monthly usage is 297MB/month or 50MB more then your average iPhone user. How do I know this? I have heard from two carriers the following average data usage by device type:

iPhone users consume ~250MB/month
Android users consume ~150MB/month
Smartphone (a non-iPhone or Android) users consume ~100MB/month
Feature phone users consume <10MB/month

My iPhone Data Usage:

Posted in Mobile, Trends | No Responses »
Tags: android, data usage, iphone, smartphone

G1 Android: One Month Later & Tad Jealous of iPhone Owners

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

G1 Android Everybody in Silicon Valley seems to have an odd love affair with the iPhone and while it is an impressive product I couldn’t resist the opportunity to be a bit different and buy myself the much derided G1 (aka Google Phone) by T-Mobile. One month later I am a tad jealous of the strange love affair people have with their iPhone. The instant reviewers of the blogosphere quickly panned the G1 — while at times I felt like jumping I felt like I needed to make the G1 part of my life for more then a few hours or even days. Here is what I found:

G1 Hardware: Overall lacks polish and fit n’ finish I would expect from a $150+ device.

Keyboard: Angled section forces right thumb into uncomfortable position. The keys themselves are
Thickness: If you miss phones from 1996 you’ll like the thickness of the G1.
Power recharge input : Flimsy plastic cover cap. Why does the most used input require a plastic cover?
Keyboard slider arm: Arm that slides the keyboard open/close position is very flimsy piece of plastic. When expanding/collapsing the arm its snap is anything but gentle, and I am fairly certain that in a matter of months it will fly off its hinges.
Battery: Rarely make it through a full day when my usage is relatively intense — multiple phone calls, checking email, and browsing the web. For an enterprise user used to the battery life of a Blackberry battery this will prove unusable for most.
Buttons: Too many. I constantly confuse the Home and Back button — especially when I am working in landscape mode.
Track ball: Too small and sensitive — when browsing the trackball is the cause of many erroneous clicks and movements.

Android OS: First, impressed by the overall responsiveness of the OS – for a version one that is not easy and it deserves credit. Yet, the UI experience leaves plenty of room for improvement. Pull Out Tray and Menu button are the biggest culprits, but there are a plethora of small stuff that when combined create a very average experience.

Pull-out tray: I suspect many users will never discover all the apps. Opening the tray requires a cumbersome select and pull motion – for all the value that sits within this tray one would expect easier and more natural access.
Menu Button: Too many applications require constant use of the Menu button — this is partially poor design on the part of the Apps, but I find myself engaging this button constantly when I am in Browser, Mail, etc. These actions should appear/disappear when needed. For example, upon reaching the bottom of a web-page display a “Bookmark” action.
Applications: Why do I need to load sixty applications to delete one. If there is an easier way that somebody is aware of please do tell.
Search Apps: Nearly impossible to discover how to search all your apps — with the tray open you just start typing — but it took me a few weeks to discover this feature. After the user has added say 40 apps why not expose a search box that can be easily dismissed by the user or provide a gentle hint once the user has a certain number of apps.
Notifications: Little icons appear when an email arrives, app download completes, etc. The icons themselves are usually useless — they don’t convey the type of notification they are supposed to represent. Additionally, it seems like anytime anything happens a notification appears — I really don’t care that it finished downloading an App. Finally, opening the notification tray requires very nimble fingers.
Clock: Why by default does the home screen include a clock that takes up half the screen real-estate when their a clock in the upper right hand corner that is perfectly fine. I don’t get it.

Core Applications: Each of these deserve their own separate post as they are core to the overall experience – will save that for another day. Here is the Twitter version:

Browser: One of the bigger disappointments of the device. Mistakes gestures as simple as scroll and zoom. Search box and Address Box are distinct entities when they should be tightly integrated (see Chrome for a good start). Finally, exclusive search provider — in some markets Yahoo! is actually superior to Google and
Mail: Gmail should place the Reply and Reply All button in the Menu option as otherwise it forces you to scroll through the entire email to simply hit Reply.

Android Market

Early start is disappointing, but withhold judgement until they have broader reach and Google providers a monetization solution.
App quality is extremely poor: I have uninstalled 80% of the apps as they were utter crap.
Limited selection: I am begging for something interesting— how about the Wall Street Journal Reader (like the one for Blackberry)

Posted in Product | 6 Responses »
Tags: android g1, google, iphone, smartphone