The Mobile Web Tablet

Something is happening in the world of mobile phones. Something big. Very big.

The driving forces for the change include the miniaturization of the components necessary for building a PC, the cost of wireless high speed internet access and the platformization of mobile phone software.

Signs of the change include how the company that practically invented the personal computer, Apple, is removing the word “computer” from its’ name while the company that turned the mobile phone into a consumer product, Nokia, keeps talking about how they really are building “multimedia computers“. Adding to that, already mobile PCs (laptops) are outselling desktops and they keep getting smaller.

Somewhere in the middle, Bill Gates sums it up nicely:

“The phone is going to be the PC, and the PC is going to be the phone.”

What does that mean to the industry? As I’ve mentioned before, the mobile OS war is a dead horse race. Even though Symbian has shipped 100 million copies of its’ OS (a completely irrelevant number since that includes many different flavors of the OS, like UIQ and S60 in different and incompatible versions) the smartphone of the future is a pocketable PC with a flash drive in stead of a hard drive and a fuel cell battery. Most likely running the latest Windows Vista-version.

So, yes, Bill Gates is right.

On the other hand, running Vista in a phone with a display the size of a small credit card is overkill no matter how you look at it. Most phones will be ultrathin clients running light-weight applications in XHTML, Flash Lite, mobile java or some similar application platform. The underlying OS will, from an application developers point of view, be irrelevant.

Will they be called computers? If you by the word computer mean “device capable of running user installable applications”, then yes.

If, on the other hand, you mean “computing device with keyboard, screen and a mouse running a window-based multitasking operating system like Windows XP or Mac OS/X”, then no.

But honestly, does it matter what we call it? The mobile phone will become a small window to the web, with small widget-like applications running within open application platforms. Is that a phone?

Is it a PC?

Or is it a mobile web tablet?

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The PC was a big invention and a great product. It brought information technology to the masses. It transformed the economy into a knowledge based one.

But it never (or at least not yet) reached outside the already wealthy part of the world. It wasn’t truly global.

The mobile phone, on the other hand, is. We’re approaching 3 billion phones worldwide and counting. And while the PC certainly improved life for those who could afford it, that pales in comparison to how the mobile phone is changing everyday life for people in the poorer parts of the world. Going from starving to fed is much better than going from a 1 car household to one that affords 2 cars.

The Economist has an excellent article on the subject explaining how a small scale market for fish has been transformed by the added information brought on by mobile phones:

Furthermore, says Mr Jensen, phones do this without the need for government intervention. Mobile-phone networks are built by private companies, not governments or charities, and are economically self-sustaining. Mobile operators build and run them because they make a profit doing so, and fishermen, carpenters and porters are willing to pay for the service because it increases their profits.

As the old saying goes: give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day. Give a man a mobile phone and he can sell that fish for a profit, build a fishing business and go mobile 2.0 before the end of fishing season.

Welfare through profit and better working markets. That’s how the west improved life and that’s how the rest of the world is doing it, thanks to that magical little information injection that the mobile phone provides.

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Johan Sch??ns post at the Opera Mini blog raised my curiosity:

The Opera Mini team has been hard at work for quite some time now on the next major version of Mini. We’re proud and excited that people who have had a chance to test early versions call this new generation another breakthrough in mobile web browsing.

Opera Mini, with an amazing 15 million downloads (!), is in my opinion (and, apparently, 15 million other peoples) the best way to surf the net outside a PC.
In fact, after using the Nokia 770 web tablet for a while, I returned to my Sony Ericsson K800 running Opera Mini (and Google Mail and Google Maps Mobile in parallel). It’s just a perfect combination of portability, speed and ease of use.
So, what’s in store for the next version? To be honest, the upgrade to 2.0 wasn’t that exciting. It’s not an easy task: how do they improve what in essence is a good enough application? I’m really looking forward to find out with the 3.0 version.

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The Apple iPhone is an interesting and innovative example of a new kind of device: the mobile web tablet. Still, I think Apple will have an extremely hard time living up to the expectations. I am reminded by that after reading the Mobile Enterprise blog:

We’ve got our priorities backwards. Working with junk like the UpStage and having paid honest dollars for the W810i, I can’t wait for Apple’s iPhone.

Oh boy, oh boy. Imagine being a 9-year old kid hailed as a musical genius after having your successful parents raise you to the skies in front of one million bloggers. No one has heard you play for real yet. Now you’re just about to play the Royal Albert Hall. The crowd is anticipating an insanely great show. Being good will not do. Being very good will not do. Everyone is expecting to be blown away.

Would you be nervous? I think that’s an understatement. You would be friggin’ terrified.

That 9-year old kid is the iPhone. Young, unproven and with huge expectations on her.

No, I’m waiting for the older sister of the iPhone. Version 1.0 will not live up to the expectations. There will most likely be a backlash that will cost Apple quite a bit of Apple Magic to repair.

(Via C.E.O.)

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Doubtless, Google is going mobile. But regardless of the rumors the Google Phone is about as likely as a Microsoft PC.

Building and selling a phone at the scale that a Google Phone would require is a lot of work and requires a huge infrastructure. Selling boxes with hardware in them is a completely different business than what Google is in at the moment. They might as well start selling breakfast cereals.

Building software (like an OS based on Linux), applications (like Gmail, Google Maps Mobile etc.) or search engines based on location or pattern recognition (the building blocks of the mobile internet) is another matter and much more likely for Google.

Then again, Microsoft does sell the Xbox, which is sort of like a Microsoft PC, so you never know…

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That last post got me thinking. The fact that I can’t get the name of any person calling me by having the phone hooking up to a web service and looking up the name from the phone number is such a sure sign of how far from The Mobile Web we really are that I’m going to make this my Mobile Web latmus test:

When I can buy a phone from the major vendors (LG, SEMC, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung) that, without me installing any special software, does that for me, then we’re there.

The web and the telecom industry will finally have merged. The telecom industry gets it and the web industry has the tools available to make it happen. Until then, we’re really only playing around. It’s like the PC-industry before Windows 3.1. The internet before Netscape. It hasn’t happened yet.

I’m guessing it’s about 2-3 years away.

By the way, does the iPhone support that? Anyone know?

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From Communities Dominates Brands:

Two interesting milestones will be reached in September 2007. We will reach 3 billion mobile phone subscribers and the mobile music revenues will reach 10 billion dollars. The 3 billion subscriber number will be widely celebrated but also widely misunderstood. It does not mean that 3 billion actual people have phones, as 28.8% of mobile phone owners have two or more subscriptions (according to Informa, 2007). So we’ll only have about 2.35 billion people who own a phone, but more than one in four of those will have two or more subscriptions (and mostly also two or more phones).

Wow. Three billion phones! And you thought the personal computer was a big deal!

So, what’s the killer application for all those mobile devices? Is it search? Music downloads? Widgets?

Well, not quite. It’s worth remembering that the three most important applications for mobile phones are:

1. Voice.
2. Voice.
3. Yepp. You guessed it: voice.

And then SMS and then nothing and then nothing and then mobile ring tones.

Sort of.

The funny thing about this is how little innovation there has been in the voice application domain. One of the key innovations for the iPhone is the GUI used when making phone calls. For some reason, the manufacturers have completely failed in improving the key feature for the devices they’re building while being busy adding mp3-players, cameras and step counters.

Just a simple example: I still can not automatically get the name of a person calling me when the number is not in my contact list! All I get is the phone number. What good is that?? It’s as if web connected phone directories never existed. I should never ever have to deal with a number. It’s persons calling me. Not numbers.

Funny how the most essential application of a phone has been so neglected.

But who am I to complain. Three billion users can’t be wrong, right?

Right…?

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This blog is as young as spring time here in Stockholm, so the Carnival of the Mobilists is a good way of getting readers. Dorrian Porter hosts the carnival #71 where I contributed with one post.
The blog Everything and the Mobile Software Universe adds some thoughts to the post.

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