The Mobile Web Tablet

Russell Beattie asks Motorola three questions but they can really be extended to any device manufacturer. The questions are:

What’s the platform? Russell writes:

Moto has now launched phones with every conceivable OS there is: Linux, Java, Symbian, Microsoft, and yet, there’s no sense that there’s any effort to create a unified target for developers.

Where’s the independent developer community? Relates to the previous question as you need a clear platform strategy to attract developers. Russell again:

The developer.motorola.com site has a decent set of specs for their phones, but doesn’t seem to have any sort of forum or way to interact with other developers. (If it is there, it’s hard as hell to find.) And why are Moto’s Linux phones still only available in Asia?

Where’s the Internet strategy?. Russell:

Why isn’t Motorola doing anything to embrace the obvious next stage in mobility, starting with a decent mobile browser? Hell, Apple has neither an open platform nor a dev community and yet they seem to be getting lots of converts just by providing a great browser on their iPhone.

The platform, the developers and the internet. There you have it: the corner stones for a successful mobile 2.0 strategy.

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Wow, what a success. At least the first weekend, the iPhone went for a knockout and succeeded. Up to 700’000 phones is nothing short of amazing especially considering the price. The iPhone has already become and iconic product that has changed the market. Every other smartphone will be compared to the iPhone.

Iconic mobile phones are otherwise few and far between. For a consumer market the size of the mobile phone market, the following is quite interesting:

[...] there are now only two mobile phones in American history that consumers ask for by product name: The Motorola Razr and the Apple iPhone.

I would have added the Blackberry, but OK. This is nothing short of a failure for a market that size. Truth is, most mobile phones are clones of each other. Even the last couple of years explosion of features (cameras, mp3 players, web browsers, games etc.) hasn’t produced a single phone that really sticks out with personality (I’m probably a bit biased when I say the Sony Ericsson T610 is a candidate).

Innovation has been in features, not in usability, design or marketing. Apple has changed that. None of the features in the iPhone are completely new, but the packaging is.

Time for the established players to start afresh and stop the cloning.

If I was the CEO of one of the major mobile vendors, I would have set aside a team of the most experienced engineers and the best designers and basically give them free hands to do magic. Preferably, they would be in a separate building from the other company. Their mission: to go to the soul of the company, the roots, and make the phone everyone in the company wants to make if they weren’t prevented by legacy requirements and old code. Start from a blank slate and work upwards.

Of course, such an endeavor would hit the bottom line pretty hard, which is why most CEOs don’t do it. A classic innovators dilemma which an outsider can take advantage of in exactly the way Apple has done.

Nokia is trying to do something along those lines with their open source and web tablet team headed by Ari Jaaksi. While the Nokia web tablets have been far from as successful as the iPhone (don’t know the sales figures for the web tablets, but I’m guessing they’re far below 500’000) I think in the long term it will pay off. (For Nokia, this is quite a courageous move. Their customers are the operators and I’m pretty sure no operator asked for a linux based wifi web tablet!)

This is also how Motorola came up with the RAZR, by the way:

They kept the project top-secret, even from their colleagues. They used materials and techniques Motorola had never tried before. After contentious internal battles, they threw out accepted models of what a mobile telephone should look and feel like. In short, the team that created the RAZR broke the mold, and in the process rejuvenated the company.

Seems like companies are only capable of pulling this through during hard times. Motorola was in a pretty bad shape when RAZR was born.

Exciting things are happening in the world of mobile and the established players better watch out – especially the ones with wind in the sails. The iPhone is not the last wanting to go for knockout and it’s so darn difficult to be innovative when times are good.

Unless you’re Apple, it seems.

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So the rumours were true: Google has aquired VoIP-pioneers Grandcentral.

Just like the company I am in the process of starting up: GlocalReach, Grandcentral is basically an internet based reach management system for voice communication (back in the 20th century they called it “telephony”).

Their idea is similar yet somewhat different from ours. They believe in the “one number for life” concept but I think it’s a feature, not a restriction, to be able to change number every now and then. In fact, I think every person wants many numbers, for different aspects of ones life: work, hobbies, family, friends etc.. As long as you can manage them easily, many phone numbers is not a problem but rather a way of better controlling how people can reach you.

Anyway. Google seemed to like what they were doing and Grandcentral has clearly shown that telephony and the web go together and has much value to add to each other.

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