The Mobile Web Tablet

Trying to connect some dots…

I’ve written about the internet as the mobile OS a couple of times. What I mean by that is that most mobile applications we will be using will be to at least 80% based on a strong web service as the backbone. What we see in the phone will be a simple and thin GUI-layer. Widsets, Opera Mini and Mobile Gmail are all examples of this.

Java, Flash Lite or even XHTML will be perfect for most of the things we will want to do with our phones. As soon as the problems with fragmentation has a solution that is good enough, things will explode in the mobile service space. Unfortunately, that might take a few more years.

I’ve also written about what Bill Gates summarized as:

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

PCs are getting smaller and phones are getting more capable. Is the iPhone an up-scaled version of the iPod or a down-scaled version of a MacBook? I’d like to say the latter. Soon enough you will have full scaled PCs in your pocket running Windows, OS/X or Linux.

If we take those two observations and try to draw a conclusion from them, that would be that we’re moving towards a point where all mobile devices more or less share the same software stack. We’re not there yet, but it’s pretty clear that’s where we going. The platform war is already here.

Another conclusion it’s tempting to draw is that since all our devices share the same software stack, we will only need one device. Let’s put everything in the mobile phone (or whatever you want to call it) and you won’t need an MP3 player, camera, small laptop, car keys or credit card.

This conclusion, however, is wrong.

Why? Well, now we’re (finally) getting to the title and the point of this post, which is: the interface is the device.

The interface is not just what’s shown on screen. It’s the entire design and behavior of the product. Where the buttons are placed. Its size. How you carry it. How it turns on (and off). A good camera is not a good MP3 player. A good stopwatch is not a good mobile phone. A good word processor is not a good SMS-tool. And so on.

I once tried to use my Sony Ericsson K800 to take the time and listen to music while running. It was useless. The UI paradigms completely clashed. The poor little K800 wanted so much to be a good phone and a good MP3 player and a good stopwatch that it simply failed to be all at the same time. Now try to add GPS, TV, video recording and one or two games to the mix. What you’ll get is a useless feature soup. Because the interface is the device.

On the other hand, I might very well imagine that my GPS, my camera and my mobile phone share the same software platform and even underlying hardware. Being able to install java midlets on my digital SLR would be great! I might even consider using it as a mobile phone in emergencies. But it will never replace my mobile phone device. Because the interface is the device.

Am I opposed of all the new features in mobile phones? No, the mobile phone may be quite good as a jack of all trades. But it will be a master of none and you will soon get tired and irritated in using it for something it wasn’t specifically designed for. Because the interface is the device.

Can more than one feature never mix in the same device? Of course they can. For example, a mobile phone can be quite a good music player if you have a good headset (because the interface…) and it was designed to be used that way. A laptop or tabletop PC can do many things. Even they are limited, though, as everyone who’s tried to use their PC to watch TV will tell you. It’s too noisy, takes time to boot (you don’t boot a television, you just don’t), isn’t very good to use with a remote control, bluescreens (crashes) every now and then and consumes too much power. The PC simply wasn’t designed to be used for watching TV and so it fails.

Because the interface is the device.

Another conclusion from all this: the mobile 2.0 revolution is not just about mobile phones. We need to get every device manufacturer out there to open up their products and make them internet connected. The phones are not enough. Maybe I’m well in to Mobile 3.0 when I say this, but every device out there need to share the same platform and become connected. From DSLRs to washing machines.

Because, and I think I told you this before: the interface is the device.

(Hm. I think I will have to return to this subject. Too long post and I don’t think I made my point clear enough. Oh well, that’s why you have a blog. )

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Good presentation here. Amongst other things, it highlights GrandCentral and Fring, two VoIP companies.

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C. Enrique Ortiz is right. The same was true for fixed internet. Remember when you had to dial in to get a connection? And it cost money per minute of use? A fixed price is even more important for the mobile web as so many of the potential services rely on you being connected all the time.

Why? Because the thing about the mobile web is the same as for mobile TV: it’s not the mobility, it’s the fact that it’s personal. It’s your phone. It’s in your pocket or purse. It’s you people try to reach on it.

Mobile is personal. Remember that if you plan on building a Mobile 2.0 service.

Updated: What comes after mobile/personal? Find out here.

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I wrote a text on Dunbar numbers and social networks over at the GlocalReach blog.

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Yes, what else can you call it, the iPod Touch might very well be the first true consumer friendly mobile web tablet. WiFi, touch screen, full browser support and, of course since it’s Apple, a stunning design. What else can you ask for?

Well, a keyboard would be nice, but I guess the accessory market for iPods will take care of that.

Downloadable applications would be nice too (don’t know if it’s as closed as the iPhone).

Oh, and VoIP, too.

Still, it is a beauty.

No wonder Palm ditched the Foleo today.

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Official announcement from the Palm Blog:

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market.

Tough move by Palm, but there’s no point in going in to a platform battle with a platform you don’t plan to support to 110%. There’s also a few competitors like the Asus EEE PC that’s much more competitively priced.

This seems to be Ed Colligans decision (the CEO of Palm) and the Foleo was Jeff Hawkins (the co-founder of Palm) pet project. Guess there was some heated discussion behind the Palm walls before this decision was taken.

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GigaOm is listing a few “facts” about the so far non-existing Google Phone. The first two are:

1. Google Phone is based on a mobile variant of Linux, and is able to run Java virtual machines.
2. All applications that are supposed to run on the Google Phone are java apps. The OS has ability to run multimedia files, including video clips.

It looks a lot like the kind of phone I would have built if I had the chance to do it from scratch. Linux at the core and Java as the application platform makes a lot of sense for building an open, developer friendly phone with an already existing ecosystem of applications and developers.

I’m sure Google has the engineers to come up with a great mobile phone. The greatest challenge for them is the logistics involved in selling consumer electronics. As mentioned before, that’s a completely different business from selling adwords. Nokia is pumping out 11 phones per second worldwide. You can have all the Ph.D:s in the world in your staff and a supercomputer on top, that’s still a huge challenge.

Nevertheless it’s a telling sign that the two most talked about phones at the moment comes from the internet and computer industry.

Updated: New York Times on how the worlds of software and telecom meet:

Nokia used to be just a cellphone maker. Google used to be just an Internet company.
Now Nokia wants to be an Internet company and Google, according to rampant speculation among bloggers and technology analysts, may be about to enter the mobile phone fray.

“Devices alone are not enough anymore,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said last week in London as the company announced plans for a digital music store, a game service, social networking links and other mobile Internet initiatives, grouped under a new brand, Ovi. “People want more; they want the complete experience.”

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