The Mobile Web Tablet

Got myself a true mobile web tablet yesterday: a Nokia N800. Let’s see if it will replace my Sony Ericsson/UIQ + Opera Mini-combo for doing all that micro-surfing to kill off dull moments throughout the day. Time will tell.

First impression: a much better device than the Nokia 770, which was a typical 1.0 showing great promises but failing to live up to them. Can’t say that the N800 is a high performer but it’s certainly faster than the 770.

Also got myself an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard to use with the N800, my Macbook and whatever needs a keyboard and supports Bluetooth HID. Will try it out today at the Hubbub conference.

(I’m also considering buying the QNAP TS-209. This is a small linux machine whos primary purpose is storage, but it also has a MySQL-server, a web server and a few other goodies running on it. Together with my Macbook, that’s two linux devices that will make my life a Microsoft-free zone.

Linux might never conquer the desktop, but it might very well take over everything else.)

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Platform battles… aren’t they fun?

Actually, they’re not. They keep a lot of innovation from happening. Will Google’s move to launch the alliance make the platform battle finish sooner than it otherwise would? Probably not. From that perspective, the Open Handset Alliance was a disappointment.

If you expected a cool device from Google, you should be also disappointed. What we got was yet another mobile linux initiative. Problem is, there are many mobile linux alliances out there, we don’t need another one.

It makes sense for a company like Google not to start building devices. As I wrote before, Nokia pumps out 11 phones per second and distributes them worldwide. They’ve probably sold a couple of hundred phones before you’ve finished reading this blog post. Feel like competing with that?

If it takes you one hour to decide, they’ve sold 40’000 devices.

Still feel like competing with that?

I didn’t think so.

No, Google is a software company and should remain a software company. Any software company that survives for some time becomes a platform company. Any platform company that survives for some time becomes an OS company. Maybe that’s where Google is today.

If anything good comes out of this, that would be a set of java applications or maybe even a java framework on top of MIDP. Can we hope for that? On November the 12th maybe we’ll know. Until then, disappointment is the word I’ll use to describe what Google launched.

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This small notebook with a 7″ inch screen is yet another sign of how there’s opportunity in the black hole of portables: the market between the mobile phone (<3 inch displays) and the laptop (>10 inch displays). The market of web tablets:

It’s not a laptop. It’s not a notebook. It’s not a ultra mobile PC (UMPC). It’s everything above.

Linux seems to be the OS of choice for these devices. Let’s just hope there’s not going to be too many flavors of it. Developers need one and only one platform.

Photos of the Asus EEE can be found here

You can click your way through screendumps of the interface here.

Here’s a video of someone unpacking and booting up the device.

If you live in Sweden, you can order one here.

As Web Worker Daily has noted, there are now three quite interesting linux boxes out there. The EEE, the Nokia N***-series and the gPC (which is a sub-$200 desktop computer).

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A few disruptive innovations are getting ready to hit the market, opening up for small device manufacturers to fill the hole between the <3 inch display devices (mobile phones) and the >10 inch display device (laptops). The hole reserved for web tablets.

One of them is flash memory replacing the hard drive. Another one is new form factor motherboards, small enough to put in a box of matches. A third one is WiMAX, promising broadband speed (well, sort of) wireless internet access (problem for WiMAX is, it’s been promising it for so long that good old 3G UMTS is catching up). Yet another is the Linux OS.

What do you get when putting all of them together?

Something like this.

The device is called MUnit and runs a 1GHz VIA CPU which is x86 compatible. You should be able to run Windows Vista on this one, if you want to. What the web tablet market needs is not Vista, though, but a Linux version that’s stable and has a developer ecosystem fertile enough to produce killer applications. The problem (some would call it a strength) with Linux is its many flavors.

Many flavors is great when eating ice cream but not so great when you want to build a commercial software application that must run on as many devices as possible for as little cost as possible. Linux is not there yet and maybe it never will get there. Why? Because Linux is a fertile environment for operating systems – not for applications.

That’s why I think Linux and Java is such a good combination – and I’m not the only one.

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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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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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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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Two observations that point in the same direction: the OS of your mobile doesn’t matter. It’s the internet compatibility that makes all the difference. First an old post by Nokia Linux web tablet product manager Ari Jaaksi:

“Today, we run Linux, X, Gnome, Flash, and friends on Nokia N800. Our big idea form the start was to run –as closely as possible– a desktop Linux stack. Others will start to do the same and I predict that mobile software will thus eventually die. All we need is software that runs everywhere.”

Then we have the announcement from Apple about how third party applications will be basically mobile widgets running AJAX. Thomas Bailey comments:

“I speculate that the other announcement of Safari coming to Windows and apparent lack of an iPhone SDK may be loosely related – notepad and a browser is all that is required once you move away from using table spaghetti for layout and design. In providing a web runtime which closely reflects the phone and making it available on Windows, a much larger potential developer base can be leveraged – could Safari be the SDK when used in conjunction with an “iPhone profile” ?“

Bailey (and Apple) is on to something here. There will be an application platform that bridges the PC world and the mobile world and a significant part of that platform will be the internet. The question is who will drive this platform? Can many different platforms co-exist? If Apple is to be truly successful, I would have to be able to run their iPhone mobile widgets on other devices as well. The iPhone might be a huge hit, but it will not be that big. So, when will we see the APIs available to javascript on an iPhone publically available and ported to other devices?

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