The Mobile Web Tablet

Who would have thought it was possible to make Windows Mobile look sexy? Well, it does and I’m happy to say it’s Sony Ericsson that pulls it off with the launch of the XPERIA X1.

Some quick thoughts:

- I wonder what the deal looks like between SEMC and Microsoft. Microsoft and Ericsson has worked together before, but that collaboration failed. Some say it was because of the way Microsoft wanted to control everything. Of course, Microsoft probably sees it differently. Either way: they couldn’t work together.

- We’re now starting to see the impact of the iPhone on the way the user interface of a modern phone is designed. Much more playful and friendly.

- The main competitor to the X1 is not the iPhone but the Nokia E90, a Symbian based smartphone with a slider Qwerty-keyboard and large screen. I think the X1 looks much better, but it remains to see how the software works in practice.

- What happens to that other platform? Does anyone care?

Updated: wow:

3‚Äù touch display 800×480 pixels

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Spent the afternoon at the Daytona Session here in Stockholm. A mini-conference focusing on the future of the internet. One of the speakers was Stefan Waldeck from Yahoo! Sweden. He talked about mobile (which by the way was a common theme amongst the speakers – seems that’s where the future of the web is) and mentioned that the Yahoo! Go Mobile client will soon be preinstalled in available for (?) more than 200 devices from all the five major device manufacturers.

Sounds like news to me. At least I’ve missed it.

I wonder what the deal is between Yahoo! and the manufacturers. A not too wild guess would be revenue sharing of ads shown in the application. Consequence: your next phone might be subsidized not only by the operator but also by Yahoo!. In other words, mobile advertising is coming and it will take the shape of value added applications in your phone.

Another example of this: Yahoo! is also the search engine that pays for you to use Opera Mini (you didn’t think it was really free, did you?). Together with Yahoo! Go Mobile in 200 devices, Yahoo! can take a significant chunk out of that mobile revenue that Google wants with their as-of-yet-non-existing GPhone.

Microsoft has been trying to break in to the telecom market for years with Windows Mobile but they will most likely join the advertising war. They’re just a little late for the game.

Microsoft, Google Phone, Yahoo! Go Mobile… looks like the future of the web really is in mobile.

Pictures from the event here.

Updated: Lotta Holmstr??m at Citizen Watch also wrote about the Yahoo! presentation:

Yahoo! Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.

What does “in” mean? Preinstalled or available for?

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David Beers runs the blog Software Everywhere and has some really interesting thoughts on the Palm Foleo:

For Hawkins, it’s the smartphone that is the new PC. The Foleo is just the piece that completes the vision.

It’s a long post but well worth the read if you’re interested in the next big paradigm for computing in a post-PC, post-internet, post-mobile world.

I agree with what he writes. There’s something happening in the “black hole” of the market between the laptop and the mobile phone: 5 to 10 inch displays, sub $1000 price (even $500) and full connectivity options.

It’s an extremely interesting battle ground because the winner might very well end up with both sides of the hole under their control.

If, for example, Microsoft and Intel manages to squeeze Windows and x86 into 5 inch notebooks that are fuel cell driven, flash card in stead of hard drive and instant on/off then what we have is the smartphone platform of the future. Bye bye, Symbian.

If, on the other hand, Nokia, Motorola and SEMC manage to upscale their mobile phones to full keyboards and larger screens, then why do I need to buy a Windows laptop?

Definitely an opportunity for new players to take a place. Palm is doing the right thing. It’s a gamble though, but what choice do they have?

Anyway, it’s fun to follow what happens. Can’t wait to get my hands on one of those Foleos.

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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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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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