The Mobile Web Tablet

It’s that time of the year, when you reflect on what has been and try to look forward to what will be.

More has happened to the mobile market during 2008 than what is appearant at first sight. A lot of changes to the market is taking place under the surface where the shock waves of iPhone and Android are disrupting the entire value chain of operators, devices, operating systems and applications.

These changes will start to erupt next year.

Add to that the financial crisis and the recession and 2009 will become a year that will bring massive change to the entire industry. We will have a completely different playing field in 2010 compared to 2008.

The last couple of years we have seen major innovations and huge change in the mobile industry. But we know from history that it is during hard times that true change happens. Companies on the verge of destruction are more likely to innovate. New players with completely different business models can enter the field. On top of that we are approaching a technological tipping point where mobile internet access and mobile platforms are becoming commodities. The ecosystem is becoming fertile.

I believe more will happen in the coming 1-2 years than in the last 5 put together. Heck, make that the last 10!

Exciting times.

So, a few predictions for the next year:

- It will be the year of Android. The most exciting device of the year will run Android – and it will not come from any of the major players but from a brand like Asus, Creative, Doro, Canon, Nike or Armani.

- Mobile application vendors will grow stronger at the expense of device manufacturers. Probably not to the extent that it really matters (yet) but the tide has clearly shifted. We are approaching the moment where people pick a device based on what applications it support. It won’t happen in 2009 but soon.

- iPhone will lose some of its momentum. The 3.0 will be released but it will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Still, it’s so far ahead of everything else that it doesn’t matter: it’s still the king of the hill.

- Windows Mobile will continue to grow stronger at a steady (some would say “too steady”) pace.

- Killer app of the year: Spotify Mobile on Symbian. An Android version follows soon after. People will complain to Apple for not allowing an iPhone version. (Spotify is a music streaming application for computers.)

- Mobile internet flat rate prices but with an upper volume limit will be more common. There will be a lot of experimenting with pricing of mobile broadband subscriptions.

- The economy will be bad but not as bad as most people seem to think today.

All in all a very interesting year.

Updated: some more predictions for 2009 from industry experts collected by Chetan Sharma.

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It’s a classic underdog story. When a couple of engineers at web browser maker Opera suggested to management that they should try building a mobile java version of their browser, no one listened. Well, they built it and it’s about to outgrow its desktop bigger brother. Here are some stats for browser market share:

(source)

Another way of putting the stats:

• Opera Mini: massive growth.
• Opera: no growth.

In a couple of months time, Opera Mini might very well pass its bigger brother and place itself amongst the top 4 browsers on the net (including desktop browsers).

Amazing! Really.

Compare this to other mobile (and pre-installed) browsers such as Access Netfront with a 0.01% market share according to the same statistics and it becomes even more amazing.

Now, “0.39%” of web traffic might not sound too impressive to you, but if you ever have tried building an application for mass market mobile phones you know that it’s a huge effort even getting it to work on the devices out there.

Then you have to convince people to download and install it. If you’re lucky, the settings for internet access are correct in their phones. If you’re even more lucky, they manage to find the application in the menu system after it’s been downloaded and installed.

And, remember, the users already have a browser pre-installed on their phones. It’s a native application and supposed to be faster and better integrated to the device. Your browser can’t be equally good to the native browser, it has to be much better otherwise people don’t bother downloading it.

Then there’s the whole mobile browsing business, which hasn’t really taken off the way once predicted. First and foremost you have to convince people of the very idea that a web browser in your phone actually can be usable.

Well, Opera pulled it off.

Looking at the statistics, it seems like Opera Mini right now is the engine pulling the entire mobile web up to the domains of the desktop world.

Look at the September stats:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 77.86%
Firefox 14.88%
Safari 5.07%
Opera 0.87%
Netscape 0.72%
Opera Mini 0.39%

There’s not a mobile browser in sight, except for Mini (disclaimer: I don’t know the percentage of iPhone users in the Safari stats). The competitors are down at 0.01%-0.02%. If Minis growth continues, it will hit 1% within 6-9 months and become the number 4 browser.

There’s only one conclusion to draw: right now the mobile web is Opera Mini and Opera Mini is the mobile web.

Sorry, Russell, but that’s a fact.

Opera Mini is becoming so big it soon makes sense to develop web sites and applications targeted towards Mini as a platform. In fact, if you plan to take your web site mobile (and of course you plan to do that, you’d be crazy not to), Opera Mini is the platform to use to do that. As a bonus, it will work on the iPhone too.

Now, if only Opera could follow Apple and open up the browser for access to the phone hardware and underlying OS (via the J2ME APIs), that would make one heck of a platform for mobile development. (I’ve actually suggested this to Opera a couple of times, but the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Oh well, the last time was pre-iPhone so maybe they’re starting to get it now. JSR290 is the Java standardization attempt of basically the same thing. )

Interesting times to work with the mobile web. Maybe 2008 will be the year it really takes off. If it does, it will be much thanks to Opera Mini. Who said mobile java is just good for games?

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The pieces of the Google Phone, gphone, puzzle is coming together. After acquiring Voice 2.0 company GrandCentral a couple of months ago they now extend to microblogging and presence with the acquisition of Jaiku (similar to Twitter but more mobile oriented).

I’ve said it a before: good mobile 2.0 services requires good web services in the back. Well, Google is building one heck of a backbone of services to complement their upcoming phones (or phone OS). Interesting to see what they come up with in the end.

Anyway, congratulations to Jyri and the rest of the Jaiku team!

Updated: Techcrunch UK has more.

Tim O’Reilly has a good overview of Jaiku here. This sentence sums up why this is related to the GPhone:

This is the way a phone address book ought to work. I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven “social networking application” represents my real social network.

My own company, GlocalReach, will solve a slightly different problem in another circle of intimacy but the address book in the phone is definitely one of the untapped goldmines of social networking. The established manufacturers are fumbling with more or less closed and slow moving solutions like Wireless Village that no one uses.

Jaiku was founded in February 2006 and Twitter the month after. Wireless Village has been in standardization groups for years. Google, on the other hand, is an acquisition machine not wasting time eating salmon sandwiches in standardization meetings (believe me, I’ve been to them) but in stead letting innovation happen outside the company and pick the right time to devour integrate it.

I bet there are at least five times as many people working with acquisitions than with standardization at Google. I also bet there are fifty times as many people working with standardization than acquisitions at companies like Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Motorola.

Should they change? I don’t know. The telecom way of standardizing everything is not a winning strategy if you want to be innovative. It might be good for a lot of other stuff, like building huge wireless networks or come up with platforms that other can innovate on, but not for innovation.

It boils down to the question: what kind of company do you want to be? The innovative kind or the standardizing kind? The application or the platform? If you’re a successful application, you’re going to end up becoming the platform anyway so I’d say the choice is easy. Just ask Microsoft.

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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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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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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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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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