User Devices

Planet Mobile's strategic response to Google's Android initiative - from ReadWriteWeb:

Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source.

They had to - ever since Google announced Android, and Apple entered with iPhone, the clock was ticking on closed operating systems in the Tower of Babel that is Mobile OS. The economics of the industry requires a small number of coherent OS to develop applications on if it is to be viable vs the miniaturising PC's.

Plus of course, Google and Apple are not point players, they run ened to end Ecosystems, which double trumps a massively fractured point solution which is what the Planet Mobile OS game now is. RWW nails it here:

But at the same time, this could also be driven by Nokia wanting to have more control over both the hardware and software side of its business, similar to how Apple has created its own operating system for the iPhone.

Google, Nokia, Apple's hats are in the ring now. I wonder what Microsoft will do in this game, given that they are also swooping down from above with the new generation of small PC's. Prediction is risky, especially about the future, but an Open Source OS would not be an impossible dream, especially if it interworked closely with one's PC.

O2 is offering free iPhones for the more valuable consumer and business tariffs, coming July 11th. Going onto the O2 website its not clear if the tariffs there are the 3G ones - I suspect not, as we are told the 3G phone will be £100.

What is interesting though is that Free! has been dangled this time round, as (i) it gets more attention than naked bodies and (ii) O2 clearly learned from the last release that upfront costs cost them upfront sales.

Current Tariffs are:

Consumer PrePay

- 8 Gb phone free for £45/month tariff, 1200 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data, 18 month contract
- 16Gb phone free for £75/month tariff, 3000 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data, 18 month contract


Consumer PAYG

No details as yet


SO/HO Businesses

- 8GB phone free on the £28pm tariff, 500 mins, 50 texts, 24 months contract
- 16Gb phone free on the £84pm tariff, 2000 mins, 200 texts, 24 months contract

Now, if I had the time and inclination I could run some linear algorithms to triangulate the approximate real costs of minutes, sms's and phone costs to give an approximation of which deal is under or over mean, but I don't - and besides, I want a 3G iPhone anyway and they are bound to change - upwards

(Nope - downwards!! - See the update below)

Update - looks like TechCrunch UK has some scoop on this (thanks Ian Betteridge for heads up). As well as a good writeup on his own blog, Ian has commented below that:

Basically, there will be four tariffs: £30, £35, £45, and £75, and the price of the iPhone will go from free to £159 depending on tariff and iPhone model. That basically means you can get a 16GB iPhone for half the price of an old 16GB one, on a contract that actually costs you £5 less a month. Aggressive isn't the word for pricing like that...

All those tariffs including unlimited 3G data, although there's no details on talk minutes or texts. What's really interesting, though, is that they're bundling free WiFi access with not only The Cloud, but also BT Openzone.

Its very interesting that its being priced at Free! and lower ongoing tariffs - some serious learning from the first time round then, plus (I suspect) a major effort to take as many potential switchers as they can early before les autres can come up with alternatives. This I suspect is because:

- It is our view that the pent up demand for the 3G iPhone is quite high in the UK, so I expect this will could be quite a gamechanger in the UK market,
- In the UK an irrationally hypercompetitive market is locked at roughly equal share for the 4 major players plus "give it away" offset deals from 3 UK, Blyk etc. A tip here could send the market dynamics towards the far more stable "3 big guys plus the noise" structure, which means that the "Big 1 and 2" win handsomely, the others all lose.

Note though that Free! is a way of captivating otherwise rational thought, so students of our FreeConomic papers (start here) will realise that something is being given away for a free phone - usually your money in monthly wodges, (but apparently not in this case - we shall see) - and with pre-registering "interest" here the opportunity to give O2 some data about yourself, all so you can learn when you can have one - now there's an offer I can refuse !

....why, build a supercomputer of course. Those clever IBM people have built a record breaking one for Los Alamos military labs, it does 1 quadrillion flops - as seen in the NYT.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

Interesting comment :

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

In all seriousness, if one looks at processing speeds etc, just chaining 8 or so PS3s together would give the average home hobbyist the processing power of a small supercomputer of 10 years ago.

What, one wonders, can the average home do with even such a mini-supercomputer? Its quite interesting just to sit back and think about that sort of power if it were taken for granted that every home had it. Who needs a Grid? Actually, speaking of Grids, another supercomputer is growing organically via Folding@Home project - the Folding@home supercomputer currently operates at 1048 teraFLOPs, 772 teraFLOPS comes from the PlayStation 3.

Hmmm...can I fit 13,000 of the little buggers in the cellar ?

Article in the NYT re the inexorable rise of the eBook, Kindle style. Its worth linking to for this quote alone:

Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.

Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud.

I suspect we will find that The New Economy 2.0 will have its own share of stars of fraud and flop.

However, I do take issue with some other thoughts in the article. Firstly, this:

In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.”

Except that it is not a "free" transfer from goods to relationships - as we explained in our articles in FreeConomics Part I and Part II, if your free lunch is usually being paid for by offset funding, and / or by your data being chained up, there is a price to pay. What is often forgotten in the "rush to free" discussion is that by and large, if another piper is paying, they will want to call the tune at some point. That bit of the bargain is too often neglected by the Freeconomists - but not by Ms Dyson, I note .

Also, making money from T shirts as a famous band (with all that Big Label spend gone in already) like the Grateful Dead is one thing - being further down the Long Tail means its a lot tougher, and this has become clearer in the interim as the network power law has just allowed the rich to get richer.

The scary thing is I find myself arguing these economics with the NYT author who is none other than Paul Krugman. Hmmmm. Second thing I'd take issue with is this thought:

According to a report in The Times, the buzz at this year’s BookExpo America was all about electronic books. Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time. (There’s an old Brazilian joke: “Brazil is the country of the future — and always will be.” E-books have been like that.) But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle.

Not the bit about eBooks being the perpetual next year's technology (along with the mobile internet), but the bit about the Kindle replacing books. I don't buy it (literally).

We've done a lot of work on e-Readers in the last two years or so, and there are 2 things that they are still struggling with:

(i) The kindle generation is still too small creen and not natural light enough for most people to find reading an easy pleasure. A few road warriors reading papers they'd otherwise have to read on laptops yes, the mass market - unlikely yet according to our analysis. We need to await the next generation of displays

(ii) Price point - not just of the Kindle, but of total (legal) ownership. Despite the price cut, its still $359.00. And the reduction in price of the average books in eBook form is - according to the Amazon Kindle site for say Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" - a whopping great reduction apparently from S25.95 to $15.42 - except that elsewhere on the Amazon site the actual book is only $17.43 Hardcover. Somehow a $2.00 reduction for a zero dead tree edition does not seem to be that great a deal. I need a lot of those to (c 180 in fact) to justify the $360 outlay!

Unless you were thinking of going to BitTorrent for Clay's book, which we could not condone as that, after all, is Piracy. Or the inevitable future, as Esther Dyson would have it ?

Better get started printing those T Shirts, Clay

On my Yahoo News this morning (yes, some people still use Yahoo to aggregate stuff ) the scary reminder that XP will no longer be on sale after June 30th. Microsoft plans to end full support — including warranty claims and free help with problems — in April 2009. The company will continue providing a more limited level of service until April 2014.

This is quite worrying, because - as anyone who has used Vista will tell you - its an unnecessary learning curve, is not fully backward compatible, is unnecessarily intrusive and - worst of all - is just too processor intensive for the benefits.

A chap called Galen Gruman at Infoworld has started a Save XP Web petition, its has c 100,000 signatures. On the petition site's comments section, some users proclaimed they will downgrade from Vista to XP, which, interestingly is an option available in the past to businesses, but now open for the first time to consumers who buy Vista Ultimate or Business editions — if they need to buy a new computer after XP goes off the market.

The real influence will be business customers though....now we've been doing research recently with SME/SOHO customers' use of ICT and the thing that comes back from them over and over again is that they want simplicity, stability and ease of use. And low cost..... Vista just doesn't have a compelling reason to exist under these criteria, so XP will be around for quite a while

And, as a comment on the news article notes:

"You really can't make 69 percent of your installed base unhappy with you,"

Besides, for those who buy XP and want the Vista experience, there is always this advice from El Reg:

"I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

Also, we know that whatever the Son-of-Vista turns out to be, it'll only really be ready post its Service Pack 2 or whatever by about 2010 earliest, so thats 2+ more years we need to operate - too long to be unsupported, too short to justify a new OS buy for a "why?" system.

Me...I'm off down the local store to get me a few XP OS's before June 30th just in case.......

e-Book Readers don't stand a chance, sez C:net:

The only way e-book readers will emerge from their current state of irrelevance is if the manufacturers of the device decide to make them free or as close as possible to free and then make their money on the e-books. At that point, consumers would be more than happy to pick up a Kindle or a Sony Reader and buy cheaper books at their leisure. And by doing that, everyone wins: the installed base will increase dramatically, e-books will sell far more copies than previously imagined and the niche market could finally become a mainstream alternative to print books.

Until then, this industry has no promise. Let's face it -- if you can buy a book for $30, why would you spend over $300 just to be able to read it?

The economics of the e-book reader industry are off and so far, no one in the business has realized it. It's time they wake up and see what's really going on.

I apologise in advance, but this is making me grumpy because it is so adamant a post, and yet shows a level of disregard of both the economics and the emerging technology that makes me think the author is not that familiar with the latest developments in the field.

We did a piece of work last year on the future of e-Books and e-Readers for Plastic Logic, a manufacturer of state of the art plastic paper, and if you look at the trajectory of that technology you know that its coming over the next few years. The Kindle is 5 year old technology (at least) re-hashed, but the next generation is a different thing entirely.

As for the economics, this is classical, well, classical thinking.

An e-Book doesn't need to be manufactured so will sell for less than a paper book (and let us not mention bitTorrent), and many of the early use cases will be pro-sumers and corporate types where its not a book, but a pad with X'00 papers and magazines to read on business trips etc,

We had opined that this would occur last year, and more recently were amused to note that Gartner had somewhat belatedly reversed their position (Forrester have yet to admit the iPhone is fit for business purpose).

If you go to the above lnk to our article, you'll see some of the quotes from a discussion I started on the Mobile Monday London board, where it became clear to us that the iPhone will do the job in many people's eyes. (This was brought about by a discussion with a client about viability of jumping blabkberry and going straight to iPhone)

More evidence, if it is needed, that the fight for the next generation mobile email device is on in this report on C:Net.

Unfortunately for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, the in-store price for the 8820 was the same as the iPhone. I deliberated for all of three seconds and walked out with the iPhone.

My reason was simple: I needed something that would sync consistently with my Mac. My Blackberry-to-Mac sync has been hit or miss for the past year (though I've been testing a beta of the new PocketMac and it is quite good) and I'm fed up. I just want something that works.

The iPhone "just works," and then some.

I thought I wouldn't be able to type on the iPhone without tactile feedback. I was wrong. I'm actually faster on the iPhone than I ever was on the Blackberry, and that's with only an hour of "training."

I thought I would miss a host of things with my Blackberry, but I haven't. Instead, I've been blown away by the innovative use of gestures and the user interface. I resisted the iPhone for a year or so, but looking back it was inevitable that I'd end here.

Now, what is clear is that the Apple style user interface will be copied, but the iPhone has two other benefits - it is simply a better "standard render" web device than other mobiles (which impacts RIM), and it is also less susceptible to operators fiddling with it and making it non standard.(which impacts les autres).

The big difference between The Internet Crowd and Planet Mobile is that the IP people want the Web to run as is on a mobile device with minimal interference, whereas Planet Mobile wants to "optimise the experience". We hypothesize that the IP school will win in the next year or so, simply because the iPhone has shown it is possible.

This also means that developing for the iPhone (and following devices) will increasingly cost in vs devising services for the current confusion of varying operator stacks, operating systems and UI's out there. (There are NOT 2bn mobile phones out there, there are 2bn mobile devices operating in a "Tower of Babel" of fragmented small segments, few of which are in themselves viable markets).

I would hypothesize that the SoHo and SME world will adopt non-Blackberry first, as they have the more flexible, less legacy tech stacks, and that divisions of corporates will follow, dragging Corp CIOs kicking and screaming behind.

From Ars Technica, quoting a report from the British Educational Computing Technology Authority.

"We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit," it said.

However, if they want Vista style operational efficiency on an XP platform we can offer them this sage advice

From the too good to be true dept:

It is well known that the amount of data you leave around is there forever, and youthful indiscretions on Facebook today will come back to haunt you later - but who would have thought digital footfalls on a Wiil could expose infidelity. Sez the Register about a US soldier who suspected cuckoldry but whose wife denied it:

However, he continued: "All that changed when I plug in my Nintendo Wii for some Wii Sports. I flip through the Wii menu and visit the Mii channel so I can peruse the many friends that I have created with the guys that I played with in Iraq. As I go through the characters I see there is a Mii that I have not created."

Tony concluded: "I went into the Wii message board and click on the calendar option. Through this menu I was able to identify the many nights my wife's Mii and this other Mii character played Wii bowling."

And she was bowling with his balls.....

We've said it before. we'll say it now, and we'll say it again - be careful about what you put online - it will come back to haunt you.....

Yesterday Amazon launched the Kindle e-Reader, and as Dave Winer complained, the GeekPress clamped on in a big way (see Techmeme this time yesterday) without really knowing what they were talking about. (We were too busy being thrown out of Facebook yesterday to comment).

Anyway, Sez Dave:

Steve Levy writes an article that appears in Newsweek about new hardware from Amazon, and it's an instant coral reef, within an hour or two it's the top item on TechMeme and there's a whole ecosystem of thought about it, published by people who have no information other than what they read in Levy's article.

But rest assured, dear reader - having worked on e-Reader projects ourselves (see here), we can honestly say that we do know what we are talking about

So, lets talk a bit about Kindle then:

Kindle is available starting today for $399 at http://amazon.com/kindle.

OK...road warrior / pro-sumer market for now.

Downloads Content Wirelessly (via EVDO), No PC Required, No Hunting for Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Interesting...thats a lot of onboard cost and weight, its a small computer rather than a pure reader - why not just use bluetooth to hook to a PC or Mobile?

No Monthly Wireless Bills or Commitments

Clearly...people already pay for mobile and broadband. Amazon says it has to pay, so thats a subsidy model (or more likely built into the book charges) - weakness if a reader comes out that can piggyback off PC / Mobile

Reads Like Paper

No, nothing reads quite like paper yet, though the next generation e-papers are getting good.

Books, Blogs, Magazines and Newspapers
On an e-Reader - well I never! Oh...you mean there's a price tag?

The same Amazon shopping experience customers are accustomed to is offered in the Kindle Store, including customer reviews, personalized recommendations, 1-Click purchasing, and everyday low prices. Additionally, Kindle customers can download and read the first chapter of most Kindle books for free.

Kindle customers can select from the most recognized U.S. newspapers, as well as popular magazines and journals, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, TIME and Fortune. The Kindle Store also includes top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland, including Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine and The Irish Times. Subscriptions are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle overnight so that the latest edition is waiting for customers when they wake up. Monthly Kindle newspaper subscriptions are $5.99 to $14.99 per month, and Kindle magazines are $1.25 to $3.49 per month. All magazines and newspapers include a free two-week trial.

Ah...a closed loop end to end system like...oh...iTunes, but with stuff costing more. Who would have thought? And even blogs...but no longer free, we note, and an incredibly limited choice!

The Kindle Store has over 300 blogs on topics ranging from Internet and technology to culture, lifestyle, and humor, to politics and opinion. Examples include Slashdot, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, The Onion, The Huffington Post, and ESPN blogs. Blogs are updated and downloaded wirelessly throughout the day so Kindle customers can read blogs whenever and wherever they want. Wireless delivery of blogs costs as little as $0.99 each per month and also includes a free two-week trial.

Not a dicky bird about the DRM I note....what gives there, Amazon?
(Update - more on DRM here in boing boing. Not good news.)

Holds Hundreds of Books in 10.3 Ounces
On the heavy end of design envelopes (for its size)....clearly a lot of in-board gear

Built-In Dictionary and Wikipedia

Well well...and a thesauraus too, we'll bet!

Long Battery Life

More weight

Search (of the Kindle store for Stuff to Buy variety)

Surprise

Annotation and Bookmarks

A must have


Ergonomic Design
Not sure about this one...that screen looks a bit small to give a book-like experience

Adjustable Text Size
Must have

Personal Documents
At a price:

Customers can take their personal documents with them on their Kindle. Customers and their contacts can e-mail Word documents and pictures directly to their unique and customizable Kindle e-mail address for $0.10 each. Kindle supports wireless delivery of unprotected Microsoft(R) Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP files.

Comes Ready To Use

Must have.

Our take - this will limit its own market - device is too clunky (and small screen) for general use, and the economics are usurious - making me pay $0.10 every time I want to download my own stuff is unacceptable. $399 is quite a heft considering you have to keep on paying into a closed system to buy content ( Quiz - do closed systems usually sell stuff at (i) premium or (ii) discount).

In addition, this device disobeys the No. 1 Law of all consumer devices - The Free Ride - this device does not give me any benefits for my existing assets - my connectivity, geekware, material I have already - and quite simply it doesn't allow people to enjoy material from their friends' collections for free (unlike, say, a book, where I buy it and loan it to you for...free)

(Afterthought - Its something I'd have expected a mobile phone company to come up with...)

The delightfully curmudgeonly Nick Carr notes that:

The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.

Its just that with a real book, the sanctity is pay once lend many. With this, its the gift that keeps on taking.

Postscript - not trying to be snarky, but whats with the tame research houses coverage of stuff these days? Facebook got a paean of praise from Forrester, this one from Jupiter, while the blogosphere is much more balanced....and free!

Post Postscript - and even the Blodget Blog only got the "pay for free newspapers" one today (thats Wednesday, two days later) - read da small print ladz