I think it started with the iPhone and Safari, combining the power of a Webkit browser and a mobile phone for the first time. Later adopted by Nokia and Google among others, the mobile browsing experience has improved in leaps and bounds over the last three years. Today, vendors offer to deliver the “real Internet” to devices but I’m not certain that the “real Internet” is what matters for mobility.
I was fortunate to get to spend some nice hands on time with the iPad. This is a first take on my initial impressions of the device. I should have a final unit here shortly so look for a full review soon. Of course, post your questions in the comments and I’ll answer as many as I can.
The PC has come a long way since it entered the home. Going from a disconnected device with little connectivity, it has become one of the core focal points for the digital home. Household PC penetration is on the rise with many homes having two PCs, and it’s not uncommon for some to have three to or more. With the rise of lower cost laptops and netbooks, the average age at which a child receives their own PC is getting younger and younger each year. This growth of the PC within the home is not without complications and more consumers are growing frustrated as the proliferation of PCs make management, configuration and support a new and unwelcome household chore.
It’s sometimes a challenge to understand how arguably better technologies often lose out to things that are inferior. We’ve seen it time and time again. The problem is that consumers are often not interested in the “best” technology but are more than satisfied with that which is “good enough”. These days, a good example would be to look at Blu-Ray and how it’s being adopted by consumers.
It’s been an interesting week, despite CES 2010 running in Las Vegas, two of the most talked about stories have been Google’s news of the Nexus One with final price and availability and the reports of Apple planning an event to make a major product announcement. I’ll save the Apple discussion until at least the invitations go out so instead, I’ll keep the focus on the Nexus One. I’ve had a chance to spend some hands on with the device and it’s pretty impressive.
It didn’t come as much as a surprise, but the good folks working on the One Laptop Per Child Project announced that the that the OLPC XO-2 concept had been shelved and in what appears to be bowing to the hype of tablet form factors, they’ve announced the new XO-3. Yawn. Feels like we’ve been here before and you know why? It’s because we have.
I recently dined at a fancy restaurant here in NY with some friends and was surprised at the rather miniscule portions that were served. “Less is more” I was told and in this case it proved to be correct. Less was definitely more if we were talking about price. In terms of filling, however, less was most certainly, well, less. Fortunately there are also cheap, late night burger joints where more is just more.
This experience comes to mind as I’m looking at a new phone from Sony Ericsson called the Xperia Pureness, that takes a page from the “less is more” playbook. The phone sells in the US at places such as Saks Fifth Avenue for $990 US. Yes, that’s not a typo, this is a $990 phone. As Sony Ericsson puts it “In an increasingly complex world, an innovative phone is honed down to the essentials. Xperia Pureness is free from excessive features, leaving an exceptionally simplified mobile experience. Talk. Text. Time.” Yep, the theme of the Pureness is “talk.text.time” and when SE says that, they mean it pretty literally.
In a world that’s short on all sorts of resources from oil and gas to water, recently we’ve been asked to cut down our use yet more. Last week, Ralph de la Vega said heavy users of music over data on the AT&T wireless network were bandwidth hogs, that 3% of smartphone users were using 40% of his capacity and frankly, we need to all cut back just a bit. Spectrum is among the few things that they’re not making any more of and, with more users than ever, it’s going to be hard to come up with the capacity needed to keep everyone happy. One solution to this is to shift some of the capacity off of current networks and come up with new broadcast models for content distribution. The folks at FloTV have done just that. The service has been around for a bit, mostly on handsets from AT&T that carry support for the service. In a reverse trend the FloTV folks have gone from the phone to creating a dedicated device for the service.
Over the weekend, news broke from both the NY Times and Wall Street Journal that Apple had purchased the online music service Lala.
What’s Lala? A little background. Lala’s been around for awhile, gone through iterations involving free online listening before settling in on a hybrid model. First. Lala lets you listen to any song you currently have on your PC that it matches to its database (a concept based on the idea of music fingerprints and a digital locker that goes back to the early days of mp3.com) and upload any song you may have that they don’t know about. Once completed, you’ve now got access to all your music any place there’s a computer with a web browser and an internet connection. There’s also an additional model that lets you listen to any song for free but only once. After that the song must be “purchased” and can only be streamed from the web but not downloaded to a computer or any other offline device.
Nokia’s first PC (as opposed to the phones they refer to as multimedia computers) got a lot of hype when it was announced and is getting a lot of mixed reviews from folks who complain mostly about price/performance and that you can get better specs in a netbook for less money. After spending some time with a Booklet 3G, I’m once again reminded that there’s more to a purchase than speeds and feeds, and that value, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So I’m not going to discuss the relatively slow processor or hard drive. We can agree that the Booklet isn’t a speed demon. It is, however, how a good PC experience should be and that’s worth paying for in my opinion.
I love watching excellence in motion. Watching Fred Astaire dance, reading a poem by Robert Frost, watching Michael Jordan play ball, Tiger Woods play golf or opening new products that have the ability to bring a smile to my face. They all share one thing, these folks make it look so easy. The result of hard work and tireless practice is that the performance appears almost effortless. Of course, that’s never the case.
I’m constantly amazed at the number and the degree of badly designed products out there that come to market. I’m talking bad stuff. I mean stuff that had to go from concept, to design, to prototype and eventually make it to the retail channel. Stuff so bad that it’s impossible to imagine that anyone in their right mind signed off on the process and the steps along the way. The stuff that makes you scream…”what were they thinking?” You don’t need to be a genius to know that some of this stuff just won’t work. It isn’t rocket science, it’s just focusing on the basics and this is why much of the criticism is warranted.
This past week I was at the opening of Apple’s latest store in NYC. It’s a work of art with a forty five foot glass wall, an all glass ceiling and marble walls. Along with that there’s the now iconic glass staircase. In many ways, it’s more a community gathering place for Apple customers and potential customers than it is a retail store. The beauty of the stores are effective but that’s not what’s ultimately driving sales. At the end of the day, the physical store is merely the visible manifestation of the Apple customer experience. Exercise if you’re Michael Dell. Build a store with a forty five foot glass wall and ceiling and see if you sell more PCs.
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