The mobile web experience needs fundamental rethinking

Michael Mace reports that mobile applications, or the development of software that runs on specific mobile platforms is dead. Michael Mace is an expert from the industry so he probably knows what he is talking about.  He writes:

We told ourselves that the fundamental rule of our business was: Mobile is different. But we lost sight of an even more fundamental law that applies to any computing platform:

A platform that is technically flawed but has a good business model will always beat a platform that is elegant but has a poor business model.

As it turns out developing software specific for mobile platforms developers encounter many difficulties. According to Michael Mace there are at least 10 different platforms software needs to be developed upon. The software needs certification, which costs a lot of money. But most important of all, the mobile operator has effectively taken over all distribution making it nearly impossible for a mobile software developer to distribute his software. The solution to this, Michal says, is the web:

Meanwhile, there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It’s horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model.

His most important argument to support this is that on the web the domination of the mobile operators is broken. I agree with Michael on that. The mobile operators do not control development, distribution, marketing and sales on the web. For this reason Google and Yahoo have very effectively pushed the mobile operators back into their role as access provider. It is the mobile operators arrogance, coming from a world in which they had a monopoly, that has lead to failed attempts to move up the value chain. Experiments with content distribution and other innovative services have failed. Mostly because the mobile operator, unlike most web companies, never had to think about providing the user with value.

So where does that leave the user? He is stuck with the world wide web that really doesn’t fit very well onto his small mobile device.  Browsing the web using a mobile device leads to a number of problems:

1. Browsing is expensive. Current web pages aren’t optimized for mobile devices forcing the user to download a lot of redundant information. As mobile data rates are still expensive the user is left with high monthly bills.
2. Browsing is slow. I currently use a Nokia N95 with UMTS/HSDPA connection and still it takes ages to view pages on the web. Not nearly as fast as my laptop, making it a cumbersome experience
3. Inputting data is a pain. I don’t have a keyboard to type, so I’m stuck using the mobile phone buttons. The overhead is at least 50% forcing me to type way more than I want to. And I tried using the iPhone’s keyboard. It’s arguably better than using the mobile phone buttons, but I still mistype a lot, because of the small size of the keyboard.
4. The screen of the mobile phone is just too small to look at web pages. Apple has invented the touch screen and smart gesture UI allowing me to quickly zoom in/out ad move around on a page. But it really isn’t solving the problem, the UI is simply providing an optimized solution for a problem that isn’t fundamentally resolved.
5. My Nokia N95 has GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA/WiFi/BlueTooth and Infrared capabilities. While this is technically probably the best you can get right now, it isn’t simple to use. This makes (affordable) access for naive mobile users a difficult task.
6. A mobile phone isn’t a computer. It has all the technology inside that computers have too, but it is fundamentally different due to not only its size but also the way it is used. For me it isn’t a computer or a telephone. It is my remote control of life. Web developers often fail to understand the implications of this. We need fundamental rethinking of service development for mobile devices. Developers that translate web services onto mobile devices will not succeed in addressing these issues.

How can we get the mass to adopt the mobile web? In my opinion a few things need to be addressed first in order to make this happen:

1. Mobile operators need to lower their data rate plans and come with easy to understand flat rate rate plans that allow users to download and upload as much data as they want without having to pay too much for it. The operators won’t be doing that just to please us of course. But with the increased competition in mobile voice, and from access technologies such as WiFi and possibly WiMax leading to price erosion, the operators will have to rethink their mobile data strategy.
2. Hardware manufacturers need to rethink the software currently residing on mobile devices. It is too technical, too functionality oriented and is not fit to fill in my desire to make it my remote control of life. I’ve explained this earlier in a post called “We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking”. Apple is doing a much better job than any of the hardware makers such as Nokia and Samsung and that should really make them think about what they have been producing so far.
3. Service developers need to really understand what I use my remote control of life for. It isn’t a very small computer that I use to do the same thing I can do much better on a full size laptop. My mobile device is an interaction device. I use it to interact with others. I do not (yet) use it as a TV screen. I don’t need to have all my web services on it. But I do need every innovative service that allows me to interact with my family and friends. It contains my most important address book. It allows me to send and receive messages, I can call and talk to people, and in the future I can see other people on it too. I can capture images and video with it and I might want to share those immediately with my family and friends. I want to know what the people I follow closely are doing and I want to be able to reach one or many of them without any effort on my side. I want to see all messages addressed to me or messages the people I follow find important enough to share, no matter if it is SMS, e-mail, a Tweet, IM, whatever. Sure, I listen to music on it, I surf the web every once in a while, and I even sometimes watch some video or TV on it. But not nearly as often as I interact with others on it! Once we get the interaction right, we might start thinking about other services like identification or buying and selling of stuff. But interaction comes first, always.

The desire of humans to interact and use their personal remote control for it will be large enough to ensure that mobile Internet will become successful in the end. Since the (technical, cost) barriers are still quite large I think the mass will not adopt it yet.  2008 might be the year in which a number of the issues will be addressed. We might see further improvements in usability, platform standardization with Google’s Android, improved mobile search, the breakthrough of Twitter like services to the mass, and even a few optimized mobile web based services. We will see a few (ad-based) experiments to offer free or low cost mobile services. But my guess is that mass adoption of Mobile Internet will take a bit longer. First we need people to rethink the fundamentals so that the mobile device can support the interaction between the user and his contacts better than it does now. It’s usability could be so much better!

The usability of mobile phones could be so much better

A few days ago I realised (yet again) that the mobile phone could be made so much better. In such a way that the interface would start working for me as a user, instead of me having to work the interface of the phone (disclosure: I use a Nokia N95, but previous phones from Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson gave me very similar experiences). (Another disclosure: yeah, I’m one of those suckers that hasn’t got an iPhone).

It started when I wanted to SMS something to Twitter after I woke up. The following happened:

I pressed the icon for SMS. Started typing “twit” in the address field, the N95 understood Twitter and I could continue to write the actual SMS. Started typing “Woke up early this morning, about to go to the office”. The display showed “Wolf up das?”. Darn, wrong language set. Pressed options, arrow up, arrow up, arrow up, enter, arrow down and selected “English”. Then pressed c,c,c,c,c and started typing “e”, pressed * to change the word “Wolf”into “Woke” and continued the sentence. Had to change “in”into “go” and finished the sentence. Options, then send. After approximately 100 key presses I was able to send away my 53 character message. An overhead of almost 100%.

Next thing I did was get into my car and drive to the office. I decided to turn on the Twitter message stream to my mobile so that I could see who was doing what. So every few minutes I would get an SMS notification from Twitter. I’d pick up the phone, pressed new message and read it while driving. After reading the message I would immediately press options, arrow down, delete message,enter and then the big red button to get back to the main screen while I was still driving. I need to clean up Twitter SMSes immediately as they clutter my inbox way too much. On a typical drive of about 1 hour I get as many as 30-40 messages, and when there are a lot of people on-line even more.

Naturally I wanted to respond to a few Twitter messages, so while driving, I typed a few short messages to Twitter friends. It takes 7 presses to get the @ sign needed in Twitter. I had to switch 3 times back and forth between languages as I follow Dutch and English speaking Twitter friends. In the mean time I answered a few calls, and I got behind in reading the Twitter alerts who would come in during the calls. I ended up with some 10-15 unread Twitter alerts, not to mention the irritating signalling of the alerts during my call.

I wanted to check something on-line, so I fired up the web browser to go on-line. I needed to type in the web address, which is pretty lame to do while in the car. Took me a few minutes, then waited for the web site to appear, only to find out it was too big to see on my mobile display. So I ended up scrolling the site to reach a point where I needed to enter text for a search. Of course I was typing in the wrong language. Ended up wiping out a lot of pressed characters and entering them individually, with spaces between them, which I then erased again to prevent the phone from thinking for me. The Twitter alerts kept coming in.

By the timeI got to the office I was about 20 messages behind. It took me a lot of time deleting them (reading them too me too long). Twitter produces enough alerts to overflow my inbox. I finally switched off Twitter by sending an off message and then I could start work.

Later that day I wanted to check something on my weblog using my mobile phone. I fired up the web browser, tried to connect to a WiFi access point only to discover I didn’t have access. Reverting back to UMTS I typed in my web log address and waited for the content to appear. The site is too big for the screen so Nokia provides me with a cursor to scroll back and forth. This is not nearly as cool as the iPhone does it (you can zoom in/zoom out and move around with your fingers on a touch screen), but at least I can get to the place I wanted to look at. I tried to open and stream a video embedded in the weblog. The phone started a video player which was hopeful, but the video never showed. Unable to grasp why it didn’t work I pressed the big red button to get to teh main phone screen. I saw a nice sunset from my office window and decided to take a picture of it. I opened up the camera at the back of the phone and wanted to take a picture. I got a “not enough memory, please close other applications first” message. It took me a while to figure out that the Internet connection was still there and I needed to close that off explicitly. Closed the camera, and opened it again to activate it and finally took the picture. Luckily Shozu worked fine and I could upload the picture with one press to my Flickr account.

That very same day the phone froze up on me once, and resetted itself (nice). I used it for another 20-30 SMSes or so, browsed the web about 3 times more and finally drove home again.

So what is the moral of this story? Well, there are a few things I realised once I got home and started thinking about the experiences I had that day:

1. The average overhead in terms of user actions, button presses, menu choices etc. is on average anywhere between 50 and 100%
2. The inbox-outbox principle of the mobile phone for messaging is a real mess and is not capable of handling 50-100 messages a day without tremendous overhead for the user
3. Web browsing sucks. The screen is too small, entering data takes too much time, a lot of the content doesn’t display, and no matter how nice the interface is, browsing on a mobile phone screen just isn’t any good. No, not even on an iPhone, sorry.
4. Multi langual input is a pain. it takes a lot of switching between dictionaries to get it to work for me. Turning the dictionaries off doesn’t work either because then I have to press way too many buttons to type.
5. Multitasking on a mobile phone is nearly impossible. Try web browsing while receiving SMSes, phone calls, and trying to take a picture in between. The phone can’t cope with it.

There is actually one functionality for which the mobile phone is optimised. It works just fine for making and receiving calls! One could easily argue that I’m trying to do things on the phone that are not normal. But, I described a pretty average day for me as a mobile user. Yes, I use the phone in the car. I do all these things, and preferably in parallel. Have you watched (your own) kids lately. They multitask even more than I do. And they deal with the complexity, just as I do. Grow up and deal with it.

But that doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied with the product. It basically is not fit for the job. Most of the mobile OSes are based upon mimicking the desktop PC interface, which sucks. The inbox/outbox principle for messaging is as old as e-mail and is not fit for today’s messaging needs. The interfaces haven’t really radically improved. We have gotten more applications, more possible connections, and ultimately more complexity. The iPhone’s major improvement is the touch screen and some really cool UI inventions. But even with the iPhone trying to do the things I decribed earlier aren’t easy.

I have said it before, we really need people to start thinking out of the box when it comes to the mobile user interface. We need people that first think about what, how, and why people are using it during a typical day. And design a user interface that works for the user to get his things done, not the other way around. With Google Android on its way there lies an opportunity to do just that. Why? Because it is open (how open remains to be seen). If it can overcome the Mobile OS es the mobile phone manufacturers ship with it, then there is hope. We might get to see some great designers rethink the mobile interface and update it to support the multitasking, multicontent, multi messaging and browsing world most of its user are in right now. The usability of mobile phones could be made so much better.

Update: just saw that there is another discussion now about the iPhone producing a lot of data traffic. That could imply that its usability has improved over other types of mobile phones, allowing the users to access the Internet easier. At the same time iPhone users are mostly tech savvy, and capable of handling the complexity provided by mobile phones. But the iPhone, with all its incredible UI novelties is still based upon the idea of browsing the way we browse with a desktop. The browsing paradigm hasn’t changed, it has justgotten a better interface. We will have to wait and see if that is good enough. I doubt it. We haven’t seen a real revolution yet, just a fast improvement over something that was really bad in the first place.

Just a few wishes for 2008 (part 2)

In my first post in 2008 I said I would elaborate a bit about things I would like to see happen in 2008. My first wish for 2008 was to bring back freedom and responsibility to the user. The article can be found here but if you want a very short abstract, I said:

My first wish for 2008 is that Service Providers build business models on user value instead of walled garden free but ad-based business models. In doing this they should provide the user with excellent, easy to use, transparent, privacy controls where the default is always set by the standards of the user. This wish would provide us with 3 major changes: The service provider becomes a partner that can be trusted and that provides user value instead of walled gardens, the user gets his freedom, and the user becomes responsible for his own actions and data on the Internet.

I just read an article written by John Battelle that takes a similar angle. He says:

The problem is, no one seems ready to truly set the social graph free. Till now.

With one move, Facebook can change the face (sorry) of this debate by making it falling-down easy to export your social graph. And I predict that it will.

Why? Because I think in the end, Facebook will win based on the services it provides for that data. Set the data free, and it will come back to roost wherever it’s best used. And if Facebook doesn’t win that race, well, it’ll lose over time anyway. Such a move is entirely in line with the company’s nascent philosophy, and would be a massively popular move within the ouroborosphere (my name for all things Techmeme).

Compete on service, Facebook, it’s where the world is headed anyway!

Let’s move on to my next wishes for 2008.

 2. Redesign of the mobile UI and Web to make it really work for its user

I personally feel that accessing the web using my mobile sucks. The experience isn’t even close to the capabilities I have access to on a PC. I have written an article about this called “We need a revolution in mobile UI thinking”. A quote from that:

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

After I wrote that article I was asked what I felt about ovi by Nokia. It is difficult for me to really comment on that until I have actually used it, but a few things come to mind.

The thing I really dislike about it is the pay off they use, “ovi by Nokia, your door to our services”. What do you mean “our services”? My mobile phone is mine, it is my personal space, my remote control of life. I don’t want anyone to tell me what services to use. Ovi might look great, but if it isn’t truly open, forget it. I won’t be using it. I want to decide what services I access via any mobile interface. It needs an API so that anyone can build services on it.  It needs to be freed from any mobile hardware. If a mobile interface is to become successful, it better work on a lot of different handsets. Maybe Android might fill this in, but it remains to be seen. But most of all, we need to get out of the current mobile UI interface, It isn’t fit for our social communications needs.

          

(images taken from www.s60.com)

We are still using SMS, web browsing (screen too small, bandwidth/cost too high), and that darn inbox/outbox paradigm (ever tried to handle 100 or more SMSes, MMSes, e-mails  a day using that mechanism?). Old school thinking.

Microsoft just announced their version 7 of their Mobile platform. It uses a touchscreen,  like the iPhone does, as a main interface element but will also use motion gestures of the user as a UI interface element.It will be interesting to see if this will lead to better UI development, but For now I hear a lot of technological features, not user experiences. And, I still see the inbox/outbox appearing in the screen shots.

3. Human behavior as the basis for new service development

Innovation is so often triggered by technology. That is not a bad thing necessarily. Many great developments start with the application of new technologies. However, where a lot of these innovations fail is their ability to support human behavior. Technology needs to be used and needs to be useful. If it isn’t the case, then the role of human behavior hasn’t been taken in account thoroughly enough. There have been numerous new technological capabilities launched in 2007 with confusing names and propositions. Just look at a snapshot of the web 2.0 directory and tell me, which services do you know and actually use?

So often this is caused by people thinking they know what users want, but fail to simply engage with them to really understand human need. I call that observing social behavior though a fishbowl. It sounds so simple, yet is hard to do. At the same time, the reward for providing user value is very big.

The good thing about this is that it leads you away from a mediocre web business model that is currently being used in web 2.0 developments. Instead of thinking about locking in the customer, you need to think of providing him value (thus setting him free, big difference).

4. Let content exploration become an interactive adventure again

There is an enormous amount of content on the Internet. Way too much to handle. It becomes increasingly difficult to find the right content. To help us there are numerous sites that index and present the available content to us. But that doesn’t help either. If I want to find something which might interest me but I don’t  really know what it is I’m lost. I tried browsing sites like YouTube, but it doesn’t work for me. I could look at the most popular, best watched, highest rated video’s, simply browse on subject or whatever, but at the same time I feel the interface isn’t helping me to find what I want. I’m not the only one with that problem. Looking at the blogosphere there are many examples of a video traveling through many different blogs. Everyone is looking at or recommending the same cleverly launched video’s.

I think the overwhelming availability of content is one part of the problem. The rating mechanism’s every site uses is another (it helps us all look at the same things). But the third aspect of this problem is human laziness. We all want to be entertained, but we don’t really want to put in the effort to find great content. The reason for this is that it is actually quite boring to find content using the current sites and interfaces provided. The search for content needs to become an adventure again. We need to explore new worlds, and get excited by all of our personal findings. To do that, we need new ways of exploration, new interfaces to enter these large worlds.

I hope that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will be paying a lot of attention into the work of Jonathan Harris. He has shown that the exploration of content can become exiting and adventurous.

Check out his universe demo to see what I mean by that. It is a new paradigm for browsing, and it is a powerful one. While you are at it, also take a look at some of his other projects. He has done some amazing and inspiring stuff.

5.  Let the web continue to be a place for inspiration

I read a lot of blogs, surf to different sites, communicate with family, friends and even total strangers. Why? Well, for one thing, interaction is what life is about. But another way of looking at it is that it helps me to find inspiration. Inspiration in life, work, blogging, anything really. There are so many smart and creative people out there. All you need to do is take the time to look around. I posted a few inspirational sources earlier here, but it is really just a modest list.

Enough for now. What are your wishes for 2008? Let me know? It would be interesting to compile them all together.

We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking

A few days ago I was fiddling around with my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) and it occurred to me (yet again) that the current mobile phone user interface just doesn’t work for me. Yes, the screens have become much bigger, it has impressive functionalities, a camera which is almost as good as a regular digital camera, it has HSDPA, WiFi you name it. But it just doesn’t work. The mobile phone interface is a phone interface with some application extra’s. It isn’t really a USER centric interface.

Just take the most basic mobile functionality you can think of (no it is not calling), messaging. I have several (technical) options to send a message to another person. But the phone forces me to resolve the technical details. I have to think about whether I want to send an SMS, e-mail or MMS (yes, I am one of those users that actually use MMS). People will obviously SMS most of the time, but with our physical and Internet world becoming connected in so many ways this will not remain to be the obvious choice. Once I have made a choice I need to wade through several menu’s in order to enter the message content, select the receiver and finally send the message away. It gets worse when I receive messages. Not only do I have several different types of inboxes (SMS, e-mail, MMS), but the notification mechanisms really suck. An SMS or MMS alert draws all my attention away from the thing I was doing. E-mail isn’t noted at all. If you don’t think this is a problem I recommend you try out Twitter and get it to send your tweets to your mobile phone for an hour or so. You see instantly why this messaging mechanisms doesn’t work. It floods my inbox and it distracts me constantly. I have to perform too many actions to read all the messages and then delete them again.

Nokia and other manufacturers are constantly working on their user interface. But they are simply improving on an old concept. Wiht the increased graphics and computing power I hoped they would not improve, but thoroughly redesign the user interface. It isn’t a phone anymore. It is my remote control of life. It needs a user centric interface where not the mobile phone functionality takes the central place in design, but the way I want to use that functionality! I want freedom, instead of being trapped into a user interface that limits my options. But they haven’t. And that is one of the main reasons I think mobile Internet will not break through to the masses yet.

I haven’t mentioned the iPhone up to this point. I don’t own one and only played with it a few times so it wouldn’t be fair to draw conclusions about it based upon a few observations. I can say that based upon first impressions Apple has done a great job in providing us with a totally new UI element when they introduced the touch screen. They have put great effort into usability. But I can’t help but think that even on the iPhone, the UI paradigms haven’t been as disruptive as I would have liked them to be, even if it stimulates mobile internet usage.

Readwrite web reports today that the mobile phone penetration worldwide increases even more than predicted, with currently over 3.3 Bln mobile phone subscriptions. I’m not surprised at that. With more and more strong developing countries now being covered by mobile networks, people in China, India, Africa and South America people fall for the very same being connected trap we all fell for. The mobile phone makes it possible to connect and be connected whenever and where ever we want.

In the article Richard McManus points us to a recent study by Nielsen that reveals that 35% of US teens (8-12 yr) now own a mobile phone and that 5% sometimes uses it for Internet. Richard feels that this is enough evidence to show that the mobile Internet is finally ready to take off.

I’m not so sure about it. The breakthrough of mobile Internet has been predicted many times. But it isn’t there yet. The most important indicator to me that it isn’t there yet is the ever increasing SMS traffic. Why use such an outdated and cumbersome messaging protocol instead of using the possibilities the web has to offer? It isn’t just price, although that is a major barrier to be resolved. I think a lot has to do with usability. Sending an SMS has become easy for people to use (even with the flaws mentioned above). Firing up the Internet anywhere (and I don’t mean just in places near a WiFi point) isn’t simple. And once on-line we are limited within the technical barriers of the mobile phone. Browsing the web doesn’t work on such a small screen.

And instead of thinking about entirely new metaphores for mobile Internet we start moving around this issue and develop solutions that aren’t really solving the problem. One way is to redefine the ENTIRE web (yeah right), by creating special mobile pages. These pages are smaller, need less data transfer and are basically optimised for the mobile phone browser. While this might sound like a good solution it really doesn’t work. First of all, it would take an impossible effort to rebuild the entire web to make it usable for the mobile phone, and secondly, it leaves the user with the task of solving complexity. Do I go to www.flickr.com (which I can remember), or do I need to try m.flickr.com. And how do I upload my picture there?

Another option is to develop a touch screen and really cool zooming and moving around functionality to handle these big pages. Apple did just that with their iPhone. They are providing us with a intuitive solution to handle big amounts of data, but they aren’t fundamentally solving the problem.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. Maybe I’ll ask Chris Messina to create some designs for this particular idea. He does a pretty cool job designing nice interfaces.

We need to let go of current paradigms, and ask ourselves, what is a user going to do with his phone in this social networking age?  It opens a new world of possibilites, a world without mobile web browsing, a world of freedom for the user. So who is going to free me from the limitations of the mobile phone and give me my remote control of life? Or maybe I should start something myself, anyone interested to join?

Who is going to add value to my remote control of life?

Today is another day after, this time the day after Google announced its Android Mobile OS initiative. Incredible amounts of posts have already been written about it, many of them talking about the breaking news, a lot of them analysing what it means (for example here and here), and very few talking about what it means for the mobile user (actually, I tried searching for it in Google reader and couldn’t come up with a search term that showed me more about the user perspective). Look at techmeme for the tech bloggers bandwagon overview.

So let’s take a look at the user’s perspective. In a previous post I stated that Mobile Internet will eventually break through to the mass but that there are still a number of hurdles to be taken.

The question is now, does the Android initiative provide possibilities to take on any of these hurdles? The most important aspect of the Android Mobile OS, in my opinion, is that it will be open source. What I hope will happen is that it will trigger many developers to start developing new software for mobile users that will work on all kinds of handsets, and will integrate much better with existing mobile phone functionalities. Off course there are already mobile OS platforms available, Windows mobile and Symbian probably being the most important competitors. But, Android, by its open nature, will bring mobile application development into a new ball game, forcing the other platforms to open up as well.

Besides the smart things other people wrote on the subject I named 5 reasons why mass adoption is not there yet:

1. There aren’t that many really useful services that really enforce mobile Internet into the lives of mobile users. Releasing an open source Mobile OS platform is smart. It will trigger developments, not only by mobile carriers, but by people that understand the mobile being your remote control to life. People that will develop user centric services on your mobile.
2. Mobile devices don’t deliver technically yet what is needed. The main question is always, can a non-tech family member or friend start up your phone and connect it to the Internet. Without you helping out? I think not. But the open source character of the Android platform will force developers to concentrate on UI and user value! It is the only way to differentiate themselves from competitors.
3. The mobile Internet interface is not nearly as flexible, intuitive and usable as the Internet browser and a mouse is on a PC. This is a difficult barrier to take. It not only involves clever UI design and new paradigms to let your mobile phone become the remote control of applications, but there is also a hardware component involved. Phone manufacturers will need to develop better phones with faster CPUs, increased graphics performance, touch screens and new interface paradigms to compensate for the fact that this remote control is rather small when you try to use it in life.
4. The cost is high for a large adoption in the market. You need high end (expensive) handsets like the Nokia N95 or Apple iPhone and transferring data is still pretty expensive.This is an issue that can’t really be solved by the Android OS. We need high end hardware terminals and fast Internet access to make the mobile Internet experience useful to the user. But the mobile terminal manufacturers and mobile carriers need to reconsider pricing of the goodies. Especially data rates are an issue. If I am being punished with high bills for connecting and transerring data between my mobile and the Internet, then I won’t be using it very often.
5. There might be a psychological barrier for users to download new applications onto their mobile phone. It is your most personal device and you won’t put any software on it unless the source is trusted. Trust is an issue. People download ringtones, wallpapers and games to their mobile phones. But will they download social applications which tentacle their way into their address books, pictures, video’s as easily? Tech people will. Business people will, but will the man on the street do it as well? Only if the source is trusted and privacy is a key element in development.

Having said all this, let me state my 5 wishes for functionalities that would really help me as a mobile user:

1. I want to be able to save, reply to and forward voice messages. Sometimes you get a personal message that is important to you. But the message can’t be saved, replied to, or forwarded, and the mobile carrier deletes it after a few days.
2. I want to be able to sent pictures and video messages to my friends phones as well as to the Internet. While applications like Shozu take care of the Internet part. It seems impossible to send a taken picture to a friend, regardless of the handset he uses. Not only does it not arrive half of the time, but I also need to think abut the protocol I use to send it, or look in different inboxes when it arrives. And make sure it is so simple to do that anyone non TECH can actually use it without understanding anything about protocols, message formats, Internet connection parameters, installation etc. An application I will be looking into is Radar. Seems very nice for mobile image and conversation sharing, so I’ll give it a go.
3. I want a integrated graphics enabled inbox for all messages, regardless if they are SMS, MMS or e-mail. Who cares about the different types, the distinction is purely technical. I get all these ugly text based headlines when someone sends me a picture. Show me the thumbnail of the picture and text together so I know what it is about before I actually open the message.
4. I would like much better group features allowing me to call, SMS, send voice messages, pictures, video, or microblog with my friends in the mobile space and Internet space. So if I’m on-line the messages go on-line, and if I’m on the move they go to my mobile. But I hate it the way Twitter clutters my SMS inbox. Having me to look at each message separately and deleting them after I read them. Too much work, and each beep when a new message arrives is annoying (yes I can turn of sound, but that is not the point). We need live feeds, allowing me to follow the flow and only act upon it if I want to.
5. I would like someone to start implementing the best possible distribution platform for downloading cool new applications. How am I supposed to know what software is available for me? I only found out about Shozu after another tech blogger pointed me to it, but my mom will never find it?

I could go on for quite a while, haven’t even said anything about location based services, streaming video, music, applications that have nothing to do with the phone itself (like identification, buying , selling, maps, etc). I am really curious about mobile developments. They can have a huge impact if executed the right way. Who is going to add value to my remote control of life?

Letting go of the connected age

This weekend I went away with my wife and horse to the countryside somewhere in the Netherlands.

It was somewhat a hassle to get on our way as we first had to pack, then get the horse trailer behind our car. Pick up our horse, called Glynnedd (see her picture below), and then drive a few hours to our destination. We were pretty excited, as it was our first trip with our horse outside (We started riding only a few months ago).

For some reason this weekend was the first in a while that we didn’t have access to any computer. It seems that everywhere we go there is always a way to go on-line. Not here. So what do you do as a 24×7 connected tech hero?

Obviously I took out my Nokia N95, my only life line to the (digital) connected world. I surfed to a few sites, looked at my blog, entered my first blog comment using a mobile phone (not very efficient), and remained connected a little via Twitter.

It got even to a point that I took my N95 with me on the first horse riding trip and took a few pictures sending them away to Flickr using Shozu. The quality of the pictures not being very good, as a horse rarely holds still while taking pictures.

I turned the phone to silence mode so that I could receive tweets without the message sounding through the Dutch countryside.

It was my wife that eventually put a stop to this connecting madness. When asked why I needed to be connected all the time to the world, while I could enjoy myself right here and now, I didn’t really have a good answer (don’t you hate it when that happens?). So I decided to disconnect altogether and focus on the event itself.

It made me realise that not being connected all the time is a good thing. Social networks, blogs, twitter, or any other web 2.0 service want you to be in their network all the time, living and sharing your life with others. But it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you need to disconnect and be part of real life.

It is like riding a horse really. You need to go with the flow. The horse feels what you want and acts upon it, and you feel everything the horse is doing and can  respond to that. It is this interaction that makes it so much fun.

A good example of this interaction is when you are riding with 10 horses together. The fun starts when we get into a gallop with them. Horses are herd animals. Their natural instinct is to stick together. So if one takes off really fast, before you know it the rest follows into this stampede.  As a rider you can do two things. You pull on the bridle (the leather straps you see to control the horse’s movements. The resulting effect is that the horse tries to fight you as her instinct tells her to run along with the group. If you pull harder, the horse merely becomes stronger and will resist you even more. However, if you have enough trust in your ability to sit without falling off, you can also let go and allow the horse to follow the herd. Just go with the flow. The horse might make some unexpected movements (for example if one horse tries to kick another in gallop, or when the horse sees something unexpected). But in this flow you can see it coming and help the horse find its balance and path. And it is this flow that makes it so incredible and energizing to ride the horse in gallop with a group. If you are able to do a gallop while standing up like a jockey it is even more fun. The pressure is off the saddle, allowing the horse to go faster and the rider getting less tired (picture taken from Wikipedia).

Back to the always being connected web 2.0 thing. Do we really need to hang on to this concept. Does it really provide the value that the service creators are telling us? I don’t think so. It is the real life interactions that makes a difference. The web 2.0 services that we are confronted with are really only just tools to support this real (or digital) life interaction. So let’s stop acting as if our life depended on it. It is a tool stupid (stole that from Clinton), nothing more. It is not your social life, your  friends, your life supporting network (social graph) that is out there. It is just a tool that may support aspects of your real or digital life. And what can you do with a tool? Put it away sometimes, disconnect, and live happily ever after!

Sending my mobile pictures to the Internet is easy (yeah right!)

I have always considered myself reasonably capable of trying out new technologies. I usually can set up devices without reading the manuals (not cool, right?), have a reasonable intuition to follow the manufacturers weird UI thinking in getting things working.

So, first I tried using MMS to send pictures of to my Facebook account. While the messages clearly reach my GMAIL, Facebook shows no sign of life. After a number of frustrating attempts I gave up and decided to twitter for help. Nearly killed myself while Twittering and driving into a traffic jam at 120 km an hour, but luckily I got good advice from Reihmo (thanks!), and decided to go for Shozu.

So setting up my Nokia N95 mobile to upload pictures to the Internet using a well known software tool like Shozu should be a breeze right?

Well, uhm, not quite. I connected my Mobile to the Internet (using GPRS, wasn’t anywhere near a HDSPA network). Browsed to Shozu and pressed the download button. The N95 froze on me. Hmm, probably a glitch. Let’s do that again. Halfway through the download process the N95 freezes yet again, but now it also lights up every led making it a very cool but seriously worthless flash light in the dark.

It took me 4 attempts to get the application. Installation went fine. So now I can upload my pictures to m Flickr account right? Well, first I need to get Flickr and Shozu to talk to each other. Just a simple “press the button here” on Shozu and it takes me to Flickr which asks me if it is alright if Shozu has access to my Flickr page. Sure, no problem. I’m all set now. Turns out I missed a crucial ok button back on the Shozu page. And, did I mention I had to use my computer instead of my mobile to perform all these tasks? Just didn’t get it on the smaller device.

Well I’m finally of to sent pictures to the Internet. I watched my 7 yr old son play a soccer match this Saturday. Took some  live action shots. Shozu kicks in nicely and asks me after every picture if I want to upload it to Flickr (why yes of course!). Exited I come home and immediately looked at my Flickr page using the computer. When pressing “My Photo’s” Flickr tells me “You have no uploaded photo’s”. What do you mean? Just uploaded a bunch of them from the soccer field.

Double-checked on my N95, Shozu tells me they have been uploaded. If I sent one again, Shozu tells me if I am sure I want to resend this picture. It still won’t show on my Flickr account.

After looking at help files, looking at settings on Flickr and Shozu and my N95, it turns out Shozu only sents things when connected to my home Wifi network. Changed the setting to include any Mobile network.

Phew, the pictures taken with my N95 in a zoo this weekend made it to Flickr. The battery of the N95 drained to death really fast though taking 5Mpix pictures and sending them off over the UMTS network.

So what is the moral of this story?

1. I suck at understanding new (mobile) technology. I am a technology wimp (hate to admit it)
2. The N95 is a great device but lacks battery power like any other great mobile device
3. Once installed Shozu works like a breeze, but setting it up to actually work is NOT easy
4. Spending more than 4 hours on installing and making things work is NOT COOL
5. Although companies like Shozu, Flickr and Nokia are already taking away a lot of complexity from the mobile user (thumbs up), there is still a LONG way to go to make things simple.

See my other post on why Mobile Internet is not going to break through for the masses (yet).

DO you have similar experiences? Anything better out there that is simple in installation and usage?