Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 7

The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, there are two important points to understand:

• How market share is defined is based on the numnber of units shipped during a particular period of time, not the number of active users of a specific smartphone platform, which is the installed base. These are commonly misunderstood terms. To determine the share that any particular smartphone platform has of worldwide active smartphone users would require aggregation of data from all of the mobile network operators. Good luck with that.
• The results of these reports are not reflective of how well a company is actually doing in terms of profit (see "A Visualized Look At The Estimated Revenues Of The Top Cell Phone Manufacturers" as an example).

Canalys covers a number of topics in their latest smartphone research, but the one topic are I want to focus on is "Global smart phone market by OS". Which companies are shipping the largest number of plastic phones into the world is less interesting to most of us than which mobile operating systems are winning. Dell vs. HP is not as compelling as Microsoft vs. Apple, in the personal computer market. LG, Fujitsu, and Samsung, three successful handset manufacturers, generally are not fully part of the smartphone conversation as they have historically licensed smartphone operating systems from companies such as Microsoft (this trend is changing to include more diverse licensing partners and increased in-house OS development).

Symbian (Nokia) accounts for half of the smartphones shipped in Q2 2009, followed by RIM, Apple, and Microsoft. Compared to the same quarter in 2008, Symbian and Microsoft are losing smartphone market share, and RIM and Apple are gaining significantly. Apple's growth percentage over the prior year is artifically inflated due to contraints in availability of the original iPhone just prior to the release of the iPhone 3G in Q3 2008. Minus that event, it would have been closer to RIM's annual growth percentage.

Even though Nokia has a 50% smartphone market share right now with Symbian, I think they are the most vulnerable of all the major players covered by Canalys. Symbian is a mobile operating system struggling to be modern with a developer ecosystem that seems to be far more fractured and unmotivated when compared to the excitement I see regularly from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry developers. Microsoft's Windows CE and its variants have been in the market since 1996, and on smartphones for nearly a decade, yet has not been able to effectively remain competitive recently. And while Android has shipped on just over a million smartphones during the quarter, that's still impressive considering the small number of devices that it's currently available on, especially due to the number of pre-announced devices that wil be coming over the next few quarters.

Surprisingly absent in this data are other Linux-based mobile operating systems, which must fall into the ambiguous "Others" category, along with mobile operating systems, such as Palm Pre. The fragmentation of the various Linux mobile operating system efforts, including handset manufacturer specific implementations, is doing more harm than good right now in terms of market share growth.

Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 26

Recently, I spent two weeks vacationing in London and Paris with only an iPod Touch for communications and connectivity.

As I wanted to honor the fact that the trip was to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary, my wife/I didn't bring either a mobile phone or a PC/Mac.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that this was a wise thing to do, but it's what I did, and this post captures the good, bad and ugly of the experience.

First off, the revelation (for me) was how much the Google Mobile Maps App on iPod Touch completely changes the equation when traveling. Touch-based control with a virtual keyboard is the perfect UI for zooming in and out of geo-locales, and Mobile Maps offers a workflow whose predictability and logical structure both de-mystifies and anchors foreign travel.

Moreover, Maps allows you to visually navigate in Real-Time (very different from the experience on my Blackberry), all the while push-pinning favorite destinations, and determining routes in just a few clicks. It is the consummate reality augmentation application for travel, a sort of "magic compass."

Case in point, is a context traversal function whereby you search for and find a destination. Right clicking on the pin reveals listing info, and left clicking takes you into Street View, revealing a 360-degree panoramic view of the target destination.

Street View provided a form of error-correction since you could visually confirm that a given destination was indeed the right destination, an extra bit of piece of mind when visiting a new area.

Candidly, I wish that Maps was even more autonomous about capturing my real-time travels and indexing them, as then I would never need to re-trace my steps, not to mention the entertainment value of being able to replay the day's travels at a later time.

Similarly, if you could somehow overlay your interaction data with that of locals, professionals (e.g., Fodors) and other travelers, you could create a very potent social fabric that is data rich, and can be filtered on parameters such as user-generated, professionally mastered, crowd-sourced and/or curated.

To frame this one, let me give you a specific example from my trip. I was walking through St-Germain in Paris when I had a flashback to the last time I was there (eight years before).

Back then, I had eaten at this incredible sandwich place nearby St-Germain. The restaurant made their own breads, had good sandwich combinations, and was an earnest, warm place. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember its name or specific location.

I remembered, however, that the sandwich place became a retail chain in New York. (It's good, but nowhere near as good as the original shop.)

While I couldn't remember the name, I did remember them having a branch near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, so I opened the Yelp app on my iPod Touch, and typed in "sandwiches" near the geo of Rockefeller Center, and up came Cosi. (Note: Yelp had limited data for London and none for Paris).

Next, I fired up the Maps App, typed in "Cosi," and a pin dropped on the map.

I clicked on the pin, and it confirmed that I had been staying less than two blocks from this place for the past week! I then left-clicked, and saw a picture that took me back eight years.

Lunch? It was everything that I remembered.

Meanwhile, another App that we used throughout the trip was Facebook. My wife and I were sharing one iPod Touch, and Facebook really delivered in terms of being very easy/seamless to log into and out of our respective accounts, not to mention providing (relatively) full access to Facebook's services.

In fact, it was through Facebook that I loosely tracked the vacation that my brother and his family were currently taking in Israel, Jordan, and Greece.

I had some short exchanges with my niece, and there was a reference to a London overlap, but it didn't seem like the times meshed.

Days later, my wife and I are walking from the Kensington Park area where we were staying to Harrods in Knightsbridge.

45 minutes later, we are ogling over the sweets and pastry section of Harrods (if you have never been there, it is a spectacle; they have everything). Suddenly, a voice chimes out, "I didn't think they let your type in here." I turn around, and it's my brother and his youngest son.

It turns out that he had tried to call me the night before to let me know that he had changed his itinerary, and that they were going to be in London while we were there. But, I brought no phone so I never got that message.

Similarly, he had emailed me, but it turned out that he sent it to an address that is not received on my iPod Touch, so I never got that message.

Finally, he had gotten the wrong hotel information from my parents (we booked our room just days before we left), and so he couldn't leave us a message at our hotel either.

Yet, just hours after landing in London, here we were face to face at Harrods in London.

Kismet, to be sure, but I am left wondering whether technology helped (the Facebook exchange with my niece), hindered (wrong emails, unanswered phone calls), or was simply a neutral observer in this outcome.

Keeping it real, one paradox presented by relying on the iPod Touch as the sole connectivity device was that connectivity was, by definition, intermittent since the iPod Touch depends upon ready access to Wi-Fi for connectivity, a sketchy bet for mobile travelers.

In London, this meant that 99% of the time, I had decent Wi-Fi connectivity at my hotel but no connectivity when mobile. This was key as we walked a ton, and took the Underground a lot (it is a great service).

Not having reliable connectivity in mobile contexts crippled some of the utility of Google Mobile Maps since it essentially removed the Real-Time goodness of the app. Moreover, it crimped the ability to search for nearby restaurants when on the move.

By contrast, in Paris we were able to grab onto "gray" connectivity within 5-10 minutes of trying to do so. This, at the very least, gave us a sense of intermittent connectivity being reliable.

Gray connectivity was captured two ways. One was via a discovery of Wi-Fi connections within the Settings tab, and jumping from one connection to the next until we found live access. Primitive, but fungible.

The second was that we discovered a service provider that offered different tiers of Wi-Fi access on-demand, including a "20 Minutes Free" option, which was like getting a lucky board game roll.

Armed with some sense of being able to queue up requests, messages, grab map views and the like, geo navigation became tactile, a virtual, but distinct, overlay to our physical navigation.

The ability to visually follow block-by-block, and see the storefront of a business blocks or miles away was very powerful.

At times, it felt like Mobile Maps was a divining rod pulling us to our destination.

What was almost magical was how Maps seemed designed to watch proactively in the background for a live connection so it could autonomously update location data when connectivity was intermittent.

I was more than once surprised to discover that Maps had used a sliver of momentary connectivity, and updated location with no prodding from me.

That said, it seems that Apple could make MobileMe even more essential for iPod Touch owners by bundling into it a Boingo-like Wi-Fi Universal Pass so at least queue-level store and forward services can autonomously be negotiated for the mobility-oriented user.

A couple of final notes: One is that my wife realized tremendous utility in using the Notes App to capture daily food & water intake and other related health data. This was a simple, powerful, and recurring workflow for her.

Two is that during the trip I finished my first Kindle book on the iPod Touch, 'Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.'

I absolutely loved the fact that when I found myself with a five-minute slug of time (waiting in lobby, bathroom, at coffee), I could read a chunk of pages and click out as easily as I had clicked in (since the Kindle App automatically bookmarks where you left off).

It, like the iPod Touch itself, was a perfect travel companion.

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The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 7

“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead

The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing.  It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management.

In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it gave rise to the urban legend that Microsoft’s Bill Gates even once sagely noted that “640K (of program memory) ought to be enough for everyone.” (the story is likely apocryphal);

Windows, in turn, gave rise to another computing form, one that was ubiquitous, almost to the point of homogeneity; it was also graphical and added connectivity to the mix, a trend that Microsoft was able to leverage into near-total hegemony during the first decade of the Internet Age.

Now, all of this is giving rise to another era, the age of Mobile Broadband, best exemplified by the iPhone, the first caveat-free mobile platform.

In two short years, the iPhone has enveloped the planet, with a 77 country global footprint, a 40M iPhone/iPod touch user base, 65K apps rolled out, those same apps downloaded 1.5B times and a 100K developer ecosystem.

This got me thinking about Carver Mead’s mantra. If DOS had one form of “native” application, and Windows had another, what then are the cornerstones of a native mobile broadband app?

Put another way; before iPhone, the industry answer to the mobile question was more akin to coaxing a dog to walk on its hind legs than watching a bird fly.  In other words, more hack and parlor trick than true dharma.

The Message is the Medium

Forty years ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserted that the “medium is the message,” as a way of underscoring how different forms of media are imbued with their own contextual forms of meaning.

Yet, as we sit at the waking hours of the Mobile Broadband Era, it is hard not to conclude that it is The Message that is to be the defining characteristic of this era.

Why, The Message?  Simply put, messages have compelling attributes.  One, they can be date stamped and packaged up to elegantly deal with both real-time and asynchronous communication scenarios.

Two, messages can be transported on a one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine basis (e.g., device to server, device to device), facilitating a wide variety of unidirectional, multidirectional, manual, automated and programmatic communication flows.

Three, as Twitter’s simple “140 characters meets open API” model suggests, a message can simultaneously be simple (it doesn’t get much simpler than 140 characters) AND support rich payloads, auto-generate events, catalyze discussion threads, and be designed to make creating derivatives easy, all the while supporting the exposition, partitioning and instantiation of all sorts of Client, Server and Service application hybrids.

That’s why it’s “interesting” that when Google announced Wave, its open source, open protocol messaging platform, the blogosphere’s response ranged from applause to derision and confusion.

In part, this is understandable, inasmuch as Wave represents an evolved sense of what real-time communication flows look like, and sometimes, the most game-changing ideas take a while to germinate (let alone actually execute the value proposition).

Hence, it’s reasonable to expect that they will initially be met with a shrug.

At its core, though, I think that Google is solving the right problem by focusing on messaging, and would suggest that the most basic thing that they can do relative to making Wave a success is to eat their own dog food by writing and exposing wrappers to all of their services directly within Wave.

At its most basic, Wave begs the question of why can't Mail, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, News, Feeds, Documents and Blogger be better integrated within Google?

But beyond that, if Google is serious about Wave they should enable developers (and meta developers – e.g., the former Visual Basic crowd) to build their own Wave apps by compositing Google service functions through one simplified wizard-like interface.

Similarly, Google should take what they have done with shortcuts in Gmail, and expand it to their other products so that users have a palette of simplified scripts that they can call upon in a context-aware fashion with little technical know how (i.e., what can be called in Maps may be different than Gmail or News for that matter).

Then, Google can focus on providing the best client, service, media, search, analytics and developer tools for Wave on a number of platforms, an approach which is congruent with supporting Chrome and Android, while remaining open to iPhone, Windows, the Mac, etc.

And of course, a whole ecosystem of data feed services, tool builders and service providers can piggyback on all of this goodness.

Information Mobility is Superconductivity

Like many people, I am a member of multiple social (Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and affiliated interest networks (favorite blogs), places where I cultivate my online persona, build a profile, upload content, participate in conversations and manage my connections with friends, followers and the like.

In the old days, I had to create my identity over and over, upload the same content repeatedly and perform unnatural acts to cobble together the sum total of my online efforts in some meaningful way.

But, thanks to services like Facebook Connect, Twitter API, OpenSocial, and “embeddable” flash widgets, I can create, converge and connect locally, but share that same information globally with minimal (or, much less) effort.

This is the power of information mobility, the premise that a user’s online actions, from login and session instantiation to status updating, profile exchange, photo posting, tweets, comments, movies/music buying/watching/rating can be spread liberally across all of their devices, networks and runtime spaces.

It’s about command, control and orchestration of the online “Me,” a domain which touches realms like publishing, distribution, information management, and privacy.

This is why information mobility, when it really kicks in (i.e., is on the right side of S-curve), becomes a self-affirming engine of systemic growth.

Cloud-ification is Upon Us

When mobile broadband is stripped to its core, you are really left with two underlying constructs.  One is the premise of being able to access your media, information and apps anytime, anywhere, and two is the precept that you need fast, perpetual connectivity to make the user experience reliable and robust enough to become mission critical.

This is the domain of cloud computing, a mode whereby software, hardware and service layers are loosely coupled enough that the data, logic and presentation elements of an application can be partitioned (as needed) between local and remote instances.

In essence, when applications are cloud-ified, they gain persistency, federation and derivation capabilities, enabling the same core to be assembled in a way that addresses the needs of specific runtime scenarios, device environments and scaling requirements.

As such, cloud-ified apps become liberated from a single instance or a single client application, enabling all sorts of interesting composite applications to promulgate.

That is why the same Twitter tweet can be presented so dramatically different in a desktop Twitter dashboard application, like TweetDeck, the Twitter.com website and the Tweetie iPhone client.

Similarly, it is the reason a website like StockTwits, which is built on top of the Twitter ecosystem, can simultaneously parse specific tweets pertaining to a particular stock or between members of a given investing circle, and a StockTwits-aware client app, like the afore-mentioned TweetDeck, can automatically create a filtered view of that same data.

In fact, Apple’s rise to it’s current lofty place can be traced to a decision to embrace cloud computing by tightly coupling iTunes (which has a service tier, desktop tier and device runtime tier) first to the iPod, and then to the iPhone (and the iPod touch).

The breakout success of App Store is a by-product of embracing and extending this same model by overlaying interfaces for developers and applications.

Finally, MobileMe takes this same computing model and applies it to a user’s personal data, backing it up, synchronizing it between devices and making it universally available across those same devices via a Web client, a native Mac/Windows client and, you guessed it, a native iPhone/iPod touch client.

But, to be clear, while Apple is the current patron saint of this model at work, we are at the beginning of this wave, not at the end game stage. Apple will not run the table.

Net It Out for Me

I am really bullish on the potential to create new, highly innovative user experiences that are fully native to the Mobile Broadband Era. 

They will be message-aware, information and media rich, mobility premised, and optimized to a specific application, service and/or device.

This is the next wave in its purest form.

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