…which I found in the blog of a german journalist living in London, writing about what happens if you have a great zest for life and are disabled at the same time.
I don’t want to describe it there. Just watch it (it’s a short movie), it’s really worth it. And think about that next time you are designing a web site.
I’ve just worked out how you could make a 3G iPhone yourself, even adding GPS support, and still get away with a lower cost than buying a regular iPhone. The solution:
JoikuSpot is still a bit limited — rather than just routing packets, it proxies HTTP traffic and doesn’t support anything else, so e.g. IMAP isn’t going to work for the time being. I hope that will get fixed soon. I tested JoikuSpot briefly for plain web traffic on my E65 and it seems to be working.
I’m not going to rush out and buy all those things now, I just find this situation curious.
John Crowcroft (a leading authority on communication systems, and a former lecturer of mine in Cambridge) has written a short informal paper on new directions in mobile communications. It is sub-titled “How to Learn to Stop Hating the Cellular Telephone Industry”, and more informally sub-titled “Rant about the cellphone industry’s failure of imagination”.
The paper draws analogies between the history of the internet (which has been absolutely astonishing over the last 30 years) and what the mobile phone industry could have done in the same time, had it taken the same sort of approach to innovation. Instead, the mobile telephone operators chose to lock down their systems, tightly control everything which goes in and out of them, and as a result have hardly experienced any innovation at all.
The key problem appears to be the fact that the telecoms companies have made a LOT of money from massively restricted services in the past, and they are continuing to do so today. If they open their systems and make it easy for third parties to provide services on top of them, they are probably going to lose some of that revenue in the short term. What they don’t realise (or do realise, but don’t want to face, for business or organisational reasons) is that they could make MUCH MORE money in the longer term by having an open system and providing great innovative services on top which people will happily pay for! The internet has proved that there are thousands of business models which are not only viable but actually extremely lucrative. You just need to be bold enough to take the risk of opening your systems to the competition.
Fortunately, there is a bit of movement — European mobile networks have at least made a few attempts at being reasonably open, and the US is gradually catching up too. But still it’s two steps forward and one back. Plenty of new devices (notably the iPhone) are still locked to one operator and don’t allow third-party software to be installed (unless you jailbreak it, of course). Eventually, we will probably get the same sort of innovation on mobile as we are getting on the internet, but it’s not going to be that quick.
Check Jon’s paper for a few business ideas, and then form a start-up. The more people try to make it happen, the more pressure there will be on the operators to open up, on the handset manufacturers to become compatible, etc.
Mobile internet usage is one of those areas which is hyped a lot, but it’s actually pretty hard to lay your hands on some real figures detailing the number of users. In this week’s NMA, there’s an article by Tim Barber of Continental Research which gives a few useful figures to quote.
If you add up the figures, you see that there are currently a total of 7.4 million mobile internet users in the UK, which corresponds to 12% of all mobile phone users. I think that’s a pretty impressive figure already — it shows that mobile internet use isn’t just a toy for a small number of geeks, but it’s actually fast en route to mainstream adoption. (I don’t have an up-to-date growth figure, but I do know that from 2006–2007 the number of page views from mobile devices went up by 16%, according to the Mobile Data Association.)
Speaking of geeks, the data from Continental Research breaks the population into four rough categories: whether or not they are interested in technology, and whether or not they are interested in style. Considering just the former criterion:
Spot something? A techie is 4 or 5 times more likely to use the internet on a mobile phone than a non-techie. However, the reality is that there are also 3 times as many non-techies as there are techies. This means they almost cancel out — right now, there are already plenty of people using mobile internet services even though they don’t care about gadgets and technology toys.
This is pretty good news: it shows that the general population has a genuine need which mobile internet access can address. It’s not just a toy, and we don’t simply use it just because we can. It’s actually something which can make our lives better.
Viewed in terms of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, right now, the mobile web and mobile internet are stepping out of the Trough of Disillusionment (into which they fell with the failure of WAP to match expectations) onto the Slope of Enlightenment.
I think this calls for a graph.
Looking back at 2007, I can’t help but think that the iPhone was probably the most important and influential technology phenomenon of the year. It’s been talked about so much that I’m actually starting to get sick of it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has had a significant impact, particularly on the way the mobile web works.
One of the most striking developments that ensued are the moves by several popular web sites to provide versions of their offering which are specifically tailored to people visiting their site from an iPhone. Amongst others, I found:
(Most of these sites show their iPhone look only to web browsers which identify themselves as Safari Mobile. To test them in a desktop web browser, see this article.)
iPhone specific development is fashionable, it seems. Some of those sites actually borrow and incorporate iPhone design elements (such as the style of lists and tabs, animation and icons), further blurring the distinction between web sites and applications. A List Apart, a widely respected resource for web developers, has even published a long article on how to develop iPhone-specific web sites (Part I, Part II). Apple themselves also offer in-depth information. iPhoneApplicationList.com maintains an extensive list of iPhone-optimised web applications.
Christopher Schmitt argues that making websites accessible for people with disabilities would expand a website’s reach far more than making an iPhone-specific site does. And Scott Gilbertson of WIRED thinks that the current situation is very similar to the old days when people were designing web sites specifically for Internet Explorer 4 (which was ahead of Netscape at the time). Jeff Croft suggests the opposite, saying that device-specific application development is going to happen anyway, and it doesn’t really matter whether it uses web technologies or not.
iPhone market share
What is the market share of iPhone internet browsing actually like? Hard to say, because it depends so much on what you measure. In terms of sold devices, the iPhone is performing strongly, but it is still a small proportion of the overall handset market. There are at least 100 million mobile devices with modern browsers (Opera Mobile, Nokia’s S60 browser, both of which are capable of displaying standard desktop web pages) compared to an estimated 2 million iPhones. Phones with WAP/XHTML browsers or adaptation browsers (such as Opera Mini) are a lot more numerous still. So in terms of the number of devices, writing iPhone-specific sites (as opposed to Opera-specific sites, for instance) really doesn’t make much sense.
Hitslink/Net Applications’ operating system statistics show that in December 2007, iPhone and iPod Touch users accounted for 0.14% of web page views, more than all other mobile platforms put together (Windows Mobile: 0.06%, S60: 0.02%). The Register reported this too. However, Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, points out that these figures are misleading:
Hitslink produced this report by using data from their analytics customers. These people operate HTML/PC websites. They say: “You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on”.
The 300 million or so mobile phone browser users (say 50 million S60) can’t or don’t browse HTML sites. They browse mobile friendly sites (WAP or XHTML or iMode) which will not have this HTML code in.
Considering that organizations like Bango, Admob, Peperonity, Vodafone report mobile browser traffic in the billions of pages per day, most of thse being S40 or S60 its clear that by ignoring non-HTML sites these stats are misleading and mistaken.
– Ray Anderson, in an email to Mobile Monday London mailing list, 5 Dec 2007
In other words, all that Hitslink’s statistics say is that iPhone users are more likely to visit more desktop web sites, but it doesn’t say anything at all about usage of sites which are specifically designed for mobile use. The conclusion I draw from this is that an iPhone user is much more likely to visit desktop sites than Windows Mobile or S60 users, and therefore non-iPhone users either mostly use sites designed for mobile, or don’t use the web much at all. This may have a variety of reasons — due to its large screen, desktop web sites are more usable on the iPhone than they are on devices with smaller screens; Safari Mobile has pretty neat zooming capabilities; and maybe iPhone users simply approach the device with a more web-oriented attitude, because after all it is more of an internet tablet than a phone.
If iPhone users actually prefer desktop-style websites, because they work quite nicely on the large screen, it really doesn’t make much sense to design a specific iPhone version of a site. On the other hand, if it’s that increased usability of the iPhone web experience which drives web usage per person to be many times higher than on S60 and Windows Mobile devices… then there’s a very strong case in favour of designing device-specific sites.
Is iPhone-specific design just a case of companies wanting to look cool by having an iPhone-optimised site and jumping on the bandwagon? Is this just a fashion which will go away again as quickly as it came? Or do such companies actually derive significant benefits from iPhone users? I’d be interested to hear your comments.
Some interesting developments in so-called location based services have hit the news in the last few days:
Although it can undoubtedly be very useful in many circumstances (I can certainly see myself using both the toilet service and the map service), these developments do raise questions: How do they know where I am? Does Google now know my location as well as my web searches, emails, contacts, diaries, YouTube video preferences and everything else? How easy is it for a somebody to track where I am, and can they do it without me noticing?
In case you were wondering, this is not GPS. There are phones with in-build GPS, but they are still pretty rare and expensive. The remarkable thing about these location technologies is that they work pretty well with a far broader range of handsets (although Google Maps is more accurate if you have GPS).
So how does it work? As far as I know, there are the following ways of finding your location:
GPS I won’t discuss any further: it can be accessed only by applications installed on the phone, which need to be given permission to do so — the phone itself controls the information, so the chances of abuse are pretty low. (But see the Google-related caveat below.)
Operator lookup is a bit more concerning. To find out somebody’s location, you need to know their phone number. You send a location request for that number to the operator whom you are registered with. The operator sends a text message to the person you are trying to locate, to ask for their consent. If they agree to release the location, that information (latitude, longitude and an accuracy value) is sent to you who requested it. (I think that’s how it works anyway — I’ve not seen it in action yet, and I can’t try it out since I’m on the only mobile network in the UK which has not yet implemented location requests). The consent is valid for only one look-up, so you don’t need to be concerned about the toilet finder service being able to track you for the rest of your life just because you needed a loo in Westminster once.
The advantage of operator-based lookup is that it works on any phone, provided that phone’s network supports location lookups. (In the UK, Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and Orange all do.) No software needs to be installed, and it appears to be reasonably secure too. On the downside, the operators charge for the service — about £0.10 a go, plus a monthly fee. And if you want to use a location-based service (for example, to find your nearest xyz shop) you need to give that shop your mobile number, risking that you may receive unwanted text message advertising from them in future.
Cell location is a very different beast, and more difficult to understand too. You may know that the mobile phone network is split into cells, each cell being the area covered by one particular receiver/transmitter (e.g. on the roof of a building). Cells can be pretty small (a few dozen meters radius) in urban areas, and much larger (several kilometers radius) in the countryside. A mobile phone is usually locked onto one particular cell, and each cell has a unique identifier. On many handsets it is possible for an application running on the phone to find out the identifier of the cell to which it is connected.
So what does that give us? Only the cell ID is not worth much. But if you have a big database which contains approximate locations for every cell in the world, you can make a pretty good guess at where you are (provided you’re in a small cell at least). The problem: there does not seem to be such a database. At least it’s not possible for normal people to get hold of it. The operators (who have built all those cells) know where they are of course, but they won’t simply give away that valuable information.
A number of collaborative projects are attempting to gather location information of cells by combining many volunteering users’ contributions. Among these are CellSpotting, GSM Location and Navizon. The general idea here is: people who have GPS in their handsets walk/drive around, and every time the phone comes across a new cell, it sends the identifier of that cell together with the GPS coordinates to the database. Over time, the database gets a pretty good idea of the range of locations in which you lock onto a particular cell. Then people who don’t have GPS can send their cell ID to the database to get an averaged value of their probable location.
(A note on the side: people talk a lot in theory about using triangulation — measuring signal strengths, angles of directional antennas, signal timings from several adjacent cells and so on. In principle, these techniques could be used to provide a location which is more accurate than simply “you are in cell X, and cell X covers this and that area”. In practise, I don’t think triangulation is feasible on phones for all sorts of reasons — software limitations, hardware support etc. The operator-based location lookup, which uses the cells rather than the handsets to measure timings, may well use it — I don’t know.)
Now how does Google Maps get its location information for non-GPS handsets? I have not yet heard a definite answer, but the general suspicion is that they use precisely one of these databases. They might have bought it off the operators, but that’s a bit unlikely. Chances are they merged together several open source projects, and also drove around in a car themselves, mapping cells to GPS locations. And now that Google have released the application to the public, they do exactly the same as Google always does: collect the data from as many users as possible. Most probably, those people with GPS handsets who use Google Maps are unknowingly helping to expand Google’s cell ID database. When a GPS user encounters a new cell, Google learns both the location and the cell ID. Over time, their cell coverage and location accuracy will increase for the benefit of non-GPS users.
So, does Google know where you are? Yes. If you do a location lookup, at least. They claim to anonymise that data, so you can only hope that they are telling the truth.
One final note: the mobile web does not come into this at all. That means, if a phone accesses a website, there is in general no way of telling where that user is located (unless they explicitly give the site their phone number and the site performs an operator location lookup).
For months there were rumors in the mobile industry that Google was going to launch a phone, until Google dispelled them with the announcement of the Android platform two weeks ago. What they are doing is basically to build an operating system for mobile devices (an alternative to Symbian and Windows Mobile), and to make it freely available. But why?
“So what is in it for Google? Why would it go to the expense of building and supporting a fully-fledged mobile OS and then give it away with very few restrictions on its usage? [...] Its [Google's] primary objective is simply to catalyse internet usage on mobile devices by ensuring as many as possible can support web services. Android is a means to an end. By doing some of the hard work on their behalf, Google is hoping it will encourage handset manufacturers and network operators to extend internet connectivity to more mobile users, more quickly.”
Marek has got it spot on: discussions on the technical details of the platform really miss the point. It isn’t even particularly important whether Android will end up being installed on any significant percentage of devices. What is important is the signalling effect to the world: the mobile web is coming, the mobile web is a huge opportunity.
Most current mobile phones are not particularly strong on the mobile web front, whereas Android places its greatest emphasis on web-based services. That’s in Google’s interests, because it enables people to use Google’s web services while mobile, which continues to drive their advertising revenues. However, but it also benefits everybody else who wants to provide services on the mobile web.
Building a mobile OS is a very difficult and expensive job, but Google are willing to do it anyway, just to encourage the mobile web to develop a tiny bit faster. That shows just how important and huge the mobile web is going to be.
As a developer I am not particularly interested in Android. I’ve not even downloaded the SDK, because I don’t want to write applications — it’s just yet another platform besides the many ones already out there. What I am interested in is the web as a platform — Ajax, SVG and Flash enable most of the richness of traditional applications, but are much easier to develop, and more importantly, much easier to get out to users. No downloads, no installations and such nonsense — just immediate use.
So in a bizarre and twisted way, by adding another OS-level platform to the market (Android), Google are actually encouraging people to move away from both Android and the other mobile OSes, and to move towards the web as a platform. One could therefore argue that the purpose of Android is to make itself obsolete (hence the slightly provocative title of this post). But that doesn’t mean it’s bad — to the contrary, I am very supportive of Android for precisely the reasons explained above.
“Will Google end up capturing the lion’s share of the value in the mobile business by dominating mobile advertising?”
There is certainly a fair chance that Google will take a large chunk of the mobile advertising market. But let’s remember that although it has fuelled a lot of recent growth, advertising is not the only business model on the web! The business models which have worked fine for centuries — such as buying goods and selling them for a higher price — have not suddenly gone away. There is a lot more value in the mobile business if e-commerce is taken into consideration.
The Yahoo user interface blog recently featured a good post introducing some of the limitations of designing for mobile devices. It points to the limitations of both output (small screen) and input (keypad, touchscreen, joystick and many other variations), and emphasises the most important basis for the design of mobile sites and services: keeping in mind the context — who the user is, where and when and how they are going to use the service. Outdoors in difficult lighting conditions? On a train which goes through tunnels and therefore keeps losing its network connection?
Last week, when the iPhone was released in the UK, my housemate James came home beaming with delight and cradling Apple’s shiny new toy, probably the most influential product release of 2007. Since then I have had a few opportunities to play with it too. It’s certainly nice.
But about everyone and anyone has written a review of it already, and there is no need for me to add yet another one. Still, there’s something special about it. If I mention the words ‘mobile’ and ‘user experience’ to anybody in conversation, I almost inevitably get ‘iPhone’ back. Why?
“First Apple made the hype, and released the hype as a product. Then they released the iPhone as the follow-up product.”
– Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software) at FoM2007
Maybe the right question should not be why the iPhone is so good, but rather why the handsets of much more established manufacturers are so bad (in some respects, notably usability). Some interesting insight came from Tom Hume and Marek Pawlowski on a FoM2007 panel discussion:
All three points are different with Apple. The user experience is clearly the most important part of their design, and features are secondary. They regularly update the software, and in fact they have already released a number of improvements which would have never reached the previously shipped devices without this update facility. And they have their own shops, in fact a whole fan base which they actively nurture — what better way to learn how to improve the next version?
And the model clearly works. The iPhone really is a pleasure to use, the experience is consistent and well thought out — it simply feels right.
But what will its longer-term effects be?
The iPhone is just one product, and even if Apple’s highly optimistic sales forecasts were to come true, they would still have less than one per cent market share. I think that the true value of the iPhone lies not in itself, but in the knock-on effects which it is having on the whole mobile ecosystem:
These effects are both rather good, and although I probably won’t be getting an iPhone myself anytime soon, I think these are very good developments.
On Wednesday I went to the Future of Mobile conference in London. It was an exciting event — lots of people had high hopes, in particular for the future of data services on mobile devices (i.e. the internet). Some of my main take-home messages were:
Amongst the speakers, possibly the most keenly awaited was David Burke of Google, who was the first to present Google’s new Android platform in Europe. See this post for more on his presentation.
Finally an interesting quote, very much in rhythm with the drum I am bashing:
”Mobile users are ready and willing to engage with their favourite brands on mobile devices.”
– Matt Millar, Director of Mobile and Devices EMEA at Adobe