The Power of Ubiquity

Google is launching a gTalk client for the iPhone. While that's terrific, some of the reaction to it is over the top. Some in the digerati to proclaim the death of texting via SMS is nigh.

They are wrong.

There are 3,000,000,000 cell phones in use.

There are 6,000,000 iPhones in use.

The iPhone is 0.2% of the cell phone market. If I want to text someone who doesn't have an iPhone (99.8% of the market) I have to use traditional SMS. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that I don't know what kind of cell phones my contacts carry. That uncertainty will prevent me from trying to reach them via that channel.

Being ubiquitous is powerful. Working on every device is imperative.

Rhetorical question: If Google launched a web app that only ran on MacBook Air computers with solid state drives would that be a good business move for them?

On Product Design...

I read this on Twitter the other day:

-"ha.. my iPaq still lives after 3 years and does most of what the iphone does" 05:46 PM September 27, 2007 from web

-"function without hype" 05:46 PM September 27, 2007 from web

The poster is right in a naive sort of way, the iPaq (and the Treo, and a host of other devices) have had the entire feature set of the iPhone for several years now. In many cases they have even more functionality than the iPhone. Nonetheless, these devices are badly designed. This tweeter(?) shows a fundamental (albeit common) misunderstanding of what's important in designing and building a consumer product.

Product design is not about filling out the feature list on the spec sheet. Product design is about how the features you implement work together as an entire user experience.

Awesome

HT to Engaget Mobile.

Foneshow on the iPhone

We've been doing some testing and Foneshow works great on the iPhone!

Here you see the notification SMS's in the iPhone SMS client. The iPhone threads conversations (just like the Treo) so the Foneshow SMS "conversation" becomes a menu of your freshest available programming. It's kind of like bloglines for podcasts (on your phone).

Notice the dynamically allocated phone numbers which allow the user to access an individual piece of programming. You can also clearly see the advertisements within the notification messages (these ads are provided by 4info.net, our messaging partner. If you want to advertise on Foneshow text messages let us know and we'll put you in touch with the right people at 4info).

While we're pleased that Foneshow works great on the iPhone, we are unsurprised. We designed Foneshow to work well on essentially any cell phone.

Here's how Foneshow looks on a Nokia 2128i. Now admittedly, Foneshow looks sexier on the iPhone (but really, everything looks sexier on the iPhone). But the functionality is all there. The SMS archive acts as a menu. Dialing a number embedded in a SMS just requires the user to hit the send key.

Most importantly, the Nokia 2128i is typical of the kind of cell phone that US cellular carriers give away. This one is one of our test/demo units. It cost us $9 with a one year plan. It would have been free if we had opted for a 2 year plan. These inexpensive cell phones make up a major part of the 220 million cell phones in the US. If you want to make a mass market product you have to be able to reach a big audience.

So what phones don't work with Foneshow? Our testing has found very few.

Nic's Mom's StarTAC (circa 1997) does not have text messaging, so it doesn't work (of course it's an analog phone, my guess is it won't even make phone calls pretty soon).

We also recently discovered that T-Mobile prepaid does not accept text messages from short codes. Regular T-Mo accounts work just fine. There is a work around for the T-Mo prepaid problem using the T-Mo email gateway. It's not an elegant solution and we're hoping T-Mo changes their prepaid short code policy.

ATT Hates Trees

Submitted with no further comment.

Dave Winer is Right

Dave's post about mobile versions of web sites is spot on.

"The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn't, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there's the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are."

This ties in very well with my observations about mobile video.

Video on Cell Phones

I've been skeptical of video on cell phones for some time. I've mentioned it here and here. I've been meaning to blog about it for a while. Hunter (who runs some segment of video for Google and/or YouTube) reminded me to finally do it, so I am.

There are a number of real challenges to mobile video. Technology can solve many of them at some level. But one of them is much more fundamental and does not have a real technological solution. That problem is driven by biology, and by market forces. There are also a number of business issues involving the cellular carriers, but we'll assume the carriers will wise up at some point and those will go away.

Technology challenges include:

Battery life
Bandwidth
Local storage
Limited UI capability of handsets
Screen size

Batteries are getting better all the time. Mobile bandwidth is also improving (here in the US it lags, but that too will pass). Storage is always getting cheaper. Clever engineers can make good UIs. Screen resolutions are getting higher and higher.

Technological advances will solve many problems, but Moore's law will never give us better eyes.

A biological fact: Human eyes are limited in their capability. Very small complex video images, even at very high resolution, are difficult to see. It has more to do with the angle subtended in your field of view than with how many pixels there are. If you get a small screen close enough to your face to subtend an acceptably large angle, it will be too close for your eyes to focus on.

A market reality: People really like small cell phones.

So...

A) On one hand you have a downward market pressure for smaller and smaller handsets.

B) On the other hand to make video viable and viewable a handset needs to have some minimal X-Y dimensions.

If the dimensions required by B are greater than the maximum acceptable mass market size defined in A, cellphone video will be niche.

The iPhone will provide an interesting test here. There's been a lot written about the iPhone; battery issues, connectivity issues, storage issues. The one thing that is seldom discussed about the iPhone is how physically large it is. It's bigger than an iPod. It's bigger than a Treo or a Blackberry. It's MUCH larger than a RIZR or a KRZR. It's big enough to need a belt holster. It's smartphone size and smartphones are a niche market. The iPhone has 3.5 inch screen. I suspect that's about as small as you can go for an acceptable video experience. But a 3.5 inch screen necessitates a really big phone.

FWIW, I rarely see people watching video on their video enabled iPods.

Erik's Obligatory iPhone Reaction Post

Looks cool.

EDGE? Non wifi browsing won't be fun.

No tactile feedback on the keyboard. I have to look at the keyboard while dialing/typing. That soft QWERTY keyboard is really tightly spaced.

I can't add my own applications?

No Java or Flash in the browser?

No wireless synch? Not even calendar or contacts via BlueTooth?

It's kind of big. Not so pocketable.

That screen+WiFi+BlueTooth is going to eat the battery before lunchtime.

I have a variety of opinions on the viability of mobile video, too many for this post.

It sure is pretty though...

I know this is iPhone version 1.0, but is it like iPod 1.0, or like Newton 1.0 ?

All that said, if Apple wants to send a unit over so that we can confirm Foneshow compatibility, I'll happily try it out (if I can wrestle it away from Nic).