It is this time again: my phone contract comes up for renewal. And – as anyone who is following this blog will know (to recap, look here), I have not been all too happy with the treatment I got from O2 UK. So today I started looking around. Given my rather fat tariff requirements, carriers normally throw in all sorts of goodies (scil. free handsets), so started there. I have an iPhone 4 and a Nexus One already, so started to see what else is out there, as there are:
- Samsung Galaxy S or its Windows Phone 7 (which I rather fancy) sister, the Omnia 7.
- HTC Desire HD or – again Windows Phone 7 – HTC HD7 or HTC 7 Trophy
- Or maybe Nokia’s latest attempt at recapturing the upper hand, the N8 with its stunning 12 MP Carl Zeiss lense?
- What about the Motorola Milestone 2 (yes, my dear Americans, that’s the horrible name the Droid 2 got over here)?
- Finally, the LG Optimus 7 doesn’t look bad either…
Then I started looking at where, what, how I could get it and at what price, and the UK carrier labyrinth was entered: The Omnia 7 is carried by 3, Orange and T-Mobile, not by O2 or Vodafone (at least I couldn’t find anything to that end). The HD7 is an Orange exclusive, the Trophy is a Vodafone exclusive. The Galaxy S and the N8 seem to be with all of them.
Step 2: tariffs. With an unhealthy amount of traveling abroad to do, my main cost item on phone bills regularly is data roaming, so this is where my sensitivity lies (because of the eye-watering bills I regularly get, I am not bothered about 600 or 900 UK any-network minutes costing £5 more or less), and it became clear quickly: Orange, T-Mobile and 3 are out of the race (their charges are even higher than O2’s). Vodafone looks good (about 1/3 of O2’s rates) but O2 claims to still have their Blackberry tariff for international data roaming (although I struggled to find it on their website). Now, THAT would bring my bill down by a cool £150-200 a month or so. Enter Blackberry. The Bold (which I dearly loved when I had it) or the Torch (which gets decent but still very mixed reviews)? And then: O2 again? In spite of my anger with them?
And then I started to compromise: anything exclusive to Orange, T-Mobile or 3 was out of the question (because data roaming is pretty much a killer for me), which boils it down to Blackberry and O2 or any of the others on Vodafone (which would mean that I couldn’t get what started being my favourite, the Samsung Omnia 7). Hang on: I compromise over some shoddy pounds? Is the handset then not so all important as one might have believed when reading all those blogs, news blitzes and tech publications over the last months?
And, yes, I think it is true to say that – at least in instances where there are certain usage requirements (in my case data roaming), the package is what rules. This is perhaps then the wedge that the carriers – scrambling for meaning in this new app store world – could use to pry that dump pipe/smart phone dichotomy open. How’s that for an idea?
So, good folks at the carriers, listen up: do it (oh, Vodafone, and get me that Omnia 7, will you? 😉 ).
Sluggishly reacting applications, latency in almost everything you do, crashes, blank screens, long lag to pick up networks, buggy settings. Do you remember any of this? Sounds like some old-fashioned feature phone that was somewhat overloaded by its ambitious maker, doesn’t it? But, alas, no, it is not. This is the user experience with a one-year-old iPhone 3G, 16GB since 24 June 2010. Do you recognise the date? Then luck will have it that you have experienced the same: the grandly titled “iOS4” update that was being pushed down your throat (or rather iTunes) to your iPhone 3G.
And then it came back to bite them! I am not a techie but iOS4 on the iPhone 3G feels like someone put a little too much luggage onto too frail a porter: the things creaks and aches at every corner. Gone are the days where one could switch from one app to another in seconds, where the iPhone – in good Apple style – did what you wanted it to do without much ado but breathtaking efficiency and speed. Now, it is clunky and, well, very old-fashioned. It could of course all have been avoided: just don’t push iOS4 to the iPhone 3G (or older models). No one would have cried, you should think: if the hardware cannot handle it, it cannot handle it. Users understand such things one should think. Keep iOS4 to the iPhone 4 (even the numbers match, doh!).
However, I think that is not it. My suspicion is rather more frightening. It very much feels like Apple starting to overextend itself and learn how complex and fragile it is to deal in the mobile space. Pushing iOS4 to devices that obviously (not only under some special and hard to find circumstances) cannot cope with it is just shoddy. Every game or app developer in the market for more than 2 years would have caught this in QA. Does Apple not have QA? Or not anymore? Or at least not enough? It might happen to you when you try too much too quickly. Apple’s passion (or paranoia?) that drives it to try and do everything itself appears to haunt it now: I mean, QA is really simple. You don’t need cohorts of phDs in elementary physics to do this. It doesn’t take you 3 years to build it up. And – last but not least – Apple appeared to being very much on top of this in the past. So what happened?
Apple’s iPhone is only a marketing fad for vain urbanites. True purists go for Android. Those who see the light in volume go for Nokia or Samsung.
On the Nexus, you’re OK (-ish) if your life evolves around Google. With a Gmail account and associated contacts (and/or calendars), you’re sort of OK. It does all that. Now – shock, horror – I do not actually send all my mail from Gmail and my contacts are mainly dealt with in my address book (take Outlook or whatever you want if you’re a Windows user). And I use iCal and not Google Calendar. And so it starts: there is no desktop application that would help me do this. On a Mac, the phone is not even recognised when you plug it in (and that is a rare thing on a Mac; is this another piece of Apple vs. Google? I don’t know but I doubt it). So you are finding yourself setting everything up by hand! Entering the POP3 and SMTP (or IMAP) server addresses, user names, passwords, etc, etc for seven e-mail accounts is no fun. And (remember I am not a techie) invariably leads to some box checked wrongly here or a typo in a password there and, kawoom, nothing works. I can set up a Google Calendar/iCal sync BUT that will only sync the specific Google Calendar bit between the two, and not any of my other (work, home) calendars. I can sync my address book with Google, so that works. The whole procedure took me the better part of 45 minutes, including lots of corrections and swearing and led to me abandoning a half-configured beauty of an Android phone. Great result.
My answer is: because they design it with engineer-centric design. And that is wrong! Why? Well, because most people are not engineers! An engineer thinks something along the following: I am Google and we love the cloud. Therefore, I will design everything so that it will adhere to that principle and will – in a purist kind of way – design everything in a way that you can beautifully and seamlessly set everything up – if and as long as you use all the wonderful Google services we have. And if you don’t get that, you’re not worthy.
Apple looks at things a little differently (and it is not only for the better although, for most people, it is): they provide a tool that brings everything I need over to my phone just like that. Job done. Easy! They will look at whatever tools they need for this. And if it means extending iTunes (which, yes, I know, they had already) to accommodate syncing data other than music and video to something other than a computer, than so be it. In that, they follow their own philosophy as slavishly as the other guys do but they do design it from a people-centric rather than an engineer-centric point of view. And that is why it works so well for people that are not (also) engineers.
According to a recent 
So what about it? Let us not forget how young Android is – even compared to the adolescent iPhone. The 
Also, do not forget the big brands: they do not necessarily care for a small share of the audience only. Whilst Android was fledgling and just starting up, they may have held back but, ultimately, they are about reach, and Android is certainly bound to deliver that. I would therefore suggest that we will be seeing an influx of large brands (gaming and otherwise) onto the Android platform very soon, and this will also help user orientation as to what to go for and what not.
The billing side of things is bound to improve, too. With carrier-billing around the corner (cf. supra), this will get easier and better. And also easier and better than it is on the iPhone: charges will simply appear on your carrier bill (smart pipe anyone?). Besides that, the business models for games are undergoing significant changes anyhow: Freemium takes centre-stage, and so it should: the model allows people to try a game out and be charged for it only when they know that a) they like it, b) what they are being charged for (e.g. that coveted sword, a couple of precious lives, or that cool background theme).
Retailing giant Tesco (where one in every seven pounds in the UK is being spent) has always been fairly active in mobile: it runs an MVNO (on the O2 network) and stocks lots of phones. It had also recently become a seller of the iPhone, yes, just in time for Christmas.
Alas, what was their bestseller? Not the iPhone but rather its opposite, an unbranded phone, the VX1 Party Phone (sic!), that retails for £18.99 and cannot do anything other than making phone calls and texts. It has a minute form factor though and, at that price, is nothing to collapse over should it get lost in the Christmas/New Year’s Eve party trouble. The phone comes SIM free but is unlocked, so everyone can use as a second one.