Volker on Mobile

After much huffing and puffing, Vodafone unveiled yesterday what everyone had been waiting for for months and months: its new Vodafone 360 concept, which will replace Vodafone Live! It launches on – drumroll – LiMo-OS Linux phones from Samsung with touchscreen and GPS and, for the H1, AMOLED display (yum!), WiFi, HSDPA, etc, etc, etc. and also supports a fairly big range of Nokia (not on the N97 though!) and Sony Ericsson devices (although, judging by the screenshots, it doesn’t look as sexy on those).

The 360 thing is, according to the press release

a brand new set of internet services for the mobile and PC which gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favourites (like music, games, photos and video) in one place.

It has an address book with nodes into Facebook, IM (Windows and Google) and will “soon” also cover Twitter, Hyves and StudiVZ (the German Facebook clone). Two tailor-made (!) handsets that use a proprietary (!) interface based on LiMo’s release 2 mobile Linux OS. Users can create groups across different networks (which is very neat!), an app store with 1,000 apps at launch (no word so far what this comprises) and syncing with your computer.

So is this the big thing then? Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly:

The Good

• The service reaches out. It acknowledges (this is a big step for most carriers!) that users have a life outside their carrier. Facebook, Live Messenger and Google Talk are a bit thin, I’d say, but let’s cut them some slack; the others will follow.
• It has a couple of neat twists built-in: I mentioned a few above but there is also a feature that uses some spooky thing called the “Vodafone’s proximity algorythm” and which basically automatically favourites your most-loved people: the most frequently contacted people (like your mom?) come closer to the front.
• At least on the custom-built devices, it looks much better than previous attempts by carriers to make something look and feel a little more user-friendly.
• I hear that the whole widget-thing should be really neat. Now, I haven’t seen any of it as yet but the concept sounds good.
• It works across different operating systems (at least LiMo and Symbian).

As a funny side remark, the PR blurb points out that

The beauty of Vodafone 360 is that all the services work together and they are easy to use.

So they weren’t before, huh? — sorry, couldn’t resist…

The Bad

Some commentators mentioned that the cloud-hosted address book and generally aggregation of contacts, networks etc through a provider rather than through the handset would tie people to the provider more closely (which might not actually be anything Vodafone would object to). I am not sure how tough it would really be (as you have your computer back-up), so easy on that.

It is still very much a closed-circuit affair: It is Vodafone and no one else. It is proprietary, tailor-made and not open. This is not good (and, yes, I know that the oft-cited iPhone is proprietary and tailor-made, too). Alas, its applications are not – unless your name is Spotify; then it takes a little longer…

The Ugly

The underlying proprietary thinking is nothing I can see working longer term. In a world that is (Vodafone press speak)

a substantiator of Vodafone’s new brand expression – ‘power to you’ – which is focused on putting the customer in control and enabling simple and easy to manage communications, both mobile and fixed

this is also a little bit of a contradiction.

But I will say that it seems to be the nicest operator-built environment I have seen so far. And for this to come from the world’s largest operator is no mean feat and might actually yield some results. Go on, guys, tweak it, improve it, show us!

The breath of fresh air that Apple has been bringing to the mobile content industry does not seem to end. However, this time, it is not so much fresh air by Apple but rather a borrowed deodorant from Microsoft (more specifically the iPod killer called Zune) and that is app-sharing. Whilst this might be largely superfluous for the Zune (how often will you find a group where more than one person has one? – as the good folks from the Apple Blog mention), it would be upping the usability game again and, for iPhone and iPod users as well as for the quickly growing Android device-base, it would arguably impact the market a little more. This also since the iPhone has become so much of the benchmark every OEM tries to emulate.

So what is it? According to Business Week who have been speaking to someone “familiar with the technology”, the iPhone 3.0 software kit provides for a functionality that could “if activated by Apple” allow users to share apps between them (note to self: ask my contacts familiar with the technology if they came across this, too).

Technically, it’s compelling and simple, well, the latter at least in Apple’s case: It was a nightmare for an engineer (as much as a dream for every “guerilla” marketeer) in the face of a gazillion different handsets with a gazillion different screen sizes, heap sizes, soft key allocations, etc, etc. In Apple’s case: 1 device, 1 screen size… off to the races…

Now, the same thing is supposed to happen with Android devices, too. And there, this might actually be a little harder to achieve; different devices, etc – well you get the gist.

From a user perspective it is of course fantastic: you can try things out before you have to commit to buy (rather than relying on the voluntary “lite” versions). So rather than buying an app that a friend likes (which increases the likelihood you might to but does not necessarily give you certainty to part with your precious cash). So: try it out. You like it, you buy it… It also (as mentioned above) is a big one on the marketing side: the strongest sales people will be happy users. So if a happy user recommends it to their peers, it is so much more likely that they will give it a go. All good stuff.

Would someone from Apple please confirm this?

I wrote about this topic a couple of times already (here and here) but here’s an interesting update/summary. The gist of the argument remains, only the numbers got better: Microsoft’s XBox has sold 29 million units, and that is fairly respectable (in particular when you consider that people regularly fork out $30 and more per game). Apple however (Mr Gates, I hate to say it) outsold its dear competitor by selling more than 30 million iPhones (and, well, iPod Touch).

Here’s one that nearly slipped through the (well, at least my) net: according to a recent press release, the Eclipse Foundation is set to unveil a unified development platform. It is said that some major players, including Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, IBM and Motorola have joined this initiative already though Android and – predictably – Microsoft and Apple are notable in their absence.

Microsoft has a central market place for Windows Mobile applications in the making. It is the latest (and maybe the last) of the big smartphone platform makers to come forth with such a model. And – with a probably already somewhat reflexive jab to its Cupertino nemesis (yes, Mr Gates’ children are not allowed iPods), it vowed to be more open to outside software developers.

So following the conflicting news about what the strategy for Windows Mobile would be, some learned folks followed up and quizzed Microsoft. So here’s what they said:

Microsoft will be focusing on building out the quality of the Windows Mobile experience, investing more in working with its partners to ensure the best hardware-software integration. While this may result in fewer phone models, Microsoft will continue working with our partners to innovate on the Windows Mobile platform.

Microsoft is committed to continued innovation of the Windows Mobile platform. Our goal continues to be working together with you to deliver exciting experiences to end users. The implication in The New York Times that Microsoft will limit the number of Windows Mobile devices is not accurate. In an interview with the paper, Todd Peters stated that Microsoft would be focusing on building out the quality of the Windows Mobile experience, investing more in working with its partners to ensure the best hardware-software integration.

Last week during the frenzy that was CES, Microsoft put out two statements that I find slightly confusing. Statement no. 1 was the announcement from Steve Ballmer that more than 20 million Windows Mobile devices had been shipped in 2008. He went on to marvel 

Microsoft scored an important success with a recently announced a deal that will see its Flash competitor Silverlight (with the most Apple-esque logo ever issued in Redmond) installed on the mighty Nokia’s s60 and – low-end – s40 devices (or multimedia terminals as the good folks from Finland like their posher phones to be called). Interestingly of course, Nokia also embeds Adobe’s Flash Lite… Tasty!

Now, is Silverlight really this good? Or is it only another product the people from Microsoft thought they should have on their shelves (arguably not being too happy that Adobe carved out for itself a nice niche for some)? I don’t know and I won’t be able to answer that without embarrassing myself. So: the news tonight is simply that Nokia is a good catch for Microsoft. And, now, the weather…

One small piece of advice to MS though: choose your showcase sites carefully. The Yugoslav maker of one of them (I don’t really know what they’re doing) does not really offer the latest and greatest in web design and functionality…

It did not take too long to bring down the value of mobile music spearheads Musiwave from $130m to $50m. The former was the price Openwave paid for the French company in 2005, the latter is what Microsoft now splashed out to buy it from Openwave ($46m in cash and $4m in assumption of debt). And at this price, it looks like a rather good buy for the world’s largest software maker.

Microsoft has acquired what was an early leader in mobile music. Musiwave is a giant in mobile distribution of music content – everything from ringtones, ringbacks and full-track downloads to music recognition, etc. Whilst Microsoft will have seized access to a trusted carrier-grade database and provisioning environment as well as Musiwave’s extensive relationships with all players on the mobile music circuit – labels, carriers and device manufacturers. Now it will have to show that it can marry it to its own music-centered services, in particular around its Zunes device and service.

All in all, Microsoft seems to be a much more natural home to Musiwave than Openwave would seem to have been. Good luck to the tall guys in Musiwave!

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) pushes into Windows Mobile reports Telephony Online. As it sets out to create a BlackBerry Virtual Machine, this would imply a move from a hardware-driven to a software-driven business model but RIM is playing this down: they say they will continue to build their Blackberry devices and merely react to market demand.

Analysts seem sceptical as loading the BlackBerry software onto a Windows-powered phone is apparently tougher than it sounds. They also claim that vendors may be reluctant to include it in their phone’s basic software stack, and carriers may be reluctant to support it.

And that seems logical: a few years ago there had not been any alternative, so everyone might have played along. However, now alternatives, most prominently from mighty MSFT itself (Microsoft ActiveSync), are here, and one wonders if it will be just as easy. Given Blackberry’s cult following and the wariness towards Microsoft’s dominance, one cannot help but wish for a powerful competitor. However, it might very well be that RIM fell for the old Apple mistake, i.e. trying to marry hardware and software for too long: once the real world has moved on and worked around proprietary systems (even if they are superior), there is no winning anymore.