April 3, 2007
Katie Fehrenbacher nicely packages an optimistic analysis of Helio’s forthcoming Ocean phone at GigaOm after linking to some doom and gloom regarding the MVNO’s prospects. While the AP story in particular details how Helio’s expensive growth is testing EarthLink investor patience, I can’t agree that the Ocean could be an “unlikely saviour.”
Devices aren’t and never have been king in the cellular business (Hear that, AT&T and Apple?). Devices have been closer to the heart of Helio than even other MVNOs, but they are still merely enablers, and it seems as though Helio has done quite well driving SMS volumes even without a QWERTY device. Its marketing formula is still probably only about 30 percent device, 70 percent image.
Helio has courted a high-end consumer but, as Katie notes, competition is stiff for the Ocean with the likes of the imminent iPhone and LG Prada, for which Engadget posted an enticing UI video walkthrough yesterday. As for Exchange integration, I suspect that many who have outgrown the Sidekick or grown weary of its incremental upgrades will take to one of the svelte trio of smartphones (the Q, BlackJack and Dash) running Windows Mobile, particularly as they are now starting to be heavily discounted and primed for Windows Mobile 6 upgrades. They still may not be as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside, but they’re gimmick-free and good enough to sustain inertia.
March 22, 2007
Hang around enough media mailing lists long enough and you will find yourself mysteriously added to some that border on your areas of focus, but are just valuable enough for some reason to justify the inertia of failing to unsubscribe. An example for me is Telecoms Korea, which requires a subscription for news on arguably the world’s most advanced wireless country.
Every so often, Telecoms Korea will throw out an inflammatory headline. Unfortunately, my coding skillz aren’t up to creating the picklists, so I’ll just list the ingredients here for making your own:
Column 1:
Samsung, LG, Pantech, KT, SK Telecom, The Korean government
says
Column 2:
CDMA, GSM, WiBro, GPS
is
Column 3:
losing, dead, dying, dead in five years
February 23, 2007
In enumerating his latest ideal features for a podcast player, Dave Winer illustrates a dilemma that convergence poses. Dave wants Blackberry-like synchronization, which I agree would be a nice feature, but one that would probably translate into carrier support and distribution. It would be a tough sell to get carriers to offer such a product as it would be deemed too niche. This is partly why cheaper. more accessible wireless broadband, via WiMax or some other source, can’t come soon enough to reinvigorate the consumer electronics market.
Dave also wants the product to be a platform of sorts. I’d support plug-in functionality, but would oppose making the thing completely open as Mike Elgan has argued the Zune should be. As Michael Gartenberg notes before tempting me to buy niche coffee-making products, there are already several multifunction products that could easily meet Dave’s requirements, yet they are not considered for the task because of their loosely defined functionality.
January 17, 2007
I didn’t get to post on the unabashed flamebait from generally more even-handed CNet editor at large Michael Kanellos on why the Apple Phone will flop and Playlist senior editor Dan Frakes’s dutiful reverse peristalsis. (Dan saw eye to eye with me on why Zune shouldn’t be “the anti-iPod.”). Both were blind men before the elephant, though. Michael saw Apple trying to turn the industry upside-down with a converged do-all device while Dan saw something more focused on media. I’d say overall that Dan’s perspective was more on target.
I must come clean that I was on the record essentially saying that Apple would never do a cell phone, so as the tidal wave of rumors came crashing down in San Francisco next week, I had to eat some humble apple pie. Oh well, my rationales held for three and a half years and some of my arguments were similar to why Michael says the Apple phone will flop.
November 18, 2006
Mark Spoonauer, editor-in-chief at LAPTOP where I write the Portable Pundit column, gave me a heads-up today on a fun little RAZR spoof they’ve put on their site. My favorite is the “Electrick (sic) RAZR” because, after all, what guy couldn’t use a little touch-up just about the time free evening calling begins?
I had my own, less graphically interesting, fun with the pioneering sleek handset back in early 2005
November 5, 2006
While at least some of its coverage seems to urge “smartphones later,” CrunchGear’s Smartphones Now series recently posted a tabletastic first-time buyers’ guide. While the site admits that there’s “no official definition” for smartphones, it notes that these handsets are, generally speaking, “a combination of a cellphone and PDA.”
Yet, in its guide, the site notes that it’s omitting Blackberries and Sidekicks as they are “communicators” even though two posts earlier it includes the Blackberry Pearl in the “Smartphones Now” series. How can the industry resolve all this? It may not be perfect, but I like the idea of defining a smartphone as one that has an operating system that enables users to install their own applications outside of those offered by the carrier in the case of proprietary OSes such as the one the Sidekick uses. Under that definition, the Blackberry would be a smartphone.
August 30, 2006
Just a few days after the announcement of Chumby comes another small device, this one focused on driving. Dash’s Web site humbly notes that its product will do for driving what TV did for entertainment and cell phones did for communication. Not only did these seminal devices result in different kinds of changes, but the CrunchGear report would indicate that at least one of Dash’s main features is real-time traffic using a mesh network that goes beyond what TomTom has done with its Friend Finder feature.
Accurate traffic reporting can turn portable navigation devices from products used only opportunistically to ones used almost every day, but I still wouldn’t put it on the magnitude scale of the cell phone or certainly the television. If it can get the viral network effect rolling (and it will be hard to lowball what sounds like a feature-rich device), Dash’s approach should have advantages over several approaches used to deliver traffic today. However, I’m still waiting to see far more natural ways of giving directions based on contextual cues, directions the way a human would give them. — “Turn left at the Mobil station on the right three blocks away.”
August 10, 2006
The Wireless Report asks whether advanced music phones will ever be able to compete with the iPod and comes up skeptical owing to the product’s extensive ecosystem. I’m more bullish on such products. Yes, we’re in the early days but we’ve already seen great strides forward and even Apple concedes that music phones are bound to improve, hence the empty admission that they’re “not doing nothing” in the space.
Something I haven’t seen much coverage about regarding the iPod is that, despite its increasing functionality, media support and vast range of accessories that have developed over the years, Apple has not opened it up to developers the way Palm did with the original Pilot. Want to develop a new game for the iPod? You can’t. One could argue that a platform or API didn’t really save the PDA in the end, but it continues to be important in the realm of smartphones, which could be the iPod’s future and is certainly one direction for portable digital music in general.
August 9, 2006
Sony recently introduced Mylo (My Life Online), a device with a resurrected name that resembles its PSP (but is actually much smaller) and boasts an integrated slide-up keyboard. Early coverage labelled it an instant messaging appliance, perhaps a higher-end version of the Wi-Fi-enabled K-Byte Zip-It, but it really is more of a mobile Internet appliance akin to the larger but comparably priced Nokia 770, which Nokia unfortunately sometimes treats like an open-source science project.
Two main differences are that the 770 has a high-resolution screen better suited to Web browsing and Bluetooth. The absence of Bluetooth in Mylo is a quandary; I’d prioritize it more highly than Wi-Fi. If Sony is concerned about the difficulty of pairing or the availability of DUN-capable phones among young hipsters, it should recognize that they can already get a capable Bluetooth-enabled handset (and headset) for less than the Mylo.
In any case, like the 770, the Mylo has the de rigeur music and photo capabilities as well as an integrated Web browser. Mylo reportedly uses Trolltech’s QTopia operating environment; let’s hope its browser is better than the PSPs and that its keyboard is better than the Vaio UX’s. Unlike the 770, it includes a Skype client and hotspot directory, the latter of which it wouldn’t need (as much) if it had Bluetooth.
June 27, 2006
I thought we had gotten past the point where all Wi-Fi business models seemed doomed, but I find it odd that Boeing did not have more success with Connexion, its technology for delivering Wi-Fi in-flight. In particular, no US airline signed up for the service, which has reportedly lost a billion dollars in its six years of operation, and so may be grounded. I thought I had long ago won an argument with a former colleague about the availability of Internet access in planes, but perhaps he will have the last laugh.
One would think that a more creative approach to the service could have used it as a business class perk or frequent-flyer reward, allowing the proletariat in coach to purchase it a la carte. Well, at least being on a plane provides a closeup view of a cloud’s silver lining, and expected relaxation of clell phone usage on planes could open up the market for at least selective high-speed data. Hmmm, 3G clobbering Wi-Fi; maybe things aren’t so different at 30,000 feet.
