2009-06-19
post/126678781
Justin Blanton | To Pre or not to Pre?
This is a parenthetical remark that’s gone somewhat unnoticed in Blanton’s (worth reading) post about the Pre, but it is quite remarkable.
I remember the time, not so long ago, when the US cellphone market was a joke. British people would take high-end Nokais to the US, and have cameras in their phones as good that were arguably as good as some people’s digital compact cameras, and which could upload to Flickr instantly. The same phones didn’t emerge there for months.
Meanwhile, Palm were still making tethered handhelds, until they finally noticed their impending doom and acquired Handspring and their line of Treo phone/Palm hybrids. If Apple or Google seriously cared about phones at this point, nobody really noticed.
The phones you could actually buy at the mall? They were Korean or Japanese, running hideously butchered operator-locked firmwares. There were Microsoft smartphones¹, but nobody seemed to actually like them. Danger came and, seemingly, went².
Then came the last three years and, of course, everything has changed. The only phones I’d consider buying instead of the iPhone are something with Android and the Palm (although, of course, the Pre hasn’t been announced, let alone shipped, with a GSM chipset yet). Just three years, and the most desirable phones³ in the world no longer get designed in Finland, Sweden or Japan; they’re products of the South Bay. Crazy.
¹ Microsoft might have sold a lot of Windows Mobile licences in their time, but the tech bubble I live in has been utterly unimpressed with the vast majority of the devices it runs on, especially since it morphed from a general PDA platform to a mobile phone OS. Maybe that’s unfair, but I suspect not.
² I don’t have the local knowledge to figure out why Hiptop effectively failed. Certainly they never got a fair crack at the UK market; T-Mobile took the market’s rejection of their first, somewhat flawed, device as a sign they should never bother again.
³ Certainly the software on these phones is better, even if the hardware isn’t (reports indicate the N97 is pleasingly well-built and has good call quality). And yes, there’s still a huge market for call-centric, hardware-wins phones (hell, I tend to refer to the things I’d consider buying as “devices”, just to make it clear how minor their traditionally central function is to me), but surely, just as fifteen years ago nobody knew why everyone should have a phone, or ten years ago nobody wanted a colour display, or five years ago cameras in phones were seen as a showy novelty, another five or ten years will see the majority of phones be Internet devices (well, in the First World, anyway), and the software will come to dominate.
2009-03-05
Mobile phones vs mobile devices
I muttered on Twitter this morning that I “really need to buy an iPhone sooner than later. Yesterday my mobile ran out of battery before I left the house; today I forgot it entirely.”
Chris Heathcote pointed out on IRC that iPhones don’t carry themselves. It’s true, but neither do iPods, yet I can’t think of many times in the last five years when I’ve left the house for more than five minutes without carrying one- having music is that important. (Oh, another nice thing about iPods: I always have a laptop and charging cable, even if it is proprietary.)
I’m probably not normal, but ten years or more into the life of mobile phones, they’re really not that important to me; only just enough that I wish I wouldn’t forget it. So, as I said, it would suit me so much better if the phone was in the iPod.
There is a bigger point here (just); as Tim Bray noted in January:
I was discussing the iPhone with a friend who works at Apple, back when the programming environment was pretty constrained, and he said: “Remember, the killer app is the phone call, so we have to protect that first.” Except for, I don’t believe that any more. And the smart players are going to focus on making their devices better and better Net citizens.
These days, we’re seeing the first phones that aren’t primarily phones; they make calls, but they’re really devices*, and while the iPhone and Google’s G1 took the first steps in that direction, it looks (as Bray says) like the Palm Pre will be the first to allow the phone to be backgrounded. Or, as Dan Hon put it on Twitter,
The iPhone is a phone, an iPod and a breakthrough internet device. The Palm Pre is foremost a breakthrough internet device.
* I prefer this to calling them computers. Unless it has enough power to host a development environment, it doesn’t count, for me anyway.
