Greener Desktop

The definition of a fad varies a little from dictionary to dictionary but essentially what they all boil down to is this (from Wiktionary):

“A phenomenon that becomes popular for a very short time”

There is no denying that the iphone meets at least half the definition of a fad. It has become very popular in a very short period. Not long enough to make it to the list of enduring fads like the Rubik’s Cube or Skateboards.

In fact it wasn’t until the second iphone was created and launched world wide just over a year ago now that it really began to pick up pace.

The question is though, will the iphone just turn out to be a fad? Will all the cool kids be carrying around the next Motorola, Nokia or LG by this time next year?

One thing we can be sure of is that it’s starting to lose its street cred or “geek cred” as some call it. When you see grannies and stay at home mums using a phone that used to be the sole the domain of designers and the “technorati” you know it’s nearing the end of its adoption lifecycle. In fact someone did a lot of research into this a while ago and came up with something called Roger’s bell curve and the technology adoption lifecycle. The iphone is indeed in the late majority phase (where your slower than average adopters are). In other words it is no longer cool. Sorry Mr Stephen Fry.

This by no means proves it as a fad. No more than being called a shiny, stupid toy by the haters does.

What all this leads me to is an article I read about the death of the Croc shoe. Who’s death unlike the iphone I could not possibly even shed a single tear for.  What an ugly, ugly excuse for a shoe. At least the iphone looks nice.

You know those stupid pieces of footwear that started off as a fairly niche product suited for a single purpose that were very well marketed as being a shiny all rounder type shoe that might even work on public pavements. Kind of like sticking a phone on a multimedia player and calling it a smartphone. Yes! I am going somewhere. Crocs are to shoes as iphones are to, well … phones.

The article - named How Crocs Crashed was very positive and actually went on not to so much focus on how the Crocs fad failed but how you can keep your brand fresh. What I got out of it being a negative nelly and all is the exact opposite. I saw the massive parallels between what Apple are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

The keys to keeping a brand “hot” from Ries’ pieces. Along with my iphone take on them:

1. Dampen demand

This is one thing Apple certainly isn’t doing. In fact they’re adding so much fuel to the iphone fire I’m beginning to wonder whether they were behind the invasion of Iraq.

You just can’t escape the brand in Sydney. If you’re not walking past an Apple store you’re looking at an Apple ad on the back of a bus, on the side of a bus shelter in a magazine, newspaper. They’ve even managed to convince the media that there is no other phone. I’m sure this is the same in any major first world city.

Apple’s marketing department are flogging the iphone for all its worth. It’s almost as if they think it might dissapear overnight. A sure sign of a fad if ever there was a good sign.

2. Resist line extension

This is one area in which Apple, at least when it comes to the iphone, have managed to resist all temptation. Even when their biggest fans have yelled and screamed about it. If you pay any attention to the iphone you would have heard the rumours about the iphone nano, the apple tablet and a qwerty iphone. That’s it. They’re all rumours.

You maybe applauding Apple right now and thinking how smart their marketing department are. However, they aren’t just doing it because they’ve read Ries’ blog. They’re doing it because they’ve seen what it does to the big boys’ profit margins. It reduces them, drastically. In fact Nokia barely make a few dollars on most of their phones while Apple continue to make hundreds.

3. Control Distribution

Apple initially did the right thing in this area by making the phone exclusive to a particular provider in a particular country but the lock-in in their biggest market, the USA, is starting to have a damaging effect.

No longer is the AT&T/Apple partnership considered exclusive. It’s now considered a burden by an ever increasing portion of Apple’s customer and potential customer base. People might actually soon be ditching their iphones just because of AT&T.

4. Focus on Core Consumers

This is probably what will finally lose the battle for Apple. That young, technology savvy and high disposable income core that the iphone rode the wave of are now starting to tire of it. The endless lock in, the lack of customisation, the ever growing list of wants will finally be fulfilled by someone else if Apple don’t pay attention to it. This is where the flood gates will open and the wave of oppressed customers will finally escape. It will only take someone to open it and like the Croc the wave will just go somewhere else.

5. Expand globally

Well you can’t fault Apple on this one. They did this, but as with the Croc Apple flooded the market. There’s some countries that Apple just stepped into too quickly and lost a lot of face and rapport doing so.

Will the iphone just turn out to be a fad or it will it stay with us? Only time will tell but there’s no doubting that given some of the warning signs it will be an interesting product to follow.

Full disclosure: I am actually the author of iphones suck so I come full of bias. This is a blog after all and what are blogs if not opinionated.

In order to quell my rampant hatred of the iPhone and save the readers of this blog from too much anti-iPhone propoganda I’ve decided to setup a new blog. iPhones Suck - every day I’ll publish at least one or two reasons why the iPhone is indeed the worst smart phone on the planet. I’ll especially talk about why iPhone users are morons. Not necessarily always being this way with but after using a device as dumb as the iPhone their brains possibly melted.

Anyway head on over to iPhones suck and please remember to give us a few reasons why. Even if you are a drooling, zombified fanboy.

It has long been a dream of mine and many others that one day the web experience on your mobile is exactly the same as on your desktop. Albeit on a smaller screen.

Imagine going to youtube and watching videos with the same experience as the full website or yahoo  mail  with all its ajaxy bling and instant messenger built right in.

In many ways we’re almost there and I have to say Apple and the iphone deserve some credit. The experience is good but its not all there yet. Try going to youtube and playing a video … Oops you can’t. But why is it that with my nokia, windows mobile etc smartphone and the built in browser or Skyfire I can? Because my browser has an important plugin - called flash. Ubiquitous on the desktop but strangely missing on the iphone.

Right about now I hear the  unified screams of the iphone fanboys yelling ‘but we have an app to do that!’ this is true but I am talking about convergence here. Parity. I as a developer doesn’t want to have to write a separate codebase for every mobile phone out there but because of the iphone’s  popularity and lack of a key feature. I have to.

Adobe just announced flash 10 will be coming to pretty much every smartphone out there bar one the iphone. Why? Not because Adobe doesn’t want to provide it. They have gone so far as to actually having written Flash for the iphone already, it’s Apple and their typical closed door approach.

Apple, please open up your platform. You’re slowing down the future. Remember when you used to accuse Microsoft of doing the same. Stop the hypocrisy.

With the storm of controversy over Nokia’s Ovi Store slowly starting to settle the nitty gritty of the store’s features are starting to become clear. In this article I will present what I found to be the best content on offer and also some of the worst. All prices have been listed in Australian Dollars. As we usually pay a high price for most products in this country you’ll probably find most things are half the price in Euros or US Dollars.

Just a note: One of the most glaringly obvious problems with the Ovi Store is that most of the apps available on your phone are not available on the website. So don’t be  surprised if you can’t find some of these programs on the website.

The Good

There really are too many great apps and games to list but here’s some of the ones I find to be invaluable.

All of the City Guides ( $8 - $26.99 )
The Ovi Store is chocked full of mobile travel guides from DK and Lonely Planet. I have used these before and believe me, when you’re on holidays and traveling around 10+ European cities in a month you don’t want to drag around 10 different guide books. For the same price as a paper city guide I’d buy 10 of the mobile versions instead.

Fring (FREE)
Fring is quite simply the best instant messaging client out there. It supports all the major IM networks (AOL,ICQ,GTalk,MSN,Yahoo etc) and on top of that you can do some basic management of your social networks like Twitter, Facebook and so on. I still can’t believe this application is free. I would pay top dollar for the time it saves me and the mobility it affords.

Joikuspot Mobile Wifi Hotspot ($19.99)
This application turns your mobile phone into a mobile hotspot. What this means is that without any special software on your laptop use your phone for internet access. With all you can eat and high gigabyte allowances these days its a great way to be able to jump on the Internet anywhere you want. The best bit is, you
can share it with your friends.

PDF+ Basic ($6.60)
The E series of Nokia phones already come with a PDF reader which I find invaluable. If you find something interesting on the web or need to catchup on an important document before that meeting tomorrow you can print the doc to PDF on your computer and save it for later reading on your mobile. So if your phone doesn’t have a PDF reader already then I recommend picking up this one.

Powerboot (FREE)
Powerboot allows you to specify which apps you’d like to load when your phone is turned on or reset. If you want your phone to automatically check your email or load up your most used applications then you can’t go past this one. Best of all, it’s FREE!

Psiloc Wireless Presenter (FREE)
This app allows you to control your powerpoint presentations from your mobile phone. It works over bluetooth and even shows notes from the presentation on the phone’s screen in case you need some help along the way. I’ve found this one invaluable when giving presentations to large audiences. Note: If you own an E-series phone it’s probably already installed.

Bubble Bash ($6.60)
Frozen Bubble was one of my favourite games on my Nokia E65 but sadly on my E71 the game doesn’t make use of the screen space
available. So with that in mind I’m recommending Bubble Bash as it’s a fine Puzzle Bubble clone.

The Bad

It looks as if the Ovi Store is trying to one up Apple’s iPhone App store in terms of 99 cent junk applications. While there’s nothing for 99 cents (the cheapest is $2) the quality and usefulness of some of the cheapest apps is questionable.

The Noise Machine ( $2 )
Not quite as useless as the iPhone fart applications but its pretty close. For your $2 you get an app that makes a variety of noises from crowds cheering to a drum roll.

Mysterious Fortune Ball ( $2 )
“Ask a question and the Mysterious Fortune Ball will give you an answer from beyond!” - Enough said really, a waste of 99kb of solid state storage space.

Every single paid wallpaper and ringtone ($2 - $8)
Why anyone would think I would pay $8 for a an MP3 ringtone of some Rihanna song is beyond me. For about $2 I could download the full song from the Nokia store, iTunes or for a few bucks more I could buy the whole album at a record store.

The Ugly

Here’s a list of applications that just can’t justify their asking price.

Happy Wakeup ( $68.99 )
This has to be the most expensive alarm clock I have ever come across. For almost seventy dollars I could go out and buy about 5 real alarm clocks. Is this
really a joke like the $999 I’m Rich iPhone app or is it someone trying to milk as much as they can out of the Ovi Store.

Security Shield Pro Edition ( $68.99 )
“Our patented scanning technologies are not ‘reworks’ of PC methodologies.” - I guess that’s what makes it worth seventy dollars. The app claims to be some sort of all in one security, privacy and anti spam software. Why you’d really need all this on a phone is beyond me.

MOT Finnish-English ($54.99)
A Finnish/English dictionary translator application. Why would I pay that much when I can buy a book for about $15 that will do the same thing. Even more ridiculous is
the fact that the rest of the MOT series of apps are all $16. Right about what I’d be prepared to pay. Is Finnish that hard to translate?

Summary

In summary there’s a lot of good applications and games on the store. Many of the most useful apps are available for free. However, like the iPhone store the Ovi Store is at risk from being plagued by an onslaught of “junk” applications. Nokia may have circumvented this somewhat by charging higher setup fees than apple does. Some see this increased barrier to entry as a bad thing  but the way I see it is that unless you write an app or game that people will seriously want then the Ovi Store is not for you.

Nokia has finally started rolling out the Nokia store to selected countries. At this point I believe just Ireland and Australia but within a few days most countries should be online. For those who are not in the know it is basically Nokia’s answer to the iPhone app store and will be accessible from both your mobile phone (as an application itself) and the Ovi Store website.

Before I start talking about the application I’m sure you’ll want to know how to install it yourself or at least check to see if it’s available for you. So without delay, here’s the instructions:

1. Locate the download functionality on your phone. For recent E and N series there should be a download icon in the main menu. You may have to look under extras
2. Download should tell you it needs to update the catalogue. If it doesn’t choose options and refresh list.
3. Select Ovi Store and wait while it downloads and installs the app
4. The installer will ask you to reboot the phone
5. Once you’ve rebooted go to the home menu and navigate to where apps are normally installed for you (installations/extras). You will find a brand new icon for the Ovi Store. Fire it up and enjoy.

The first thing you have to do before you can enjoy any of the Ovi Store content is to login. Yes, even free content requires a login. If you haven’t got an account don’t worry. You can create one on the spot without a computer.

After you’ve gone through the sign in/sign up process you are presented with the following screen. Notice how all the apps recommended to you initially are free. They want to hook you in. They’ve done a great job here as there’s almost 20 apps and videos you can download without charge to get a feel for the service.

Scrolling left and right takes you across the major tabs in the Ovi Store where content is broken down into Apps, Recommended, Games, Audio & Video (media not apps), Personalisation (wallpapers and ring tones) and My Stuff. At first navigation seems daunting - pages and pages of apps, music and other stuff.  Go through to the options menu and you’ll find that most content is categorised and all content can be filtered by cost, popularity and by recency.

The application prices are surprisingly reasonable. I was expecting developers to be holding out for $20 + as they did in the old Nokia store. Games seem to start at AUD $6.60 and do go up to AUD $12.00 where you do have to think twice before buying. Videos on the other hand are either free or come at a nominal price. There’s a wide range available as well with everything from movie trailers, to travel guides to stand up comedy routines. Pricing is definitely not the same as the iPhone app store where programs start at USD 0.99 but the quality on Ovi Store seems vastly superior. I haven’t seen any fart apps so far. I know I’m prepared to pay more for quality software that does more than play funny sounds or allow you to shake a baby to death.

Installing apps is, surprisingly, even more pleasant than the already quite agreeable standard way of installing apps. It’s completely seamless - once you’ve selected an App to install (and possibly paid for it) you’ll see a progress bar indicating the download progress and then another giving you the install progress. When the application is ready to be run you’ll be prompted to start it. If like me you’re so keen on installing as much free software and media as you can it will go into your installed applications folder on the phone for later use.

Once you’ve installed an app you can write a full review, right there on the phone.

So far the experience is good and I enjoyed the new found freedom I have. The old application download service was horrible. However, I will reserve my full judgement of the service for when they launch the full PC website and to see how that integrates using Nokia Suite with the phone itself. As you can see from the screen shots there’s not much chance I’ll be doing all my app purchasing on the E71s 320×240 screen.

The ultimate question is - “Will this bring Nokia enough hype and backing to take on some of Apple’s slice of new smart phone uptake?”

You were waiting for something profound weren’t you. Well before that comes, here’s one of the runners up for the supidest iPhone app ever.  The iSnort.

Rather than buying an iPhone and paying $5 for a virtual cocaine app. I’d rather spend the $500 or so and buy a good quantity of cocaine. It has the same sort of user experience - big, loud, noisy, stupid and clunky but the fun lasts a lot longer. I found the iPhone’s entertainment factor lasted about five minutes. $500 of cocaine would probably get you at least a week’s worth.

Anyway on to the epiphany. I just realised something. Whereas the out of the box the iPhone experience is rather limited. A good smart phone will give you things like a decent email experience, office apps, voice recorders etc. Apple in their brilliant mindedness have encouraged developers to add the features that other smart phone users have come to expect as standard in dribs and drabs. For example on the Nokia you have a fully featured Twitter client called Gravity, whereas on the iPhone you have about two hundred different apps. One will read your friends tweets, one for composing your tweets another for sending them and so on. Just to get the same type of experience you do on other phones you need to buy at least ten applications!

Apple are ingenious. They give you what is basically the poorer cousin of a 1990s analogue mobile (or cell) phone but with a pretty screen and you as the sucker who bought one go out and waste thousands of dollars on trying to compete with those people who own a smart phone like the Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile line. Those people who bought an iPhone are basically coke heads. They need to buy more and more to make themselves feel adequate.

Apple please send me an iPhone. I hate them and everything they stand for. That is why you need to send me one.

I’ve written many articles about what pisses me off about iPhones, iPhone users and all the features the iPhone is missing. I’d say I’m pretty much in the minority as far as bloggers who talk about the iphone so negatively.

With that being said I can see the positives behind the platform and especially the huge following it has generated in just a couple of years. I’ve even written about how Nokia, the mobile phone giant might find itself outsmarted by Apple and all the great marketing.

Apple - Imagine if you could convert me. I write so much about how I hate the iPhone and what it’s missing. If you could turn me around and bring me into the fold, that passion could be directed towards talking about how much I love the iPhone and even into positive debate about how it could be improved. If I could then, in turn convert just a few of my readers to your platform then that phone would have paid itself off in full, many times. Who knows, I might even end up buying a Mac.

During my trial I would give the iPhone exactly one week which is a long time to decide whether you like something or not. If in that time I miss all the wonderful features of my Nokia E71 too much then you will have failed to convert me. I will send it back. If I am converted and absolutely must have an iPhone with me at all times then I get to keep the phone. For free! Either way, I will write about my experience. If Apple fail to answer my call to give me an iPhone then I will continue to write about it in a objective way having not used one for long enough to forgive its shortcomings in favour of its advantages over other smart phones.

So Apple, please send me an iPhone so I can fall in love with it. It would be a great marketing move. I’ll blog and twitter about my conversion experience daily.

Most of the regular readers of this blog and those who know me personally probably know by now that i hate the iPhone. With a passion. It’s not that I particularly like any other type of smart phone out there (my Nokia E71 is ok). It’s just that the iPhone stands for everything wrong with the world.

The straw that broke the camels back today and hence lead to this rant is an app (no link coz you iphone fanboys will just buy it to spite me) called Birdhouse and while they have done a great job doing up a promotional video for it which has world class production values. The application itself is ….. USELESS. It’s beyond useless in fact. It’s just a notepad for the iphone.  I don’t own an iphone but I’m fairly certain it has a notepad feature already and if it doesn’t then that’s one more reason for it to burn in hell along with all the idiots who bought one.
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This week Apple released a teaser list of what new features we’ll see in the iPhone/iPod 3.0 firmware. While the list certainly looks impressive and I’m sure many of them will be invaluable for iPhone users the list is mainly functionality that should have been released in the initial firmware. There are still a lot missing many of them downright obvious (like video recording) others impossible without the release of new phone hardware (video calling, higher resolution camera, replaceable batteries).

So what I’ll present in this article is an abbreviated list of the most important updates along with commentary covering why they’re so crucial to the success of the phone and even questioning why they weren’t present in the the earlier revisions of the phone. I’ll then wrap up the article with some of the commentary I’ve heard  from various users about what’s still needed to bring the phone up to scratch. Only then can you iPhone users look down on us smart phone users.

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A close friend today was discussing mobile internet with me. I forced him to when I started ranting today about the fact that Vodafone want to charge you $10 a month extra for 100mb of Internet access on your mobile whilst I can get a whole gigabyte for $19 a month if I use one of those USB sticks. Don’t use Vodafone, they’re just one example of why we’ll be stuck in the dark ages for a long long time. Anyway I digress.

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