Andrew Orlowski

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Brendon McLean wrote to me with such a succinct summary of mobile phone angst, I invited him to elaborate. Read the result, How the mobile phone biz lost the plot, here.

These days, no major tragedy is complete without ambulance-chasing technology boosters muscling in on the aftermath. The Asian tsunami and the London 7/7 attacks both provided a tasteless excuse for evangelists to hype their favourite cause: instant real-time communications in general, and blogging in particular.

But with the Virginia Tech massacre, the reliance on technology itself is in the spotlight. Campus administrators took two hours to warn students there was a threat to their lives. Police were alerted that a gunman was on the loose at 7:15am. The second shooting spree began at 9:45am.

All students and staff received this warning by email (yes, email): “A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows.”
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When one looks at the prime assets of the Nokia of five years ago, it’s alarming to see how many have been discarded. At the turn of the decade, the Finnish giant boasted a formidable reputation for reliability, security and ease of use. Now it’s thrown all three out of the window, with security being the last to go.

The diminishing reliability of these devices isn’t unique to Nokia, and it may be a consequence of having so many products, in so many markets, all at once. But engineers deep in Nokia we’ve spoken with describe how they grew weary at being conditioned only to fix a proportion of bugs. It offends an engineer’s pride to release a flawed product, but this became a way of life. There was simply too much to do.

As for usability, the company which pioneered an interface that helped popularize the digital mobile phone – NaviKey™ – now falls far behind much of the competition. With feature phones, Nokia’s interface has failed to evolve with the tactile and graceful interface of Sony Ericsson, for example.

At the high end, the story is far worse. The S60 UI initially provided Nokia with a clever bridge to the future, but it looks pedantic and cumbersome besides Motorola’s MotoRizr 8, let alone Apple’s iPhone. Nokia answers the perennial S60 user’s question, “Why so many clicks?” by adding extra hardware buttons, such as the slow and inflexible “Multimedia” key. S60 is incredibly poorly written in parts, but Samsung has demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be sluggish, by using its own chip to speed up its first European S60 phone. Yet Nokia has ensured most of its smartphone users have a substandard experience, by starving the devices of sufficient memory or fast enough processors.

It doesn’t augur well that the company’s skill at exploiting the emerging markets owes little to its recent R&D work: it’s succeeded with low cost models in China by dusting off older, more reliable, and easier-to-use technologies. In other words, it’s living off past glories, rather than looking to the future.

In fact, Nokia now appears to quite relish the complexity of its devices. Quite bizarrely, a company which had no need for an inferiority complex appears to have acquired one.
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I’m glad the iPhone’s is here – and I have very selfish reasons for wanting it to succeed. That’s because even without the cellular telephony, it looks like something I’ve been wanting to buy. But it’s also because after years of writing about smartphones, I’ve seen the established players become lazy and complacent, go down blind alleys, or standardize on horrible designs and feature sets. So the iPhone should focus minds wonderfully – it should raise the bar for everyone.

I’m also hoping a crushing wave of shame will overcome anyone who has a Blackberry, or one of its hideous clones from HP, Motorola, Nokia or Palm. Owning one of these is like volunteering for a lobotomy – then boasting about it afterwards.

I’m also hoping a crushing wave of shame will overcome anyone who has a Blackberry, or one of its hideous clones from HP, Motorola, Nokia or Palm. Owning one of these is like volunteering for a lobotomy – then boasting about it afterwards.

But common sense suggests it’s going to be a bumpy road for Apple, and it knows it. This isn’t a new experience: both the original Macintosh computer and the iPod received rave reviews on their debut but both were, a year of later, perceived to be failures. Both eventually recovered. Will Apple’s new PDA?
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“It looks like you’re trying to have a conversation with a computer – can I help?
In the early 1970s, no science show was complete without predictions of HAL-like intelligent autonomous computers by the turn of the century.

The Japanese, fearing their industrial base would collapse without a response to this omniscient technology, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their own AI project, called Fifth Generation. They may as well have buried the money in the Pacific Ocean. Two decades later there are no intelligent robots, and “intelligent” computers are a pipe-dream.

(It was an academic coup for MIT’s Professor Marvin Minsky, a fixture on the AI slots. Minsky’s own preferred, linguistics-based approach to AI, symbolic AI, triumphed in the grants lotteries over an approach which preferred to investigate and mimic the neural functions of the brain. Minsky’s non-stop publicity campaign helped ensure his AI lab at MIT was well-rewarded while neural networks starved.)

For the past week reports have again confidently predicted intelligent computers are just around the corner. Rollo Carpenter, whose chatbot Joan won an annual AI prize for creating software that most resembles a human, predicts that computers will pass the ‘Turing Test’ by 2016. In this test, computer software fools a human interrogator by passing off as a human.

(You can spot the flaw already: to sound human isn’t a sign of intelligence. And what a pity it is that Turing is remembered more for his muddle-headed metaphysics than for his landmark work in building computational machines. It’s a bit like lauding Einstein for opposition to the theory of plate tectonics, rather than his work on relativity, or remembering Newton for his alchemy, not his theory of gravity).

But let’s have a look. A moment’s glance at the conversation of Joan, or George, is enough to show us there is no intelligence here.
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Answers service AQA is two years old this summer, and finds itself in the happy position of not only being profitable, but something of a social phenomenon in its home country.

A book based on the service, The End Of The Question Mark is due to be published in October, drawing the questions Britons ask, and the answers AQA gives them. Not bad for a company that still has only nine full time employees.

What AQA allows you to do is text in a question and receive an answer for a quid. This might strike US readers as expensive: it’s nearly two dollars (or four days of the San Francisco Chronicle) for a few lines of text at today’s exchange rate. But Britons love texting, and arguing, and AQA’s combination of canny marketing and the quirky charm of AQA’s answers have proved to be a hit.

But where AQA particularly interests us is how its success poses a challenge to a lot of the Californian-inspired orthodoxy about search engines, and Silicon Valley’s latest hype of fetishising “amateur” content.

These are strange times indeed when an AOL web executive must defend his decision to pay former volunteers real money for their labours. Actually pay them – so they can help feed their families? The horror of it!

Founder Colly Myers had plenty to say on this, in typically no-nonsense style, when we caught up with him recently.
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At one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would become a smartphone.

Expectations were sky high.

A few years ago an American business consultant and author published a very silly book called ‘Smart Mobs‘ – which even predicted that phone-toting nerds would be at the vanguard of social upheaval.

But something funny happened on the way to this digital nirvana. Perhaps the signs were there from the start: ‘Smart Mobs‘ couldn’t find a UK publisher. A website of the same name continues, however, apparently staffed by volunteers, and making its ghostly way across the web like a latter day Marie Celeste. Alas the site still has a category called “How To Recognize The Future When It Lands On You.”

And earlier this year the best known smartphone blogger hung up his pen.

So what went wrong?

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About a year ago, a man I’d never met before showed me pictures of a dramatic episode in his life. These showed him driving his wife to the hospital, where she was about to give birth. There were dozens and dozens of these pictures, and in each one his wife was looking progressively more grumpy.

As you’d be, too, if your waters had broken, and your husband had only one hand on the steering wheel.

He was as proud of this act of obsessive recording as I, a total stranger, was embarrassed.

The man then enthused at length about “emerging technology”. Shortly afterwards, I was not surprised to hear that he’d decided to start a new life in California.

The fellow was Christian Lindholm, and the irony of this review is that while he was at Nokia, Christian helped make a hostile technology usable for ordinary people. Mobile phones are indisputably the one technology success story over the last decade, and Lindholm’s team developed the Navi-key user interface, which I believe has never been surpassed in terms of grace and simplicity.

Now’s he’s at Yahoo!, Christian is helping make technology hostile again – something he’d already begun to do with at Nokia, with his work on the Series 60 user interface for Symbian smartphones.

I’ve been testing Yahoo!’s Go! software for mobile phones for six weeks now, and it’s the most presumptuous and irritating piece of software I’ve ever used. I value some of Yahoo!’s services, and I’m more forgiving of my phone’s idiosyncrasies than most people. But Yahoo! Go is a poster child for what happens when scientists or technologists lose sight of the needs of ordinary people. Judged purely on some narrow technical parameters, it’s amazing. Judged by how well it fits into a corporate Yahoo! marketing strategy, it fills all the tick boxes. Someone’s even created a Yahoo! theme and bundled it in the package.

The problem is much deeper than that, and as a result, everything that made Navi-key a success has been forgotten, or thrown away, in Y!Go.

I don’t mean to pick on Christian personally, he’s a super fellow. The Y!Go project was underway before he joined Yahoo! as its VP of Global Mobile Products in September. It’s much more about what misinforms corporate technology decisions.

There’s something about people who, once they get smitten by the idea of a “Hive Mind”, often lose their own (usually it’s temporary, but sometimes it’s not). When the basic philosophical assumptions are misguided, then the plumbing is wrong, and that takes a lot of fixing.

read more at The Register

Punters are giving flaky mobile data services the cold shoulder, a survey has revealed. 64 per cent of those surveyed gave up after one or two attempts with the services, while only two per cent said they’d seek help from the carrier. Asked what would encourage them to use more mobile data, 53 per cent said lower pricing, 43 per cent cited greater ease of use, and 32 per cent better help and advice.

The survey was conducted by NOP and commissioned by mobile infrastructure software supplier Olista, and polled 1,000 adults in September.

An earlier Olista-commissioned poll found that 77 per cent of phone users have never tried any data service, and of those who had, only 12 per cent were happy with the mobile data experience.

That’s grim reading for the carriers, who need to invest more in ease of use and reliability, Olista CEO Oren Glanz told us. Olista sells network diagnostic tools to the carriers.

“We’ve mapped hundreds of thousands of different problems with mobile data services,” he said. “Some have different problems the second time they attempt to use a service.” Amongst the most common problems were content not being accessible on specific handsets, and the failure of different service elements to interoperate.

Glanz also said carriers should use more predictable pricing models.

“When prices have been reduced it’s not apparent that usage has increased. There’s price confusion – a lot of the time you’re not sure how you’ll be charged. It’s not like making a phone call.”

Mobile data services are often an impulse decision and need to work first time, he said.

MIT has taken the unfriendly computer interface to its natural conclusion: and created a computer that runs away from you.

We’ve all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But “Clocky” goes all the way – it’s an alarm clock that has wheels. If you hit the snooze button, “Clocky” rolls away and hides. To make life doubly difficult, it will try and hide in a new place every day. And if you live in a 1970s sitcom, it poses a third challenge. Since it’s covered in thick brown nylon shagpile carpet, Clocky might never be found. For now, it’s simply described as an “academic” exercise, but a fully-blown fugitive PC can’t be too far away.

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