The public preview of Windows 8 has won “rave reviews” according to the Daily Mail, the newspaper that claims to reflect Middle England and is proudly conservative in every sense of the word. The Mail, it’ll have you know, is a feisty opponent of “change for the sake of it”.

So not only do I fear that somebody has spiked the water supply at the Kensington HQ of Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s publisher, I’m puzzled about what it is in Windows 8 that merits a “rave”.

For, apart from an outbreak of violent electromagnetic storms that zap our PCs at random, nothing is going to disrupt ordinary users as much as the design changes Microsoft wants to introduce. So detached from reality has Microsoft become, it touts every one of these disruptions as a virtue.

The problem isn’t Metro, it’s the Maoists

Metro is a user interface designed for smartphones, which I have praised generously, and which looks good and works well on small devices. It may yet mature into something equally attractive and useful on iPad-like tablets. But welded onto a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, it represents a huge negative for the majority of Windows users.

The problem isn’t so much Metro, which by itself represents some good thinking about touch device design. It’s Microsoft’s insistence on inserting Metro between us and what we want to do – and at times Metro is spectacularly inappropriate.

But over at Redmond, the Metro team appears to be completely out of control, like the Red Guard during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’ve sent the educated to the countryside to dig trenches, and for good measure broken their spectacles. Nobody seems to be able to say no to the Metro Guard, it seems, for fear of punishment. But welding this immature and inappropriate smallscreen UI into the everyday Windows experience is being carried out in a quite totalitarian fashion.

And this is being welcomed not just at the Daily Mail, of all places, but on blogs and fansites. Apparently, according to WinSuperSite the vanguard of the Red Youth will spend most of its time in Metro while the legacy UI will only be relegated for use by “office workers”.

Hey! That’s us!

I’ll explain a few of the problems here. But first, it must be said, it’s a bit of a crying shame.

Hit me again with your brilliance, Active Desktop

The Windows UI today has considerable room for improvement and simplification, and this can be done without causing such huge disruption to a couple of billion users. The Windows 7 don’t-call-it-a-dock Dock helped non-technical users without causing experienced users too much disruption. Many seasoned Windows users appreciate the Jump Lists, for example, and many who don’t like the feature can happily ignore it. It’s not intrusive.

It’s a shame because the underlying Windows 8 code shows considerable improvement. Windows 8 shows the fruit of several quiet years of throwing out the cruft and refactoring vital portions of the software for performance. Windows 8 boots much faster, applications spring to life, and many common operations just feel more responsive and crunchier – on the same hardware. Windows 8 without the Metro UI might even be the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.

So logically, Windows 8 could be released like Apple’s Snow Leopard, a minor $20 upgrade boasting no (or hardly any) new features but performance improvements all round. But of course, Microsoft doesn’t work like that. The accounts team want their margins, the marketing bureaucracy requires something to do. And an industry hangs off this. Consultants smell the prospect of fees, while bloggers hope to cash in with how-to books. Disinterested parties are hard to find.

The problem with Metro in Windows 8 is one of policy rather than execution. At the end of the day Metro is like one of those funky widget layers like Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets or like a lockdown launcher, like At Ease. But the Maoists have dictated that this ephemeral layer must become the new shell.

You can’t avoid it.

The problems begin with the Metro screen, which is the fullscreen overlay now invoked every time you hit the Windows key, and the mandatory replacement for the old start menu.

This is what Microsoft wants you to see:

But once you’ve installed a few basic apps, this is what you actually see.

You see your iSCSI Initiator, your ODBC Data Sources and all your uninstallers. Microsoft hasn’t hidden anything or cleaned it up. It’s like when the camera accidentally wanders to the side of the soundstage and you see the backs of all the props.

So do you get anything from this new compulsory widget layer? Well, the quality of Metro apps varies, as you can see. The Maps app is very simple, so simple you can’t drop a pin, in fact. This next screenshot is a Twitter feed in the People app. Bear in mind that Microsoft specifies a minimum optimal screen width of 1366 pixels for Windows 8. And look what you get:

What a great use of space.

In time, no doubt, we’ll get more sophisticated desktop Metro apps – with the extra uncertainty that they won’t run on a Windows Phone, and smaller devices. Ho hum.

Here’s an example of both over-simplification and duplication, two issues which plague this release. Finding common items has become a crapshoot. There are two control panels, this being the simplified, Metro settings panel.

Very nice. Now where’s the Bluetooth toggle? Phones have them. It’s a trick question, because it’s not there.

Things get quite Heisenberg from this point on. Various options float in from the right hand edge of the Metro screen: Search, Share, Devices and Settings; Microsoft calls them “charms”. Click Devices and the only item populating it is “Second Screen”. The Windows 7 devices page has been ripped out of Computer and unhappily relocated in Metro Settings:

Now you can’t actually do anything with the devices here. Want to check the toner level of that Brother laser printer, or print a test page? Tough. Right click, and nothing happens.

Another strange inconsistency is task-switching. This seems to be something the Red Guard doesn’t want you to do. In last year’s developer preview of Windows 8, it wasn’t possible – you had to swipe through all your applications one by one. Like you do on Windows Phone. With a back button.

Microsoft has restored Alt-Tab, which now works as it has for the past 20 years (it was introduced in v3.1):

But you’re not supposed to use it in this brave new Metro World, you bourgeois recidivist! You’re supposed to use Win-Tab. But look what happens when you do:

Win-Tab slides open a vertical task bar on the left, with thumbnails of your running apps. Except it doesn’t. Here, Opera and Paint.net and a couple of Explorer windows are running, but not displayed. As task-switching goes it’s useless.

The most persistent annoyance is being thrown back into Metro when you don’t want to be, and while you can change the default handlers for every application Microsoft is going to insist on Metro.

The fix? Make Metro optional

This is just folly. Underneath we have a steadily improving OS, and we have a decent UI layer designed for smaller touch devices. That’s all fine.

I have nothing against Microsoft introducing Metro as an option, as it did with Active Desktop and Windows Widgets.

But inserting Metro into our everyday workflows causes many more context switches (modal switches, in the jargon) than we need. If you’re not on a touch device, there’s lots of pain for very little gain. We are fairly robust creatures who can cope with context switches and UI idiosyncrasies, and the web forces us to do it more often than any UI purist would want (Facebook has its own peculiarities, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own weird design quirks too.)

Microsoft should remember computers are the things getting between us and what we want to do, and making Metro – something so inappropriate for non-touch users – mandatory is completely unnecessary. Time to tame the Metro Guard, I think. ®

Windows Phone might be the most impressive bit of software Microsoft has produced – but it isn’t setting the world on fire. The iPhone and Android go from strength to strength – the latter proliferating so widely even Google doesn’t know how many Android systems are out there. (It can’t count the Chinese forks which don’t use any Google services and don’t phone home.)

This discrepancy puzzles people. Reviewers like WinPho a lot – it’s clean, fast, functional and forward-looking. The social media integration is very clever. Operators have a soft spot for Nokia and WP7 too, because – if for no other reason – they dislike and distrust Google and Apple even more. So what’s the problem?

Three weeks ago I raised the prospect that there may never be a third smartphone ecosystem – something upon which Nokia has bet the company. Many markets only have room for two leading players – and in the technology platform world, many have only one. On the margins the niche players are little islands. No matter how impressive WP is, if the needle doesn’t move, then it too becomes a marginal player. Ecosystems can perish more rapidly than they arise. If Windows Phone is to avoid the same fate as WebOS then the dynamic has to change.

But what might this be?

To help try and find an answer to this, I’ve been using Nokia’s Lumia 710 as a main phone – there’s no substitute for experience, and you can read my review of it here.

1. It’s a device business, stupid

The smartphone market is one driven by a desire for unique and distinctive devices – quite unlike the white box consumer electronics business. Operating systems and platforms don’t really matter to people, who make their choice from three or four models on display on the High Street at any particular time. This isn’t to say they don’t matter at all – nobody wants to choose a lemon – but if a phone is on display, it has a chance of selling.

Nokia has never had to think like this before, and spent the Noughties coasting on its brand and market position. Getting it to think about the customer and retail experience is one of the biggest cultural changes Elop has to make. Yet where are these quite outstanding and attractive devices going to come from? Microsoft’s reference platform allows little scope for differentiation or innovation.

A couple of years after announcing Android, Google did a strategic U-turn that upset many of its partners. It anointed a manufacturer to work with on what is essentially a reference phone, giving this chosen handset Google branding. The idea was that other ODMs (Original Device Manufacturers) would have to raise their game. It’s worked and nobody left the Android fold.

It’s hard to see Microsoft usurping Nokia’s branding (more than it already has), but the two need something creative to raise the visibility of WP in the public consciousness – it hasn’t left a footprint so far.

But Microsoft needs to loosen its reference platform to encourage some serious design innovation. Where’s the Windows Phone Communicator – with a clamshell or slide-out keyboard?

2. Growing up

This is probably the easiest of the problems to fix. It simply takes time, money and careful product management. WP7 was very much a working technology demonstration, lacking removable storage card support and a clipboard, amongst other things. Mango fixes a lot of these, but it still feels like a version 1.1 product. The flagship Nokia devices don’t have video calling or tethering, for example.

But it takes time. It took Apple three generations of iOS to implement a clipboard and four to implement coherent task switching and notifications. But these are major architectural features with huge knock-on impacts elsewhere. There’s little point in Microsoft getting one team to tune battery life when the system can change so drastically overnight.

Now I’ll get to the hardest problem. We need to raise some home truths about the Windows user interface, which aren’t noticed by bloggers and unboxers and only become apparent after extended use. Colour me surprised – you might be too.

3. We need to talk about the UI

The Metro UI for Windows Phone has been justifiably praised for being clean and distinctive. Microsoft is extending it across more products, most controversially, into Windows 8. But in extended use, I found myself using the phone less than I expected, because I simply didn’t want to read text on the screen. This realisation came quite subtly, and was unexpected.

Here’s what I think is the issue.

Some things in the world are theoretically human-readable, but nobody ever reads them. Postscript source code is one example, the fiction of Cory Doctorow another. Metro turned out to be a little like this. It is a UI designed to be glanced at, and it fulfils that very well.

But it makes poor use of the space available. My preferred WP Twitter app Rowl shows me three tweets at a time. You do have to pinch yourself that you’re using an 800×480 pixel screen. Entire newspapers were being laid out on VGA screens (or smaller – many were Mac Classics) 25 years ago – but this is a poor use of space.

The font is for glancing, not for reading, and the white-on-black colour scheme doesn’t help.

There’s too much thumbing going on. The default WP home screen shows you eight options. A thumb press will show you eight more options or twelve by revealing the Apps List. The default iPhone screen shows you 16, and a swipe 16 more. Android also shows much more. And from the Blackberry OS 7.0, I can change almost any setting by swiping from the top.

Now none of this is catastrophic – and it’s all fixable. Choose a better body font, change some of the proportions, and vary the size of home screen tiles – all would help enormously. But first, admit there’s room for improvement.

If you want to make the phone an "immersive experience", as per the jargon, don’t punish users for getting wet.

4. Give it all away? Not a good idea

"You can’t compete with free" is a cliche in the content world. And it’s proved one of the most misleading. Android is nominally given away for free, making Microsoft’s paid-for licensing model almost seem like an anachronism. Smartphone platforms are given away for free, or not given away at all.

But this argument is misleading. Android isn’t free at all, the patent uncertainties require ODMs to pay third parties – including Microsoft. This is a long way from being resolved.

So although one option is to go royalty-free, it’s one Microsoft doesn’t have to take. Not when there are more creative options on the table.

5. Telcos hate smartphones. They don’t have to hate yours

Telcos like growth, but they view smartphones very ambivalently. Once the pesky users have one – all they want to do is use it – the impertinence! – while the value of the services we use is captured by everyone except the telcos. So mobile operators have rapidly found themselves in same funk as broadband ISPs – who want punters to sign up (as long as the acquisition cost is low), and who don’t want them to leave, but who want them to use the network as little as possible while they’re there.

It’s a mug’s game: spending billions on network upgrades but seeing the value realised by device manufacturers (Apple) or ad networks (Google). The mobile network operators don’t want to be dumb bit-pipes – which is all they will be in Apple and Google’s future.

It doesn’t have to be like this – and Microsoft has an ace up its sleeve, with a messaging platform almost everybody in the world has heard of: Skype. It might be time to start thinking about some radical initiatives.

Here’s one: why exactly is Microsoft licensing Skype? Why is it even tolerating it? It paid a lot of money to acquire this proprietary VoIP messaging platform, and sees no advantage from it. How about raising the fees for Skype for some or all non-Windows mobile platforms? One of the first things Steve Jobs did in 1997 to stabilise Apple was to stop licensing MacOS and kill the clones.

And messaging is just one example. Advertising and media could benefit from some sort of semi-open shared platform on the wholesale side. This is something Microsoft and Nokia have thought about, so the idea shouldn’t be alien. But it makes sense to move value up the stack. When all smartphones look alike, one with an attractive bundle of messaging and content should be able to stand out from the crowd. We might even pay a pound or two more for it.

The verdict

Of course, Windows Phone might not need any of this. Perhaps it’s just not being seen, and will sell gazillions of units once people see it. Perhaps simply throwing more money at development and marketing will do. It worked for Xbox.

But Xbox was a success that was years in the making, soaking up billions of dollars of capital. Nobody involved in WP has this luxury. Nokia is fighting a battle on three fronts – and haemorrhaged €1bn last year – and Nokia is absolutely key to WP’s success. Although it has cash in the bank, it can’t fight on with this kind burn rate.

We know from WebOS, or BeOS, or many technically wonderful predecessors that won rave reviews from the critics only to perish in the marketplace, that being good isn’t enough. These are interesting times – the opportunity is there. ®

Tech startups that can truly be considered game-changers are rare – especially in Shoreditch. The more hype that the Silicon Roundabout “leisure startup” scene receives, the more painfully apparent it is that the emperor has no clothes – see these comments for example. Which is a pity, for less attention is paid to genuinely creative British tech startups.

I’ve rarely seen something as startling as Muvizu, the PC software from Digimania which allows a seven-year-old to start creating something a lot like Toy Story. The startup emerged from the ashes of the DA Group, which was previously Digital Animations. New investors took over the ashes and had an idea.

Perhaps the 3D power of games engines such as Unreal could be put to make a genuinely easy-to-use, consumer-level animation software. The development team had the chops for this; it was the team behind animated newsreader Anna Nova, for those of you who remember the first dot.com boom. And so Muvizu was unveiled two years ago.

You can get a glimpse of what you can do with it from this video – our sister site Reg Hardware reviewed it recently here.

It’s still a tiny startup in Glasgow, with a core team of half a dozen developers, but since then it has added a clutch of features: you can build your own models and characters, edit timelines, move cameras, create custom textures, and introduce anti-aliasing. Huge libraries of animations and art assets are now available. You can’t import your own characters – but you can customise with textures.

It has notched up 138,000 downloads since August 2010, CEO Vince Ryan tells us. Muvizu took a community approach – and it is a lively place for users to share and swap assets and collaborate. It’s useful for anything from 30 second funnies to in-house training videos.

But with no visible revenue, I was curious to see how Muvizu was paying the rent. Long-term it makes an enviable acquisition target for an Adobe or a Google – but for now it’s looking to collaborate with animation companies, toy-makers or TV companies that want to extend their brand to their fanbase, allowing them to knock together their own stories and content.

A new version is due on 19 December.

Read the full review here.

Dull people will always cheer a bold experiment that goes wrong. After July 2001, Apple’s design team never again attempted anything as daring or distinctive. It has produced beautiful designs, and unarguably influenced consumer technology design more than any one else.

But essentially, its computer designs are variations on the same theme. The professional laptops have continued in their rectangular, razor-like way. Even the iPad looks very much like how you’d expect a media slate to look like, for example.

But the Cube was different. The Cube looked like Buckminster Fuller talked; the Cube looked like it might have fallen to earth from an advanced civilisation, eager to escape orbit and looking to throw some ballast overboard. Or like a millionaire had given a mad bloke on a bus an unlimited budget.

“Hello. You look like you’ve done a lot of LSD. Well, here’s several million dollars – go and design a computer, any shape you want. Just make sure it hangs upside down.”

We don’t have enough of this sort of thing – Apple’s design is clever but it’s now conservative, and this conservatism seemed to set in a decade ago. (Although the plans for its new corporate HQ complex show signs of the same daring and ambition).

I’ll confess here that I loved the G4 Cube and still do. Until a couple of years ago, one was chugging away on my desk in the Reg office – it literally chugged – and another had a stint tethered to the home HiFi.

I’ve had five Cubes in all, although only two were healthy enough to do any work. I can’t part with the fifth. In a few years it will be hauled out of storage to power a child-friendly Firewire keyboard or Pangea Software’s Bugdom (“Ladybug” is already a hit with one of my toddlers).

Cubes evidently fascinate Steve Jobs, too. The first Mac was a near Cube, and his first NeXT machine was perfectly cubic. When Apple launched its flagship New York retail store, you can guess what shape it was.

What was it all about?

Unveiled at the height of dot.com exuberance, the Cube was the “fifth” product in a four product portfolio – the first of several paradoxes (we will explore a few more) and surely a sign something wasn’t quite right. It didn’t fit from the start. The new marvel was launched alongside three new matching monitors, two LED and one CRT, a new design of keyboard and mouse (not exclusive to the Cube) and Harmon Kardon produced a three-piece speaker to match.

The product wasn’t a cube – the actual computer was an eight-inch cube, suspended in a thick, but clear ten-inch housing. Like Skylon, the essential design conceit was to give the impression of the thing floating above the surface.

In a typical Jobs touch, there was no mechanical switch visible on any surface (although there was a tiny “programmer’s” reset switch underneath). The innards of the machine were one central core, which lifted right out very simply in one piece. And it was designed to operate without a fan: a convection system drew in air from a desk-level opening at the rear, and distributed it out through the grill at the top.

A silent supercomputer is what Apple emphasised. And it was priced accordingly. The Cube came in above the price of the cheapest professional PowerMac, using the latest G4 processor that had only just trickled onto the market the previous fall, at $1,799.

A faster model available only through the online Apple store (Apple had no retail stores back then) was priced at $2,299. Sans monitor. The cheapest PowerMac, announced the same day, cost $1,599.

The Riddle of the Cube

It emphasised minaturisation, but it was actually quite a formidable beast. It demanded to be placed in view – which meant being placed on a desk, and from there it dominated its space.

It was harder to hide the peripherals, too, which inevitably detracted from the clean lines emphasised in the video above. It also hid a hefty secret – a very large (but naturally well designed) power brick dangled on the floor underneath.

As for the vaunted silent operation, well, the intentions were right, and the execution was mostly brilliant. In the Cube’s original configurations, it didn’t need a fan, and it didn’t overheat. Users though, expecting the first version of Mac OS X to drop at any moment, clamoured for the model with the more powerful ATI Radeon 32GB VRAM graphics card – which did have a fan, and a fairly audible one.

There was a bigger problem.

The designers seem to have overlooked the spinning disk drive which transmitted vibration down directly through the plastic, into the desk – making it almost as obtrusive as a desktop machine. You felt the Cube up through your elbows.

The story is now well known of how cracks appeared in the casing, and the press gleefully ran with the story. Apple denied them, explaining they were “mould lines”. What was harder to live with was the power switch.

In theory, you simply placed your finger on the smooth plastic, over a static capacitor concealed within. In a forerunner of the iPhone screen, it was activated using the body’s static capacitance. It could be easily activated by accident – but worse, it responded to light and heat as well as human bodies.

Our publisher was unfortunate enough to decide to put it in a conservatory, where it turned itself on and off as it pleased. Years later it would do the same thing for me in San Francisco. It was never rectified – you had to seal off the sensor underneath with some masking tape..

The press marveled at it, and the Cube began to appear on reception desks at design studios, advertising agencies and dot.coms. Clones began to appear.

But by October it was clear sales were poor, and Apple was offering refunds to bring down the price, effectively throwing in a monitor for free. Apple blamed a poor quarter on lower-than-expected Cube sales. By early 2001 the dot.com bubble was bursting, throwing the economy into a recession. Less than 100,000 Cubes had been shifted.

In March 2001, MacUser reported the team had been disbanded. MacWorld reported that was buying back Cubes from the retail channel, quoting a CompUSA salesman as saying: “When you sell only a couple of Cubes in a month, no price decrease in the world will matter.”

On July 3, Apple put out a statement confirming that it had decided “to suspend production of the Power Mac G4 Cube indefinitely”. Apple wouldn’t put out a headless Mac until 2005, with the Mac Mini. But this was aimed at the budget buyer, used laptop parts rather than premium components for performance, and had none of the style of the Cube. It was designed to be ignored, and not the centre of attention.

What went wrong?

f it had launched a year or two earlier, in the insane spending spree of the dot.com era, it may have been a different story. But Apple’s marketing suggests it too was nervous about the appeal.

The five-minute promotional video introduces it as a “super computer” – and the original press release emphasised a “Pentium-busting” performance. But it was no more of a “super computer” than its G4 siblings in the PowerMac line. This suggests a lack of confidence in the design – Apple felt it had to be utilitarian, too.

Pulling out the reactor core

It hadn’t helped that Apple had missed the Napster era. PCs came with CD burners while Apple insisted machines were sold with DVDs or CD drives. Apple certainly made up for it in 2001, starting with the “Rip Mix and Burn” campaign – and version 1.0 of iTunes. And it never forgot the importance of music – creating the digital music retail market in 2003, where labels had failed.

The problem was that Apple’s customer base was really bifurcated into two camps back then – students and consumers who wanted an all-in-one, and looked for value, and the professionals who expected to expand their machines. The Cube was too expensive for the former, and too restrictive for the pros.
Getting Cubic now

Yet the unworldly design created a fiercely loyal fanbase who supported the market for add-ons. A succession of strong CPU upgrades, from Powerlogix, Giga and Sonnet, which took the Cube up to dual 1.7Ghz G4. There were also beefier, Quartz Extreme-capable graphics cards made available. Third parties even manufactured larger cubic cases – these were needed for the fans and cooling systems.

The community lives on and gathers at Cubeowner.com, where the affection for the machines is evident. Do check out the galleries.

In the UK, you can pick one up for anywhere between £100 and £150 on eBay. The expansion options are limited, ruling out USB 2.0 cards for example, and you’ll be stuck with a Parallel ATA drive that needs special drivers for drives larger than 120MB. But it will still run Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger well enough to get some work done. The problem is the bus speed is constrained; at 167Mhz it’s ten times slower than a 1Ghz CPU, for example.

My first Cube was late adn DOA, and so was the second. Its replacement arrived two months later, spluttered for three weeks and then expired. All were motherboard blow-outs. It was enough to repel anyone but a fanatic from demanding another, so I didn’t.

It was 2006 before I picked up a cheap Cube that had been upgraded to a noisy 800Mhz G4 with thanks to Sonnet. But it did great service for a couple of more years. You just had to leave a note on the desk reminding people not to leave their newspaper on the grill …

The Cube remains a quite bonkers, and quite brilliant expression of a particular design – a really outrageous statement. There was no reason it should ever have been cubic, let alone suspended in mid air. It should never have been made – we should be glad it was. ®

Is everything going touchscreen?

It’s evident that the effects of Apple’s dramatic entry into the mobile business are still being digested. The importance of the user experience is regarded as the difference between success and failure, and merely having a touch screen isn’t enough. Almost four years ago I expressed some reasons [1] why Apple’s entry into the business should be a Good Thing. The established players had become “lazy and complacent, [gone] down blind alleys, or [standardised] on horrible designs and feature sets.” The iPhone should raise the bar for design.

Well, there’s a rare mobile prediction that comes true.

Just as I’d hoped, the iPhone increased the standard of design and ease-of-use across the board. Along the way, not everybody had been able to keep up.

Not just a shiny new thing

Phone designer Nick Healey said he thought the iPhone was the first smartphone that people could actually use. He’d attended smartphone conferences for almost a decade. Until the iPhone appeared, people had always predicted a mass market was 18 months away.

As for the Android UX, views were decidedly more mixed. No one disputes Android’s phenomenal success. It has gone gangbusters throughout 2010, toppling Apple from No 1 spot in the UK in September, on one set of stats I saw presented. Symbian’s share has crashed from 40 per cent to 12.9 per cent – putting it in fourth place behind RIM. But you will probably have guessed that just from walking into Carphone Warehouse at any point in 2010. The figures are monthly, and may reflect an empty product pipeline – since refreshed with the new Symbian^3 devices.

But was the vanilla UI good enough? Some said it was good. Others said it needed the OEM-added layers such as HTC Sense. Others maintained that even with the manufacturer’s UIs it was still too “geeky” for the mass market. Healey gave me an example of HTC’s Sense UI.

“HTCs have a ‘Favorite people’ widget on one Home screen – you swipe up and down to scroll your list of people. Great. But if you tap on it, but happen to pause a fraction of a second before the swipe down – a normal user will be thinking ‘is Fred Up or Down, oh yes, Down <swipe>” – the widget itself vanishes.”

Ken Ken Johnstone from INQ said he really thought it a bit of shame that essential tasks – such as hanging up a call – were harder than they were 10 years ago.

What about other users?

There was much collective chewing of the cud over what would happen to the rest of the market – the 80 per cent of people who don’t buy flash touchscreen bling. This poses a bit of a problem for designers – these are really phones that also do a bit of data. (Or none at all). By contrast an iPhone or an Android phone is a computer that does a bit of phone. Would everyone succumb to the touchscreen? Not if they were only interested in making phone calls.

INQ’s Chat is already a Facebook phone, and bears the Zuckerberg seal of approval

INQ has been linked with reports that it would create “appliance”-style devices based around a particular service, or use. A few weeks ago it was Facebook [2]. More recently rumours have circulated that INQ is creating a Spotify phone. (Hutchison, which owns INQ, has invested in Spotify; INQ’s CEO sits on the Spotify board).

Ken Johnstone didn’t comment, but there’s a precedent. The Japanese market already caters to service-branded or appliance style phones, and a few attendees thought it might be tried here, to unlock a few more pennies of value from punters who are fans of a service, but find the mega-touchscreen devices overkill.

For my part I thought fashions might be cyclical. Today, there’s terrific consumer excitement about smartphones – so much so, that punters are prepared to overlook issues such as battery life and call quality. It’s all shiny and new. But I for one have forsworn the picking up any of the current generation of smartphones – amazing as they are – because of battery life and call quality issues. Not one model has a compelling feature over last year’s iPhone 3GS, and for phone calls I’ve reverted this battered old Nokia [3].

One participant quoted research which showed that 60 per cent of iPhone users never downloaded an app. If people get more stroppy about demanding the smartphones do the basics, things could get complicated (for the vendors, not for us).

Industry attendees agreed that battery life was only going to become more of an issue. The telcos had encouraged us to pick up cheap 3G dongles – only to throttle back when we actually started using them. One mobile network executive said games were the biggest sleeper issue. Games would only become more bandwidth-intensive.

At around this point Healey pulled out something from his pocket, as a reminder that network speed is every bit a “user experience” issue as eye candy.

His other phone was an iPhone, but because it was on the O2 network, and the O2 network sucked, the iPhone may as well be one of these half the time.

A UPG

This is a UPG created by Stuckist artist Richard Conway-Jones. UPG stands for useless palm gadget.

For all the talk of appliances, there are so many everyday things that are still impossible or really hard to do on a mobile. Like shopping, or sharing music legally. A bit more design effort to optimise the phone around one of these (say shopping) might pay dividends.

That’s if Apple hasn’t got to it first [4]. Apple does of course occasionally claim to have invented something that’s been around for ages – like video conferencing. But it also has a knack of cracking on, and implementing something the rest of the industry sits around and talks about for years. And Nokia, yes – I’m looking at you. ®

Links

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/iphone_where_is_the_market/
2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/23/facebook_phone_again/
3. http://www.reghardware.com/2007/12/20/nokia_breakthrough_phone/
4. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/02/apple_nfc_again/

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Apple will continue to rule the roost, dictating terms and charging eye-watering prices to punters. The punters will continue to be delighted with Apple, and will clamour for more; while BlackBerry has an ace up its sleeve – probably the biggest mobile sensation of the year.

When the crystal ball lies

But first things first. It’s sometimes useful to revisit why you’ve been wrong, because it can tell you a lot about the future.

Ten years ago, I thought the European advantage of GSM combined with the Nordics’ technological and market advantages would eventually result in a real shift in power away from the United States. Nobody dreamed that RIM and Apple would pocket most of the profits. Back then, RIM was a maker of ugly corporate pagers that depended on a complex and expensive proprietary messaging server. Surely Microsoft and Exchange would soon demolish that advantage. RIM had the added disadvantage of being Canadian.

Meanwhile Apple was a boutique, recovering computer company. Its first foray into mobile devices since Jobs returned came in late 2001, and was widely derided by lots of clever people. The iPod was hugely expensive (almost £600 here in the UK), and only worked with the Mac over Firewire.

In 2002, at the first of what became annual "Apple makes a phone" rumours, I pointed out that integration was extremely difficult – integrating the hardware, integrating the device to play nice with the networks. Creating a balsa wood mockup in the lab was easy, but in the wild mobile phones presented lots of complex challenges, and the Nordics’ experience would win out.

I also thought mobile data services would be hugely popular, with the established players learning from the WAP and walled garden mistakes. They never did, and must now join the queue to implement other people’s mobile-unfriendly protocols, such as the angle-bracket stew on offer from Facebook and Twitter.

The networks’ lack of innovation stands in stark contrast to their GSM glory years. It means they have little option but to deal with Apple and RIM on Apple and RIM’s own terms – this will become increasingly important, as we’ll see. In short, Apple and RIM have succeeded where Nokia and Sony Ericsson failed, in making mobile data popular.

Apple’s still got what everyone wants

Apple and RIM’s success will continue, and Android will march on, I believe – but the rhetoric doesn’t quite sit right. The mobile market is too diverse to see a replay of Microsoft and the PC. The triumphalism behind Android now reminds me very much of the Symbian-Microsoft smartphone wars a decade ago.

Android is new. It hasn’t experienced the problems that Symbian experienced, because manufacturers are throwing new models out of factories as fast as they can, and haven’t really noticed where they land.

My confidence in Apple rests on its comparative advantage in the user experience (UX) – it’s still streets ahead of the rivals in ease of use. If you don’t believe me, try a test with someone who has a new, rival touchscreen phone; invite them to change the wallpaper or the ringtone.

I’ve been actively using S60 for much of the past eight years, and I still had to consult the manual recently (when reviewing the X6) to find out where Nokia has stuffed a particular setting this year. I don’t think this is something a newcomer to BlackBerry or iPhone has ever had to do. Nokia and Sony Ericsson – the two dauphins of smartphones ten years ago – have cranked out some really impressive hardware over the past decade, which often succeeded in spite of the user experience, not because of it.

Android will fail to live up to the lofty expectations because the manufacturers are still at the "Wow!" phase with it, bless them. They think that by simply adopting Android and hiding some of the rougher edges of the UI, success will follow. That’s not the problem, and Android isn’t the solution.

The entire "platform" premise behind Symbian, and the many Linuxes such as LiMo, now looks (with the benefit of hindsight) extremely dubious. The idea was that you’d get a common standard, and a network effect. The idea behind Symbian was that the platform company would do the heavy lifting, and because it’s cheaper across a portfolio range, you could do lots of phones more cheaply.

The Android licensees think that today – but throwing out lots of mediocre products isn’t necessarily profitable. The lucrative end of the mobile device market is a product culture, and it pays to put more of your wood behind one arrow, or just a few arrows; the more you make, the less distinctive each one is. Android doesn’t really do anything to encourage the development and marketing of distinctive products, must-have phones that people talk about in the pub.

The economic consequences of the Android approach are also dubious, as Horace Dediu concisely pointed out. It leads to a low-margin, bargain basement culture.

I agree that the supply of Android devices to the market will increase, at least in the short term, and that the usability of the platform will improve. But demand doesn’t necessarily rise to meet supply. If it did, we’d still be WAP-ping away. Or… and insert your favourite technology failure here.

And in a scrap for the scraps in a bargain-basement fight, the winners can only be the companies with huge economy of scale advantages, which means Nokia, or ultra cheap, corner-cutting no-name manufacturers we’ve never heard of.

The BBM Factor

The perception of RIM has changed enormously here in the past five years. It’s a compulsory corporate item in the US, where it’s to the white collar cubicle dweller what the loin cloth was to the cave man. (I get all my history from Hollywood – in this case 1 Million Years BC; I challenge you to prove me wrong).

But in the US, as soon as the "cabin doors to open" announcement is made, out come the ugly, chunky BlackBerrys. Most of them are still monochrome. In Europe, however, a BlackBerry is now what you buy if you don’t buy an iPhone. (I know many people who have both.)

The BlackBerry isn’t the best voice phone in the world, but neither is the iPhone. It does have a reputation of getting one or two things done very well, and of handling the rest (photos and music, and a bit of web) adequately. RIM never skimped on high quality screens and keyboards; there’s a real assurance to that. As with the iPhone, its high word-of-mouth reputation does the marketing.

The ace that BlackBerry now has is BBM, the UI which for devotees is now the gateway to the entire phone. To see a BBM user in full flow, typically with a wired headset, scrolling away, is quite something. It makes you wonder why the phone giants have never done this properly, instead of focussing on all the cruft that comes with "personalisable Outlook screens". (Actually, the last few years of smartphone UI development pre-2007 were devoted to taking out UI features, and optimising one-handed use, which left the cupboard bare when Apple came along.)

While BBM was originally sold as a business tool, it’s the ordinary people who are now the greatest users. Even only using a fraction of features in RIM’s one minute demonstration video takes you quite a long way.

Ironically, Google sort of had the right idea with Nexus One, which was to make a stand-out product that got people talking. The error was insisting on doing Nexus One itself.

In short, Apple and RIM will continue to prosper because they focus relentlessly on user experience, and because they do one or two things well. This is a Good Thing.

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