Like lots of people, I've been oohing and aahing over the PhotoSynth app Microsoft have just given away for the iPhone. It's clever, useful, striking... and oh look: it seems to coincidentally carry with it a taste of the distinctive Metro UI Microsoft are using throughout WP7. Look at the typography, spacing and button/link styles:

Now, isn't that interesting? Because it was only a couple of weeks ago that I looked over the Google Mobile App and was struck by its use of Android metaphors: in particular, the drawer which is dragged down from the top of the screen, much like the Android notification bar:

2 examples: That's a big enough sample size to justify a blog post!

Here's what I think is going on here: mobile hardware is commoditised. A majority percentage of new smartphones are lumps of metal with a front-face of touchable glass, and maybe a button or four. I'll bet you that, with a few exceptions, most purchasers of mobile devices aren't influenced by hardware differences - and that it's software which wins them over or loses them. Software is where differentiation is happening nowadays.

And here come Microsoft and Google, taking elements of the UI from their own mobile operating systems and deploying it into free apps for iPhone; giving iPhone owners a taste of what they're missing.

One explanation: G and MS (understandably) take the stance that the UI they have designed for their own devices is the best one they could think of, and that it's only natural for them to use its principles elsewhere. Sounds reasonable, especially if you consider the benefits the UI brings to outweigh the cost of having to learn something "slightly different".

But I think there's another reason to do this: that it's a great way to reach iPhone owners and show them that there *is* an alternative to what they know and love, to acclimatise them to a different way of doing things, and maybe, just maybe, show them that they can have a good experience on devices that aren't designed in Cupertino...

I've been thinking about this for a little while, spurred on by a combination of The Real Life Social Network (an excellent slideshow from a Googler) and going to see Robin Dunbar talk at the Ropetackle Centre back in February.

Dunbar was fun. Some highlights from my notes (which I forgot to post here at the time):

• Dunbar's number pops up everywhere: early hunter/gatherer clans were 150. Average village size in the Doomsday book was 150 (except in Kent, where it was 100). Hutterites split communities when they hit 150, because that's the point where they think you start needing a police force - and they want to avoid hierarchies;
• Urbanisation prevents coherent social communities: your 150 are scattered and you end up with isolated groups of friends, places to hide yourself from the unblinking gaze of your 150 - which leads to mischief;
• Lifelong monogamous relationships require computational brainpower: larger brained birds tend to be lifelong pair-bonders; the next biggest are annual pair bonders. This is driven by the need for bi-parental care: they need to coordinate to do it well;
• Primates have usefully generalised this pair-bonding to create friendships. They developed the skill of modelling the mental processes of others to help with this;
• Friendships deteriorate over time fast, without investment in them. By contrast, kinship deepens over time;
• Those from large extended families have fewer friends: your 150 gets filled kin-first;
• Military structures conform to Dunbar numbers: a section of 15 men, a platoon of 35-50, a company of 150, a battalion of 350. The seriousness of military endeavour means it's important to get coordination right. The company is the primary unit of loyalty in the military; most competitive sports are between companies;

I've been mentally collecting "lies of social software" since then, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. So far I've come up with these, mainly based on my experiences with blogging, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook:

• "Your friends are equally important". Dunbar pointed out that we have concentric circles of friends: 5 close ones, 15 acquaintances, 50 rough friends, etc. Yet in my friends lists on Twitter and Facebook, everyone's equal (and usually alphabetical). I like what Path have done around limiting the size of your network, and the Flickr concept of Family, Friends and Contacts - but what about software for just you and those 5 of your closest? Or for you and your other half?
• "Your friends are arranged into discrete groups", with a corollary that these groups rarely change. Managing lists of friends is unpleasantly icky. I bet Google or Facebook could take away much of the pain of creating these lists by analysing my flow of communications. I bet they could notice and prompt me to confirm changes ("you're emailing Freda a lot at the moment - working late or is she a friend outside work nowadays?"). Perhaps the challenge is less technical and more how to present this to a privacy-concerned public;
• "You can manage hundreds of friends". Dunbar talked about Facebook offering circles of friends beyond the sizes our brains would naturally sustain, and mentioned that conventional friendships need sustaining interactions. I asked whether software might act as a friend-ship sustaining interaction in the absence of physical nearness - i.e. as a prosthetic primate-grooming tool. His suspicion was that without some physical contact even virtual friendships will fade, but virtual contact would slow this degradation. Conversely, in the real world, friendships don't last forever: why do we insist that they do in the virtual world? I don't know of any social network that times them out in the absence of contact;
• "Friendship is reciprocal and equal". Some people are more important to me than I am to them, and vice versa; we might not like to face up to this in every day life but it's true nonetheless, and our digital tools don't reflect this. More than that, commuting relationships into binary leaves them unhelpfully stark: what room for plausible deniability in a world built on flippable but certain bits?

I think that if we're going to use software for social purposes in future (that is, to mediate, extend or substitute our social relationships), we'll need to start fixing some of these bugs in the current implementation. I'm having some fun thinking about playful ways this might be done...

Things I love about my Kindle:

• Its weaknesses feel like strengths. The web browser is rubbish. It's comforting to have one there for emergencies, but I've hardly ever used it;
• The cheapo leather case. It feels like one of the books my dad would use for display in his shop. The kindle is a well-loved, treasured item;
• No multitasking - yay! No multitasking means fewer distractions means more reading;
• One-click ordering, frictionless flow of financibits between my pocket and Mr Bezos;
• The unboxing experience was a glorious slap in the face to Cupertino: recycled cardboard instead of glossy white; welcoming me by name instead of inviting into the Cupertino fan-club;
• Synchronisation between devices: reading a few pages on my phone updates my place on the Kindle.

Things I hate about my Kindle:

• The bizarrely WIMPy UI, completely unsuited to using with cursor keys. Who cares about windows and cursors? Why not use the left/right paging metaphor here?
• 90% of my keyboard use is typing numbers, to go to specific pages. Numbers are the hardest thing to type (I have to pop up the symbol keyboard);
• Organising large numbers of books and documents is icky. Collections are a start but a year in, I'm going to hate this aspect of it;
• Why not more use of book recommendations? Feed me more books and I'll buy them, this thing is addictive;

It's strange how warm I feel towards this device, shocking and pleasing at the same time. After my mobile phone, it's the first thing I carry with me: it's cheap enough for me to worry less about damage or theft, and I don't feel like I'm showing off if I get it out on the train (as I do with iPad).

I'm parked at Chateau Arkwright in Molins de Rei, catching up with everything that happened during Mobile World Congress. Here's a few scattered observations from the week:

• J2ME is practically speaking dead, in the West. Oracle had a small stand at App Planet which ostensibly promoted it, but when I asked how a company like FP could be doing more J2ME work, I was told that any that exists is in BRIC territories (which fits with our recent experience).
• Everyone's launching tablets. Everyone: even the tiny stands of Shenzhen boutique manufacturers had them. Meego launched their tablet, in what I like to think was a big fuck-you to Nokia.
• Android was everywhere: they had a good stand, but more importantly were all over the rest of the site on individual vendor stands. Some good marketing around collectable pins too.
• God bless HP/WebOS for giving it a go. The product looks interesting, capable and thoughtful. I'm looking forward to trying it out for real.
• Nokia were practically absent. Microsoft weren't smug about the deal. Apple, as usual, weren't there.
• There was much less emphasis on operators - with the exception of T-Mobile, all the big operator pavilions had been replaced by those of device manufacturers (Huawei, HTC, etc.).
• Apps interest seems to have spread beyond the Apps Planet pavilion to the rest of the show. Everyone was showing off apps.
• Samsung impressed me; clearly committed to Android, showing off Honeycomb tablets (the UI feels v confused and pointlessly 3D in places), Nexus S handsets, etc. A manufacturer to watch (as Tomi Ahonen has been pointing out for ages).
• Lots of talk around next-generation LTE networks. Operators fixated on voice revenues still, in the LTE panel. Weird, maybe talking of data revenues takes the conversation too quickly towards bit pipes?

I did a few bits of speaking: a piece on the MWL TV channel which is probably the most appallingly vapid experience of me anyone could hope to have (my first and hopefully last experience of doing live TV). I apologise unreservedly to anyone who saw it. The advertising panel later on the Tuesday was a bit more fun: Best Buy and CNN were both positive and practical about their experiences of mobile advertising (as purchasers and in the case of CNN, a media owner). Yahoo! clearly have a lot to say here, but then how would they not?

The one I most enjoyed was a storytelling session I did at WIPJam to kick the day off, talking about The Guardian Anywhere and our experiences launching apps. Nice, well-informed audience: I wish I could've hung around longer but a few meetings dragged me away. I really enjoyed the other stories too: Nacho Sanchez speaking about TheChanner in particular, I've had a long-unrequited interest in thinking about social and TV...

So, Nokia and Microsoft, eh? My take, double-quick:

1. This looks weirder than it is: a great hardware manufacturer that's struggled with high-end software, and a software manufacturer that's just delivered a decent mobile OS from scratch. It only wrenches your guts when you consider who the two players are. Nokia becomes a box-shifter to a great degree. It's as unfashionable as being a bit pipe, but there's still money and dignity to be had there. Clearly the folks running the business felt it had no alternative;
2. Symbian's getting a lot of attention as it's right excised from the product line. Series 40, an underappreciated workhorse of an OS, lives on at the low end - hooray;
3. WP7 is a solid OS, particularly for a first version. Personally, I quite like it - it's fresh, bold, not as app-focused as iPhone and Android, more about supporting the lives of real people (through deep Facebook integration, good syncing, and so on). In this way it seems a worthy successor to Symbian, particularly for the mid-to-high-end devices. I can see it competing well here and bringing a modern smartphone experience to an audience lagging just behind iPhone and Android purchasers;
4. This is good news for app developers (whose voice, particularly online, is perhaps overrepresented). Nokia have floundered with developer tools, giving too many options: J2ME, C++, Python, Qt, WebSDK, probably others. The WP7 tools are good, and there's only one set of them: it's much clearer where to go and what to do;
5. The WP7 Market has a superior UI to Ovi. For app developers, this is very important. MS' experience with XBox Live has helped here - I hope they start talking more about app success stories;
6. WP7 has a single reference hardware design, so far differentiated minimally (by physical screen size, say; or the existence of a foldaway stand). It'll be interesting to see whether Nokia drop a few successful and iconic form factors (E71, Communicator), or work to bring WP7 to them, and handle resulting fragmentation;

Risks aren't hard to see: two former competitors, in different time zones and cultures, collaborating for the first time and as fast as possible on a highly visible first product on which they will both be judged... ow. And they need to deliver devices - good ones - fast.

But the wider issue for me is: where does this leave the web? Consider that content providers supporting iPhone are currently more likely to produce an app than a web site, if they want to make money from selling content or if they want the best possible user experience. This trend doesn't appear to be slowing down, if anything iPad and the surge of Android devices has sped it up.

At the same time Google are improving the Android Marketplace and adding in better billing options, which will distract content providers from distributing via the web.

WP7 has a quite different web browser to most other mobile devices.

If WP7 achieves any market share, I think this is the last nail in the coffin of the notion of web apps being used to provide a native level of experience across all mobile platforms. WP7 UI is very different, I think to the point of being infeasible to "emulate" using web technologies. And whilst the web provides a good standard means of providing (usually free) content across devices, even with JQTouch or Sencha the experiences it provides when pretending to be a native app are, shall we say, sub-optimal. It's tough or impossible to fake the level of polish (animations, transitions, responsiveness) that native apps give; you end up balancing your application on top of a precarious stack of browser variants, JavaScript libraries and native UI toolkits; and performance is usually noticeably poor, even with the demo apps shipping with some of these toolkits.

Browsers and processor speeds will improve, of course. But as they do, native UI will take advantage of them to improve too - so I don't think the gap between native and web will narrow as fast as we might wish it will. Which leaves us musing on how we might deliver native app experiences across different OS platforms...