In the interest of Putting It Out There, some predictions on mobile - and in particular, my thoughts on mobile operating systems over the next 3 years:

1. Apple have done in mobile what they've done on the desktop, and they'll continue to do it: i.e. take the high end and defend it vigorously by doing an excellent job of not just design but also technology, logistics and marketing (I'm bored of people lazily equating all of Apples success with design, they do a phenomenal job in lots of less fashionable fields too). They take a small high-value percentage of the overall mobile audience (<10% at most) but not much more: iPhone will be to mobile as Mac was to the PC. It will not be as the iPod was to the walkman;
2. Android will start to hoover up high-end smartphones, effectively replacing in-house OSes which Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung etc maintained, and taking OS marketshare from Symbian. Android is to mobile as Windows was to PC, and in three years has 60%ish market share of new devices;
3. Palm will die. I'd like to think their excellent work lives on through an acquisition, but I wouldn't bet on it;
4. RIM continue in the short term to do what they've done: hold onto the enterprise customer. They'll start facing competition in this area, as Google Apps for businesses plus Android become compelling, initially for SMEs and increasingly for large organisations. They struggle to offer a competitive range of services, but do well from a loyal and currently happy customer-base. They make small inroads with consumers, but face strong competition from iPhone/Android and don't go far here;
5. Nokia continue to shift volumes of devices through their excellent channels, but whilst in volume they continue to be a market leader, activity from Nokia handsets declines disproportionally. Series 40 has a few more years life in it, particularly as it moves towards low-end devices. Symbian suffers even more; as a coherent platform for application development it is effectively dead, and it lives on only as part of a proven technology stack for mid- and low-end devices;
6. Microsoft make little-or-no inroads with any form of consumer Windows Mobile device. Windows is to mobile as IBM is to mobile;

   Other trends? The rate of progress in mobile speeds up over the next 3-5 years, as over-the-air OS updates (which we see regularly now with iPhone and Android, and which are occasionally seen in the wild from Nokia etc) get us used to upgrading mobile software more frequently than hardware. This divorcing of software updates from hardware lets OEMs roll out incremental improvements much faster. The sophistication of mobile web applications increases far faster in the next few years than in the last few as a result, and the web starts to become a reasonable - if slightly lower-fidelity - platform for doing applications across a range of underlying operating systems. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

   What do you think?

   Flash on Mobile: Why, Lord, Why?

   January 17, 2010 | Comments

   Ah, Aral posted a few weeks back about Flash Lite failing, putting it down to a failure of "user experience". I've been wanting to write a follow-up to this with some more thoughts, but never quite got round to it. Here we go...

   In short, I don't think the issue is one of user experience. Macromedia had Flash Lite running on mobile devices back in 1999 or earlier (I met a company back then who'd been brought in to do the port to Palm, I think), had plenty of time to work through UX issues with the product, and changed most aspects of it many times without success. In my opinion the problem was more a historical and strategic one for them, and it went like this:

   1. The Flash player was ubiquitous on the fixed web, but they'd only ever managed to make money out of authoring tools - so felt short-changed;
   2. Mobile came along and gave them an opportunity to get revenues derived from player volume: i.e. monitise the razor blades, not the razors;
   3. They spent years trying to do this, at the expense of getting the player ubiquitous as fast as possible - ubiquity was the destination, not the journey;

   My evidence for this? Mainly, the absolutely batshit business models they pursued: I met a Macromedia guy at the Symbian show sometime before 2005, who told me they'd be charging UK end-users £7 for the player itself - a policy that didn't get promoted too far, and which no-one talks about now. They also approached device manufacturers like Nokia and tried to license the technology to them on a commercial basis. With no installed base on mobile and lots of competition for getting interactive content onto phones (J2ME, Silverlight, Symbian, web) they had little leverage and couldn't negotiate such deals effectively. This meant that the player didn't go far except in markets like Japan, where they did an excellent job of getting in early, working closely with DoCoMo and bundling it onto devices. I'm not sure what the commercial basis for this was, but it let Macromedia claim gazillions of Flash-enabled phones in press releases so I'm guessing terms were favourable to Docomo etc.

   To be fair, they were also hamstrung in mobile by the difficulty of upgrading players to handsets (which would help them roll out new versions or fix bugs), by the same sort of fragmentation issues that have affected the Java guys (difficulty of reaching many devices, and quality of implementations), and by a consequent apathy from developers. All this happened whilst the alternatives were out there and doing a better job of getting an audience - J2ME may be flawed as a platform, but it's still a de facto standard, for those that can work with it. Silverlight popped up in the last few years and managed to get some deals - whether or not you think it's a valid competitor, it did compete and probably muddied the waters in licensing negotiations.

   Aral touches on the issues of fragmentation and recommends that Macromedia should've delivered a great experience on one device; I actually think they did this with a number of devices in Japan quite successfully. In the West, pre-iPhone there was no one device which could deliver the sort of audience to justify such a strategy, and post-iPhone... well, they're beholden to Mr Jobs on that front.

   The end result? A few years down the line there's lots of competition, no real installed base, and few people wanting to produce content. At this stage I'd expect Adobe to be doing things which modify the authoring tools and make them more appropriate for creating mobile content (e.g. compiling Flash into iPhone apps), rather than concentrating on getting the player everywhere - effectively going back to the way they did things on the web, and acknowledging that their attempt to monitise the player in mobile has failed.

   Nexus, first impressions

   January 16, 2010 | Comments

   My Nexus turned up yesterday. I'll do a full review if I get time, but first impressions:

   • The unboxing experience was very good: simple, straightforward, friendly, good attention to detail.
   • The industrial design of this device equals the iPhone, I think: it feels solid, well put-together, clean and crisp;
   • The screen is amazing, probably the best screen I've ever used on a mobile device - bright, clear, large, and responsive to touch;
   • It's *fast* - the snappiness makes a difference, particularly switching between apps;
   • The camera is OK - 5 megapixels and a flash make a big difference (the HTC Magic camera was dreadful), but it doesn't equal some of the optics I've seen in Sony Ericsson or Nokia devices. There's still room for an Android device with an amazing camera;
   • The migration experience was middling; on the one hand all my email, contacts and calendars synced down without any trouble. Applications, bookmarks, and a few other bits and pieces didn't arrive, though applications I'd bought were waiting for me to download again from the Marketplace. I had to reconfigure every application I reinstalled with passwords, etc., which was a bit of a pain;
   • Android 2.1 is incrementally nicer. The main win for me is "undo" option in the Mail client, which is a godsend on mobile (particularly when I inadvertently hit the wrong key and delete/archive an email).

   Overall, this is the first phone that lives up to all those 3G concept videos we were shown at the start of the century. I'm really impressed so far, though I'm only about 24 hours into using it...

   Nexus Flops, film at 11

   January 13, 2010 | Comments

   So, the Nexus has bombed, apparently - with Flurry reporting only 20,000 new Nexus owners.

   Hold on though - this handset launched publicly just 7 days ago! Surely it's a bit apples-and-oranges to compare sales figures for the Droid, launched 2 months ago (and before Christmas), with a device which may not even have reached all the people who've purchased it yet...? Drawing any conclusions by comparing estimated sales figures at this stage seems almost negligent, journalistically...

   Update: I really ought to learn how to read. The comparison is more like-for-like than I made out - looking at week 1 sales. However, I still don't think it's a fair comparison. Droid was sold through traditional channels (online, physical stores, etc.), and I'm guessing that there wasn't - for many Droid owners - a 4-day lag between ordering and getting the handset.

   Android wireframe templates

   January 12, 2010 | Comments

   Here's a little something for all you people making lovely apps for Android. If you use a pencil before you start to take your app to the digital realm, then we've made some templates to help you design for some of the Android handsets out there.

   There are a whole variety of devices to choose from, with different screen resolutions, and hard or virtual keyboards. We find these help give our sketches a little context when we're presenting them internally or to clients.

   The PDF is Letter size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and the handsets are to scale, so you can use these quite happily for paper prototyping and get a realistic sense of scale. There's a subtle 10x10 grid on the screens to help you with your pencil based needs. If you're short on Letter paper, you can get away with printing them on A4.

   If you have any suggestions, comments or improvements, feel free to suggest them here.

   All that's left is to snack down on cupcake, donut or eclair, or if you're feeling greedy - all three. Enjoy - and click here for the templates.

   These templates were designed and lavishly tooled by Ali Driver, Senior Designer at Future Platforms.