...more recent posts
Bruce Sterling gave a talk at the launch party for Layar's Reality Browser which is one of the big players in the Augmented Reality scene. I've written excitedly about Augmented Reality recently, and Sterling is drinking a similar Kool-aid, calling it a "techno visionary dream come true" among other superlatives. The basic idea is just to lay data over the top of a live video feed, turning our handheld video cameras (a.k.a., our phones) into third eyes with access to the vast knowledge stored on the internet. In other words, not "virtual reality" where the user is immersed in an entirely artificial computer generated world, but "augmented reality" where computer generated graphics are overlayed on top of a real time view of the world. Something like a Terminator's view of the world. In any case, to me this is a pretty weak talk by Sterling (although the bar is about as high as it can go regarding his talks,) so maybe not worth watching. But it is interesting that this is what he's excited about at the moment.
Blackberry maker RIM just bought Torch Mobile, developers of the WebKit-based Iris Browser. WebKit is the open source heart of Apple's Safari browser that is quickly becoming the defacto browser (or rendering engine at least) in the mobile world. Google's Android OS uses it, obviously the iPhone uses it, the Palm Pre uses it, Nokia S60 uses it, and now it looks like the Blackberry will be using it too. Not a happy time to be backing Windows Mobile browsing! And more than just another (huge) win for WebKit, this will be huge for the Blackberry as it's lackluster browsing experience is it's current weak spot.
If I was Adobe I'd have a hit team focused exclusively on WebKit. There is a tiny historical moment upon us right now where Flash could be killed as we move into the mobile space. Apple looks like they want to do it, and just about every major mobile player is on board.
In my fantasy stock trader life I've been betting against Nokia because I see them as too unfocused, with no experience bringing a full hardware / software stack to market in anything but the entry level phone space. Or, put another way, I think Symbian (the open source OS backed, primarily, by Nokia and Sony that Nokia uses in it's smartphones) is doomed and I'm betting that Nokia can't get anything else together.
But of course now they've just released a new flagship "phone" they are calling the N900 Mobile Computer. And it's not running Symbian, it's running a full Linux distribution (based on Debian + Gnome) called maemo. Hardware specs look great: Arm Cortex A8 CPU like the new iPhone, lots of RAM, 3D graphics horsepower, full hardware qwerty keyboard, and a 5mp camera with a zeiss lens.
Obviously the very stock linux OS is appealing to the geeks. This is what I thought the iPhone was going to be when it was first announced - something exactly like my computer, but in my phone. Instead the iPhone turned out to be a much more closed, more closely controled by Apple, computing device. This has turned out great for Apple who are selling a gazillion of them, but a little disappointing to geeks like me who would like to run a full LAMP stack on their phone. Just 'cuz.
So I like the N900. Very intriguing. But the devil is in the details, and we'll see how it works out. My guess is that just like there are much better PMPs out there than the iPod, the N900 may well be a technically better smartphone than the iPhone. But you can't consider these things in isolation. The iPod won because of the complete iPod, iTunes, iTunes Music Store package. It was just completely easy to use, buy, and manage music with it, Similarly, the iPhone, iTunes (for syncing), and the App Store are a killer combination that Nokia (or Microsoft, or Google, etc...) is going to have a tough time competing with. (Om Malik says the App store does 2.4 Billion in sales a year, with 1.5 Billion applications having been downloaded.)
The N900 looks like a good move by Nokia. Enough to make me wonder about my (fantasy) short position. But I'm sticking to my guns. They have layed a nice foundation here, but I still think they can screw it up. Competition is good for everyone though, so the better they do the better phones we'll all be using. Congratulations on at least building a seemingly very open system. Now will they come?