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Smartphone total cost of ownership side by side comparison chart: Nexus One, Droid, iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre.
Following up on the Nexus One launch I posted about below let me say a few words about the smartphone space. I want to make this brief, so of course this will be too condensed (and probably overstated) to turn out to be accurate, but it's basically how I see things at this point.
There are only three camps in the race at this point: RIM's Blackberry, Apple's iPhone, and the various Android devices.
The Blackberry is all about business email (which is all about Microsoft Exchange support.) If your business runs on Exchange and uses Blackberry then you need a Blackberry - end of story. They have this niche locked down and will continue to do so. So they have something to generate profits, but I don't see them ever breaking out of this niche. And as Microsoft continues their very slow deterioration (and specifically, as Exchange and Office give way to online, cloud based, software from people like Google) RIM's market will slowly and continuously erode. They aren't going away soon, but they are the definite third wheel here and won't ever gain ground from where they stand today.
That leaves Apple vs. Android, or, really, Apple vs. Google. This doesn't have to be a battle to the death, as the space is giant. But it's a battle nonetheless. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt left Apple's board last year over conflict of interest as the two previous allies turned their guns more and more toward the other.
Very briefly, Google (with Android) is more open than Apple's iPhone ecosystem. But the iPhone - through the Apple run online App Store - is a much more developed, and much more tightly integrated market place for third party software (3 billion app downloads and counting.) The Android marketplace is far behind at this point. And really this is all that matters. Hardware has to be good, but tons of people can build good hardware. It's the software, and how it integrates with the hardware and with the marketplace for third party software, that matters. And here Androids openness works both for and against it.
There has been lots of third party software developer unease with Apple since they totally control who can sell and what they can sell. But my guess is that money talks, and as long as it's easy to develop, and the marketplace is giant with lots of profit opportunities, people will continue to develop and put up with Apple's occasional flights of whimsy in rejecting certain apps.
Android, by courting lots of different hardware makers, has a chance to grab marketshare rapidly (and in fact, with the Droid, they are doing so.) But at the same time, different manufacturers, combined with a completely open software stack, means that fragmentation is a danger. It might turn out something like the Windows software world where it becomes difficult to support all the variations of 'Android' devices out there. Apple looks to avoid this problem by keeping very tight control over the iPhone.
So can the Android marketplace catch up with the iPhone + App store? Of course it can, but it has a ways to go. To me it's really looking a lot like a replay of the PC world Microsoft vs. Apple story. Android is like Windows in that it's trying to be all things to all people and to let partnerships with other companies (Motorola, HTC, Verizon, etc...) flesh out the ecosystem. Apple, as they did on the desktop, wants to control every detail in order to flesh out their own very specific vision. Some people will really connect with this vision; others will not. But my guess is that it won't turn out as lopsided of a contest this time as it did on the desktop. Smartphones will do less than general purpose computers, but they will do what they do better, easier, and more intuitively. And that will be enough for most people. If Apple can execute (more on this later!) I think they can "win", and if not then Android will have no problem picking up the pieces.
For the rest of them: Palm tried valiantly with the Pre - which looks to be a very solid device - but it's too late and they are dead. Nokia has nothing right now, but does have several big projects in the works. I think it's too late for them as well, but they are an awfully big horse to bet against. And Microsoft just can't seem to compete at all in the smartphone space. I'd say they are already dead (although with some legacy numbers that don't look too bad at this point, but really will by the end of the year.)
The smartphone will be the main computer for most people over the next ten years, and your choices are going to be Apple, or some kind of Android device. The race is on. But there is still another twist to come.
Okay, so I've totally fallen down on posting more often. I really tried to put something together, but I just couldn't get it out. In any case, it's the new year, and as I sort of said, some big changes are coming our way in digital media land. But instead of getting out ahead of these things I'm just going to comment as we go.
Like, for instance, today Google releases the Nexus One. This is Google's own Android smartphone entry. Android, of course, is a smartphone operating system built on top of the linux kernel by google. It's open source and freely available (including the entire network stack) under the very permissive Apache license. What this means is that anyone can use Android as the OS for their own smartphone. And people have, most notably HTC, who really got the space rolling with their G1, and Motorola, with the current champ Droid. But, somewhat confusingly, the name 'Droid' is licensed from Lucasfilm by Verizon, and thus there are also other Droid phones on the Verizon network such as the HTC Droid Eris. So 'Droid' seems to be Verizon's branding for Android, although at this point most people would assume you mean the Motorola Droid if you just said 'Droid'.
In any case, back to the Nexus One. It too - to further complicate the threads - is built by HTC. But the branding is 100% Google. They designed it and outsourced the construction to HTC (much as Microsoft designed the Zune, but it was built by Toshiba.) The top link in this post has probably the best info so far, as Engadget has had a unit for a little over a day. But also Engadget is liveblogging the Google event at CES right now where the device is to presumably be unveiled.
Hardware specs are very impressive but I'll skip the boring details. The real story here is the way the phone is going to be sold. Supposedly Google is going to sell the phone online, unlocked, directly to consumers, for $529. Or, alternately, with a 2 year T-Mobile contract for $179. This puts google in a position of competing directly with their partners (like Motorola) which is something they had previously said they weren't going to do. (Think here about how Microsoft never entered the PC hardware business - they didn't precisely for this reason: they didn't want to compete with their partners like Dell and HP. Google is abruptly taking an alternate route.)
Long blog short: There is a ton of hype and excitement here for a phone that seems to be genuinely well thought out and well built but not really breaking too much new ground, and with a price that would seem to put it well out of the reach of most consumers unless you want to be on the T-Mobile network. From what I've seen I really like this phone, and I welcome competition in this space as being vital to our future, but the Nexus One is merely a competent entry and not a game changer.
P.S. the name Nexus One should be interesting to Blade Runner aficionados.
Fake Steve Jobs at his finest.
Really interesting TED talk from Pranav Mistry, an MIT Media Lab PhD student, about future augmented reality computer interfaces. Great video demonstrations. Worth the 12 minutes.
Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.
Haven't been able to blog recently, although I've made a few failed attempts. It is starting to look like a really interesting time is coming up so I want to keep trying to restart. But there are so many different pieces I haven't been able to put it all together. I'll try here with a series of posts about the "interesting to me" topics without necessarily trying to tie it all together. If you can tie it all together please clue me in because we're in for some real changes in our computer networked world.
I used to think much more clearly, and therefore maybe not as deeply, about the tension between intellectual property (IP) and the digital world. I knew for sure that no digital rights management (DRM) scheme could ultimately work on a general purpose computer, and so all such schemes would prove ineffective and either IP rights enforcement would therefore be impossible, or general purpose computers would have to be prohibited legislatively.
But, to skip right to the end, I now think neither of those two options has or will come to pass. DRM protected digital IP is already somewhat effective (from a rights holder's point of view) in a world of freely available general purpose computers which can, in theory, break the DRM. And even better, for this side of the fence at least, a new computing device is about to emerge that will make things even more secure. It won't be, by my particular definition, a general purpose computer, and it won't be capable of circumventing the controls. This new class of device will exist along side our general purpose computers, and we will buy and use them despite this drawback, because they will do their specific tasks better than our general purpose computers.
To put the central issue in a different way: what used to be a solid line (or even wide gulf) between general purpose computing devices (what we would call "computers") and single purpose computing devices (like a thermostat, or fancy fuel injectors, or a fax machine) is now growing fuzzy. And that's pretty interesting.
Sometimes I read people who say "Wow, it's amazing that we actually have this whole internet thing that is so open - you'd think 'they' would have never let it happen." I think this sometimes myself. But if that sort of reasoning makes sense to you, then what should really seem amazing is not that we got the internet, but that we got the general purpose computer. Denying that is the way to really lock things down. And that is what is happening. Except not by outlawing the general purpose computer, but simply by building something new, something like a "just less than general purpose computer," and making it better than the alternatives. I really didn't forsee this possibility.
This would all be more clear if I could just say what this new device is going to be. But it's not that clear to me yet. In one way it's here already with the iPhone and now Droid. Except I'm not talking about just phones, and they are just one of many beginning. But since I'm looking for a place to pick up the thread for some new blog posts I think that's the place to start. Droid is really important. Or Android is really important and Droid is the first device to show it. (How long has it been since I've said "Way to go Motorolla!" Feels kind of good :-) And the iPhone is probably the most important because it shows where we are going with closed stack systems for interacting with DRM protected digital IP. It's not the iPhone so much as the iPhone + iTunes + iTunes Music store + App store universe. It's really breathtaking what they have built. Probably I sound like what's derisively called a fan boy when I say that. And I guess I am a fan in the sense that I really like some of Apple's products. But I don't say breathtaking here with any of that feeling. I'm genuinely not sure whether to be scared or not. I don't know how it's going to come out, but we've been at an impasse for some time and that is about to break. The future of our commercial mediasphere (which I guess might be a better way of saying "DRM protected digital IP") is about to take shape. My hope is to post a series, starting with the iPhone and Android, and see if writing it out can help me see more clearly.
Nice industry I've worked my way into: Help wanted, full working knowledge of Php, Ruby on Rails, and Java required - $10/hour. In NYC!
If you have an email account on my server I'd be very curious if you've seen any improvement in spam (i.e., if you've seen less spam) over the past 24 hours.
Just spent the entire morning trying to get text inside a custom height input field to vertically align in FireFox. Turns out the answer is to just put top and bottom padding on the input and leave out the height style all together. Only took 4 hours to figure that out. Good times.