Mobile Solutions CI

LG launches app store in APAC

LG launching an app store is big news for Nokia and RIM. Apple's relatively low presence in the region makes this a more wide-open play in expectation setting with end customers. 

For that reason it's foolish of LG, Nokia, and RIM to play into Apple's hands by launching with the same basic distribution UI and concept and then going even further and marketing it based on Apple's benchmarks (beginning with number of apps).

This will no doubt put the Ovi store under even more pressure to perform for Nokia as losing smartphone dominance in these markets would kill one of the last solid high-margin footholds Nokia has.

"Handset manufacturer LG Electronics announced it will launch the LG Application Store on Tuesday, promising 1,400 mobile applications--including 100 free apps--available in 15 different languages. The beta storefront, which will first launch in markets including Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, will expand to Europe and South America before the end of 2009, by which time LG expects to offer more than 2,000 applications"

App stores are distracting providers from solving discoverability

App stores have become a shorthand for distributing content and services on smartphones--and soon all phones. This is a useful construct for touchscreen only devices but many devices are not and don't need to be touch-driven or have menu interfaces that mimic the iPhones.

FierceDeveloper has a good article on the nuts and bolts of app store mania and why most of them will fail. I'd go further and say all of them will fail. Similar to the rise of amazon.com, the useful and long-lived competitors to Apple will offer different user experiences. Amazon has eBay, Apple will have...what?

I've argued before that the social address book is a natural starting place for finding what's next. If it is then Android has the best chance of getting there but so far all the Android players are staying with a copy Apple approach. When will they go directly from the address book and contacts to aid discoverability? What other UIs can they use which will remove a layer instead of adding a layer or icon?

That to me is the real question. What can be taken away from current interfaces to surface discoverability and increase context at the point of action--the call log, contact list, clock, map...?

CIO.com Article on Must-Do Fixes for RIM's App Store

BlackBerry App World: Nine Must-Do Fixes for RIM's App Store - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership.

This article take a good pass through the major issues facing RIM on the App World. However I think it misses some of the architectural implications. Some of these problems are specific to the device OS, some to the BIS or BES, some to the App World service itself.

Knowing which is which is crucial for developers but also helpful to keep in mind for partners--and, of course, competitors.

Nokia kills Widsets--Challenges of migrating application inventory

"It was the Finns, behind the Ovi, with the candlestick"

You have to love the Register--god bless the people who write the bylines. Why can't US media hit the notes that the mighty Reg and the Economist nail with caption headlining?

Anyway, this is a great article to read because it highlightst the tremendous challenges facing Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and Palm. All have large embedded bases of applications which they heavily promote to developers as a signal of being a strong platform. And most or all of this inventory is useless because it won't port or won't port easily to an experience on par with an iPhone app.

Nokia admits killing off Widsets • The Register.

This is one key reason why existing platforms should be thinking beyond the app store. Nokia in particular is frustratingly behind the curve on this. They have great ideas behind context, location, and relevance and then bury them all uselessly chasing Apple and adopting all the iPhone constructs of display and distribution. That is stupid. Nokia is trying hard to be the next Motorola but hopefully with this strategy.

RIM will also run into this quickly, but larger challenges around device OS, memory, and form factor range will keep it distracted and unable to change strategy for some time. Microsoft also falls into this camp.

The best opportunity for rethinking this dynamic comes from a vendor or service provider leveraging Android. I have hopes that we'll see something along these lines by year end 2010.

Pre shows strong use of app store

The medialets blog is reporting that the Pre users are very active application downloaders with "an average of 2 apps downloaded per device and 5,500 downloads per app (with a low of 600 and a high of 20k). 18 days later and they’ve tripled the user base to 150k units, averaging 6+ apps downloaded per device and 33.3k downloads per app (with a low of 2.4k and a high of 114k)."

As it seems increasingly true that consumers enjoy using a well-integrated application store to personalize their devices it would be nice to know what the average shelf life of apps is and how application usage compares to core device feature use. Do people who download 6+ apps also use many features of their phone intensively, or are apps replacing device and service features?

Do people who download few apps use few features in general or are they supplanting apps with network and device features?

 

The summer of smartphones; iPhone 3GS sells 1Mn on 1st weekend

Summer has beey busy with mobile device and service launches. So what have learned with the Pre launch, T-Mobile announcing it's next generation Android G2, and Apple rolling out the iPhone 3Gs?

The mobile services market is increasingly tied to the consumer products cycle of big holiday promotions. All the major smartphone launches are happening now in June and July, there will be a month or two to get software upgrades out, and then the systems and marketing campaigns will be locked in for the big holiday season shopping push.

Price is relatively unimportant. These are all relatively expensive devices with costly data plans, yet they are are selling well. The new iPhone supposedly sold 1Mn over the first weekend, taking an increasing share from Blackberry users and continuing to draw customers from other carriers in large numbers according to a Piper Jaffray report.

Service experience trumps features. From comments of sales floor staff and these reports it looks like Apple's focus on improving the speed and battery life are the important updates to consumers and are driving purchases. The tech blogs and reviews are such an echo chamber and really missed the boat on this--features, even cut and paste, are not driving the increased uptake. Improving and streamlining the service experience are.

The mass customer audience is paying attention, and consumer expectations are changing. NPD is reporting that data plan pricing and a desire to stay with Verizon and other carriers are the main inhibitors to consumers purchasing an iPhone (note that this is directly at odds with NPDs own misleading headline). Yet they also state 1 in 5 consumers is considering buying one. 1 in 5!! That would be remarkable market share for Apple and clearly indicates that smartphones and rich internet services are becoming table stakes for many consumers.

Those to me are the main takeaways. Meanwhile, T-Mobile's comments about the new G2 seem to indicate they are also focusing on improving the overall service experience by reducing features rather than packing more in. The new device has no physical keyboard (or "chin"). Slowly but surely the service providers are getting it. On the device side I don't think the same can be said for RIM and Nokia, and we'll know soon about Motorola, but so far LG and Samsung seem to have best learned lessons from the iPhone's success. LG and Samsung have both focused on very targeted devices which wrap capabilities around a few specific use cases. And both are driving major service uptake in doing so.

Android and the social address book: Looking at T-Mobile's myTouch

T-Mobile has announced that the new flagship Android device will come with Sherpa, an app which personalizes the device to the end user. Here is a short slide show on the myTouch. This is the first baby step for a service provider in truly differentiating themselves using Android.

Android has several advantages which have so far not been sufficiently leveraged. It has Exchange support, as well as POP/IMAP; it has great web-based sync to Google calendars (which also easily syncs with Exchange) and contacts; and open source makes it easier in some ways to develop against than most other platforms. So what could be done to take better advantage of these traits?

Pulling all of these together suggests carriers should focus on enabling the social address book through encouraging third party providers to tackle carrier-suggested roadmaps for messaging, calendaring, and contacts management.

T-Mobile has taken the first steps by using a 3rd party to launch Sherpa. But personalization cannot take place within an app to be meaningful.

What Sherpa should become is not personalization within an app. The app should merely be a mechanism to ensure customers are opting in to allow personalization and by installing it Sherpa should embed itself within contacts, calendar, maps, and messaging.

For example if you frequently sms your friend then his contact details should show "text" first; conversely if you only ever call someone their contact detail should show a phone icon and offer one-touch dialing as the first option. People who are near you in place, time, and online status should be surfaced before people who are offline, not near you, etc.

Google's new "what's here" feature for maps should also show how many other mobile users are at a location and should filter/rank content based on user preferences and the supposition that the user is mobile.

T-Mobile should infuse Sherpa with this type of network-derived data to seed preferences with what other devices are doing, where they are doing it, and when they are doing it. None of this requires personally identifiable data. But your phone should know if it should ring or vibrate based on where you are. It should know where other people like you are--and are not--and where they are going. And all of this should be presented within the call log, contacts, and home page. Not within an app.

There is so much which could be done to make Android phones the device of the social graph. But doing so does not mean adding pile of features and UIs on top of the device. It means stripping out extra layers and steps to make the core actions of the phone smarter and more dynamic.

Samsung Instinct generating heavy US mobile ad impressions

Here is an interesting story on a report claiming the Samsung Instinct generates more mobile ads than any other device on at least one ad network. So a feature phone on Sprint's network is generating the same level of mobile internet browsing as iPhones?

I could easily believe that. The smartphone phenom has been shadowed by a much less examined story of Samsung and LG creating more focused (therefore limited) devices which look and act like smartphones to the average consumer.

As the Instinct becomes an important mobile advertising platform on Sprint, LG has become an extremely valuable partner for Verizon by generating the bulk of premium downloads (games, applications, ringtones).

The next wave of mobile internet services should pay close attention to this. New services need less features, not more. They need simpler hardware, not more complex. And they need to deliver their focused service experiences directly to the home screen and within the basic phone user flow--the call log, the address book.

Samsung's Instinct and several LG devices start down this path. The INQ devices and service also hint at this although I don't think they execute as well as they could. Who will begin noticing these usage trends and take this theme to the next stage?

RIM reports flat growth for Q3 (it's fiscal Q1 2010)--and missing subs?

I follow RIM's quarterly earnings and calls because RIM is an important indicator for the mobile industry. Maybe it's just lack of sleep this week but for the first time ever I can't make sense of their reported numbers. Is it just me?

RIM claimed "over 25 million" subscribers last quarter. This quarter they added 3.8 million new subscribers. The new total? About 28.5 million. My spreadsheet says that at about half a million subscribers just disappeared. 25.something + 3.8 does not equal 28.5!

Every quarter RIM rounds out their reported total while reporting relatively precise numbers for new adds. I total the adds and it usually runs very true for compiling the total subscriber base. If you total the claimed new subscriber adds over the past four quarters you get over 29.5 million subscribers, not 28.5. Where did the missing million go? Where is my math wrong? I went back and looked at the transcripts and press releases for the past year and everything tracks until this quarter. Hmm.

Without an accurate breakout of total subs all the rest of my estimated breakouts are also off, but even with a relative large fudge factor several things jump out:

Enterprise growth flatlined! RIM has never seen such a poor quarter for BES subs. I assume this finally shows the meltdown of RIM's key verticals such as finance. Whatever the case it is the first sign of a chink in RIM's armor. Enterprise growth of 3% will not continue to gain share for RIM given the rapid growth of iPhone, Android, and Pre devices.

Secondly, I'm not convinced international growth is as strong as RIM talks it up. It is likely about 15 % quarter on quarter. This is very respectable growth but only as compared to Symbian.

Lastly, the flat overall growth in new subs added is a real surprise. RIM benefited from very heavy promotion, new device launches, some stumbles from competitors, and it still only managed to stay at the same pace. Again, not horrible, but a real change from previous increasing growth.

While RIM continues to scale it now appears to be really feeling the pressure from the slew of Android devices and the next generation iPhones and Palm devices. If I were at RIM I'd be very concerned about now about a device portfolio that needs better differentiation, and a service platform that has yet to come up with an answer for how to extend past the inbox and calendar.

INQ "Facebook phone" sells 700k units, has 50% services uptake

3 claims INQ platform a roaring success » telecoms.com - telecoms industry news, analysis and opinion.