Mobile Solutions CI

CTIA Fall 2010 Notes: Motorola device portfolio rounds out

Motorola is really beginning to spread their portfolio more broadly. The announcements at CTIA fall 2010 are coming thick and fast:

Moto is launching three MOTO Blur devices on ATT at 79, 99, and 129 which are similar to TMO devices already announced and will also be launched in holiday window. Moto has created a clear strategy of choosing one touch only, one touch with qwerty slideout, and one messaging-centric form factor. All of these are consistently one version of Android back. It will be interesting to see if that is a demand killer or totally irrelevant--particularly in this year when the Android OS cycle compressed. There is also a touch-only Blur device on 2.1 launching on VZW.

As a side note, Google is really killing its OEM partners with this totally random and always late release cycles for Android.

A lot of industry watchers have been waiting for an Android device to go head to head with RIM, and now MOT has one which RIM's number one partner and customer, Verizon, is promoting.  This will be a good validation test for demand from current Blackberry users for similar device on android.

 

BlackBerry Outage Again, Day 2?

Blackberry having an outage in February/March? No updates available? An eighth straight year of outages with no customer support?

"Day 2 of this outage. No update, no RIM statements… just the same continuance from yesterday’s data issues. 

Again, this is affecting devices on all North American carriers, BIS and BES, and it appears to be only devices on WiFi, wherein data works “sometimes” when connected via WiFi; no data when WiFi is disconnected."

 Shocking!

Blackberry profit surprises on Dec 17th (Fiscal Q3 '10 for RIM)

RIM posted some solid earnings after a rough quarter last time. Here is the earnings call transcript. Note that for some reason they have labeled it Fiscal quarter 2 for RIM but this is Q3 FY10 for RIM.

Some key stats: RIM shipped 10.1 million devices and added4.4 million new subscribers, claiming 16% QoQ growth.

80% of new subscribers were "consumer", meaning they were not associated with a BES server.

There continue to be some worrying trends for RIM within these numbers. 

First, their net new adds relative to devices shipped is quite low. That looks like only 44% of devices shipped went to new customers? On the one hand it's great to show customer retention and upsell but on the other hand with the biggest channel partners heavily marketing 2-for-1 deals I think it's a real problem if this has indeed slipped below the 50% threshold. Everyone will be comparing Blackberries shipped to iPhones but the huge difference to keep in mind is that RIM is bringing 4.4M new subs in while Apple is doubling that.

And just to really nitpick, RIM didn't sell 10.1M devices. They shipped that many and sold about 9M data-enabled devices and less than half of those to new subscribers. It's a very healthy quarter but that is not kicking Apple's ass. 

Secondly, RIM's Edel Ebbs  stated that they "don't break out" international subscribers. Well, they did across all quarters in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Suddenly last quarter they stopped. There are few reasons to stop reporting that and none of them are positive ones for RIM. The WSJ is reporting international growth "at 37% of overall revenue, up from 30% the previous quarter". RIM's share of subs who were international had been slowly climbing from 25% to 35% so if the WSJ is right in their numbers they are wrong in their assessment that WW growth is driving RIM. I think Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and the two big UK operators are driving RIM growth and the rest is ticking over at the same rate. Still upward, and still good, but at a flat rate of growth.

Third, the Flip Pearl sure seems MIA. For a company rapidly reaching downmarket to lower ASPs and youth/consumer segments it's interesting that their first departure from the standard form factor seems to be a dud.

A really positive factor to watch is RIM's tiered pricing: "As we discussed during RIM's capital market day in May, we are continuing to implement service price tiering strategies to further segment the market for BlackBerry products and services. For example, [Telecom Sao] Indonesia, in addition to its full BIS offering, also offers the lower priced version of BIS that gives the customer a more limited feature set that includes only IM and texting for the equivalent of about $7 a month."

Carriers and service providers should notice and learn from this. In the Q&A portion the meaning of tiered pricing was misinterpreted, which Balsille didn't correct, showing that this is really going under the radar.

RIM also promised to "deliver a web kit browser during calendar 2010". Amen!

RIM email down--Eight years running for EOY outages

RIM's email service is down.

Every year as the calendar turns over, RIM experiences service outages. At first I didn't mind this so much. Cloud services such as Gmail have their outages too. But RIM's NOC is supposed to be super reliable. And what really frosts me more than anything is this happens every single year and every single year there is no "maintenance being performed" notice or other notification. 

Blackberry outages are a signal that RIM is expanding its BIS capabilities and preparing for new device launches. But why at the expense of existing customers?

The voice signal still works on the device so what about an SMS or PIN message RIM? Why not pre-install a device side client which can give user notification if it loses IP push for more than 15 or 30 or 60 minutes? How f***g hard can this horrible customer service experience be to solve?

The long term solution for me wasn't that hard. After having switched from a first-gen iPhone back to a Blackberry I'm going back again, having just ordered a 3Gs online. 

Microsoft rolls out WM 6.5

Microsoft had their big open house yesterday to roll out Windows Mobile 6.5. There were no big surprises so if you've been following mobile news at all over the past year or two you got just what you were expecting.

There is a decent roundup here at CNET. It focuses on the remote wipe and app store. It tells you something that the overall usability and the flow between applications and user scenarios is getting very little coverage.

Microsoft itself emphasized "operator choice" in promoting the dozens of handset form factors that will be available. That is a useless drum to bang--operators are not your press audience and they are the only ones who care about operator choice. 

Developers here that and think "great, further fragmentation and I can be sure I have to tailor an app to multiple devices or have an addressable market that is unlikely to top 1 million". Consumers here that and think of all the feature-laden unusable phones that have been shoved over the counter for the past fifteen years.

So that is my cranky Tuesday morning summation of the incremental release that never should have been. When does WM 7 launch?

FUD alert: MSFT & Nokia aliance is not RIM challenge

Well the rumours were true and Microsoft and Nokia announced a collaboration to distribute Office mobile software on Symbian devices. Reuters quotes a Nokia executive as saying "This is giving some of our competitors -- let's spell it out, RIM -- a run for their money".

FUD alert! It is not, of course, doing anything of the kind.

1. Mobile client software is not a challenge to the device, middleware, and NOC integration offered by RIM.
2. This deal is with Microsoft's Office division and not the mobile division so it does not neccessarily signal anything further than software distribution. It is in effect a bigger version of a dataviz launch. 
3. Offering Microsoft mobile does not affect enterprise buying decisions for solutions--that happens because of role admin capabilities, security from both a process and hardware/software perspective, more basic usability criteria such as battery life, UI, device durability, etc. 
4. Slapping more client software on top of Symbian as an OS is not a recipe for better integration and access to mobile business needs. Integrating those features natively in Symbian would be, but that won't happen because the OS moves to the Symbian foundation and not Nokia.  

So this is a great distribution deal for Microsoft and a nice extra for Nokia's E-Series device line. But you'd certainly think that a company that had burned through several in-house mobile email efforts, a huge acquisition and divestiture, and several partnerships during failed efforts to offer solutions competitive to RIM would know better than to use a client software distribution deal to claim parity with a Blackberry and BES solution. Doing so just demonstrates how little someone understands the enterprise mobile market.

Messaging innovation centered on SMS, not email

It's really interesting how many new messaging and communication startups are leveraging SMS. At CTIA I met several interesting new startups, such as Zipwhip, built on texting. The broken inbox experience of email is creating the biggest competitive threat for mobile messaging vendors.

As startups like Smash proliferate more services need to Twitter themselves down to digestabile elements for mobile.

Smash is providing a technology platform that lets software developers create new text applications on top of texting

Texting is so dreadfully simple. Smash wants liven it up - NYTimes.com.

 

Revisiting the Treo Centro, and not liking it

I just finished spending a week using a Palm Centro. I'd heard very positive things about the Centro and Access OS Palm devices and they've been selling reasonably well, so I wanted to spend some in-depth time with one before the new WebOS launches with the Pre.

And boy did that suck. As a long-time Blackberry and reasonably long-time iPhone user the Palm user interface, messaging integration, and application integration all feel very weak. I have three main complaints. I realize that I'm not the typical consumer but was very surprised at how deep many features and functions are buried. Second, the OS is filled with quirky things such as how the device turns on and off independtly of the phone turning on and off. And lastly the setup for applications, especially the email applications, is horrendous because of the number of steps and level of detailed information required.

A phone has to come with some key service which will light up and work out of the box with no more than three steps. That to me is table stakes in the smartphone market. The Palm fails miserably on this by having too many startup questions before it even boots the first time. After you do have it up and running each application requires another round of fiddly inputs. This is not a phone to set up one-handed or while on the train on the way back home. And a smartphone should be designed exactly for such occasions at least for one or more basic use cases.

Once up and running I found the navigation tiresome because of the large number of icons and applications which I had no interest in but had to navigate past. I'm sure there are ways to customize screens but equally sure that I have no interest in spending half an hour finding out how to do that.

The qwerty keyboard was responsive with distinctive buttons. The web browser performed well and was good enough that I ended up using webmail clients for two email accounts rather than bothering to integrate the accounts into the device client.

Travelling with the Centro was not fun. The form factor is too thick and bulky to disappear in jeans pockets. If you are running through airports it takes a while to get used to turning the phone software on and off independently of the device which was a real annoyance. Checking, deleting, and sending messages is hard to do with one hand and managing sms, email, and voice messages requires too much navigation.

I expected to find a simple stripped down messaging phone which fit easily into any pocket and had a nice browser and great email integration which I could use with one hand while walking. I will have to keep looking to find that in a low-end, low-priced device.

SEVEN now supporting Google Calendar

SEVEN has put out a press release describing their calendar integration to mobile email and PIM for their supported handsets (currently listed as 450). They are working hard to reach further into operators by listing carrier-side support for gmail and calendering issues as a main feature.

SEVEN Launches Google Calendar Integration for Mobile Devices.

While this is the right path for SEVEN to pursue in extending mobile email and calendering from web-based services to mobile phones, in a way I find it amazing that carriers have yet to think and act beyond providing connectivity. Why aren't carriers demanding a personalized or contextualized version of such a service where calendar updates are time and location sensitive (e.g. auto-sms or email notice to participants if you are running late, on a another call, etc)?

Why aren't they working on a UI that is specific to handet classes--if not specific handsets--instead of just trying to port a PC-based web experience to a tiny screen? If players from Zimbra through Xobni, Clearcontext, etc. are trying to do better than Outlook on the web why in the world isn't anyone tyring to do better for email and calendar experiences in mobile?

The danger of this product roadmap for SEVEN, Visto, and SyncML-based players is that user uptake flips to interacting directly through different experiences and they are left high and dry with all their investments in a roadmap designed to support use cases that are suddenly irrelevant. This could happen sooner than one might think through expansion of Twitter or RSS use cases, of Facebook or MySpace or Youtube overlays which replace email and IM and calendering, or productization of any of these through third party standalone apps released through app stores.

Nokia gets a S60 email win with Telefonica Spain and Nokia Spain

Nice win for Nokia. This is the first I've seen since they devested from the Intellisync solution and moved to the new platform.

Telefonica Spain and Nokia Spain Sign an Agreement to Introduce Nokia Messaging.