iPhone nano

This is my wish for this holiday, a product that I would like to see.

Like an iPhone to an iPod Touch, the size of an iPhone nano should be similar to an iPod nano. It is small and its screen is only good for limited yet well defined functions, such as choosing an album, point-and-shoot camera and address book sync. It will not be a good game device nor a good email reader. It sounds like quite the opposite of all the trendy development nowadays: the bigger, the better. The latest phone is so big that you have to attend to your weight training and fitness program diligently in order to keep your arm strength up with the phone.

But an iPhone nano will be very good for one thing: tethering. It should have the same data connection capability as its cousin. It makes such a device a good companion for iPads and laptops. A user with such a device will not need a separate data contract or go through a complicated data sharing arrangement. When the data connection drains battery too fast, it borrows power from the big device it connects to. In my opinion, a cell phone with a near 5-inch screen serves no purpose well. A cell phone should be compact enough to be dropped in virtually any pocket. And the size of an iPad mini is the minimum to be adequate for a tablet. For people that need a cell phone with a long-lasting battery and a good-sized mobile device, this imaginary iPhone nano is probably a good alternative, if not the best.

Why now? The time is ripe to push further for tablets. The need for data connection is more a given than an after-thought. Wireless carriers may frown at the product as a double-edged sword. Can Android community do this? I have not seen a decent small Android phone yet. All those carrier-branded, dumb-down small Android phones look undesirable. Can Nokia do this? Nokia is very good at building solid yet cute phones. But Nokia may no longer have the influence to persuade carriers to promote such a product. Apple needs an inexpensive phone to combat Android in markets where carrier subsidy is not a preferred business practice. An iPhone nano may fill the bill and sells more iPad.

Apple Map

It started with a map application, CEO's apology for the bad user experience, and now the departure of a senior executive.

http://www.apple.com/letter-from-tim-cook-on-maps/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/30/us-apple-changes-idUSBRE89S18H20121030

It is obvious that Apple would want to have a map application of its own. What a smart phone or tablet can provide that a laptop cannot easily match is its mobility and portability. Many applications on iOS give users the ability to make decisions or acquire needed information on the spot in real time. Map data, or say information for location and surroundings, need to be integrated into the platform, iOS, for more interesting applications to happen.

Up to now, Siri cannot have a real conversion with its user. The usage is still limited to question-and-answer in a request-response fashion. When Siri is able to have a conversion, the conversation will have a context. The context may be defined by the state of the conversation on top of other inputs, say, an email, a previous phone call or voice message, or recent locations. Google search and map application may not be able to provide all that Apple needs, not to mention the competition between the two companies. 

Recent news reported Apple's executive, the head of iOS, Scott Forstall was let go for the blame of Apple map. I think office dynamics goes beyond one product flop. Apple has produced 'sub-standard' hardware and software before. It is not the first time and it will not be the last time Apple makes a mistake. Google has been working on map applications for years. Even if there is no bug in Apple's map application, it would not be as feature rich as Google's map in this first release. Judging from Mr. Cook's letter, Apple is working on some advanced applications that require integration beyond today's interface. For an iOS developer like myself, it is good to see someone firmly at the helm of the company. It is even more important to see the company make steady progress and eventually grow beyond its legendary founder. 

Screen size of a smart phone

The Android phone industry just hands out one oversized Android phone after another.

Let's look at these big phones.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4G, 135 x 67.9mm with 1280x800 pixels (aspect ratio 8:5)
Samsung Galaxy SII 125.3 x 66.1mm with 800x480 pixels (aspect ratio 5:3)
HTC EVO 3D 126.1 x 65.4mm with 960x540 pixels (aspect ratio 16:9)
And Samsung Galaxy Note trumps all of them at 146.9 x 9.7 mm with 1280x800 pixels.
(For reference, iPhone 4S 115.2 x 58.6 mm with 960x640 pixels)

I don't understand why all the obsessions with a gigantic screen on a phone.  Without a big hand, one can hardly wrap his/her thumb around to touch the right spot on the screen with one hand.  A purse or bag is required to carried it around.  Putting it in a pocket is possible but it takes away too much precious real estate of a pocket. And a big screen burns battery much too fast.

Another problem is the aspect ratio of the screen.  It already presents a design challenge for me when designing a universal game for both iPhone (3:2) and iPad (4:3).  But I can make an excuse between a phone and a tablet.  Stretching images into a different aspect ratio does not make it picture perfect.  The other choice is to fill un-used space with background color or image. There are many blogs and articles discussing techniques dealing with this issue.  But none has talked about how to test and see the user interface on different screens without buying all of them.

Bigger screens will not make those products more appealing to consumers, when human factors are taken out of product design. I also wonder whether Samsung and HTC care to tend Android application and game developers.  The two leading Android brands behave like pure hardware manufacturers that don't seem to appreciate the importance of consistency to the ecosystem which adds value to Android phones. At the same time, I heard it is the carriers who drive product specifications.  Well, carriers have never had a love for third party developers.

Steve Jobs resigned

Steve Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of Apple.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/08/24Steve-Jobs-Resigns-as-CEO-of-Apple.html
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/08/24Letter-from-Steve-Jobs.html

Jobs turned Apple around from the brink of bankruptcy.  It was no small feast to say the least.  What he and Apple impressed me most was the way Apple jumped in and woke up a very competitive and already booming cell phone industry by introducing iPhone.  In 2007, more than 1.1 billion units of cell phones were shipped, while there were only 271 million units of PC shipped in 2007.  Among those, more than 110 million units were smart phones. The number one cell phone vendor in 2007, Nokia, owned at least 36% of the overall cell phone market and over 50% of the smart phone market.  Nokia had a record revenue in 2007 at €51 billion, which was approximately $80 billion dollars on an average exchange rate of 1 EUR to 1.5 dollar.  While the whole electronic-hardware industry looked at the cell phone industry as the main source of demand, Apple walked in with iPhone and told everyone the king has no clothes on.  Given an average lead time of two years for a brand new cell phone, the iPhone project might have started in early 2005.  In 2005, North America was only a barren field for smart phones.

Apple's stock fell only slightly to $373.72, a drop of $2.46 or 0.65% today.  It seems that the market believes Apple now stands firm on the ground, not on Jobs' shoulder.  No matter it is an impression or a reality, Apple will eventually out-grow Jobs.  Some people in the Valley refer Jobs as "micro-management". That is an expression of their own preferences.  After all, Jobs delivered products, revenue and profit to underscore his leadership style.  Not many CEOs on earth can say the same, no matter what their preference in leadership styles is.

春聯與對聯

我的第四個 iPhone 軟體, 春聯與對聯 (Chinese Couplets), 今天進了App Store.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chinese-couplets/id438346456?mt=8

就像前三個產品一樣, 書的內容都需要經過一番校對和整理。我常用網際網路上的內容來和我的資料比較。但是這次的經驗, 倒是非常獨特。或許春聯和對聯不是太冷門的題目, 許多網站都有相關的內容。但是這些內容的抄襲率太高, 而且錯誤百出。我有時只是為了搜尋一個特定的詞句, 可以找到十多個有相同內容的網頁。而當中的錯誤也都十分相似, 甚至雷同。古人印書, 因為交通及通訊的不便, 校對是件難事。所以一篇文章或是詩詞常有兩三種版本。今天的電子刊物也能有類似的現象, 也讓人開了眼界。

Developers, Phones, and Applications

I recently read two articles that underlined my long-time viewpoint on applications, devices and developers.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/48888.php
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215832/Developers_not_phones_driving_mobile_banking_apps_

A lot of factors come in to the decision of whether to develop for a platform. It can be the accessibility to programming interface and talent poll, platform capability, application characteristics, cost and overhead, etc. Nevertheless, the dominant criterion is the volume of shipment. If a platform is sold like hot cakes, it is definitely worth taking a look. But the usefulness of this rule of thumb decreases dramatically from this point. The mystery lies within the percentage of addressable and target demographics among the user base of a particular platform.

As volume shows itself as an absolute number, yet it is a relative term. Look at this article from more than three years ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/11/whats-an-iphone-14-3m-windows-mobile-phones-sold-in-the-past-s/
I knew it had a wrong argument when I saw it three years ago. But I did not realize how wrong it was. In 2008, Windows Mobile shipped more than 16 million units of smartphones, roughly a quarter of what Nokia had shipped for the same category. Windows Mobile had more developers than iPhone OS or any other smartphone OS at that time. Microsoft was the number two smartphone OS provider and Windows Mobile was the number three smartphone platform. The number however did not carry it further. BlackBerry caught up from behind in 2008 and stood firm as number two smartphone platform (23M units in 2008 and 34M in 2009). It, too, lost momentum.

Many users of BlackBerry and Window Mobile phones are in for the access of corporate email. When the user population is so fixated on getting one thing, how can any application developer add any value to the platform? I had a colleague who said he could not get used to the touch screen of iPhone. He missed the qwerty keyboard of his old phone. When I asked what kind of applications he used on his phone most of the time. Unsurprisingly, it was the email. Being an application developer myself, I would not poll his opinion on user experience of a small device. Such a consumer is not among my target audience. This fact pretty much cut the majority of Microsoft's 16 million or BlackBerry's 23 million of 2008 out of the equation. After that, it hardly represented a volume of interest.

HP/Palm's WebOS would serve as a contrast. It has, in my opinion, an equally capable platform as any other OS, and a set of elegantly designed programming interface. But, alas, it has no volume.

Angry Birds and product packaging

I played "Angry Birds" on my iPod Touch. It is so far the most popular mobile game on iOS and Android platforms. And it is not limited to male players.

It is a touch-based game, using different birds as projectiles to crash pigs hiding in a structure or out in the open. It is rated for 4 years old and older (4+). After playing it for a while, it seems to me Angry Birds is an artillery and dive-bomber game packaged with cute cartoon-like graphics. The red bird is a typical projectile shot in a parabolic trajectory. The little blue bird resembles clustered warheads. The fat black bird penetrates building structures with delayed detonation. The bloated white bird is similar to a dive bomber or ground attack aircraft.

My point is not to call out those similarities or to upset anyone. It is a successful software product executed by a 12-member team from a company with 50 or so employees. If the product were delivered as an artillery and dive bomber game, it would have lost most of its female players, which is half of its current player base. More importantly, the viral marketing effect would dissipate with halved customer demographics. (The interview with the creator, Peter Vesterbacka. http://technmarketing.com/iphone/peter-vesterbacka-maker-of-angry-birds-talks-about-the-birds-apple-android-nokia-and-palmhp/)

I played another iPhone game, Metal Core. It is almost the same type of game as Angry Birds. I believe its sales number is far less than what Angry Birds has achieved. The bird-against-pig game is not about any brand new idea that no one has done before. It is all about packaging. It will not be surprising if copycats of Angry Birds show up on iPhone App Store, since the birds are not original either.

Second and third iPhone applications

My second and third iPhone/iPad applications are now on the App Store. They are Chinese calligraphy copybooks (字帖) using Chinese Surnames (百家姓) for model characters.
百家姓字帖-仿歐陽詢體
(http://itunes.apple.com/ph/app/chinese-surname-calligraphy/id427523658?mt=8) and
百家姓字帖-仿顏真卿體
(http://itunes.apple.com/ph/app/chinese-surname-calligraphy/id431207772?mt=8)

It was a fun project to work on. I reused the code from my first product and spent a little more time on the contents. It was a quick and easy job for this new product release. The aspect of "universal application", Apple's lingo for applications designed for both Apple iPhone and iPad, was what I was experimenting with. For an image-centric calligraphy model book, it seems to be a fit for a universal application. However, it is not that straightforward for other types of applications. For other product ideas that I have, it may make sense to put more user interface elements into the iPad branch. If I choose to go down that path, The "universal" application may become two applications that present different user experiences. I am not sure user experience bifurcation is a good idea. Maybe my thinking of putting more ingredients to a bigger screen is on a wrong track.

That aside, it was fun to design and create an application for two different types of devices. The visual impact from a bigger screen compared with that on a smaller screen is obvious. Supporting universal application may put more design constraints on a product. But I think it will be a basic requirement for many future applications from me.

My first iPhone application

I just released my first iPhone application on Apple App Store. The title is called "Tang Poems for the Youth" [幼學唐詩].

This application is for a very niche market, that is, people who have learned traditional Chinese. For me, this is a good opportunity examining the theory of long-tail market. As an independent iPhone application developer, I don't have a lot of resources or time. It is important to me that I don't have to resort to some esoteric programming tactics or interfaces to accomplish what I wanted to do. It is also equivalently important that I don't have to test through many different devices with different capabilities and screen real estate. In a sense, I created an application that appears to be outside of the main stream using mostly common programming interface on a generic platform, and made the product available on all the iPhone OS products For that, I praise iPhone and iPod Touch.

A friend asked me whether I will port this application to the Android platform. I am a registered Android developer though I have not put much of an effort in it. Android is an "open" platform for device manufacturers. It is no more open than Windows Mobile or iPhone OS for an application developer. It will take over iPhone in terms of volume, just like Symbian of yesterday. It will be a fragmented market for a developer like me. I will put more efforts in making my application iPad ready before having some quality time with Android.

In the meantime, there will be more titles coming out from me. I will see how far this long-tail theory will take me, and Apple.

7-inch Tablets

A lot of new tablet products are coming to the market. And they have 7-inch screens.

I have a doubt toward those 7-inch tablets. In my previous experience with those 7-inch UMPC, the most troublesome experience is to browse Internet on such a screen. The constant zooming and page sliding are annoying, to say the least. The billion pages of HTML contents on the Internet were built for laptop and desktop screens. It has been this way for the most part of Internet and it will stay that way for quite a while. For Internet devices with smaller screen like iPhone, users understand its limitation and bear with the inconvenience in exchange for its portability. Constantly re-sizing and moving browser pages on a supposedly bigger screen is defeating the purpose. Now the manufacturers are hoping to improve the portability over 10-inch tablets, yet at the expense of user experience. Is this product differentiation worthwhile?

E-reader can get by with a 7-inch screen because its contents are tailor-made for it. For tablets with this form-factor and its use cases, I cannot clearly see a consumer segment for it. For business people who are always on the road, I think they will stick with their laptops. For consumers in the living room? I, for one, will stick with 10-inch iPad, especially when it has a forward-facing camera.

Fancy Phone vs Smart Phone

The result of 1Q 2009 worldwide mobile phone sales just came out. The world map of smart phones has changed a lot since last year because of Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/37570.php

The mid to high end of cell phone market is traditionally defined by so called "smart phones" and "feature phones". A smart phone is (typically defined as) a cell phone being able to add applications to it. A feature phone is a cell phone with a bunch of applications pre-loaded, but an end user can not add software to it. When looking at the data and thinking of those manufacturers that used to have major shares in the smart phone market, I have to add one more category, "fancy phone" to the market mix.

What is a fancy phone? A fancy phone is a smart phone that a consumer buys one for its brand and look, or the prestige comes with the price, but not for its smart phone capabilities. The manufacturer would like to believe its smart phones are popular because of its features. A lot of market data were put together in the effort of proving the correlation between the market share and technological superiority. When true competition shows up, such a market share wanes rapidly, and people begin to realize the king does not have clothes on him.

iTablet

There is a huge gap between a laptop and a smart phone. And the gap is getting bigger.

The UMPC is supposed to fill in the gap but it seems very unlikely now. The price point is not right (Sony UMPC or Samsung Q1). It is too slow and the target audience is not clear either. It is like anything can go wrong with the UMPC went wrong.

What is not right about the laptop? Not much actually. It is just a little too big to be carried around all the time, and it costs a little extra outside the comfort zone for every member in a family to own one. For most families, the laptop is used by daddy and mommy to continue working on what is not done in the office or to manage household accounting. It is really used as a workstation. How about a second computer for entertainment and education? A desktop would cost less. But it takes too much space for most homes on this planet, except for those in the North America. Besides, you cannot carry a desktop around. How about a smart phone? No, it just doesn't cut it. The screen and the keyboard are too small. For the foreseeable future, the smart phone will remain as a contingency device.

So we need something cheap with a form factor between a 12-inch-screen laptop and a smart phone. It is a huge gap. It is a product that can have the profit margin falls between that of a laptop PC and a smart phone. This device will be a mobile device for Internet, like a TV set for TV programs and movies. It will be a device for personal email, photo, video, music, instant messaging, learning, and of course, Internet browsing.

Will the TV set become the family Internet device? It is very possible, but it will happen later than the tablet device. It still takes another year or two for the technology to ripe. But it will take a while after that for the price to be palatable. Furthermore, the frequency of replacing TV is slower too.

There are prototypes and products showing up in the market. Take a look at OLPC XO 2.0 and Asus Eee PC. I wonder when Apple will release its "iTablet". It is just a matter of time.

iPhone Hype and Market Research

You don't create a product like Wii or iPhone by just doing market research.

I was reading a market research report titled "iPhone Hype Holds Up". It compares the differences in usage between iPhone users and overall (including iPhone) smart phone users. It gives some interesting comparisons such as,

• 85% of iPhone owners access web content with the device versus 58% of the overall smart phone users.
• 31% of iPhone users watch mobile TV or video versus 14% of smart phone users.
  
• 49% of iPhone users access social networks and blogs using their phone versus 19% of smart phone users.
  

It is nothing new at all (see my earlier blog). The numbers in the survey provide a quantifiable justification to the common-sense observation at a hindsight. But I don't think Apple created iPhone because Apple has a way to read market research data differently. In late 2005 or early 2006 when Apple created the iPhone product program (my guess), the market research data must have shown a even bleaker view of what a smart phone user might be interested in doing with the device. I don't think it is the "only-the-paranoid-survive" factor, either. Many paranoids went belly up in the Valley while Apple is doing better than surviving.

Market research data tell you only what you ask for, sometimes not even that. I would guess the team created Nintando Wii asked questions like, "what prevents you from playing video games', instead of "what new feature will make you interested in video games more". There is another market research data, Smart Phone 2007 Result, from Canalys. This report may be useful for a financial analyst covering cell phone industry for a financial institute. But for people in the cell phone industry, they have to have the ambition of asking a bigger question. Except for that, the industry can just copy iPhone, and there is no shame in doing that. There are many great examples of copy cat littering all over in the high tech industry. But be aware, it is not easy to copy either.

iPhone - A Product that Changes User Behaviors

Apple's iPhone is a unique product in many aspects.
(http://www.apple.com/iphone/)

The first release of iPhone on June 29, 2007 did not have all the bells and whistles. It was a GSM phone with EDGE for Internet connection. It did not have a GPS and its 2 mega-pixel camera could not shoot videos. It was pricy ($499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version) and locked with one carrier, AT&T. However, this product changed the cell phone industry overnight.

One of my friends got his iPhone and activated it. The second day he and his wife were on their way to Chicago for vacation. Before, they would have brought maps for the places they were going to visit and planned the routes before arriving in the city. Not this time! They logged all the points of interest in a note in the phone and used Google Map any time they felt like it. When they found something interesting during the trip and wanted to find out more before improvising on the itinerary, the Internet browser and search engines were in the pocket with them all the time.

What is dramatic about this? This friend of mine had never subscribed any data service for cell phone before that day, and he had hardly expressed any interest in using such a service for mobile applications. This is the main-stream attitude of US consumers towards their beloved cell phones. Yet iPhone had him converted. There were hundreds of millions of savvy Internet users waiting for the cell phone industry to enable them to do what they have been doing for a decade. The killer application that the industry dreamed about is not anything new. It is the enabler to mobilize what people are doing day in and day out. Apple got it and Apple got the glory, mind share, and profit, of course.

I will blog a little more about iPhone and continue to watch Apple's next move. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see what Google's Open Handset Alliance can do to the market. After all, user experience comes as a total package, so is the cell phone.