Amazon Kindle experience

I bought a 6" Amazon Kindle device recently to save bookshelf space. But the user experience really fell short.

I have used the very first generation Kindle. At that time, I was evaluating the Kindle device for a work related project. I understood it was the first generation, and Amazon was not an OEM vendor. Even that its industrial design and build quality left much to be desired, I was willing to give the first generation Kindle full credit. It did what it was set out to do: to put an e-reader in front of the publishers and to persuade them to go digital. In the long run, Amazon can make a fat margin on digital contents by saving a lot on inventory, facility and distribution.

More than two years later after my first encounter with Kindle, Kindle made quite some changes to its appearance. With more and more books piling up on my bookshelves, I thought it is time for me to mingle with Kindle. I bought a couple of Kindle books and started reading. The experience was not satisfactory. It is maybe that the e-ink display took too long to refresh. It took too long to flip a page. It is fine to read a book sequentially for the first time. But after a while, I need to use those books as reference books and go back and forth among pages regularly. It is really annoying and counter productive to wait for page refresh in order to flip 3 to 5 pages.

My experience with Kindle may not be applicable to all Kindle users. Different types of books warrant different usage patterns. But I think it is time for Kindle to revamp. It was a good work to pave the digital way all the way here. Nevertheless, the gap in user experience is increasing. One misstep, the path will turn to iPad and put Amazon to a peripheral position in providing digital contents. Without a leading position, it will undercut the margin Amazon could have hoped for in promoting all those digital books and magazines.

Nokia picks Microsoft Windows Mobile

It finally happened. Symbian is gone and Nokia's mobile Linux platform, MeeGo, is in serious doubt.
Bloomberg
mocoNews.Net

Nokia gave up Symbian long time ago, right at the moment it bought Symbian and made it an open source. Nokia did not want to admit it in the hope of protecting its share price. Now, what would Qt of Trolltech do? Nokia bought Trolltech in 2008 with the intention of creating a uniform interface across S60, S40 and its then Linux platform, Maemo. Now S60, which sits on top of Symbian, bade its farewell; the visibility to Meego's future is unclear, and it does not add value to unify S40 with high end platforms. What does Qt plan to do with its API to Windows Mobile? Or not? Or will Nokia spat Qt out like EBay spat out Skype? Windows Mobile developers don't need Qt. They have been doing their trade for many years under Microsoft's leadership.

As Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra commented on Nokia's decision in his tweeter post, "Two turkeys do not make an eagle." He actually quoted this from Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's ex EVP. Ironically, Vic Gundotra is an ex-Microsoft employee.

"Two turkeys make a bigger dish", I might add. Big mobile carriers do not want Nokia tread the Android path, afraid it will create an Apple/Google duopoly. But a join force between Microsoft and Nokia will not prevent it from happening. It is not because Windows Mobile is not good enough, but Nokia will not do it whole-heartily. Nokia did not kill MeeGo to show its resolution. It needs MeeGo for leverage. On the other hand, Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, needs Windows Mobile to keep MeeGo from becoming complacent. Will this strategy work? Not for a big organization like Nokia. It just creates confusion, grudge and diversion. This reminds me of Gil Amelio, Apple's ex-CEO before Steve Jobs's come-back. Amelio cleaned the house so Jobs did not have to. Maybe that is what Elop will be in Nokia's history.

I am glad I have not spent time in developing applications for Symbian/Qt phones. It will take a lot for Nokia to restore trust among developers. Maybe Nokia will continue to be the king of low-end mobile phones, though the king knows he has very little on him. After all, the world still needs a lot of low-end phones for a long time to come.

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.

Nokia has a new CEO

Nokia has a new CEO.

The title of the article is "Nokia’s New Chief Faces Culture of Complacency", by The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/technology/27nokia.html?ref=technology

Does Nokia has a culture of complacency? See in the article how the spokeswoman responded to the comments from former employees, "They were, she said, “managers with individual roles or leaders of small teams.” ". Do you expect Nokia to have a vibrant work environment and its employees to feel empowered in what they do? Well, most of them are just "with individual roles or leaders of small teams".

This should be a textbook example for MBA classes.