iPhone App Store. The star dims. Again.

Everyone knows about the success of the iPhone app store. I've sung its praises on many occasions, most notably for the burst of innovation in mobile applications that it has allowed. Full marks to Apple for that.

For better or worse, Apple has adopted the 'Benevolent Dictator' model when it comes to managing the App Store. It now seems that what 'benevolent' means can depend on what side of the table you sit, and when.

This became clearer last week, and no one less that Google was caught out. Apple and Google have a deep, complex relationship, and were working together to bring Google Latitude, a friend-finding technology to the iPhone. Google had developed a native iPhone application, like it had for all the other major mobile phone OSs, as part of this discussion. Then the wheels came off. Apple decided no-can-do, and Google had to fall back to building a mobile Safari Latitude site for the iPhone. For Google, that's not the end of the world; the webkit enabled site works pretty well, and (more importantly) Google has no desire to sell the app.

But, the effect of this news like this has to be chilling among the Apple developer community. It's now VERY clear that Apple will limit App Store access to application that do (or will) not in any way conflict with their revenue plans. Got a great idea, and think you can out-Apple Apple? Well maybe your could, but you'll never get the chance.

And therein lies the rub. Like Google, you will never know this until your app comes back rejected. You cannot know this is going to happen, because Apple does not make a habit of pre-announcing its product plans. Google will not go out of business because of the Latitude reject. Smaller companies might not fair so well. Android and Symbian/Nokia have promised to be much more open in this regard. Lets hope that that is true, and developers reward their foresight.

My Nokia E71, Rest In Peace. Bring on the E72!

My Nokia E71 is dead. In a big way. I left it on top of my car and drove away. When I figured out where I must have left it, I searched and found it in the street near where I was parked. It took a direct hit, and the force of the impact somehow almost folded the phone in half. It was hard to look at. That phone was my primary device for over 9 months, and nothing could keep my SIM out of it for long. Upside? Well, my SIM and MicroSD card survived. And, I'll need a new phone! ;^)

Device-wise, I'm not sure I'll be able to cope with the Nokia N97 (with the current state of affairs, SW wise) until the E72 comes out. I'll REALLY looking forward to the E72. From my perspective it may end up being the ultimate expression of a Symbian/S60 device. As we know, Series 60 was designed and developed for 1-handed use, facilitated by a soft-key driven UI. Grafting on a touchscreen has had very mixed results; see my older post here.

The E71 was (and still is) a class leading device, and it's amazing that Nokia has not been able to generate more uptake in the US. I fear that touch-screen mania has pushed it to the back burner in most high-end consumer's minds here. Thanks to Apple/Android/Palm, most US consumers have been trained to believe that smartphone=touchscreen. That's a huge problem for Nokia USA. Nokia marketing/positioning has not helped. Americans have fallen in love with QWERTY keyboards, and you have to offer one, either on-screen or physical. None of the pre-N97 N-Series devices had them, and the E-Series QWERTY devices were sold as 'business only' phones. The E72, with its 3.5mm audio jack and 5MPix camera, has the chops to change that if it is marketed better. And adding support for T-Mobile USA 3G would help as well. In the mean time, I can't wait for it.

Nokia's FOTA is flawed

As smartphones become more and more complex, the need to update the firmware (FW) in the device becomes more and more important. Equally important, is the ability to do it easily and in a cost effective manner. I remember the days when an update required a stop to a service center, or shipping your device off to one. Slow and costly for all parties involved.
Next came updates via the PC. This helped things along, but still left a huge problem. Not everyone HAS a PC. Now if you are reading this in the USA, that might seem strange. But if you have aspirations on the huge, under-penetrated BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) market, you have to realize that not only are PCs rare, but the smartphone companies are want to sell the phones as a REPLACEMENT for PCs. So you cannot have an update strategy that relies on them. Apple, take note.

Because of all this, NOKIA has developed a FOTA (FW Over The Air) strategy for their smartphones. The updates to the FW can be 'pushed' over the data network to the devices, and upon a restart the device is running on the new FW. It's reliable technology and works well.

So where is Nokia miss-step? Well, they combined it with another seemingly good idea called User Data Preservation (UDP). UDP allows the phone to retain all of the user's data and settings when doing an update. I can tell you from experience, having to reload all your contacts, apps and settings into a phone after a update can take hours. So fundamentally, it's a good idea.

The problem is that Nokia's implementation is flawed. It does not account for damage to the file system that happens due to a programming error. And it is happening to users now.

Normally, a FW update to the phone would refresh the entire file system. FOTA+UDP does not. If a buggy program has a memory leak that consumed all of the free memory in the C: file system, a FW update or even a so-called factory reset will not cure the problem, and the phone will have to be sent in for repair.

This is NOT a theoretical discussion. The 'Mail for Exchange' client for the new Nokia E75 smartphone has a bug that can eat up all of the free memory on the phone over the course of a few days. Once this has used up all free memory, apps will refuse to load or run. Normally a factory reset, or a FW update would fix this, but because the current process does not want to disturb the file system, it does not. The E75 users that this has happened to (including myself) must sent the phones back to Nokia to have them 'fixed'.

Its not a easy problem to solve. The notion of FOTA+UDP is great idea, but it in the current implementation relies on not touching the file system. Perhaps the solution would be an option to do the FOTA with a file system refresh. What ever the longer term solution, it will not help my E75, which is a box on the way to Finland.

Get Your Google Voice account!

CONTEST OVER THANKS!

I just got an invite to Google Voice, and I am already a member. So, I am giving it away to the first person that Twitters me back with the word GONZO in their tweet!

Traffic, finally the savior of the PND business??

The PND guys are worried. OK, maybe for a lot of reasons, but I want to address one in particular. It's the the big one. Who needs a PND anyway? Stay with me here....

Back in the day, PNDs were crazy expensive, north of US$1000. That is a lot of cash, and for 1000 bucks you REALLY needed to have one. At Magellan, we looked at potential buyers in three camps:
1) Road Warriors (pros on the road to unknown places)
2) Safe-and-Secure Seniors (well-off 50+ers that like to travel)
3) Gadget Freaks (at least the well-off ones)

Price clearly was the biggest barrier to adoption. You really needed to NEED one, and even if you did, price was still an problem. All of the big players figured that as the price dropped, the volumes would pick up. It was basic economics, and of the most part it holds true.

But here's the issue. As the base PNDs are now in the US$100 range, the industry is facing a nasty fact; not everybody wants one. The adaption curve is leveling off before the industry expected it to. Why? A lot of people just don't see the need, at any price. Their typical argument is, I know my way to work, how to get to my friends house, and I just don't get lost all that often. And, that's true for a lot of people. Maybe they would use it once a month, but that does not justify a purchase.

Here is were traffic comes in. Now I know it's been around for a while, and I think it's been mis-marketed and mis-implemented.

In the past, and currently, all traffic solutions were based on generating alternative routes and active guidance on an entered route. That's not smart, for these reasons:
1) Most driving in traffic situations is COMMUTING.
2) Most people know their commute destinations and origins.
3) Most people commute at a regular, predicable time.
4) Most people expect traffic and delays, and just need an overview of what to expect.

I use a Garmin Nuvi 755 with MSN Traffic, and it is a great device. But I HATE having to enter in my work/home destination twice a day, and then have to listen to it give me (annoying) voice directions to a place I could drive to with my eyes closed. All this to get traffic information. It's a turn-off.

What I REALLY want is a device that knows (or better, LEARNS) my typical drives, and then calculates traffic info in the background. It does NOT need to give me turn-by-turn guidance, but give me audibles on traffic and suggestions if it gets really bad, and there is a clearly better route. My Nuvi is taking baby-steps in this regard. For instance, it will give traffic details without an active route in the road ahead. But only on that road. If you turn off if it, you could get blind-sided.

It's part of the philosophy of telling the driver something they did not know when they go in their car. Connected PNDs will do this someday and drive this value proposition to new levels. But for now, traffic is the only game in town. This is where a lot of coding activity should be taking place.

And then they need to get the word out. Marketing the PND as way to 'find a place' is tapped out. Everybody that would have bought into that pitch already has, and currently own PND. Now it's time to move on to the next untapped group. The traffic data in most markets is of sufficient quality to make a decent product. Time to build and sell it!

Open Street Map, and the trails advantage

Open Street Map is a fascinating project. The idea is to build a 'open source' map of the world's streets based on UGC (User Generated Content), and make this data available free of charge, as an alternative to the fee-based maps from Navteq and Tele Atlas. Interesting, yes. How is it doing?

Well, at first look, things seem promising. Bringing up the map of the USA on the OSM site shows all sorts of roads, and no major holes. But, things are not that simple.

The VAST MAJORITY of the data in the OSM road network in the USA is from the (also free) TIGER/line database, provided by the US Government Census. And although this data is OK from a road vector perspective, it is not fully complete vector-wise, and more critically, lacks much of the additional attribution (max speeds, directionality, and turn restrictions) that car navigation solutions require. Generating that attribution would be slow and costly. The UGC aspect fails here, as who wants to spend a weekend doing that?

Where things are MUCH more interesting are on the trails/walking side. Here, the open, UGC-friendly side of OSM has a huge advantage over Navteq and Teleatlas. On a daily basis, people are walking trails with GPS units, logging their paths, and uploading it to OSM. Quick, fun, and it scales. There, it becomes part of the known OSM world. Navteq's Discover Cities product, which also includes trails, are gathered by Navteq employees and entered into the Navteq database the same way as roads are. It's a slow, costly process, and does not scale.

I'm not sure OSM has a play in Autonav, where all of the complex road segment attribution is missing. But, as pedestrian navigation becomes more important in the LBS/GPS world, I see a bright future for Open Street Maps.

No MMS on the iPhone 2G. Why?

When Apple announced that the MMS feature of the iPhone 3.0 software would NOT be available to owners of 2G iPhones, it set a bit of a precedent. What exactly was that?

Well, it was the FIRST time that a pure software function has been held back from users of older generation iPhones.

In the 3 years of iPhone existence, there has been several major software upgrades. In all cases, unless the new feature was tied to new hardware (3G, GPS, etc) the capability was made available to older devices.

But now for 3.0, no MMS for 2G phones. Why? It's clear that it is not hardware related, MMS is a simple, well understood capability in mobile phones and places no significant demands on the OS or hardware. The 2G is clearly up to the task. And keeping the phones in the Apple ecosystem (and buying apps) is clearly a win for Apple.

So why? Here are some guesses:

1) Apple wants to start to move these users to new phones. Although users of 2G phones buy apps and drive revenue, Apple IS a hardware company, and wants to sell new phones.

2) ATT wants to keep EDGE traffic as low as possible. MMS sends attached images over the data network. EDGE is much less efficient with spectrum than 3G. Maybe the network guys got involved.

3) The conspiracy theory. Lots of 2G iPhones are jail broken and on other networks. Enabling MMS in 2G phones would allows 2G owners on T-Mobile (gasp!) to have MMS BEFORE new users on ATT. How embarrassing.

My head tells me the reason is a mix of 1 and 2, but I'd like to think it's 3. That's just me. You?