It's no secret that Windows Mobile has hit a rough patch as the iPhone and Android-based smartphones have take center stage. Recent statistics from AdMob shows that Windows Mobile market share of Web surfing was way down during the past 12 months--more than 70 percent year over year.
Any number of people postulate that Windows Mobile will be dead, some say as soon as 2011, unless Microsoft figures out a way to not only make the operating system better but to convince users that they should care.
On the New York Times Bits blog, Steve Lohr wrote earlier Thursday on analyst Mark Anderson's comments suggesting that Microsoft abandon their consumer efforts entirely--that the company has lost the battle for consumers:
Except for gaming, it is 'game over' for Microsoft in the consumer market. It's time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones. Just get out of Dodge.
I'm not a huge fan of Windows Mobile, but Microsoft certainly can't give up on smartphones and really has no alternative but to make a big move in the mobile operating system space. And Windows Mobile is not nearly as bad as many people think--if you don't believe me, check out these results from mobile blog jkOntheRun.
I recently toyed with Windows Mobile phones at both Verizon and AT&T stores and I could absolutely see the appeal of the common desktop functional paradigm if I were a Windows user. But consumers are fickle and don't want to add an OS decision into their buying process. They just want the phone and its applications to work and be easy to use.
There remains a huge opportunity for Microsoft to take its dominant position and make Windows Mobile truly great, even if it means walking away from the status quo. And while that's not typically the Microsoft way, the company has shown with Bing that it can make those kinds of decisions (as well as less-positive choices.)
There are two very simple moves Microsoft could make that would not only shake up the whole market, but also build a path for the future:
... Read more
Google and Microsoft have joined a group devoted to creating a way that cell phone buyers can easily comprehend the quality of their camera phones.
The International Imaging Industry Association said the tech titans signed up to help with the third phase of the Camera Phone Image Quality Initiative, in which a variety of companies try to create measurements to capture various test results.
Mobile phones that can take photos are ubiquitous today, but with tiny image sensors and lenses and severe budget constraints, they vary widely in their ability to take good photos. Mostly all that buyers have to go on is a megapixel count, which isn't terribly meaningful when it comes to such small sensors. The International Imaging Industry Association, a consortium whose mission is to make imaging better for consumers, is trying to come up with a better way.
The mobile phone camera tests include resolution, color uniformity, lens distortion, and lens chromatic aberration, but the group also plans to factor in sharpness and noise reduction. A variety of other possibilities ranging from dynamic range, white balance, and resistance to glare also could be added into the mix as well.
The group is trying boil all this down into an official star rating consumers can trust.
Other companies working on the standard include Aptina Imaging, CDM Optics, DxO Labs, Eastman Kodak, Fujifilm, Motorola, Nokia, OmniVision Technologies, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, STMicroelectronics, ST Ericsson, and VistaPoint Technologies.
T-Mobile USA said late Monday that it is resuming sales of the Sidekick after pulling it off the shelves in the wake of last month's massive outage.
The wireless carrier said that the Sidekick 2008 will now sell for as low as $49 with a two-year contract, while the Sidekick LX 2009 will be priced at $149 with a two-year contract.
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)"T-Mobile is pleased to announce that Sidekick sales have resumed," the carrier said in a statement.
The company is still dealing with the aftermath of the outage, which left customers without access to their data for weeks. Most customers have now been able to get much of their data back, although photos are being e-mailed to customers rather than being restored to the device.
Although sales have resumed, the question is whether the device will ever be able to regain the confidence of consumers.
It's also an issue for Microsoft, whose Danger service powers the Sidekick. The software maker on Tuesday is expected to announce another key cloud-based effort, the final version of Windows Azure.
As consumers increasingly purchase sophisticated smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid, they are developing expectations for how these phones allow contacts, calendars, e-mail, and social networks to remain in sync across all their devices.
One of the big challenges is that users don't always maintain the same source of inputting data--they switch from browser to desktop application to smartphone as their data access and entry point, introducing many variables into the data chain. And data integrity will only get more complicated as more applications become browser-based and keep no local data storage.
Most enterprise users have a local store in addition to the cloud storage, something that I still find puzzling from the T-mobile Sidekick outage, where consumer data that should have been in multiple locations (or at least present on the device) was thought to be lost.
The most common sync services are not provided directly by the mobile operator. Generally this is a good thing, as the more you can dis-intermediate the carrier, the more control you have over your data. But because the sync services are provided by others--notably Microsoft, Google, and Apple--you end up locked-in to their data structures as well as whatever privacy and data management issues that might arise in relation to advertising or other usage of your information.
Today, you can fairly easily sync your mobile device with most common online e-mail and PIM services although the BlackBerry, Droid, and the iPhone differ in their approaches--or at least in the visibility of how they work. For example, you can sync with Gmail and other services on the iPhone, but it rather perversely requires the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol.
By controlling the address book, Google and Apple effectively lock-in users to their sync service, leaving the carriers and devices to be easily replaced (minus the cancellation charges.) The user would barely notice the difference, aside from the sticker on his phone that says AT&T or Verizon.
Mobile operators do not want to cede control of the address book to Google or Apple, but they are late to the game and do not yet have sync solutions of their own. As a result, they are scrambling to add this functionality, but building a sync solution that works with all different devices and email services is no easy task, thanks to the widespread problem of device fragmentation in the industry.
One option is to deploy a white label solution, like the open mobile cloud sync offered by Funambol. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me the company has been approached by many of the top mobile operators, with several of them looking to setup sync services for their customers. They all recognize the issue, and according to Capobianco can turn to Funambol as a way to quickly bring a high-quality solution to market.
With all the different players in mobile sync, users will begin to question who owns their data. Enterprise users, in particular, should have privacy concerns about trusting their data to someone else. In the case of Android users, there is a growing anti-Google sentiment, and if Google already owns your email, calendar, and search queries, do you really want them to own your phone contacts as well?
A massive outage left many T-Mobile USA customers across the country unable to make calls or get data on their cellular phones on Tuesday.
In a statement, T-Mobile said it is working to get its service back up and running.
"T-Mobile customers may be experiencing service disruptions impacting voice and data," the company said in a statement. "Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide updates as more information is available."
The move comes as the carrier is still working to restore data to T-Mobile Sidekick users, many of whom have been without some or all of their information for an entire month.
In a statement on Friday, T-Mobile said many of its Sidekick customers have been able to restore at least their contacts, although it acknowledged not everyone got their address books back.
"There was a very small group of customers for whom we were unable to recover any contacts," the carrier said. It is still working to bring back other data, including calendars, to-do lists, notes, pictures and other data. "We will share more details around this restoration process very soon," it said.
Microsoft, whose Danger service powers the Sidekick, initially thought all data might be lost, but later said it expected to be able to restore most, if not all user data.
Update 5:04 p.m. PT: In a slightly updated statement, T-Mobile said "Some T-Mobile customers may be experiencing intermittent service disruptions impacting voice and some data services."
Reports from users seem to vary. In San Francisco, I was unable to make or receive calls or get e-mail. Meanwhile, a few users in Boston and Washington, D.C. told me that their T-Mobile phones appeared to be working.
If other people want to drop me a note of where they are and what's working or not, I'll get a better sense of things.
5:20 p.m. PT: T-Mobile subscribers in eastern Tennessee, Honolulu, Long Island, N.Y. all e-mailed me to say they, too, were experiencing outages.
Gretchen Wuersching, an accountant who lives in Mount Vernon, N.Y. and works in Manhattan said she has been without service in New York City and Westchester County. Wuersching said she first noticed her service out in Manhattan and was still out in both Westchester County and later when she drove to the Bronx.
Meanwhile, a T-Mobile subscriber in Orange County, Calif. said service was intermittent, while another customer in Denver said her BlackBerry could make calls and handle e-mail, as could friends on T-Mobile's network there, but that text messages were not working.
Several people in the Salt Lake City area said they were having problems, while another in Utah said that calls and text messages were not working, but that Web and e-mail access was continuing.
All in all, it sounds like a very mixed bag for T-Mobile subscribers. Thanks to everyone who wrote in and I'll let you know when I hear more from T-Mobile.
Update 6:24 p.m. PT: T-Mobile issued an updated statement saying it now believes only 5 percent of customers are experiencing outages.
"We're making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers," a T-mobile representative said. "At this time, approximately 5 percent of T-Mobile customers are experiencing service disruptions. Issues began at approximately 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. Our rapid response team is working continuously to fully resolve this disruption. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers."
The e-mails are literally flooding into my in-box from around the country and far more people are telling me they are experiencing outages of one variety or another than say they have full service. But perhaps that's the nature of who e-mails.
Among the dozens of e-mails of problems I have gotten was this message from Karen Jacobson, an analyst and programmer in North Carolina. "My daughter called me from Chicago to say that her text messaging doesn't work and asked me to call T-Mobile," Jacobson said. "I called them and was told that the network was busy. I then tried texting ... and was unable to text from down here. My friend Crystal called from Florida, on her landline, to tell me that her T-Mobile has not been able to make or accept phone calls for at least an hour (and now her boyfriend is angry cause he thinks she ignored him!)."
For my part, I have data access on my Blackberry Curve, but no ability to make calls. E-mail service, which was out for a time, seems to be back.
Update 10:50 p.m. PT: T-Mobile issued an updated statement saying it has restored voice and text/picture messaging services to customers who experienced outages and apologizing for the inconvenience.
One App Store to rule them all?
(Credit: Apple)Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.
We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.
I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.
They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?
More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?
After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?
Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").
This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.
At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.
Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."
Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?
I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.
As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.
Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?
It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.
How about you?
Microsoft on Monday apologized for the length of time it is taking to restore missing data to T-Mobile Sidekicks. The company said it expects to begin restoring data this week, but added that bringing back all data will take longer than that.
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)In a note on its Web site, Microsoft said that the reason for the delay is that the company wants to make sure that it doesn't risk messing up data as it restores information to users' phones.
"The Danger/Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration proces," Microsoft said. "We apologize that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."
A significant number of Sidekick owners have been without their data since the beginning of the month, when Sidekick data service became interrupted amid a massive outage. At one point, Microsoft feared much of the data was lost, but the company said early last week that things were looking better and later added that it expected to be able to bring back most, if not all, of the data.
"We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter," Microsoft said.
Although Microsoft has said it expects to recover most if not all lost data for Sidekick users, T-Mobile said on Thursday that new sales of the product remain on hold.
The carrier declined to say when--or if--Sidekick sales would resume.
(Credit:
CNET)
"We're pleased that Microsoft/Danger is continuing to make progress," T-Mobile vice president David Beigie said in a statement to CNET News. "T-Mobile's sole focus remains on helping Sidekick customers recover from this disruption."
Service for the device has been impaired for going on two weeks. Last Saturday, Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, said it believed that any data that was not on users' devices might be permanently lost.
However, by Monday, Microsoft said it was more optimistic and early on Thursday Microsoft issued a letter to customers saying it expected to recover most, if not all, user data.
All models of the Sidekick have remained listed as "temporarily out of stock" on T-Mobile's Web site.
The T-Mobile Sidekick LX.
(Credit: CNET)When the T-Mobile Sidekick started having data problems two weeks ago, it was a big pain for nearly all of the company's roughly 800,000 subscribers. But it became particularly rough for the many deaf people who have been among the Sidekick's most loyal fan base.
"It was severely limiting and made me very dependent on others," Carla McCraw, a Web designer from San Antonio, Texas, said in an e-mail interview. "This loss of independence was very stressful on me."
McCraw said she relies on her Sidekick to manage everyday tasks, from keeping up with closures at her son's day care to whether soccer practice will be rained out.
"It was extremely frustrating, not being able to know, and my mother had to call the soccer coach and day care, making me feel extremely inadequate," she said. "I had to rely on the Internet through (alternative services such as) Yahoo and Facebook to let my friends know my Sidekick was down."
The good news, for both deaf and hearing users, is that Microsoft and T-Mobile appear to be making headway at restoring much of the data that, at one time, appeared gone permanently.
But even an outage can be a big deal for those that use the Sidekick as something of a communications lifeline.
Lisa Gault, a deaf Sidekick owner in Katy, Texas.
(Credit: Lisa Gault)"As the outage went on, I became concerned about how my deaf teenage son would be able to communicate in an emergency," Jamie Berke, an About.com guide based in the Washington metro area, said in an e-mail.
"I know he is not the only one," said Berke, who is also deaf. "The outage probably meant that thousands of deaf children who depend on their Sidekicks to communicate with parents were unable to communicate in the event of an emergency. Plus, I myself, would have been unable to communicate in an emergency."
The Sidekick became an early favorite in deaf circles because of its good keyboard, then-state-of-the-art instant-messaging abilities, and ability to connect to relay services. T-Mobile improved things further by adding a data-only option so that deaf users weren't paying for voice minutes they didn't use.
Because the Sidekick didn't evolve as fast as other smartphones, many users--deaf and hearing alike--moved to the BlackBerry and other devices. And after their recent experiences, many of the remaining Sidekick users in the deaf community have said they are considering jumping ship, once their T-Mobile contracts end.
Audio
Impact on the deaf
CNET News reporter Ina Fried tells
editor Leslie Katz why the Sidekick
troubles hit deaf customers so hard.
Download mp3 (1.44MB)
"I am going to look into Sprint's BlackBerry, which more and more deaf people are taking up, and have complimented, and (said) that it is a lot more reliable," McCraw said.
Lisa Gault, a deaf Sidekick owner in Katy, Texas, said she in an e-mail interview that she relies on the Sidekick as a means to stay in touch with her family.
"It's a way for the school to get a hold of me, if something were to occur with my son who is (not deaf)," Gault said.
Gault said that even short of an emergency, it is a problem not to get her e-mail for an extended period.
"It's annoying, as my friends think I'm ignoring them, when in reality, I didn't get the e-mails yet," Gault said. "It really put the deaf community at more of a disadvantage--more so than for hearing people, since we're so reliant on e-mail (devices) to keep in touch."
Deaf users sound off on Sidekick outage
Recent problems with the smartphone, long popular in the deaf community, leave many users frustrated and sizing up alternatives.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 15, 2009 4:00 AM PDT
Microsoft: We've recovered most Sidekick data
In a letter to customers, the software maker said that it thinks only a minority of customers will end up losing any data.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 15, 2009 1:00 AM PDT
Lawsuits filed over Sidekick outages
Various legal actions claim negligence on the part of Microsoft and T-Mobile led to the recent cell phone woes.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 14, 2009 4:04 PM PDT
Sidekick's lesson: We learn by failing
The Sidekick outage shows that management hasn't caught up with the cloud, not that network storage is unreliable.(Posted in Rafe's Radar by Rafe Needleman)
October 12, 2009 10:32 PM PDT
Unanswered questions loom large in Sidekick fiasco
Microsoft and Danger remain largely silent as to both what led to a massive data loss as well as what it plans to do to try to make things right, not to mention what this will all mean for the future of the device.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 4:39 PM PDT
T-Mobile says Sidekick data may yet return
The wireless carrier says "recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible." Those who suffer permanent data loss will get $100.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 6:01 PM PDT
T-Mobile halts sales of Sidekick
Amid a massive failure that led to data loss for owners of the the gadgets, the wireless carrier stops selling new devices online and at its stores.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 10:11 AM PDT
Sidekick users share their horror stories
In the wake of a massive data loss, tales of woe are coming in from those whose devices have suffered a wicked case of amnesia.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 9:29 AM PDT
Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft
Although Microsoft inherited Danger's service, this week's massive failure could call into question the broader reliability of depending on keeping data in Redmond's cloud.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 10, 2009 3:26 PM PDT
Missing Sidekick data may be gone for good
T-Mobile issues apology to users, saying whatever contacts, calendar info, and other data that are currently missing from their Sidekicks are likely to be lost forever.(Posted in Crave by Matt Hickey)
October 10, 2009 1:40 PM PDT
Major outage hits T-Mobile Sidekick users
Outage that began Friday knocked out data service. Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, says it has restored service for "critical applications."(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 6, 2009 11:57 AM PDT
