The Open Road

I had dinner Monday night in London with David Wood, futurist at Symbian, and came away feeling strangely calm. Perhaps it was the exceptional food at Veeraswamy, capped off by a bitter chocolate ice cream....

Or perhaps it was the fact that Wood has spent 21 years with Symbian (and Psion before it was acquired by Nokia), long enough to live through several mobile revolutions and not get too ruffled by any particular one.

In fact, over the course of our dinner Wood pulled out his back-to-the-future Psion Series 5mx on several occasions, a device released a decade ago yet eerily resembles the cutting-edge Netbooks and smartphones of today.

Plus ça change...

Symbian has proved to be such a formidable competitor in Europe and the Middle East, but has underwhelmed in North America and Japan, though it claims roughly 50 percent of the global handheld market. In part it stemmed from the fact that Symbian had limited target GSM wireless carriers in the U.S. (AT&T and T-Mobile). Without a CDMA offering, Symbian was locked out of much of the U.S. market.

But in June 2008, Nokia announced that Symbian would be open sourced to broaden its appeal to developers. The catch? The process would take up to two years to complete. Today, Symbian still isn't open source but is actively working toward that goal.

Unfortunately, Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and even the Palm Pre have been claiming ever-widening swaths of the global smartphone market, taking share in Symbian's European backyard. Wood isn't overly concerned. He may have good reason.

While we like to think of technology moving at incredible speed, the fact is that adoption moves much more slowly. Even in a market as dynamic as browsers, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler calls out the snail-pace shifts in browser adoption trends.

To prove his point, Wood points out how Apple's iPhone was considered near divine until the Palm Pre came out, and then suddenly criticism was heaped on the iPhone for lacking basic functionality. No multitasking? No cut-and-paste? Come on, Apple!

And so Apple has, as its soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S shows. But the Pre's launch suggests that Apple doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile mind share. If Symbian does things right and provides compelling value as an application publisher, it should have ample time to mount a serious challenge to existing smartphone competitors.

Symbian doesn't plan to launch an App Store, Apple-style. Instead, as CNET has reported, the foundation wants to serve the same role a book publisher does: provide intermediary services between application developers and the wireless carriers. Such a strategy not only gives Symbian more devices to play on, but it also makes it a valuable partner to more wireless carriers than Apple can.

It's not a given that Symbian will succeed, of course, but Wood could be right to remain calm in advance of Symbian's launch of its open-source project. The world is not standing still, waiting for Symbian's arrival. On the other hand, it's also not moving forward nearly as fast as we might think.

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I love my iPhone and have never felt tempted to return to the BlackBerry, but I was still rolling my eyes at TechCrunch's report of the iPhone being "twice as reliable as the BlackBerry". After all, my iPhone crashed in four different applications in a 45-minute period this afternoon.

Of course, the referenced SquareTrade study covers hardware malfunctions, not software malfunctions. In this, perhaps it is true that the malfunction rate for Apple's smartphones after one year is only 5.6 percent, while Research In Motion's phones crap out 11.2 percent of the time.

But in day-to-day usage, I've found my iPhone software to be far less stable than the ugly-but-reliable BlackBerry software.

As I said, I'm not going back to the BlackBerry, as the iPhone experience, even with less-than-stellar software stability, is still much better than BlackBerry's stodgy dependability. I wouldn't, however, complain if Apple managed to make the iPhone as rock-solid as its OS X software on my MacBook Pro.

The big news this week for Apple wasn't the new 3G iPhone. It was the business model behind the next-generation iPhone, and the threat it poses to Research in Motion (RIM). Apple's model depends on developers. RIM's model depends on devices.

If history repeats itself, the developers will win. Just ask Microsoft.

More on that in a minute. For now, consider the superior TCO (total cost of ownership) argument that Apple now has for both developers and end-users. Many enterprises are going to find the cost/benefit analysis of RIM vs. iPhone favoring the iPhone. RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) solution costs $5 to 10 per mailbox per month (for Exchange), plus an additional $10 per mailbox per month for BES, which includes a combination of licensing plus the cost of administering BES. Not so cheap.

The iPhone? It's still going to cost $5 to 10 per mailbox per month (for Exchange or Zimbra or whatever your mail service happens to be), but the extra $10 charge is wiped away. Gone. This leaves the enterprise with a two-times price advantage for the SaaS/iPhone world, which doesn't even include the cost of the device, which also continues to plummet.

Again, RIM's business model depends on extracting maximum value from each device/user, and it does so to good effect. Apple's business model is shifting to be about ubiquity of devices, and then the monetization of the applications.

Which will be better? Well, that depends on how one feels about developers and their impact on markets.

(Credit: Apple)

I walked into my local AT&T Wireless store on Saturday fully expecting and prepared to get a Blackberry 8820. My Blackberry 8800 died while I was in London last week, and both Visa and American Express tried to protect me from fraud by disallowing my attempts to order a new phone over the web. Hence, my face-to-face visit with AT&T.

Unfortunately for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, the in-store price for the 8820 was the same as the iPhone. I deliberated for all of three seconds and walked out with the iPhone.

My reason was simple: I needed something that would sync consistently with my Mac. My Blackberry-to-Mac sync has been hit or miss for the past year (though I've been testing a beta of the new PocketMac and it is quite good) and I'm fed up. I just want something that works.

The iPhone "just works," and then some.

Though Research in Motion continues to keep the BlackBerry a frustratingly closed platform (with precious few applications--my biggest complaint about an otherwise great device/service), it is upgrading its software to add some interesting new features, the Wall Street Journal reports:

With the aim of making mobile e-mailing more like e-mailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting...[RIM] also said the changes will enable users to retrieve e-mail messages that aren't stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request.

To wait so long...for so little. At this pace, Apple's iPhone will leapfrog the BlackBerry. Already, I've noticed scads of new iPhones being used in corporate settings. But for the lack of a keyboard, I'd be on an iPhone, too.

RIM makes great hardware and decent software. It needs to recognize, however, that it's not the center of all original thinking. Once it came up with its idea and implemented it, it hasn't done much in the way of innovation.

I used to think I was an early adopter. But then then iPhone hit, and I just couldn't feel the hype. I had to go into my local Apple Store today to have an iPod fixed, and discovered that Apple had plenty of iPhones on hand (to try and to buy). So, I gave it a spin.

It's beautiful. It's easy to use. It has everything going for it, except two:

1. It's not very easy to type on this thing, whatever Mossberg may tell you. It's just not.
   
   
2. It doesn't fundamentally change the value proposition of a phone/PDA combo.

On this first point, I suppose one could get used to hitting a screen and, if Steve Jobs is to be believed, eventually we all will. Why? Well, because Mr. Jobs tells us to. (I'm a diehard Mac fanatic, so I've been convinced by him before against my will. :-)

But it's the second point that has me sticking with my Blackberry (after years of using a Treo and recently switching to the Berry). ... Read more