Filling the Tablet Hole

By | November 22, 2011
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This is a guest post by my old friend and collaborator, Robin Lubbock

I’m still waiting for this hole in the market to fill in. It’s the tablet hole. The space for a viewer/reader/player about the size of a novel. It’s easy to type on, it runs apps like an iPhone and everybody’s going to love it. But it’s not here yet.

 
Apple’s iPhone, let’s be frank, isn’t that wonderful a piece of technology. It’s a beautiful piece of sculpture: nice to look at and hold, and it’s just the right weight. But now that I’ve had mine for a year it has such a lag in its response time that it’s actually somewhat entertaining. You type, then sit back and after what seems like seconds you watch the keyboard apparently hitting keys of its own accord. Like one of those old pianos that plays itself, the keys moving in that wonderful ghostly way.

 
One impact the iPhone has had on me (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is that I now find myself touching screens everywhere and expecting them to do something. Of course by and large they don’t, which is disappointing. David Pogue had an article in the Times this week about screens that play images and music, but aren’t touch sensitive. He points out that one of the screens he reviews looks as if it was originally designed to be touch sensitive. But it isn’t. Either the market won’t bear the cost, or the technology won’t bear the burden.

 
Manufacturers of tablet sized computers still seem to be stuck with the choice between power and portability. So you have a rash of e-readers that aim to trickle out their power over a long time, and so have slow two-tone screens that can’t be asked to do very much.

 
Add to that the absence of a standardized platform for e-books and you’ve created an unmanageable mess of choices for users.

 
Somewhere on the heels of the Kindle and Sony’s e-reader, you’ll soon have Plastic Logic’s business e-reader (see demo): a reader that’s aimed at people who like to print out documents before they read them. This may sound a little bizarre as a business proposition, but the reader does have a touch sensitive (if rather slow) screen. This alone puts it ahead of other readers. But how will people with Kindle accounts use it?

 
These are murky waters, but they are turbulent with activity and they will clear one day. I hope it’s one day soon.

The Pain of Fingers Dancing on a Touchpad

By | November 22, 2011
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Before I leave the poor folks at Nokia alone, I must take issue with one more thing about their promotional videos for their new Booklet.

Touchpads are mostly poorly used; I’ve only seen a handful of people who can use them well (I’m not one) and more quickly than a mouse. If you’re going to focus on them in a promo video make sure you find one of these people, because frankly there’s nothing worse than watching someone try to navigate via a trackpad. It’s like watching a funeral.

Oh, and another thing. Get a good hand model. Not someone with weird colored fingernails and a hands with veins and tendons so prominent even the painted fingernails don’t distract attention from them.

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How Not to Disintermediate

By | November 22, 2011
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With traditional media on the rocks, there are lots of opportunities for companies and organisations to  disintermediate: to project themselves directly to the public. Indeed, in some ways, this is the future.

But here’s how not to do it: to put a guy from the PR department in front of one of the senior folks and let him babble. The result is always awkward half sentences linked rehearsed (and usually quite obviously, and badly) lines from some media training session that ooze jargonish phrases that a real journalist would never let pass.

Things like these (with their translations alongside) from the Nokia Booklet 3G interview with John Hwang, its designer.

“nokia’s all about connecting people” = we make mobile phones

“further strengthening our device portfolio” = we’ve got a lot of different models. You’re confused? Try working here.

“mobile heritage” (repeated by the interviewer, as if it’s a phrase we all use in our daily lives: “honey, could you look in the drawer at our device portfolio and see if there’s something there from our mobile heritage we could lend the kids for sleepover?”) = we have to acknowledge we mainly make mobile phones, but we’re trying to make it sound like that’s our past. Just like our “tree-felling heritage”

“connected services” = the Internet

“all day performance” = the battery won’t give out on ya

“mobile design language” = we design mobile phones. Well we used to. Now we want to be thought of as computer manufacturers

“launched from our mobility statement” = I have no idea what this means.

(And the PR guy keeps saying “we” and then correcting himself to say “nokia”.)

If you’re going to do this kind of thing, do it right. PR guys should not be afraid of asking questions real journalists would ask, including tough ones. (Interestingly, the only tough question here is one the interviewee asks himself.)

Firefox’s Billion, Amazon’s Misstep, and Facebook’s Hole

By | November 22, 2011
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Here’s another appearance on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club, now called something else, which after a hiatus is back on every Friday—around 1.15 GMT.

Here’s the audio of the segment (about 10 minutes’ worth).

Here’s what I talked about:

Xoopit, Or Channels vs Trenches

By | November 22, 2011
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I’ve been a fan of Xoopit so I guess I am a bit surprised that Yahoo! has bought it. Xoopit, for me, was the future of email. Or a part of it.

(For those of you who haven’t used it, or those who didn’t “get” it, Xoopit is a plugin for Gmail—for others, too, but Gmail is the best working one—which extends Gmail’s functionlity: better search for attachments, dovetailing with Facebook so you can see who you’re talking to on Gmail etc.)

Xoopit, for me, was/is a way to push email beyond being one channel of communication to being part of a single channel of communication. In other words, I believe it will make no sense to future generations that we have different applications for communicating with people.

Right now we have SMS, phone, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, face time, and then within those we may have several accounts, depending on whether we’re at work etc etc… This does not make sense.

Some of us would argue that it makes sense if we want to keep our work friends in LinkedIn, and our family friends on Facebook. Yes, but those shouldn’t have to be product choices, surely?

We didn’t use separate postal services to communicate with different kinds of people we knew, or different phones for different kinds of friends? (Well, OK, we may have kept a work phone and a personal phone, but I don’t see many people doing that these days.)

What we are really looking for is a way to organize our increasingly complex social, work and family lives into a coherent web that allows us to control how we communicate with them—not dictated by service, device, product, but by our preferences.

For example, I want to communicate with friend A via SMS because that suits me (and her). I should be able to send that SMS through pretty much any device I want—phone, voice, computer (email, twitter, Facebook etc), TV, pigeon, whatever. It shouldn’t matter to me.

Similarly, the method and format that Friend A receives the message in should be her choice. It shouldn’t be an issue that I sent it as an SMS. She should be able to receive however, and wherever she wishes—guided by whatever factor is important to her (priority—’let everything from Jeremy through’—or cost—‘don’t send me anything by SMS because I’m on roaming, but data is free’ or device—“I’m only carrying my no-data cellphone so route all important communications thro via SMS”.)

Right now this is only a dream, for the most part. Why? Because we’re still stuck in a world of platforms, packages and a lack of understanding of why and how people communicate.

We don’t love twitter because it’s twitter. We love it because it opens all sorts of new doors for sharing information and experiences. And because it’s an open platform, which means we can control how we send and receive.

But we’re still some way off.

Some way off a world where I decide who I communicate with and how I communicate with them, instead of being nudged into one or another walled garden. I may want to talk to Friend A about their holiday on Facebook, but about the new project we’re working on via Gmail. I should be able to do that however I want, and from the same place, and she should be able to decide how she receives and reponds to those emails.

Right now we’re stuck in these trenches dug for us by the creators of the services.

A truly open system will be one where we control these channels.

Xoopit was just a small step, but it had potential. Being able to see whether someone I was talking to on email had a Facebook account—and, if they did, being able to see their profile picture—was great for me, as I communicate often with people I’ve not met, and who often have first names that aren’t always gender specific. Always good to know.

Imagine if that service extended to LinkedIn, twitter and others. Gmail would become a console that would enable me to manage and extend my networks more efficiently than occasional trawling through the network services pages themselves.

And finding attachments? Sounds trivial but it made finding stuff easy, and turned Gmail into an online repository of files I could—relatively—easily share and pass on to others.

Small shifts, but in the right direction.

The chatter on TechCrunch is that Google didn’t buy because it’s launching Wave.

Maybe true, but great though Wave sounds it doesn’t, I think, move us in the direction of open channels. Instead, it sounds a lot like Google wasn’t interested in Xoopit because it was taking Gmail in the wrong direction—into the world of open channels—when Wave is designed to keep us in the trenches.