Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

First, props to Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity, who took a clever and creative approach to his mission as host of the 37th edition of Carnival of the Mobilists. I continue to be impressed both with the quality of the writing that makes up the Carnival and the dedication of the hosts to making it a great reading experience instead of just a list of links. I look forward to reading it every weekend. Also a big thanks to Khosla Ventures for sponsoring this great community.

I always like to call out my own favorite contribution to each Carnival but this week I have to agree with Mike's choice. Steve Litchfield and Rafe Blanford's point/counterpoint debate about what (if anything) should be done about the limited usage patterns of smartphone users gets right to the heart of what all of us in the mobile software business are trying to understand. Writing as they do for AllAboutSymbian.com, they use the example of the Nokia/Symbian S60, which is the most popular smartphone platform in the world today by quite a long shot. While from my observation Palm OS and Pocket PC phone users are more likely to use the applications on their phones and to install third party software, the basic and surprising fact remains across all smartphones today: people are buying them but most aren't using them very differently from simple cameraphones and feature phones.

With Rafe I count myself among the optimists who believes mobile applications will become mainstream before long. Rafe writes:

the 'killer app' is customisation and while people are used to achieving this just though content (themes, ringtones, Java applets, etc.) in time it will be second nature for it to be through services and applications. The change is not educating people that this is possible, it is changing their thinking that this is the way it should be. i.e. part of the reason for non take-up of third party applications is an expectation that a phone is a phone. Early computers were seen as advanced electronic typewriters for many, but clearly this was an under-sell...

Mike himself had a good discussion a while back of how to give users the vision that they can personalize their devices with apps, not just ringtones and skins. He calls for a new software platform that's designed to query the user about their profession, hobbies and activities, suggest applications that might interest them, and link them directly to a store to download and pay for the software--all on the smartphone screen. I'm down with him 100% on the need for a new platform and that application discovery is the critical missing ingredient, but I wonder if we couldn't do even just a bit better than what he describes.

How to teach someone they really need a smartphone

The experience I'd like to see when someone turns on their smartphone the first time is something like this: First the phone should ask the user to plug their cradle into their PC and drop the phone in the cradle. The PC should recognize a partition of the phone's flash as an external drive and should auto-run a PC application directly off device memory--don't expect users to run a CD. That application becomes to your smartphone what iTunes is to your iPod. There on the large screen with a fast, unlimited Internet connection, is where you query the new user about his or her interests and sell her the appropriate software.

There are a couple of reasons for doing it this way. First, if you know the users you're reaching out to are the ones who aren't accustomed to using mobile applications, don't try their patience by confronting them right out of the box with an on-device customization application that requires a lot of tapping and tedious touchscreen entry. To do a good job personalizing the device I think this application is going to need to get a fair amount of information, which probably would be easier and quicker to do on a large screen with mouse and keyboard. It also needs to be revisited regularly. In addition to being easier to navigate on a PC, the discovery experience can be richer and more immersive there than on the tiny device screen. Mike talks about the Expert Guides -- user-generated web content that PalmSource published so that people with specific professions, hobbies or activities could get software recommendations from like-minded users that had tried a lot of software already. In the Web 2.0 era that kind of content shouldn't be posted in static web pages, it should appear in communities that new users can browse and join. Like Amazon does, the desktop companion software to any smartphone should keep tabs on the communities that users have visited or joined and the software titles they have visited or purchased and offer suggestions of other titles they might like.

What made the iPod sell so well despite there being a fairly mature field of personal music players on the market at the time it came out was not the device itself. iPod sales didn't take off until iTunes was released on Windows. That should be a hint to everyone involved in trying to sell smartphones and the mobile computing vision: it takes more than nice hardware and a good on-device user experience to sell mobile data; it takes an end-to-end solution that's focused on helping the consumers in the Long Tail of the software market discover the niche applications to personalize their devices.

This companion software needs to be a powerful tool in its own right as well as a way to discover new tools. For one thing, if it's going to be used to attract "eyeballs" for marketing purposes you need it to be something people want to look at on a regular basis. It really should be the replacement for tools like Palm Desktop and Nokia PC Suite in that it should give you at-your-fingertips access to the data and apps on the phone from the PC. But one important difference is this: I propose that even the PC software should stay in device memory rather than be installed on the PC. This might sound very strange but it has some powerful advantages, despite the cost of the extra flash memory. It makes it so the user can access their desktop companion software from any PC at all--they only need to connect their device to it via USB, WiFi or Bluetooth. It also means that the sometimes time-consuming (and slightly nerve-wracking) process of synchronizing data can go away completely. Aside from backups (which can occur silently in the background whenever a device is docked) all your data is in one place: on your person wherever you go. The era when mobile computing will really take off is the one when people start to think of their mobile device as the place where their whole personal workspace and playspace live and the PC is an accessory that just lets them use those spaces in a more immersive, less peripatetic manner.

This gets back to the topic of continuous computing that I discussed in my last post. I've got a lot more to say about this, but it will have to wait. Suffice it for now to say this: if you think people don't need smart mobile devices, just wait. They said people didn't need home PCs either.