the trouble with mobile

The mobile space today remains a minefield for consumers. First of all, it's completely balkanized:

• handset manufacturers want to sell you the latest doodad, described in language only a hardware engineer from the FCC could love;
• service providers want to lock you into two year plans and charge you $40 extra a month to check e-mail;
• and advertisers want to put commercials on your little screen.

The operating systems are tested on different handsets than they'll ultimately be used with. There's no standard aspect ratio for the screens.

Reviewers live in spiff dreamland, and presumably complete most phone reviews after putting the device through a day's worth of tasks off a spreadsheet. I just finished reading an 8-page glowing review for the Helio Ocean that nowhere mentioned either its price or how much monthly data charges would be. CNET and the NY Times review phones without ever discussing the cost of the required 2-year service plan. This is reprehensible. Imagine buying a car based on a $200 discount, without anyone disclosing that the cost of actually driving it would be $2500.

Text messages thrive while internet access lags because you can pay a dime for them rather than needing a data plan. Seriously, if price doesn't matter, I'll take a Serene Mobile from Bang & Olufsen for $1275. If you have to ask about service plans, you can't afford it.

As a result it's challenging for developers to build a service that works across a reasonable number of devices without resorting to a least common denominator strategy, in this case SMS, or text.

It's all a lot like the PDA market was 8 or 9 years ago, or the PC market before Windows 95 and the mPC standard, when you really had to roll your own computer and do a lot of work detecting video and sound cards and screen size, because no one did it for you.

In some ways the iPhone is a glorified Newton--and despite my skepticism about next month's overpriced touchscreen wonder device, I don't mean that disparagingly. Presumably we've all learned a lot, especially Palm. We need devices that are optimized in form factor for intended uses, not a single heavy rectangle that requires typing with your thumbs and doesn't work very well as a phone either.

I was at dinner with a large party recently, and when the check came, I reached for it to see if they'd added service and to split the bill. But the woman next to me pulled out her phone, pushed two buttons, and announced the shares. Her phone automatically added the tip and divided by the number of guests.

Now this is basic math, and probably everyone at the table had a phone with a calculator in it, although honestly I'm not sure where mine is buried in the menus. But someone had actually gone to the trouble to take into account a trivially simple scenario that happens all the time and program it as an explicit feature.

Makes you think.


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