This month’s Mobile Monday-Boston certainly assembled an esteemed panel to address the decade-old problem of the dismally poor experience of using a mobile browser on your cell phone. Yet how could so many brilliant minds after two hours of discussion not come up with a solution?
Easy. Each panelist enjoys their cushy, high-paid ‘evangelist’ existence due to the deep pockets of a major corporation. So, while each evangelist may in their heart-of-hearts know that an outside-the-box solution is what is required, their high flying lifestyle and hefty paycheck tell them to only offer up solutions that protect the franchise of their employer. So Google suggests ‘better mobile search’, Mozilla proffers ‘small, mobile-specific browsers’ as the way to go, and Nokia says the answer is ‘a powerful OS like OpenSymbian.’
So with no viable solution offered, the three highlights of the night were: (a) getting an unprecedented ‘look see’ at the posh, expensive, over-the-top, completely unnecessary digs of Orange Labs; (b) the great food and drink provided by Vlingo’s founder, speech recognition pioneer Mike Phillips (Question: Do Izhar Armony (Charles River Ventures) and Bob Davoli (Sigma Partners) know this is where Mike’s spending their money?); and (c) the comment by Franklin Davis of Nokia, equating the current mobile web browser experience to ‘looking at the web through a paper towel roll.’
The current mobile browser experience IS that bad. And it’s getting worse: as one……audience member noted, mobile web browsing was actually a better experience ten years ago when the browsers were not much worse than they are today, but the web sites the browsers were attempting to display were far simpler; viewing these pages through that ‘paper towel roll’ wasn’t all that bad.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask. True, most Americans don’t care, or even know, about this problem. If we need to surf the web when we’re on the road, all we need to do is just stop at the next intersection, take our laptop into the Starbucks that’s surly there, and go online before the barrister has had time to deliver our triple Venti nonfat half-caff soy latte with 1 pump mocha, 1 pump caramel and 1 pump peppermint, low foam, non-fat whip with an extra protective sleeve.
But as the panelists pointed out, for much of the world the only access people have to the Internet is through their mobile. The number of mobile phones sold last year was larger than the number of PCs already installed! For more people than not, a mobile browser is the only browser they have to access the Internet.
So if the problem is real – and if it’s important to a good chunk of the world’s three billion mobile users – what’s the ‘outside the box’ solution that our esteemed panelists would offer if they were not worried about pissing off their employers? They would do what Bill Gates did when he founded Microsoft; they’d suggest a solution that is 180 degrees opposed to the solution offered a generation ago when PCs first went on line. (BTW, for a brilliant summary of Bill Gates’ career, check out The Economist’s “The meaning of Bill Gates”, a summary of his success and failures that only The Economists’ writers can achieve in just one page.)
Thinking today like Gates thought back then, our panelists would note that today’s mobile environment requires an on-line solution 180 degrees opposed of that of on-line PCs. A dozen years ago, it was the advent of the Windows browser that resulted in the rapid uptake of on-line PC usage. Simple jobs like on-line-banking were far easier to deliver to the masses as browser-based applications.
But today, the inherent and entrenched fragmentation of the mobile device industry requires the opposite solution. Delivering services on small mobile devices with different operating systems requires powerful-yet-compact applications — true applications, not glorified markup, widgets, or other “toy” technologies. Applications that can be written quickly – and only once – on an open platform. Applications that can be immediately delivered over the air, and that will run on the majority of existing feature phones.
The iPhone is great, and smartphones are a blessing for those who can afford them. But most of the world will for many years still be using Java-enabled MIDP 2.X mobile devices. Delivering the mobile web to them requires a way to strengthen and extend the Java promise of “write once, run anywhere”.
None of the companies represented by the panelists will offer such a solution as each needs to protect their franchise. But just as IBM suffered when it resisted Digital’s onslaught with the mini computer, and just as Digital died when it resisted the arrival of the desktop PC, in today’s mobile space Google, Mozilla, Nokia, Orange, etc. will suffer unless and until they recognize the need to bring a whole new set of capabilities to standard Java-enabled MIDP 2.X mobile devices -– capabilities such as vector graphics, real-time always-on “push” databases, worldwide fonts, and presence –- all through applications that can quickly be scripted and distributed direct to end users, by-passing the carriers.
Yes, that’s what the panelists would have offered, if only they could have spoken their minds honestly.
31 July 2008 at 2:58 PM |
Des,
I think your assessment of the situation is off base on many fronts. Not the least is your disdain for “cushy, high-paid evangelists”. Perhaps it’s this disdain that leads you to dismiss anything these evangelists have to say.
Regardless, let me address some of the other topics you mention.
a) Google is Old Guard. Google hasn’t even shipped a phone, yet you claim they’re Old Guard and part of the problem. Google is not adopting Java MIDP, but a variant of Java that runs on their mobile device and on desktops. This is a clever hack around Sun Java licensing terms and a classic problem with debugging code on desktop-based emulators and on actual hardware devices. However, it fragments the platform market even more and is not available on other devices.
b) Vector graphics in Java. Nokia supports JSR-226 for Scalable Vector Graphics for our Series 40 and S60 phone lines.
c) “push” databases are great for the right kind of applications and for people with unlimited data plans and/or a “deep-pockets” employer willing to foot the bill. I have to admit, I take tremendous advantage of mobile browsing partly because my employer foots the bill. Without an unlimited data plan, I regularly rack up $700+/month in bills.
d) “True applications…not …“toy” technologies” — I think you’re revealing some old-fashioned bias. The Web2.0 / JavaScript applications are truly mind-boggling in what they can deliver. My team delivers and supports a Web Runtime to S60 Smartphones that is wholly HTML/JavaScript/CSS-based. Web services are geared for delivering to JavaScript, so extending this development “platform” to mobile devices allows companies to re-use code and not waste time on debugging.
e) You ignore Adobe AIR (aka, Flash) and Microsoft Silverlight. Both companies are pushing hard for these cross-platform development environments to take on the “write once, run everywhere” Java promise.
Let’s get together and talk more in person…maybe at our next LexTech meeting.
Cheers,
Jerry Harris
Director, S60 Browser Development
Nokia, Inc.
4 August 2008 at 10:23 AM |
Jerry, I’m of two minds in my response. One is to give a ‘point by point’ rebuttal to what you say. I will do that below.
But my ‘second mind’ is to say that your points sound so much like the Mobile Monday panelists and, more importantly, they sound so much like what I heard decades ago when working for a very successful and profitable mainframe company when I asked the executives, “How are we going to respond to these upstart mini computer companies like Digital?” and when, a decade later, I asked, “How are we going to responded to DOS?” Their answers showed they were like so many other executives back then who didn’t see what Bill Gates saw. (I again refer to article in The Economist on how Gates had vision when the rest of the industry did not.)
Though we’re talking mobile browsers here (and not mini computers or PCs) I feel the Mobile Monday panelists are repeating these same mistakes with their lack of vision. Will these companies become dinosaurs like the mainframe companies did?
Back to my ‘first mind’, addressing your points:
a) The MIDP-not-being-used argument is a non sequitur. It’s the Nokia/Sun party line on what Google did. Sun isn’t using MIDP because it’s a tiny subset of Java and is not a proper foundation for building a new operating system.
b) JSR-226 is virtually useless. It’s good for vector “clipart”. If it’s so good then why is Sun talking about JavaFX Script for Mobile? JSR-226 has shipped on quite a few Series 40 and SonyEricsson devices… but who is using it? Hardly anyone. There are multiple reasons for that: it’s not on every device so it’s a risk (the same fragmentation issue he noted about Google) and it’s a pain to use.
c) “Push is great for deep pockets”? First, over the last couple years we’ve seen leading carriers around the world offer unlimited flat-rate data plans. Second, always-on is what people want in this always-connected world – witness the success of SMS, Blackberry, Sidekick, Apple “Push” services, etc. Integrated push generates excitement; for proof just look at the Apple community: http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/09/iphone-push-notification-service-for-devs-announced/
d) Web2.0/Javascript on mobile is not ready for prime time. Google is the first to admit this: http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/snakes-on-wireless-plane.html.
e) As for Flash and Silverlight If anything they’re direct competition to every platform that was on the stage but at the end of the day are faced with the same problems: what “built-for-mobile” features are missing from the platform, how much work does the developer need to do to add these missing features, how are applications distributed and, most important of all, market size — how many devices are out there with the same version of the environment in firmware?
As you said, let’s chat over a beer at LexTech.
Des
8 August 2008 at 4:33 PM |
Des –
I think you touched on the solution briefly when you said this:
“The iPhone is great, and smartphones are a blessing for those who can afford them. ”
The iPhone has shown what a powerful platform with a large uncluttered interface can do for mobile browsing. As time goes on, this technology will filter down as it gets cheaper and cheaper. A year ago, Apple sold the iPhone 8GB model was $599. They dropped the price $200 within the first few months, and now the price of the iPhone 3G 8GB model is $199. It’s not too hard to imagine in a year or so there being a completely subsidized iPhone offered by a carrier.
And it’s not just the iPhone — in theory, all phones should benefit from Moore’s law and eventually even the cheapest of phones should be able to have enough power to provide a reasonable mobile browsing experience — if the cell phone manufacturers invest in using that power to provide a better experience, that is.
On another note in regards to J2ME — I’ve never found reason to believe that J2ME is a write once deploy anywhere technology. Even on phones in the same OS family there are usually differences that prevent you from writing a single application and deploying it everywhere. Instead, you end up having phone specific builds and hacks like using the C pre-processor to allow having a single code base for different phones (see http://www.duo-creative.com/chrisb/jpp/).
dennis
10 August 2008 at 4:53 PM |
Dennis, I used to believe as you state, that “all phones should benefit from Moore’s law and eventually even the cheapest of phones should be able to have enough power to provide a reasonable mobile browsing experience.” But I’ve learned that the key is in the rest of your sentence; “if the cell phone manufacturers invest in using the power to provide a better experience, that is.” In fact, the manufacturers have other pressures: They need to drive costs down; pennies per phone really matter. And they need to drive power consumption way down; It’s easy for you and I to plug our phone in each night, but in many emerging markets, there is a need for phones to run for a week or more on one charge.
The key to success will be when someone cracks the problem that you articulately point out: The historic disappointment in the the ‘write it once, deploy anywhere’ claims of Java. When someone comes along and can solve this problem, then we’ll see a way to turn all Feature Phones into iPhones.
Thank you for the great comments. Des
2 December 2008 at 2:07 AM |
Any simple USB driver for N70 so that we can use the phone just as Pen drive on PC, and we don’t have to use the PC-Suite ?
Or we are bound with Nokia’s properitery driver completely .
Motorola good in this respect all Motorola phones are detected as USB drives as soon you connect ‘em to PC.
Is there any crack tht I needn’t install PCSuite still phone is detected…?