Mobitopia Posts

Since the Mobitopia site got hacked a while back, I’ve decided to re-post my various entries to that site in the relevant places here (I usually just teased the story here). You can read all of them at once on the Mobitopia category page, or you can read them individually if you want (earliest posts first):

• developer.symbian.com Redux
• Camera Phones Considered Harmful
• Rollercoaster Review
• Are You Being Self-Served?
• Stupid, Stupid Operator Creatures
• SMS and WAP: Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated…
• Searching On The Move

RSS isn't WML

I posted a response (with help from the other Mobitopians) to Dave Winer’s SMS complaint, which you can read here. It also handles the myth that WAP is dead.

SMS and WAP: Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated…

Dave Winer dit:

I don’t use SMS, I don’t think it exists in the US, but I understand it’s popular in Europe and Asia.

Given that this sentence was written on the same day that Verizon Wireless of the US announced that they handled 2.1 billion text messages in Q1 2004, and given that I was sending transatlantic SMS back in February 2002, it should have been fairly straightforward to check whether or not SMS exists in the US.

And it is indeed fairly popular in Europe, with 2.1 billion (there’s that big number again) text messages being sent in the UK in March 2004 alone.

Dave also writes:

There will be eighteen brands of SMS, and you’ll only be able to message people who use the same brand of phone.

After some discussion on #mobitopia, we’re of the opinion that SMS is a basic standard supplied with pretty much every GSM handset. It was originally designed for engineering use, and you could only send to other handsets on the same network. Once the operators realised that people were actually using it as a lifestyle tool, they were quick to establish connections so that you could send messages to handsets (any handset) on the other networks.

Like any protocol, over time it evolved in different ways, such as EMS (which allowed sending little picture icons and never really took off), and the ability to send long messages (more than 160 characters) using Segmentation And Reassembly (SAR). The kicker here is that these enhancements were designed to degrade gracefully, so a long message received by a phone which didn’t support SAR would be received as multiple messages.

Now, there are multiple different brands of SMSCs, the software which actually handles the messages, and there are several different ways of communicating directly with these (SMPP being the official standard, but it only appeared relatively late in the day). But that doesn’t affect the end user.

"But what of MMS?", you cry. The protocol itself is a hybrid of SMS and WAP, and once again, graceful degradation is the order of the day: sending an MMS to a non-MMS client results in the recipient getting a standard SMS with the text portion of the MMS and a URL for them to see the associated media objects. The problems MMS has are related to the carrier inter-connections, which have yet to be fully resolved, not the protocol itself.

What’s next? Ah, yes; Adam Curry writes:

Ed is a developer of cellphone applications, he told me the saddest story about WAP, and why it died before it really had a chance. Apparently every phone manufacturer made up their ‘own’ version of the WAP protocol and built proprietary browsers. The net effect is that Ed said developing content for close to 2000 (!) different versions and permutations made it impossible.

First of all, WAP didn’t die and it isn’t likely to. This story tells us that there were 1.2 billion WAP impressions in February 2004, just in the UK. Practically every handset produced since 2000 supports WAP, and manufacturers didn’t make up their versions of the WAP protocol; they did write their own browsers (gods forbid!), however, and yes they were (and still can be) buggy. To say that you needed to build 2000 different versions of the same site or application is stretching the truth a little: Nokia’s browser accounts for around 60% of the market, and it behaves in pretty much the same way across all devices. Openwave’s accounts for 35% or so, although it behaves differently than Nokia’s does. Who cares? That’s 95% of the market—we just didn’t use any of the dubious elements, focussed on using images and hyperlinks only. And Wireless Pets (a game which my company produced) ran for over 36 months (one of the longest running WAP applications, I believe). It even had animation in it when you fed the pets and played with them.

Secondly, tools have been developed for dealing with implementation differences in WAP phones. There is an XML file written by members of the WURFL project that describes in great detail the capabilities of most of the phones in the market. Of course if you stick with the basics and test content using the Openwave and Nokia browsers, it should work for most people. How many different permutations of HTML web browsers are there out there? Do you test for each and every one? Do you check your site with every version of IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Safari, and every other browser ever made on every platform? I doubt it. I’ll also just point out that XHTML-MP will help resolve this in the same way as standards based browsers resolve similar issues on the desktop.

So, as is mentioned above, WAP forms the basis for delivering and viewing MMS content, and it is also used to deliver J2ME content. So, what has it ever done for us?

And what’s with this focus on finding the killer app? The killer app is killing time, something which the phone allows people to do very well indeed. And it’s not even so much about any given application; the killer aspect is connectivity. That’s what inspires us here at Mobitopia.

Michael Gartenberg, a research analyst at Jupiter Research, agrees with Winer that his analogy is “great … and very correct”.

It’s not great, and it’s nowhere near being correct.

I’m not arguing that WML doesn’t have issues, but the fact is that there didn’t exist a variety of different formats that the WML could be presented in (as is the case with RSS). The same mark-up could at least be interpreted sanely by the majority of phones, even if didn’t entirely didn’t understand what it was talking about. The browser didn’t need to know umpteen different ways in which to decode the same information, each piece of which can potentially be decoded in a different way.

At first glance, you may think that perhaps my perspective on things is different because I’m in Europe and Gartenberg and Winer are in the US, but some people get it.

Lack of Thought

Mobilopia? Gizmondo? Evidently, the brand naming people are getting lazier by the day…

Stupid, Stupid Operator Creatures

Wow, two Mobitopia posts in the same week! I’m on a roll! In fact, that’s three posts in the whole of March!

Anyway, this post deals with a missed opportunity from an operator to provide a nice new service to sports fans.

Can anyone tell me why the operators make me so angry?

Last night I caught a Vodafone advert I hadn’t seen before. In it, a man is walking around (on his way home from working late or something) and is listening to commentary of a football (by which I mean Football, not football) match.

“Oh,” thinks I, “they must be launching a sports radio service or something, that’s cool.”

The the guy gets home, and it turns out that his wife had her phone sat in front of the television, relaying the TV commentary to her husband’s phone. Vodafone are selling special packs of voice minutes from only 2 pence per minute.

I can just imagine the marketing meeting: “Oh, you know what would make a great advert..?”. I bet they’re all really pleased with themselves.

I’d fire all of them. And the advertising agency.

What the marketing team should have done when somebody suggested the advert is actually think “Wait, that sounds like a service we could offer…”

Let’s assume that you get 2 pence per minute for the 94 minutes of the average football game; that works out at a call cost of GBP 1.88 (possibly slightly higher if you split the call in two halves (as you must) and thus have two connection charges). That’s not an unreasonable price to pay for a footy mad nation like the UK, right? Right. But because of the nature of the setup suggested in the advert, I’m willing to bet the audio quality isn’t as crystal clear as they make it out to be.

So why don’t Vodafone offer audio commentary for GBP 1.99 per match (hell, they could probably get away with GBP 2.99) straight from the TV or radio station covering the event, and give them some cut of the proceeds. I just send a text or click a button on my phone’s browser, the system calls me back, and I get a good quality audio feed direct to the phone? Why don’t they do that?

The advert is bad enough in that I don’t think many women would be prepared to set their phones up like that in the first place (certainly not in front of the living room television, anyway) since they wouldn’t be able to receive calls. And the guy in the advert doesn’t even use a headset – his arm must hurt.

Those stupid, stupid operator creatures make me madder every day.

Are You Being Self-Served?

I’ve posted a new entry at Mobitopia, which is a kicking off point as to how mobile network operators could improve their customer service. My suggestion is via self-service, whereby I can connect into the operator via the phone’s browser, and select an option I want to enable. That’s it; no phone calls or real human contact involved. Read more here…

Why is mobile network operator customer service so bad?

The majority of the time I call is to add something to my existing service, such as roaming, switching on GPRS, enabling MMS, conference calls and such like. On the other occasions, I want to upgrade my handset. I think that in 8 years, I’ve called Orange about a network problem once, perhaps twice. That’s probably a good recommendation of the network, but not of their customer service.

Usually, I have to wait a while before someone actually answers (and that’s after I’ve gone through the maze of touchtone options), and then inevitably, the “system is down for now” or some such. How can it be down every time I call in?

If all I want to do is enable a new service, order a new handset or have my GPRS settings resent to me, I shouldn’t have to call up. I should just go into the phone’s browser, visit the ‘Support’ section and choose my option. The operator knows who I am, and they already send me a bill every month for using their network, so what’s the holdup in implementing such a service? Make it available through the web too, if you like.

This would help cut the costs of servicing users (especially users like me), and I expect it would work out even cheaper in the long run than offshoring your customer support team…

Still, at least I’ve never had an experience to match that of Greg Costikyan. Greg also makes a great recommendation for improving customer service:

...why can’t the phone detect that it’s an AT&T SIM card, the account isn’t activated, and give me the option of making a simple call to activate it?

What other things could operators do that would help them improve on how they serve their customers?

Rollercoaster Review

I’ve posted a review of Rollercoaster: The Turbulent Life and Times of Chris Gent and Vodafone over at Mobitopia. Check it out below.

Rollercoaster: The Turbulent Life and Times of Chris Gent and Vodafone is, tellingly, a book that doesn’t have any descriptions on the Amazon site, and the back of the book is covered with quotes for the author’s previous book (about Napster). However, a couple of review quotes do exist on the book’s page at Amazon, with one claiming that “it gives the reader an insight into their (Chris Gent & Vodafone) stunning achievement” (from Management Today). Now, I’ve never read Management Today, and frankly, if the quality of their book reviews is a taster for the quality of their other articles, I’m never likely to read it either.

The book is pretty much a series of news clippings about Vodafone, with a potted history stuck on the front, and all loosely linked with narrative of sorts. The author makes such a big show about the fact that he asked Chris Gent a question at a press conference once that it made me wonder if he’d actually ever interviewed anyone else for the book. Actually, that’s not quite true: the chapter about how Vodafone upset the population of their headquarters town (Newbury) has quite a lot of actual quotes from people, whereas the rest of the book relies on quotes from “sources”, which just adds to the tabloid-esque style of writing.

I’m not completely averse to that type of book, after all Breaking Windows is pretty much built in the same way, using court records of all the emails that Microsoft sent and piecing them all together with the time line of events surrounding the Internet and Microsoft’s decisions. But at least there, the author provides his own insights into the situations.

For an example from Rollercoaster, the book starts and ends with the press conference where the author asks his question (about how long Gent intends to remain at Vodafone). The conference that day is about how Vodafone had turned around their business from the previous 6 months (when they’d issued a GBP 13 billion loss), and now they had a really good set of figures. At no point does the book go into how they had managed to turn things around so well, so quickly.

This is not the sort of detailed book for a company which, for all its faults, has come an incredibly long way in a very short space of time.

Summary: Not the best 10 quid I’ve ever spent, and you, reader, should save your money.

Camera Phones Considered Harmful*

*: to serendipitous picture taking

Phone cameras, such as my Nokia 3650 are advertised as being able to let you take pictures quickly, easily, and at those points where you think “Damn, I wish I had a camera with me”, right? At least, that’s what I thought.

Imagine my suprise, then, when last week, en route to the pub to meet with some friends, I spotted a fox wandering through a garden. Now, being a city dweller, it’s not a very common occurrence to see these animals at such close quarters; especially when it has obviously just caught its dinner and is carrying said dead dinner in its jaws.

“I’ll try and get a picture”, thinks I, despite knowing that the quality of the picture would probably be poor since the 3650 doesn’t have a flash. So I whipped the phone out, unlocked the keypad, pressed the right softkey (which I have set to be “Camera”), and waited. And waited.

And waited.

I waited so long, in fact, that the fox had long since noticed me and promptly scarpered.

I was annoyed at missing this photo opportunity, but I was even more annoyed at the ridiculous response time of the camera. Now, I’d noticed that in the past when I was using the camera that the ‘boot’ time of the camera was a bit shoddy, but in those situations the pictures were set-up, not impromptu as this one was, so I hadn’t really bothered that much (although it was still enough to try my patience once in a while).

Next day, I tried an experiment comparing my Pentax Optio S camera against the 3650. (As a side note, the Pentax is actually lighter then the 3650.) I wasn’t all that surprised to discover that the Pentax was ready to take a picture before the 3650 had finished responding to me unlocking the keypad. Now, you could say that I should leave the keypad unlocked; but then I’d run up a massive phone bill due to it making random calls to people as the keypad is bumped around in my pocket.

I’d been growing more and more unhappy with the Series 60 UI over the last few weeks anyway, and this was the last straw. Further evidence was found when my wife asked me for a phone number the other night, and I just handed her the phone. About 30 seconds later she handed me it back saying, “How the hell does that thing work?”. Now, my wife may not be a gadget geek like I am, but when she first used the Palm IIIc I got her a couple of years back, she had no problem. She was adding phone numbers and addresses using Graffiti within the first minute of switching the device on.

The problem is, of course, what else is there? The Treo 600 is probably the nicest one I’ve used, but I don’t have the GSM version of that yet. Over at The Register, Andrew Orlowski this morning posted a great piece wondering Where is the perfect phone UI?, where he writes that he also considers the Treo 600 to be a nice phone UI, but wonders why no-one has yet build a truly smart interface to these so-called smart phones.

A while back, I read a statistic that said that users on phone networks (in the UK) using Nokia handsets sent an average of 36 text messages per month, against an average of 12 messages by Motorola users. As these phones become more complex, the UI itself increases in importance, and I don’t see enough evidence of innovation by the major players at the moment. Why doesn’t the phone industry make like the car industry, but instead of introducing concept handset designs (as they currently do), they should show and publically demonstrate concept interface designs. Imagine how great the N-Gage could have been if only they’d shown it to some people who had a clue?