A Question Of Mobiles

It's a long story of no interest to anyone but myself, but hell, this is my blog and if I want to be a boring old git, nobody can stop me. Bwaa haa haa etc.

I bought my first mobile - in 1994 - under enormous pressure. I hated the idea of carrying a phone around with me and loathed the sort of people you saw hefting the things around - all blue suits, white socks and green ties. Dom Jolie and so on. But then I started publishing a weekly and needed to be available in case anything happened at the printing press.

I got an Etisalat 'HudHud' - a rebadged Nokia - and the extra life battery pack. I'd been covering telecoms in the Middle East since the days of the car-phone, so the HudHud was quite impressive. It was a portable rather than a luggable, but the extra battery pack was the size of Luxembourg. Apparently a HudHud is a desert bird. Who knew?

A succession of Nokias followed. The houbara bustard sized HudHud got smaller over the years - as did the outrageous phone bills. Going from writing telecoms magazines to handling the communications strategies for telcos, I soon had a pocket full of SIMs and a deep-rooted sense that telcos simply didn't understand data. 

Telecomms people used to look down their noses at datacomms people. The telephone was mightier than the modem. I'm serious. And it started to become clear that the world's dominant handset maker had the same legacy attitude. The Nokia 6310 - I would still argue the company's brightest moment - remained resolutely mono, mini-screened and app-free. It never transitioned to a new generation, Nokia failing to understand technology adoption models and so lurching from inflection point to inflection point rather than offering users a smooth transition through iterations of an evolving platform. In technology, discontinuity invites disloyalty - users have an incentive to switch platforms if their investment in your new new thing compared to their investment in your old new thing is the same as the investment required to adopt your competitor's new new thing.

It's a thing thing. Trust me.

And the 6310 was where I got off. I clung on for ages, but nothing happened. No new model, no colour screen, no data evolution. No clear upgrade path. Time to get a Sony Ericsson, then.

What do you get when you mate an oyster and a brick? The Nokia Communicator. This was the 'future of the smartphone' and I wasn't buying. But then the Sony Ericsson experience was awful, too. Back to Nokia, which by now had colour screen 'smart' phones such as the N86 and N93. But the store (to become the ill-fated 'Ovi store') had nothing in it. No backgrounds, ringtones, apps. Nokia invented the smartphone and invented the ecosystem. It's just they didn't 'get' that an ecosystem needs to be populated, otherwise it's just barren terrain. They were a phone company playing at computers.

Boy Jobs, of course, coming at this from a computer perspective (one of those dirty 'datacomms' people, don't you know? Absolute parvenu, dahling) got it in spades. Nokia was still laughing as the water in the bath warmed up and his scalpel sliced through their sleepy carotid.

Which left me with a dumb smartphone. I stomped off and went for Google's Android. If I'm honest, I was probably a little bit angry with Jobs for killing 'my' mobile but more angry with Nokia for not understanding (them and the telcos, too) what he understood - that a mobile is a computer, not a phone. An access point to an ecosystem full of super toys and fun things. The terminal device in a rich data-driven world of high bandwidth always-on gloriousness.

It was after I'd flung my incessantly-crashing HTC at a wall that Nokia got in touch and slipped a canary-yellow Lumia my way. I loved the handset - still do. I don't like Microsoft, never really have. I hated them as a journalist (I still treasure 'official' letters of complaint from them) and never really learned to love them as their Middle East PR guy (I was, for something like five years). I tried, Lord knows I tried. But behind Barney lies an arrogant, mean, machine.

I wanted Nokia to win, to come back and show us it had worked things out and understood what was happening. I wanted there to be a third way, an alternative to Google's Moonie-evangelistic ubiquitousness or The Church of Jobs.

It's no use. It's game over. Microsoft has deleted Nokia and it's now clear that any innovation in mobile applications isn't going to be starting with Windows. Developers can't be bothered to port their apps to WinPhone and every other kid in the playground has shinier toys than me.

Now I'm in a real pickle. I can't make my mind up and it's been killing me for weeks.

Android or Apple?

BlackBerry Down

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As anyone who has heard me chatting on the radio (*ahem* Every Thursday from 12.45 on 103.8FM's 'Lunchtime Live') will attest, I have long been fascinated by the precipitous dynamics of the smartphone market. In the past five years, we have seen shifts in technology and corporate fortunes on an unprecedented scale - no other industry in history has impelled such meteoric change at such speed and with such scope.

Five years ago, Nokia was the world's biggest mobile maker and a dominant force. They invented the smartphone. They had over 49% of the global smartphone market, represented 4% of Finland's GDP and boasted a market capitalisation of over 110 billion Euro. Something like 25,000 lost jobs later, Nokia's stock was rated junk, its market share stood  at something like 3% and Microsoft snapped it up for a tad over 5 billion Euro. Remarkably, the man who presided over what must stand as one of the biggest, fastest falls in corporate history, Stephen Elop, looks set to make $25 million from that sale. He came from Microsoft, spent three years destroying Nokia and now he's going back to a $25 million bonus and a stab at Ballmer's job. No wonder people call him the 'Trojan Horse'.

Over the same period, 'troubled' BlackBerry has also managed to transition from global dominance to failure - although its decline and fall has been more recent, its position protected by its strength in the conservative corporate market. It hasn't finished falling by any means, either. BlackBerry's market capitalisation has plummeted from a high of over $70 billion to under $5 billion, while its user base has actually increased, from 8 million-odd in 2007 to almost 80 million in 2013. That hasn't been enough to stem a whopping billion dollar Q2 loss - or the haemorrhage of 4,500 jobs - 40% of the company's global workforce. This is clearly a company in terrible trouble.

It's the speed of these falls that is so stunning. And the speed of the rises, too. Of course, when Steve Jobs took to the stage back in 2007 in his polo-neck and announced the future of the mobile, many in the industry had a good old laugh. Steve Ballmer, brilliantly, led the giggling. You can still enjoy the Great Visionary's laughter today thanks to YouTube. Nokia and BlackBerry weren't far behind in the hooning. But it wasn't actually Jobs banging the nails into coffins - that took Google and Android.

Google mimicked the rise of the PC by providing an 'open top' standard for multiple manufacturers with Android. Once again, it's Mac vs PC, only Microsoft and IBM are no longer players. IBM had the sense to get out, because it could. Microsoft didn't even see it coming - not as remarkable as it may seem: those with long memories will recall the company's 'visionary' leadership missed the Internet, albeit performing a remarkable pirouette on a sixpence to recover the existentially threatening situation its arrogance and lack of awareness created. This time around, the dynamics are different and Microsoft can't depend on market dominance to bludgeon its way out of trouble. And it is in an awful lot of trouble.

But Microsoft's headlines are yet to come. Today belongs to BlackBerry, the company that's had to write off almost a billion dollars against its unsold inventory of unwanted smartphones, having missed its sales targets by over 50%. Now the company itself is for sale and it's a cheaper buy than Nokia. The question is, who wants 80 million users who are, undoubtedly almost without exception, wondering whether they'll go for the iPhone or a Samsung.

Fascinatingly, BlackBerry was to have rolled out BB Messenger apps for Android and iPhone this weekend just past, but they appear to have totally blown the rollout and have withdrawn the apps after getting hit by over a million downloads, despite only short availability on small regional platforms. Screwing this one up was a real Barbarians at the Gate 'light the smokeless cigarette with a match' moment for BlackBerry.

By the way, following that Mac vs PC history repeats itself analogy, I'd guess that makes Samsung Compaq which famously led the charge against IBM by having the sheer balls to release an 80386 machine before Big Blue and rip the PC market rug from under IBM's feet...

Nokia Lumia 920. Dubai - The Final Frontier...

Life rushing by... (Photo credit: .craig)

So I had this rather public meltdown the other day. My HTC Desire once again went into a negative feedback loop and started cluster-crashing because of some accretive Android/HTC bug that constantly pumps memory full like a narcoleptic bouncy castle pump operator.

It crashed, then rebooted (every time twinkling "Quietly Brilliant", which when a device is being bumptiously retarded is not, believe me, helpful), crashed and rebooted. I had to send a potential client a land-line number to call over LinkedIn for a scheduled call. The shame. It was as bad as asking someone to send a fax. I couldn't tweet a photo I had taken. I was cut off, in The Land That Time Forgot.

Now, to be fair, the HTC is getting long in the tooth now. It's running Frozen Mastodon or whatever early version of Android was around back then. I bought it from an authorised UAE reseller which meant, of course, that I got a Jordanian mobile with a 'Muezin' app built into the firmware. For two years, I have been finding whatever it is I want to do interrupted five times a day. It took me three days to work out how to turn the audible alarm off. A morning person, even I found 4.30am alarms wearing after a while.

The crashes made me realise I had been putting up with a subtly degrading 'user experience' for some time now. The camera's not all that - and frequently crashes. I use SIM based contacts because the only way to clear memory every time it fills is delete the phone contacts. TweetDeck and Instagram are pretty much the phone's saving graces. Meanwhile, it's sat on the desk, quietly and brilliantly crashing and re-crashing.

The decision to throw the mobile at the wall was an easy one and highly cathartic. However, I now had a perma-crashing mobile with a cracked screen. What happened next was something of a surprise.

Nokia's PR agency popped up and gave me a Lumia 920 on loan. Which is about as neat a piece of timing as you'd want to find. And pretty brave given that I had not only forsworn Nokia by hurling my N-86 at the self-same wall two years back but have been quite a vocal critic of the company as it proceeded to screw everything up over the past 18 months and more.

So far I can tell you the Lumia is a very impressive piece of hardware indeed. The first thing I've noticed is the onscreen keyboard is a quantum leap from the HTC one and usable to the point of provoking child-like gurgles of pleasure. Windows Phone is very slick and so utterly unlike Windows you wonder why they kept the name. I have reservations about sucking up the Microsoft ecosystem Kool-Aid, but I'm going along with things for now. The Lumia is heavy, in the substantial way that Nissan Patrol doors go 'thunk' when you close them. I'm not entirely sure a canary yellow phone is 'me', but beggars and all that.

I'll let you know how I get on with it. Meanwhile, I've got a book to launch...