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[Calling all developers: VisionMobile launches the most ambitious developer research to date. We also take the opportunity to look back at our past developer research to present some of the most interesting findings] We ‘ve recently launched what is probably the most ambitious mobile developer research to date – benchmarking the developer experience across 400+ developers, all 8 major platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Java ME, RIM, Windows Mobile, Flash Lite and mobile web) and the entire developer journey. The project has been sponsored by Telefonica so that the research findings can be made freely available and widely publicized. The most ambitious mobile developer research to date Our research will take a closer look at developer needs and expectations by examining all aspects of the development life cycle, from design to delivery. More specifically, we’ll be looking at platform selection, platform features & application design, code development, tools &debugging, developer support, go-to-market and application marketing – as well as covering hot topics like open source and the future of network operators. We ‘ve spent a long time in planning, peer reviewing and logistics of the research. Our methodology includes 200 one-on-one developer interviews over the phone in addition to an online survey and an in-depth hands-on platform benchmarks; we ‘ve designed this three-pronged methodology to combine quality, consistency and depth of analysis in what is the most ambitious mobile developer research to date. Calling all developers Are you a mobile developer? Register at visionmobile.com/developers to participate in our research via 30 minute one-on-one interviews. We ‘re giving away a free MWC pass, a 500 EUR Amazon voucher and 20 wallcharts of the Mobile Industry Atlas which will be drawn out to participants. But do hurry, as the free MWC pass is only valid until Friday 5 February. We have been excited in launching this project, as we believe this research will become a seminal point of reference for developer research, and provide new insights into every aspect of mobile application development. Plus – thanks to the generous sponsorship of Telefonica, the results will be freely available and widely disseminated in Q2 as part of the report Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond. Cross-platform insights from our earlier survey In view of our latest research, we’d like to share some noteworthy findings from our earlier developer research project. Our research carried out during the first 8 months of 2008 included an online survey; we polled over 350 mobile developers across 60 countries and 5 platforms: S60, Android, Java, Windows and Linux. We ‘ll share a small subset of 6 questions out of 40+ we polled during that survey – in what will probably be a small appetizer prior to the main course, i.e. our Developer Economics 2010 report coming in Q2 2010. One of the most important questions we asked was also one of the most naive ones: What is your favourite mobile OS or platform? Quite understandably, the S60 users and professionals went for S60 or Symbian in general, Android fans went for Android and so on. However, this is only half of the story.The Java group was the least ‘faithful’ to its platform, with only 62% of respondents citing Java as their favourite platform. The highest percentage of ‘faithful’ developers were those working with Linux, with 92%.  Linux was also the most popular platform, stealing away 3% of S60 and Java users and 7% of Android and Windows users. The next graph shows preferences for platforms, based on platform selected for survey. Note that all graphs are normalized to a total of 100 developers. What is your favourite platform? The next logical question after the ‘what’ is the ‘why’. Why is this your favourite OS or platform? The answer on most people’s lips was ‘ease of use’, followed by ‘rich APIs’. ‘Faster to program with’ and ‘better dev tools’ were also popular answers, while financial and self-promotion reasons were almost non-existent. How the world has changed in just under two years; post iPhone App Store, monetization and addressable market are much higher up in the agenda of mobile application developers. Why do you prefer this platform or OS? The most important factor in selecting an OS or platform was ‘feature-rich APIs’, while the least important was ‘responsive and accessible technical support’. It’s worth noting that Android developers seem to go for rich APIs, having the highest percentage, but complain about the lack of documentation (esp. in those early days of Android). Most important factors in an OS or platform In terms of the IDE, the vast majority of respondents believed theirs was lacking in terms of the UI editor for apps – which was particularly painful for Android and Java at that time. A well-integrated toolchain was another major pain point in the IDE for most developers. What does the IDE lack? It’s love or hate time! We’ll start with what developers love in their platforms. ‘Easy to use the APIs’ was the most popular answer, followed closely by ‘access to all APIs’. Linux and Android users were particularly impressed with access to all APIs, a sentiment not at all shared by their S60 colleagues. Windows users mostly went for ‘productivity due to the tools and environment’, while Java users preferred the ease of use of the APIs. What do developers love about their platform? What do developers hate about their platform? Well, most of them seemed peeved with the difficulties they faced in reaching the market; a reason that is mostly relevant to the way the market is set up (or was setup – in the pre- iPhone App Store era), rather than a fault in the platform. The main inherent fault most people found was the disparity between emulator and device performance, a view shared by all platform users except Android. Android users were also pleased with the production cost of the apps, as well as the support their platform offered. Unsurprisingly, less than half of the developers found something bad to say about their platform. What do developers hate about their platform? Of course the world of mobile development has gone through a sea of changes in the last two years. Apple introduced a single platform to target 50+ million handsets. GetJar, Apple and others paved the developer-to-consumer route to market. Google led the open source wave with the majority of the device platform published under a non-copyleft license. Adobe went back to square one introducing the Flash and Air runtimes to replace its fragmented Flash Lite installed base. And Palm left a thriving Palm OS developer community die a slow death. Mobile application development has gone through a roller-coaster history, with even more twists and turns behind the next corner. So – stay tuned. The Developer Economics 2010 will tread new ground in understanding mobile developers, across platforms, regions and across the entire developer journey – and thanks to Telefonica’s sponsorship – we ‘ll be publishing the insights from the research far and wide. Join in or spread the word! – Matos #developereconomics #operatingsystems #telefonica #nokia #symbian #developers #windowsmobile #Android #Blackberry #mobile #iphone

[Thought Android and iPhone are taking over the world? Think again. The device platforms map is more fragmented than ever, while the media hype distorts the commercial reality. Guest blogger, Guy Agin goes behind the Smartphone craze to redraw the landscape of mobile platforms] The Smartphone Craze The other day I was reading some of the usual hype-induced reports on the Smartphone revolution. Wanting to put things into perspective I pulled out some old Smartphone forecasts from 2004-2005 by the likes of IDC, Informa and Ovum. In those pre-historic days the main Smartphone contenders were Symbian and Windows. Blackberry was still an insignificant niche, and touch screen devices were still clunky stylus based UIQ phones and iPAQs. Yet surprisingly, the average Smartphone share of shipments that was forecast for 2010 was …about 30%. So even without the Apple & Google revolution fanning the flames, many analysts believed in the mass migration to Smartphones. Reality check: by looking at the numbers for the first three quarters of 2009, it appears that last year there have shipped no more than 170-180 million devices considered to be Open OS Smartphones. Indeed Symbian, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WebOS, LiMO and Maemo taken all together still only constitute about 15-17% of shipments. This percentage is in fact much lower than the 2009 Smartphone share predicted a few years ago by many research companies. Why is this interesting?  It shows that hype can cause people to overlook the simple facts.  Despite the hype, Smartphone penetration seems to be following a gradual path which will eventually, in the long run, see Smartphones dominate shipments, revenues and installed base, but Smartphones are far from being an overnight revolution. In this light, mobile operators and software providers planning device platform strategies need to look at the opportunities going forward in a balanced, realistic way and not base it on hype. Reports of death of the mid-range may have been a bit too early… The analysis de-jour is that OEMs that relied on mid-range proprietary platforms and did not have a high-end Smartphone/Open OS offering suffered badly.  “Collapse of the mid range feature phone market” they claim.  Sony Ericsson and Motorola are given as the prime examples of that collapse, both having significantly lower shipments in 2008 and 2009 and both banking on Android to lift them back up. Yet the interesting data is that the two OEMs that gained the most market share at the expense of Sony Ericsson and Motorola and grew their revenues and profits in 2008-2009 were Samsung and LG, who together make up about 30% of the market– around 330M handsets shipped in 2009. What’s both interesting and counter-intuitive is that these two Korean vendors achieved this phenomenal performance in the face of a recession with virtually no reliance on Smartphone platforms. A Telecoms Korea article estimated that in 2009 Samsung and LG have jointly shipped about 10 Million Open OS handsets, including their newly launched Android phones. That is only 10 million out of 330M (a paltry 3%!). It comes in stark contrast to the hyped picture that emerges from the Smartphone speak.  According to same article, 2010 will see almost tripling of Samsung and LG’s Smartphone shipments to about 25 million. Assuming Samsung and LG will maintain or increase their volumes in 2010, this growth, while impressive, is still very far from Smartphone domination. Unless Sony-Ericsson and Motorola achieve miracles with Android, the Google OS will not yet conquer the market in 2010. How can this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon be explained? Touch Screen Phone Does NOT equal Smartphone Despite the supposedly obvious linkage some seem to make between Smartphone /Open OS and touch screens, the reality is quite different. When Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007, rivals all rushed to come up with iPhone killers. The major benchmark set by the iPhone was not the Open OS and 3rd party applications – the App Store did not open until mid 2008. Rather it was the slickness of the UI, the finger based multi-touch, and the browsing experience. LG and Samsung were the quickest OEMs to respond, and promptly chose implement the slick UIs and touch screens on their so called “proprietary” handset platforms, not on Open OS platforms such as Symbian or Windows Mobile. Starting with a big marketing campaign for the LG Prada, a myriad of curiously named models appeared in quick succession, like LG’s Arena, Renoir, Cookie, Viewty, Chocolate and Samsung’s Tocco, Pixon, Jet, Behold, Star, Corby and Solstice, among countless others. Both Samsung and LG invested heavily in cross-platform touch screen UI layers -TouchWiz and S-Class respectively. A rough count of LG and Samsung’s currently shipping GSM/UMTS models shows over 70% of their touch screen phone models are not Smartphones. Samsung and LG have correctly identified the market demand for slick UI, touch screens and Web browsing, and have created the mass market affordable touch phone segment. Samsung’s Tocco is the prime example: a 5 Megapixel, HSDPA phone, which has sold over 9 million units. Samsung and LG’s relatively stable ASPs (Average Selling Price) which are significantly higher than Nokia’s, show that their product mix has not gravitated towards the ultra low cost markets but rather the share gains were as a result of great success of the “mass-market touch” strategy in developed markets such as Western Europe and the US. Even at the high-end flagship model segment, both Korean OEMs heavily marketed the proprietary models over their very few Smartphones. The Samsung Jet S8000’s key marketing theme was “Smarter than a Smartphone”. Head-to-head comparisons show Jet outperforming competing Samsung offerings like the Windows based Omnia. Similarly LG’s BL40 New Chocolate is presented as its ultimate multimedia phone. With 800Mhz processors, capacitive touch screens and 5 to 12 megapixel cameras, hardware requirements pose no limitations for the proprietary flagships. LG and Samsung are clearly continuing to invest in the proprietary platforms and in cross-platform UI Frameworks, as Samsung’s integration of the Dolphin browser into its SHP (Samsung Handset Platform) shows. Meanwhile, with the recently unveiled Bada platform (or UI layer) it’s become clear that Samsung is not out to create yet another Smartphone/ Open OS platform but rather enhance its proprietary SHP platform.  If Samsung and LG’s proprietary platforms continue to improve, generate sales and build market share, it is difficult to see them vanish anytime soon. Are “dumb-phones” really becoming extinct? Clearly some RTOS phone platforms have fallen by the wayside, and it is certain that over the long term, older Operating Systems are bound to be marginalized or end their lives. But those feature phone platforms that have currently survived will still have huge markets to be sold into in the next few years. The key contenders are the major OEM’s internal platforms:  Nokia’s Series 40, LG’s platform (called WISE) and Samsung SHP/Bada. There is also one platform that is licensed to multiple OEMs: Qualcomm’s Brew Mobile Platform. Qualcomm’s Brew MP is quietly gaining ground in many markets that have growth potential, especially China’s new 3G markets (and India to follow). Moreover, traditional BREW supporting CDMA operators such as Verizon Wireless, KDDI and Sprint have committed to Brew Mobile Platform going forward.  HTC, traditionally associated with Windows and Android, has recently launched HTC Smart, a Brew MP based phone, to compete in the mass-market touch screen phone segment.  I believe Brew MP’s new positioning as an open, free and Qualcomm-unattached offering has increased its appeal even for GSM/UMTS operators to utilize Brew MP as a basis for operator own-branded mid-range platforms. AT&T’s recent announcement of a major commitment to use Brew MP for a range of mass market handsets is the latest proof of this development Nokia Series 40 (and whatever is left of Series 30) still accounts for over 80% of Nokia’s shipment volumes- this amounts to at least 320 Million phones in 2009. It still covers a vast range, from ultra-low cost to mid-high end. While Nokia will no doubt increase the proportion of Symbian and Maemo over time, it is still investing in the Series 40 platform into 2010- even adding touch screen capability and if the market returns to growth in 2010, Series 40 shipments could even increase. Redrawing the platform map based on customer ownership I believe that the platform definition lines are now being redrawn, and will not follow the traditional Smartphone vs. RTOS dumb phone view. The clear definition of what constitutes a Smartphone is blurring fast. First, the view of the Smartphone as a device uniquely capable of installing full-fledged native applications is challenged by the following paradox: that LiMo and WebOS are considered “Open OS” Smartphones even though they do not (yet or ever) allow native Linux applications to be deployed. At the same time, Brew Mobile Platform, which has a native SDK and allows native application installations, is considered a feature phone platform. The appearance of Bada will surely obscure this definition further. Second, I have also shown that high specification hardware, multi-tasking and touch screens are also not the exclusive domain of Smartphones.  Third, the emergence of new cross-platform rich application environments such as Web runtime widgets, can enable Widget app stores on any supporting device, Smart or “dumb”. I believe the picture that emerges is a platforms landscape mapped by control of the end-to-end proposition. This map is bounded at its edges by two types of propositions (not including the low-end): Type 1:  the vertically integrated, high-end consumer branded device-and-service platforms of the Apple/Google/RIM /Palm type, where the platform owner or OEM is in control of UX and services (with App Stores and software updates at the epicenter). The operator can aspire to serve as a “smart-pipe” at best, as most services are delivered and managed by the platform and brand owner. Type 2:  a mid-range proposition involving platforms which are white labeled by design like LiMo, Brew MP and OMS (a customized version of Android). These are platforms that cater to tier-1 operators, where they can define and manage customized UX and services, including Web, multimedia content, data sync, device and software management.  This is classically typified by INQ and Three’s BREW based phones, Vodafone’s LiMo-based 360, and AT&T’s plans outlined earlier. The emphasis here is on services, where consumer access to an application store (for widgets, Java or native apps) is a service but is not as critical to the overall proposition. In between these two there are hybrids, notably tier-1 OEMs like Nokia and Samsung, who are attempting to build their own end-to-end service propositions with their device platforms (Symbian & Maemo for Nokia, Bada for Samsung) while still collaborating with their traditional operator customers on co-branded services and customized device propositions. Google’s Android partnership with key operators such T-Mobile also falls into this hybrid category. The bets are spreading As of late 2009, the only companies who are shipping true Open OS Smartphones in mass volumes are Nokia (Symbian), RIM (Blackberry), Apple (iPhone) and HTC (Windows Mobile, now Android). This will no doubt start to change over the course of time as Android shipments start to ramp up and the rest of the platforms realize their growth potential, but it is still not an overnight revolution. Looking forward, this thesis shows that the market will be much more diverse than the simplistic notion that everyone either wants an App Store capable iPhone or Droid, or alternatively, an ultra-low cost phone to make phone calls. There is many more commercial dynamics at play, making up a complex platform map which is driven by customer ownership. In 2009 the number of available device software platforms effectively grew, creating more fragmentation in the industry, not less. There are clearly mid-range segments and geographical markets with varying needs, which can be addressed with various software platforms, not necessarily in the traditional view of Smartphones vs. RTOS “dumb phones”. Simply betting on one or two platforms to rule the industry is not a sensible plan. – Guy [Guy Agin has been working in the mobile industry since the days of the Palm Pilot. He has product managed diverse mobile solutions for many companies in the mobile industry. He is currently heading strategy and strategic business development activities at Red Bend Software. He can be reached at guy [dot] agin /a/t  redbend.com] #operatingsystems #rim #nokia #smartphone #lg #motorola #symbian #windowsmobile #sonyericsson #Android #Blackberry #iphone #samsung

[Where is the app store frenzy heading after all?  Guest blogger Francisco Kattan discusses why it’s a winner-take-all game] 2009 was the year of the app store wannabes.  Following the remarkable success of the Apple App Store, OEMs, mobile platform vendors, mobile operators, and traditional aggregators either created new app stores or repositioned their existing offerings as app stores.  There are now between 24 to 32 app stores depending on who is counting (see Distimo’s app store report and the WIP App Store Wiki for reference), and more stores are surely to follow.  However, key questions remain about how the app store landscape will emerge after the current period of hysteria subsides and the dust settles. – Are we going to see many app stores on each handset? – Will app malls emerge to host multiple app stores within? – Will operator stores gain critical mass? Andreas Constantinou wrote an excellent article that defines the app store building blocks and predicts a “dime-a-dozen” app store future.  I will build on this post, but will offer an alternative view of how the landscape will evolve. It’s a Winner-Take-All Contest If we were to extrapolate the current trend, we could expect a future where each handset will host many app stores.   An LG Android device on the Orange network would have the LG App Store, the Android Market, and the Orange App Shop.  The Verizon version would have the V CAST store in place of the Orange App Shop.  On top of this, you could add the Getjar multiplatform store and several specialty stores for say, games, health, and productivity apps to name just a few.  Can you imagine the mess this would create for the user experience?  Which app store do I launch? Which apps do I find on which store? Are apps duplicated on multiple stores?  Are the prices the same across stores or do I need to shop around?  Are the versions of the apps consistent across stores? Fortunately when the dust settles consolidation will occur and one app store will command nearly all the market share on each device.  Sure there may be a couple “also rans” with a small share, but as history has shown us, these two-sided platform battles tend to result in winner-take-all contests (see definition of two-sided markets here).   We’ve seen similar battles already play out on the web with Amazon winning e-commerce, eBay winning auctions, and Google winning search. Why winner-take-all markets happen has already been well documented.  Economists Frank and Cook documented this phenomenon with their Winner Take All Society book and Rich Skrenta wrote a nice post on the battle for search supremacy that led to Google’s reign. In two-sided markets there are two sets of users (consumers and developers in the case of app stores) and once both sets of users pick a winner, it is very hard for competitors to gain much share. To cut to the chase, the app store battle in mobile will also result in a winner-take-all contest for the following reasons: Low switching costs.  Given how easy it is for a consumer to switch from one app store to another, any advantage of one store, even if small, will cause more consumers to visit the better store. Why buy at the world’s second best store when the best store is only a click away?  This initial advantage could be in terms of time-to-market, quality or quantity of applications, user experience, or pricing. The word spreads.  Word of mouth, accelerated by social networks, will cause a snowball effect attracting more and more users to the store with the initial advantage. Developers vote.  As more consumers visit the winning store, more and more developers will prioritize that store for their applications offering that store an even greater advantage. Economies of scale.  As one store gets significantly larger, it will enjoy greater economies of scale and therefore a cost advantage over competing stores. A positive feedback loop cements the ultimate winner.  The more consumers that visit one store, the more developers will create apps for that store, and the greater the economies of scale the winner will enjoy. This battle will play out on a device by device basis with the Apple App Store already the winner on Apple devices (to be accurate, there was no real battle in this case as Apple’s policy does not allow competing stores).  A battle will play out for say RIM devices on the Verizon network (V CAST versus App World), another one for Android devices on the Orange network, etc.  So while we are initially headed for a “dime-a-dozen” app store landscape as Andreas predicted, over time we will see significant consolidation.  And as the number handset platforms themselves consolidate (surely to happen, but this is outside the scope of this post), we’ll have even fewer stores. The Two Exceptions that Prove the Rule Adult Content.  Niche stores will exist to satisfy needs that, by policy, are not met by the winning store.  Adult content stores such as MiKandi are a clear example.  Another example is Cydia, an app store for jail broken iPhones. Enterprise App Stores.  App stores designed for IT organizations to manage application distribution and provisioning within an enterprise have unique requirements that the consumer stores will not meet.  In addition, the low switching costs described above do not apply to enterprise stores.  Examples of Enterprise stores include Mobile Iron and Ondeego. Think Department Store, not App Mall Rather than app malls that host multiple stores, the winning app stores will be like department stores with applications organized by category.  Games, health, productivity, entertainment, etc. will be departments within a big store, not specialty stores within a mall. For clarification I’m defining a “mall” from the point of view of the customer experience, as in the real world.  Customers walk into a mall and discover multiple branded stores, each with its own checkout process.  An example of an app mall is the now defunct Nokia Download. You may recall that Nokia Download (formerly called Nokia Content Discoverer) touted its “advanced shopping mall experience” when it was announced, hosting multiple stores such as Handango and Jamster (called aggregators at the time). The mall concept does not work because it hurts the user experience for no extra value:  users end up clicking on unknown store brands adding an extra layer of user interface that gets in the way of the app discovery process.  Moreover, if each store in the mall requires users to enter a form of payment the user experience suffers even more.  Although there are more reasons why Nokia Download failed, the user experience of its mall concept was an important factor and as a result Nokia is now busy copying the more successful department store model with the Ovi Store. This does not mean that there won’t be aggregators behind the scenes.  In fact, the ingestion process could include a publisher like Symbian Horizon or a syndication service like Getjar’s.  However from a user experience point of view, it’s a department store, not a mall.  Amazon is a good model for the winning app stores.  There may be many sellers behind the scenes, but it looks much more like a department store than a mall.  There is one prominent store brand with many departments, a single shopping cart, and a single checkout process. Will operator stores gain critical mass? Once upon a time operators had a virtual monopoly for the distribution of mobile applications (depending on the region). Apple changed all that, of course, and the tables are now turned resulting in a developer exodus away from operators (for more on this see My Number One Wish for Operators).   To regain developer mindshare many operators are launching their own “app store style” stores, implementing many of the lessons learned from Apple, including the 70% rev share, developer set pricing, and click-through agreements.  Verizon announced V CAST, Orange has App Shop, O2 is testing Litmus, AT&T has App Center, Vodafone has 360, etc.  But will these operator stores succeed?  I think it depends on the type of device (feature phone vs. smartphone) and on the size of the operator. Operators lose the app store battle on smartphones, but win on feature phones Operators have a natural disadvantage to attract developers compared to the smartphone platforms because they are more fragmented.  There are dozens of operators compared to only a handful of smartphone platforms.  Developers are better off working with the small number of smartphone platforms to get worldwide distribution across all operators instead of targeting each operator separately (each with their own SDK, certification requirements, business terms, and fragmented device line-up).  To compensate for this disadvantage operators would have to add much more value with their own stores.  Carrier billing and access to network APIs are areas where operators can add value, but these capabilities are likely to also become available on the native handset stores.  Operators can also differentiate by tapping into their huge advertising budgets to market their apps, enticing developers whose apps are difficult to discover given the unlimited shelf space in the stores. Another option for operators is to increase store switching costs for their customers by not preloading competing stores on devices they sell.  This would require customers who want to shop elsewhere to find, download, and install other stores on their own.   Verizon Wireless is a good example of an operator trying this strategy.  Verizon does not preload RIM’s App World in favor of its own (upcoming) V CAST store.  However, as operator influence over smartphone providers continues to erode (a trend surely to be accelerated as devices such as Google’s Nexus One are sold directly to consumers), this option will go away forcing operators to truly differentiate their stores, or else. We’ll see how this plays out, but operators will likely lose the app store battle on smartphones unless they find a way to significantly differentiate and do it fast before the native stores consolidate their advantage. The battle for app stores on feature phones is quite different for two reasons: This category of devices is much more fragmented and operators can gain an advantage by providing a common platform across them to attract developers. This approach neutralizes the fragmentation advantage that OEMs enjoy in the smartphone category, as discussed above, and is precisely the strategy that AT&T just announced at CES: AT&T will launch Qualcomm’s BREW Mobile Platform across its mid-tier devices to attract developers for its AppCenter store Operators enjoy much more influence over feature phone specs and content than on smartphones.  This will enable many operators to exclusively preload their own stores on these devices essentially blocking alternative stores. Although the smartphone category is where the growth is, there is still a very large and mostly underserved market at the high end of the feature phone category.  These devices have large displays and often full QWERTY keyboards (touch or physical), representing a large untapped market for mobile applications that operators can serve. However only tier 1 operators are large enough to attract developers to their own stores.  Even tier 1 operators are better off getting together to form a much larger market to attract developers as we have seen with the JIL alliance or the collaboration between AT&T, Orange and America Móvil (just announced at CES).  Smaller operators will have to rely on third party stores that can aggregate applications and syndicate them across multiple operators.  A good example of an operator pursuing this strategy in North America is Sprint.  Sprint has announced that it will remove its own application offerings from its smartphone line-up and will partner with an external aggregator to launch a white label store for its feature phone line-up.  Other operators will have to follow the same approach. What are your thoughts?  Do you buy into the winner-take-all argument?  Are we going to see app malls or department stores?  What role do you believe operator stores will play? – Francisco [Francisco Kattan has worked in the mobile industry for 10 years and has deep expertise across the entire ecosystem, including devices, operators, developers, and content providers.  Francisco has held leadership roles at Edify, Openwave, Adobe, and currently Alcatel Lucent where he is Senior Director, Developer Ecosystem.  You can follow Francisco via his blog, on Twitter and he can be reached at franciscok [/at/] stanfordalumni.org. This post reflects the author’s personal opinion and not necessarily that of his employer.] * As an aside, the launch of the iPhone changed the ecosystem so dramatically that we need a new way to measure time in mobile.  Any discussion about how the mobile ecosystem works must specify Ai or Bi (After or Before the iPhone) in the same way historians use BC and AD to date events. #vodafone #operatingsystems #ATampT #nokia #orange #sprint #verizon #operatorstores #developers #Android #iphone #appstores

[In our third annual Mobile Megatrends 2010 research we look at the future of web platforms, app stores, revenue models, open source, mobile recommendations, OEM monetisation, and operator strategies] After many months in the making, we ‘ve released our annual Mobile Megatrends 2010. It’s our third and biggest Megatrends research we ‘ve published to date featuring 64 juicy slides with detailed analysis on the future of mobile. [slideshare id=2899240&doc=mobilemegatrends2010visionmobileresearch-100112163016-phpapp02] So what are the overarching trends of mobile in 2010? We ‘ve covered 8 core themes: 1. Vertical integration: one way street or quick detour? We present a novel way of studying the evolution of the mobile industry, from 1985 to 2010+ and the trend-setting milestones for handset OEMs and network operators. We use this tool to demonstrate how handset OEMs have evolved twice as fast as network operators and how vertical integration (as practiced by Apple, RIM, Nokia et al) is a 20-year cyclic trend, not a panacea. 2. The evolution of revenue models. We re-introduce Value Quadrants, our novel tool for mapping the evolution of revenue models, and present how revenue flows are changing in 2010 and beyond. Here we discuss upstream monetisation, productisation of systemware and completely new revenue models that are emerging such as per inventory, per reach and per activation. 3. App Stores: the long-tail future. We compare the top-5 App Stores across their key figures (installed base, downloads, applications, revenues and revenue share). More importantly, we go behind the scenes to uncover the five key ingredients of the app store recipe, and why a succesful recipe must fuse ingredients from very opposite ends of the value chain. We also review the evolution of app stores throughout 2000-2012 and place predictions on five key tenets that will determine the future of app stores; abundance, diversity, co-existence, low barriers and the dominance of retailing. 4. Web platforms: why the future of software development is still elusive. In this trend we review the evolution of the mobile web, from WAP to widgets and WebKit. We compare and contrast 3rd parties (developers) vs 2nd parties (handset OEMs and their partners) to demonstrate how the need and 2nd and 3rd parties are diametrically opposite. We then show how web platforms address very few OEM needs and therefore why the web is simply a means to an end to attracting developers, but little else. 5. In Open is the New Closed: how companies are using open source to further own agendas we update our seminal research on licenses vs governance models. We then poke under Symbian Foundation, Google Android and LiMo Foundation to show how each of these initiatives is using open source as part of a capitalist governance, rather than a socialist one that the open source moniker implies. 6. Recommendations everywhere: raising the bar for mobile services offers a state-of-the-market update on one of the most underhyped sectors in mobile: recommendation (a.k.a personalisation) solutions. The analysis goes into the many types of recommendation solutions, key suppliers for each and reviews 8 key vendors in recommendation technology: Xiam, Changing Worlds, Ericsson, Loomia, Pontis, July Systems, Olista and Choice Stream. The trend analysis concludes with an outlook on recommendation systems, including the next challenges in academic research and commercial evolution, and why we expect M&As to ensue in this sector. 7. In OEM Monetisation: products, services or distribution we present a ‘reverse engineering’ of the mobile value stack to uncover where are the remaining unique assets handset OEMs can tap into. We then present two promising strategies for OEM monetisation; inventory distribution and integrated device+UI design. 8. In the final trend Operator futures: bit-pipes or supermarkets? we discuss 7 strategies with which operators can change course away from a bit-pipe future. Based on a top-down analysis of the remaining ‘value pockets’ in the mobile value stack we present our theses on unique brand deliverables, matchmaking between consumers+brands, customer and service analytics, reach-beyond-VISA, in-the-hands experience, idle-screen monetisation and other smart-pipe strategies. We ‘ve already presented earlier versions of our Mobile Megatrends as part of closed customer events and conferences, including as part of Rutberg’s invitation-only Wireless Influencers event in San Diego. The next presentation of the Mobile Megatrends 2010 is taking place in early February in Lund, Sweden courtesy of Cybercom. To request a on-site presentation of Mobile Megatrends please contact us. Comments welcome as always, – Andreas follow me twitter: @andreascon We always welcome guest posts in our blog. Are you a bright thinker looking for bright readers? Drop us a line.

The VisionMobile website, and our blog in particular, has seen a lot of action in 2009: 59,000 unique visitors from 176 countries, with blog articles each reaching into 10s of thousands of views. We also made it into the Top 100 Analyst Blogs and are eagerly pushing towards the top-10! What is it that makes the VisionMobile blog tick? Our blog motto is ‘Distilling market noise into market sense’; delivering high quality, informative and substantiated articles, with passion and attention to detail, that help clarify the competitive market landscape in telecoms. 10 most influential blog articles for 2009 For this end-of-year article, we‘ve analysed the top-10 most influential articles that appeared on the VisionMobile blog in 2009, based on the visitor views, tweets and comments. Here’s the top-10 finalists: 1. The 100 million club: some surprising facts about mobile software The H2 2008 update to the watch list of software products with more than 100 million cumulative shipments (most viewed article with 13,500+ views, 16 tweets and 6 comments). 2. Why the LiMo Foundation needs to go back to the drawing board A long, hard look into the LiMo Foundation and the need for re-positioning (10,000+ views, 11 tweets and 6 comments) 3. The Amazon Kindle: More revolutionary for the mobile telecoms industry than the iPhone ever was The Kindle model – the shape of revenue models to come? (10,000+ views, 31 tweets and 8 comments) 4. Will Legacy Smartphone Platforms Keep-up with iPhone and Android? How do Legacy Smartphone platforms fare against the much-hyped giants? (7,000+ views, 54 tweets, 22 comments) 5. Mobile App Stores: The Next Two Years An overview of the app stores market, complete with profiles of major players and the two-year outlook for app stores (most tweeted with 91 tweets and most commented with 29 comments. 7,000+ views) 6. Mobile widgets: market review and commercial reality The what, where, who and how of mobile widgets, complete with comparative research for 8 vendors (6,500+ views, 12 tweets, 13 comments) 7. Open is the New Closed The divergence between open source licenses and governance models (6,300+ views, 48 tweets and 6 comments) 8.NaaS: Network as a Service, a new business model for network operators An analysis of the emerging Network-as-a-Service market (5,900+ views, 10 tweets, 11 comments) 9. Mobile Megatrends 2009 The annual megatrends report looks at the overarching trends of mobile for 2009 (5,500+ views, 22 tweets, 8 comments) 10. Feature phones and the RTOS – the ignored 85% of the market An important analysis on how feature phones and RTOSes comprise the vast majority of the market (5,300+ views, 24 tweets, 9 comments) 5 most influential guest articles in 2009 The VisionMobile blog is a space where industry insiders exchange views on the fast-changing mobile market and the trends that define the future direction of telecoms. This year we hosted articles by 11 industry insiders, who contributed their vast knowledge and experience in the mobile ecosystem. The top 5 guest articles for 2009, rated in terms of views, comments and tweets, are presented below. 1. Stefan Constantinescu: The Amazon Kindle: More revolutionary for the mobile telecoms industry than the iPhone ever was The Kindle model – the shape of revenue models to come? (10,000+ views, 31 tweets and 8 comments) 2. Michael Vakulenko: Will Legacy Smartphone Platforms Keep-up with iPhone and Android? How do Legacy Smartphone platforms fare against the much-hyped giants? (7,000+ views, 54 tweets, 22 comments) 3. Ben Hookway: Feature phones and the RTOS – the ignored 85% of the market An important analysis on how feature phones and RTOSes comprise the vast majority of the market (5,300+ views, 24 tweets, 9 comments) 4. Florent Stroppa: Socializing the mobile address book: market overview and trends A detailed analysis of the market of social address book services (4,400+ views, 31 tweets, 10 comments) 5. Gabor Torok: Android and the threat of fragmentation How much fragmentation is there in Android and how does it impact developers? (4,200+ views, 20 tweets, 3 comments) We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our guest bloggers for 2009: Andy V. O’ Lay, Antony Edwards, Ben Hookway, Elad Granot, Florent Stroppa, Gabor Torok, Michael Vakulenko, Raj Singh, Stefan Constantinescu, Thomas Menguy and Wouter Deelman. We’ve already lined up several guest blog articles for 2010, and are open to more submissions. If you have an original thesis or analysis and wish to share it with our 2,000+ industry insider readers, drop us a line. Most influential article for 2009 The Mobile App Stores: The Next Two Years article is clearly the most influential for 2009 with 91 tweets, 29 user comments and 6,923 views. The article examines the fast-emerging mobile app store market and profiles the five most prominent app stores today in terms of distribution model, installed base, downloads, applications and revenues. Also, those looking for insights will find within an analysis of the five key elements of an app store and their predicted evolution over the next two years. Behind the blog scenes We ‘ve embarked on several pioneering research projects in 2009; recommendation engines, mobile widgets, app stores evolution, open source economics and many more projects we can’t talk about 😉 We also hit the headlines with four products in 2009: Mobile Industry Atlas (wallchart).The Industry Atlas (2nd edition) is a visual who’s who of the mobile industry covering more than 800 companies in 47 market sectors. Be sure to check the vastly expanded 3rd edition of the Atlas coming out early 2010, with more than 1,200 companies across 70 categories! (check out this video intro to the Atlas wallchart) 100 million club (watch list). 2009 saw the release of two updates to our ‘100 million club’, the watch list of all mobile software products that have been embedded in more than 100 million devices. Our latest report includes product shipments up to H1 2009 and market penetration figures for the 30 most successful software products, developed by 24 companies (download report here). Mobile Megatrends 2009 (presentation). Our annual megatrends report looks at the overarching trends of mobile in 2009; 8 Centres of Gravity, Mass Consolidation in the Software Industry, Understanding Revenue Model Innovation, why Open is the New Closed, the recipes behind Application Stores, Network as a Service and Mobile Service Analytics. See also Cybercom’s upcoming seminar on Mobile Megatrends 2010, held in Malmö, Sweden, where VisionMobile’s Reseach Director, Andreas Constantinou, will be presenting our latest edition of Megatrends (view presentation here) Active Idle Screen 2009-2011 (report). The active idle screen is the most premium real-estate on the handset for service delivery and promotion. In this report we review the solutions which offer zero-click access to services, information and promotion on the handset idle screen. We also examine the market trends and opportunities that will determine the billion-unit question: who will own the screen? (download report here) What’s coming in 2010? Lots of planning has gone into 2010 already; we ‘re working a reinvention of one of our existing products that is bound to pick your interest and prove an invaluable research tool. We are also embarking on a major benchmark project that will prove seminal for many future reports across the mobile ecosystem. But we ‘re getting ahead of ourselves 🙂 For now, and within this last post of 2009, we’d like to wish everyone a happy holiday season! – Matos

[Samsung recently perplexed the mobile world with the introduction of its “new smartphone platform” bada. Most commentators have already dismissed bada as an ill-conceived concept and moved on, but does bada actually make a lot of sense? Guest blogger Antony Edwards looks at what’s driving Samsung.] This article is also available in Chinese. Yet another platform to target is the last thing most mobile developers need. So when Samsung announced its new bada platform earlier this month it was met first by confusion, and then ridicule as it was further revealed that bada applications must be written in C++, the SDK will only run on Windows, and there won’t actually be any bada devices for some time. Most of the technical press have already dismissed bada simply as an ill-conceived concept. But the creation of bada, and what it signals about how the mobile industry will evolve over the next three years, is very significant; especially what it says about the changing attitudes towards Android. Samsung makes most of its profit in the smartphone segment, delivering hundreds of well-designed models for operators and regions all over the world. But these are volatile times for the smartphone segment. Android is bringing more-and-more competition into smartphones, most importantly competitors such as Acer and Dell from the PC manufacturing world who are content with gross margins far below those expected (and sorely needed!) by traditional smartphone OEMs. And at the same time as competition increases, traditional OEMs are finding it more-and-more difficult to differentiate themselves in an Android world. The inevitable result is a decline in average sales price (ASP); Samsung’s ASP decreased 3% in Q3 2009. Similarly, HTC who focuses entirely on the smartphone segment with Android and Windows Mobile saw their ASP decrease by 4.4% between Q2 and Q3 and expect a further decrease of 5% in Q4. Motorola released their Android-based Droid device in Q3, but after the initial excitement of being the first Android 2.0 device in the market, it has now been labelled a “me too” smartphone and its price is being repeatedly reduced. 2010 has already been hailed “the year of Android” with an unprecedented line-up of Android devices coming to market from 10s of manufacturers. So, how are manufacturers like Samsung going to stand out in this crowded landscape? Margin pressure is not only coming from consumers due to a lack of device differentiation, but also from mobile network operators who have complete visibility of Android device-creation economics and are demanding cost-based prices from the OEMs. How can OEMs retain the high margins they’ve enjoyed for so long and that their shareholders have come to expect? bada may not be the right answer, but it doesn’t seem like Android is either. All traditional mobile phone OEMs (except Nokia) are making Android devices, and they have all increased their adoption of Android through 2009. With their bottom-lines under serious threat from the economic downturn, ever increasing operating costs, and Apple’s appropriation of 30% of the profit from the market, the low cost of device-creation promised by Google has proven very tempting. bada is the first sign that an OEM is looking a bit further ahead and realising that while cost of device-creation may be low in an Android world, there’s also little differentiation, and that means ever lower margins. The struggle to maintain margins has always driven significant changes in the mobile phone industry from cameras, to open platforms, to integrated on-line services; and as Android puts margins under increasing threat we should expect more-and-more major changes in 2010. Samsung are right that they had to do something. Following the footsteps of Apple, and to some extent RIM, the current answer to differentiation is “own the whole stack”, and so that’s exactly what Samsung is doing. Will bada save Samsung’s margins? Maybe. Probably not. But the core motivation for change is correct, and from that perspective bada definitely makes sense. – Antony [Antony Edwards has been working in mobile since he discovered how to program his Apple Newton 12 years ago. During 7 years at Symbian in a mix of engineering and marketing roles, he worked with all the major OEMs and operators, and continues to be a keen observer of the ever-changing OEM platform strategies.] What do you think? Can bada work? Can OEMs achieve high-margins on Android devices? Does the appearance of a Google-branded phone change your opinion of bada? Comments and feedback appreciated.

[There’s lots more than meets the eye in augmented reality. Research Director, Andreas Constantinou talks about Augmented Economics, a new form of economy where value is created by superimposing virtual value on top of our physical world] Economics is an area of continuous research, both academic and industrial. Once in a while, new revenue models or new markets surface, which are followed by a string of industry capital movements. Take for example new revenue models being pioneered in the Internet like the cost-per-follower (ie being paid based on how many people are following you on twitter) or in the mobile domain (pay-per-app-activation when B2B provisioning applications on a device). New markets are continually formed around new solution types; in the fast-moving mobile industry for example, App Stores,  Social Addressbooks and Service Analytics are  new solution markets which emerged only in the last two years. What’s more interesting is when entire new economies emerge, ie new systems for creating value and monetising from that value. I would argue that in the last few years we have been witnessing the creation of Augmented Economics, ie the economy formed by superimposing value on top of our physical world. But let me take a step back to explain. There’s been a lot of buzz recently around augmented reality browsers. These browsers bring augmented reality to the mass market; now you can scan through the surroundings through your phone’s camera and see information superimposed, from advertising to siteseeing in real time. Augmented reality browsers have been made possible in a mass market sense thanks to the GPS and compass sensors  first appearing within Android and iPhone devices. The value in augmented reality browsing is in the connection between the physical world (what the camera captures) and the commercial information that is displayed on top. Already a number of startups have emerged to capture value in augmented reality browsers like Metaio, Total Immersion, Zugara, Layar, Mobilizy and Tonchidot (see here for a detailed review of augmented reality startups) In a sense, Facebook is no different. Facebook is a platform that overlays virtual games and applications on top of the people profiles and mesh of relationships that exist in the physical world. Facebook is indeed a connecting platform between the physical world and 1000s of virtual worlds created by third parties. Facebook monetises through on-site ads for now, and moving to off-site ads, self-service ads and virtual goods which is expected to increase ARPU (average revenue per user) from $0.25 to $0.50 according to Fred Wilson, a prominent VC. Flirtomatic, a popular mobile dating service in the UK, Germany and USA, monetises by offering social capital for sale. Flirtomatic allows users to buy social capital; users can send virtual ice cubes, auction themselves to the top of the service homepage, or even buy Ego services so they can eliminate bad ratings on their profile or bend the voting rules (see here for a good review of the service by Tomi Ahonen). Flirtomatic again monetises by bonding together the physical world with the virtual world where users can defy physics. There’s lots more examples. – Monopoly City Streets creates capital by allow users to buy virtual real-estate (viewable only through your browser) in exchange for real money. – Cyworld, Everquest, World of Warcraft and Second Life are virtual worlds which monetise by subscriptions, virtual goods, virtual currency exchanges and ads by physical world brands. Fortune reported that the market in China for virtual goods is larger than the market for online advertising with Tencent, China’s largest messaging+Avatar+social networking service, generating $1 billion  in revenues in 2008, 90% of which is from virtual goods, as cited in the Business Model Database. – A barcode (or QR Code, Data Matrix and Ezcode)  allows a mobile device to connect a physical product in a store or a poster in the train station to a wealth of online information, such as where the product ingredients came from, or when is the next train (the Economist has a good update on the commercialisation of 2D codes). Again monetisation is by providing the connection between physical and virtual worlds. – Anoto, a Swedish company, produces technology to connect a digital pen with the origin of the paper that it’s writing on. For example, by writing on a business card, you can send that to the contact directly, or by writing on a recruitment form, you can have your job application dispatched immediately. Anoto monetises by acting as the link between the physical world (pen and paper) and the virtual world (that of service providers of business information, recruiters, etc). There’s probably lots more examples where companies have formed connections between the physical world and countless virtual worlds. And as Clayton Christensen et al argue in Skate to Where the Money Will Be, those who control the interdependent links in a value chain capture the most profit. In other words, the platform that links the physical with the virtual worlds stands to profit the most. It’s amazing how value can be created out of thin air.. in this case creating social capital that allows users to ‘augment’ the physics of the real world (time, money or influence). And as S Schaffer said the next Google might be a physical world connection company. That’s the world of Augmented Economics. Looking forward to your comments, – Andreas follow me on Twitter: @andreascon

[2010 might be the year when the mobile address book will become social. Guest blogger Florent Stroppa analyses the market of social address book services, the main actors and the trends.] Recent events such as the launch of the INQ1 phone by 3, the acquisition of Zyb by Vodafone and the acquisition Cellity by Nokia, seem to prove that operators are finally beginning to appreciate the importance of the address book.  The boring address book is about to be rebooted with social address book services. So, what is a social address book service and why are contacts so important? Who are the market players and why is this all happening now? Behind the social address book Network-based address book services are not really new. Back in 2004, Orange UK launched a network address book with Voxmobili allowing mobile synchronization of contacts and calendar events with a Web-based service. While initially a niche market, those services are now widely deployed and most of the Tier-1 operators provide a mobile synchronization or backup service. Those solutions are usually based on the OMA DS SyncML protocol and are integrated within the mobile operator infrastructure. A social address book (SAB) is an online service which allows end-users to save their mobile contacts, synchronize them and link them up with their social network profiles. The contacts are no longer static, as they display presence, location and status updates. A social address book is usually coupled with a new mobile address book application, a type of ‘phonebook 2.0‘ which similarly transforms static contacts into a Skype-like buddy list. The company I worked for, Voxmobili (recently acquired by OnMobile), developed last year a product called (simply) Phonebook 2.0, and which happens to be one of the Google ADC 1 finalists. Why is the mobile address book so important? Along with the other core applications like the idle screen, the dialer, the call logs or the inbox, the mobile address book is one of the most frequently used applications on the phone. The address book is: The central enabler of voice and messaging. In a previous article, The Mechanics behind the Mobile User Interface, Andreas Constantinou clearly presented the place of the address book in user’s journey, where most calls are initiated from the address book. The ultimate retention tool. The mobile address book is the most precious vault of people’s life-long connections and relationships. While it is relatively easy to build an internet address book from email messages, it is much more difficult to retrieve a mobile address book in case of phone loss. The social address book service ensures that contact information follows the mobile subscribers, not the SIM cards or handsets. T-Mobile US with the MyFaves and Contacts service has executed this strategy amazingly well. At the heart of customer relationship. New mobile players such as Apple and Google are taking a piece of customer relationship from the operators. By integrating Facebook, Linkedin, GTalk and MSN into the address book, the operators have the opportunity to be back at the center of customer’s attention. Who are involved in this new market? The social address book landscape is one of the most fascinating in the industry as all the major players seem to be involved: mobile operators, handset manufacturers, internet giants, white-label solution providers and Silicon Valley start-ups: Mobile operators: 3 was the first operator to launch a phonebook 2.0 application with the INQ 1 phone. They will not remain alone very long. A video leaked on Techcrunch UK about a service called People that Vodafone is about to launch. Internet giants: Google and Microsoft have also launched synchronization services with Google Sync and MyPhone. Those services started from their webmail services, they introduced a while ago presence and lately synchronization of those contacts. Google also added location with Google Latitude and launched (quite silently) Google Profile. As usual, Google is launching services which are not initially completely integrated but we can already see where they are going. Internet service provider: Comcast acquired Plaxo last year. They are now putting a social address book in the center of their online services. Handset manufacturers: Apple has developed its own MobileMe service. Some rumors talk about a possible social networking app within iTunes. In turn, Nokia launched OVI Contacts and acquired cellity. They are also launching a quite impressive Maemo-based phone, the N900, with Lifecasting. HTC has launched a phonebook 2.0 integrated to the Hero, while Palm provides the Synergy service which links all contacts in a single view on its Pre device. B2C start-ups: Many start-ups like Skydeck are in this space. We can find mature ones like Plaxo and smaller ones like ZYB and cellity. Most of them have already been acquired. Given the big players involved, I doubt there will manage to grow significantly their user base if they remain independent. White-label network address book providers [updated]: Here we can find Colibria, Critical Path , Funambol , FusionOne and OnMobile . FusionOne powers the Verizon service, Funambol provides the Earthlink and AOL solutions while OnMobile is behind the Orange , Telstra , T-Mobile and Turkcell services. Apart from those actors, the mobile industry has started several new standards initiatives. The OMA is working on the CAB (Converged Address Book) specification and the GSMA has released the RCS (Rich Communication Suite) specification. RCS is now a live commercial service in South Korea with KT, LG Telecom and SK Telecom providing an interoperable service. Why is this happening now? The success of Facebook and Skype has shown that people-centric services are highly in demand by end-users. The idea of transforming a static list of phone numbers into a convenient view of relationships has become natural. Technology is another important factor. The synchronization protocols (SyncML or Exchange Active Sync) are mature and widely deployed while mobile platforms are much more open. For instance, on Android, all applications are created equal which means that any developer can create their own flavor of address book. The Internet platform is also more open than ever: social networking sites, Webmail and even Skype provide rich API allowing an easy integration. Who will own the address book? There is no simple answer. There will be competitions and “coopetitions” between operators, handset manufacturers, social networking sites and webmail providers to control it. Some handset manufacturers and small operators won’t even try to enter this game, while some others will play an important role. I believe that in the long run, this service will benefit the end-users. They will still own their data, they will enjoy a much simpler communication experience, they will never lose their life-long connections and they will be able to use their contacts across multiple devices and multiple applications. Looking forward to your comments. – Florent [Florent Stroppa is Product Director at OnMobile, the largest mobile VAS provider in India. He previously worked as Director of Product Management at Voxmobili, a Paris-based company specialized in social address books and synchronization solutions for mobile operators.]

Here at VisionMobile we continually strive to bring our community of readers the ‘insider’ views on the fast-changing mobile market. Since our very first blog post in January 2005 (Symbian: only one way to go) the blog readership has grown immensely – for example, the most popular posts have exceeded 10,000 reads, like the The Mobile Application Store phenomenon, The significance of Google’s Android and Flash Lite: Facts and Figures. Readers to the blog have grown steadily to around 2,100 readers as of July 2009 as you can see from the graph below. There’s some jitter due to the way Feedburner is measuring blog readers (you can see the live count on the blog sidebar, too). Website visitors have been increasing continually, too, averaging over 7,000 unique visitors per month, as of July 2009. A key part of this has been ensuring high quality of articles; although at the expense of posting new articles only once every week or so. Who’s behind the VisionMobile community? There’s tons more stats we could dig up, but we were missing a key aspect: who are the readers of the blog? Who is behind the VisionMobile community and what do they want to see on our site? – Blog readers 2,000+ via RSS and email – Unique visitors/month: 7,000+, driven by content and twitter referrals – Reader profile: industry insiders, bloggers, developers? Community survey There’s lot’s more to ask, from You that is, the reader. Are we covering the topics of interest to you? Can we be improving our analysis and articles? Is there a report that you’d like to see us working on? Does our content really match our audience? As an incentive, we are running a draw for five free Mobile Industry Atlas wallcharts for survey participants. The survey will close on Wednesday 30 September and we will notify the winner by email. What will we do with the results? We’ll take your feedback seriously. If there is something that we are not doing right, we’ll address these points constructively. We’ll also publish the results of the survey so that you can also get a better idea of the who else in your community is visiting this site. So – help us map the community by completing the community survey. Thanks – and keep the conversation going, – Vanessa #survey

[BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 were designed years ago – the traditional strengths of these software platforms are rapidly becoming liabilities in the fast-paced smartphone market. Guest blogger Michael Vakulenko answers a critical question: are user interface face-lifts, application stores or even going open source enough for the legacy smartphone platforms to stand-up to the challenges posed by iPhone and Android?] The unprecedented success of iPhone changed market requirements almost overnight; today smartphones are all about smooth delivery of digital content, applications and Web 2.0 services. Coming from very different backgrounds, BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 were designed to achieve very different product objectives, being it a business productivity tool or a unified platform for wide range of high-end phones. Yet these software platforms will require radical improvements to compete with iPhone and Android, and ground-up design for the mobile Internet age. BlackBerry OS is part of an end-to-end mobile messaging solution developed by RIM for the enterprise market. It was designed to integrate with enterprise collaboration systems, provide state-of-the-art security and operate over low-bandwidth 2.5G cellular networks. Windows Mobile evolved as a variant of the Pocket PC operating system, adding a cellular phone to the PDA. Windows Mobile was conceived as a companion product for Microsoft Windows operating systems and Office application suites. Symbian OS together with ‘Series 60′ user interface powers Nokia’s high-end phones. It was designed to provide consistent software platform for very broad range of Nokia phones – From souped-up feature phones like 6120 to multimedia power-phones like N96 and business-oriented phones like E71. As a result, Symbian/S60 is skewed towards phone functions, really being a good mobile phone with multimedia capabilities and supporting downloadable applications. We will return to the legacy platforms later in the discussion, but in general, legacy smartphone platforms do a decent job in their respective “comfort zones”. Nonetheless, when taken out of their natural environment they fall far behind in comparison to iPhone and Android. These modern platforms were designed for new market requirements without constraints of legacy code or backwards compatibility considerations. iPhone and Android While technically very different, iPhone and Android share many common traits. Both are designed as true multi-purpose devices fulfilling a wide spectrum of business and personal use cases. The user interface of these software platforms relies on relatively large touch-screens with gesture-based controls, designed for device personalization, easy discovery, delivery and consumption of content, application and services. Downloadable applications further extend the spectrum of possibilities with the device. iPhone and Android offer software development environments allowing fast and easy creation of wide array of novel applications from turning the device into a musical instrument to location-based collaboration services and augmented reality systems. High-speed 3G networks and Wi-Fi connectivity finally brought Web applications to mobile devices. iPhone and Android are equipped with powerful state-of-the art Web browsers based on the open source WebKit engine. Moreover, iPhone and Android browsers provide constantly improving support for emerging HTML5 standard, which brings capabilities of Web applications even closer to capabilities of applications installed on the device. This includes JavaScript performance improvements, location services and offline capabilities which are critically important on mobile devices. There is wide gap between modern and legacy smartphone platforms in all these areas, calling for radical improvements to the legacy platforms. This gap cannot be closed by just user interface face-lifts, launching application stores or even going open source. Blackberry BlackBerry is recognized for its user interface optimized for email and productivity applications. It, however, showed its limitations on BlackBerry Storm – Not such a successful touchscreen “iPhone killer”. The BlackBerry application environment is based on the J2ME framework with proprietary extensions by RIM. The J2ME framework was originally designed for feature phones and as such restricts access to device capabilities available to applications. Proprietary extensions introduced by RIM to J2ME further deepen fragmentation and lack of compatibility characteristic of the J2ME environment. BlackBerry is a closed platform tightly integrated with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). For example, there are six different methods for an application to open up an Internet connection. Instead of going to the open Internet, most of them end up traversing BES in the enterprise data center. While this approach makes perfect sense for many enterprise use cases, it does not necessary work well for the open Internet. Furthermore, BlackBerry platform utilizes proprietary Web browser, which obviously slows down adoption of latest Web technologies by the BlackBerry platform. Taking the BlackBerry platform out of its natural habitat of corporate messaging stretches capabilities of the architecture. Without significant improvements and openness in application and Web services frameworks, BlackBerry will find it difficult to complete with iPhone and Android outside of its established customer target segment. Windows Mobile Upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 (Windows Phone by its new moniker) promises much-needed user interface improvements and a better Web browser. Unfortunately, the new version of Windows Mobile is still based on the same outdated version of Windows CE kernel, which was responsible for the lack of stability and responsiveness plaguing previous versions of the platform. Windows CE 5 limits applications to 32MB of memory per application and is restricted to 32 total processes in the system. The Windows Mobile application environment is based on WIN32 and .NET Compact programming interfaces. While well understood and supported by software developers, these programming interfaces represent scaled-down versions of interfaces designed for Windows on PC. This environment is too complex and outdated compared to modern programming and mobile application paradigms. All in all, Windows Mobile 6.5 appears to be an incremental stopgap solution. Presumably, the next major Windows Mobile version will leverage know-how gained by Microsoft with the acquisition of Danger, and provide long-term response from Microsoft to smartphone challenges. The big question is when will it come to the market? Symbian/S60 Nokia’s Symbian/S60 user interface is infamous for its complexity and is optimized for making voice calls. It can greatly benefit from basic usability enhancements in practically everything else. For example, there is absolutely no reason why placing an application shortcut on the home screen requires going through nine (!) menu layers, or setting a meeting date cannot be done through a calendar widget. (disclaimer: I own Nokia E71). Symbian/S60 offers multiple choices for application developers: Native Symbian code, J2ME, Flash Lite, Web Runtime and even Python scripting. None of these choices is great by itself – each has its own limitations and compatibility issues. Native programming has a steep learning curve and unnecessary complex signing procedures, while J2ME and the Web Runtime are too limited for modern applications. Whilst the S60 Web browser is also based on WebKit engine, it is slow and lacks HTML5 capabilities supported by iPhone and Android. Moreover, Nokia’s decision to open Symbian/S60 source has stalled development of the platform. It will be very difficult for Nokia and its partners to make major improvements to the platform in parallel to moving the platform to an open source model. Summary iPhone and Android set new standards and, at least in the medium term, will continue to lead the way in all major areas of smartphone software. There are no quick fixes for legacy platforms and it will take considerable time and massive R&D resources for RIM, Microsoft and Nokia to break from limitations of their product architectures and legacy code. It will be great to continue this discussion on the future of the smartphone software platforms in the blog comments. Your feedback is much appreciated. – Michael [Michael Vakulenko has been working in the mobile industry for over 15 years starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Throughout his career he gained broad experience in many aspects of mobile technologies including handset software, mobile services, network infrastructure and wireless system engineering. Today Michael consults and provides expert training to established and start-up companies, and can be reached at michaelv [/at/] WaveCompass.com ] #nokia #smartphone #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #Blackberry #iphone #michaelvakulenko

[Android, Symbian, LiMo, Qt, WebKit… all open source projects, but how really open are they? Research Director Andreas Constantinou explains the differences between open source licenses and governance models and why governance is so misunderstood yet important in assessing true openness] Openness is a much-misunderstood word; a kind of good-will moniker to which people attach an impressive variety of definitions; open source code, open standards, open handsets, openness as in transparency, shared roadmaps, open APIs, open route to market… It’s a very forgiving term as far as definitions go. One of the industry’s favourite facets of openness is of course open source. For the past three years we ‘ve researching open source here at VisionMobile, partly because of our training course, and partly out of a drive to understand what this all means for the industry. Lots of software vendors and consortia have embraced open source in some form or other; Symbian Foundation, LiMo Foundation, OHA/Android, Nokia Qt, Nokia Maemo, WebKit, GTK, Eclipse IDE, Sun phoneME and Funambol are the main efforts that have hit the limelight. So what is open source ? Open source licensed software carries four basic freedoms; the right to access (source code), modify, distribute and contribute to the software. These freedoms have been embodied in the key licenses – GPL, LGPL, APL, EPL, MPL, BSD and MIT – which are used in the vast majority of open source projects. The licenses in turn determine the rights and obligations that use of the source code carries. Unsurprisingly, strong copyleft licenses (read: GPL) are rarely used in mobile products, due to the OEM concerns for downstream liabilities. But what’s often missed in open source discussions is how open source licenses tell only half the story. Licenses typically govern control of the source code. But in the mobile industry, source code and products are two very different things. For example; while you can play with Android source code to your heart’s content, are the latest code check-ins publicly visible ? You can peak at Symbian Foundation’s EPL-licensed source code, but who arbitrates what changes go into Symbian? You can buy a LiMo-compliant handset, but as a LiMo member can you expect LiMo handsets to ship with your source code contributions ? You can create your own WebKit-based browser, but why is it so difficult to get your contributions back into the ‘tip of the tree’? It turns out there’s often no ‘official’ answer to these questions, and when there is, the answer is a resounding No. Indeed, there are 10s of questions you could be asking to these ‘open’ projects or products, and none of these is within the bounds of the open source software license; they are in the small print or what’s known as the governance model. We ‘ve long been tracking the who’s who of mobile open source; what’s most interesting is how the popular open source projects (Android, Symbian, LiMo et al) map in terms of the spectrum of licenses and governance models. We ‘ve done that as part of our training course, and you can peek at the summary in the next chart: The picture that emerges is one where : – open source licenses (the large print that covers source control) are widely used, converged and well understood, while – governance models (the small print that governs product control) are proprietary, diverging and poorly understood Governance models can be simplified to indicate the democracy of influence on an open source product; on one end of the spectrum are autonomous communities where opinion leaders influence the direction of the product (see Linux), while on the other end are single-sponsor communities where the product roadmap is influenced by a single company. In reality, things are much more complicated. There have been many attempts at classifying governance models (most notably the work of West and O’Mahony), but there is really no universal dictionary, no certification body, and an excessive amount of  ‘openness’ marketing hype to help obscure rather than enlighten the mobile industry. Governance models are in effect multi-dimensional; how do you control access to a product, determine influence mechanisms, or manage IP rights? Here’s a few questions you should be asking to assess the openness of a product’s governance model (in particular, think Android, Symbian and LiMo when asking these questions): – Are code check-ins publically accessible (and on a realtime basis) ? – Is the product roadmap publically available (and how far does it stretch) ? – Are any of the above accessible to members only ? Are there any fees or contractual commitments (NDAs, etc) required for members? – Who has access to check-in code (and what is the process for check-ins) ? – What is the arbitration process in case there is a conflict between two contributions to the source code ? – Who has the authority to release code and binaries (and how is the release schedule determined)? – Who gets to decide if a contributed component is optional or mandatory (downstream influence)? – How is the roadmap formed ? What is the process and who has voting rights ? – Are IP rights (patents, copyrights, etc) of contributions maintained or automatically transferred? – Are there any support implications for parties who contribute source code ? – Are there any safe harbour provisions for contributors to the source code ? What this industry needs is not more marketing hype, but more education and clarity on governance models, and a benchmark – an openness index – for determining the true transparency of an open source product, and for pushing the corporate sponsors to play fair. We have been quietly working towards developing an openness index and are keen to hear from companies who want to make this happen. Governance is one of the most understated topics in the ‘open’ mobile industry today, yet one of the most fundamental in the direction where the industry will be taking. Open is the new Closed. For now. – Andreas twitter: @andreascon So, what’s your open source strategy? What does open source mean and how will it impact your business? Sign up for our open source training course, an intense, one-day crash course into mobile open source, offering 360 degree analysis and insights into every facet and who’s who of mobile open source today. Covering: economics – cultural roots – licenses & patents – business models – governance models – community culture – operating systems – application environments – standards fora – plus 10s of case studies and tools to developing an open source strategy.

[The landscape of idle screen (aka home screen) solutions has changed considerably in 2007-2009. How will it look over the next two years? Research Director Andreas Constantinou looks at the trends in the active idle screen market and tries to answer the perennial question: who will own the screen ?] here) as part of our Atlas research; in this post I ‘ll highlight some of the most interesting conclusions. The market of idle screen (aka home screen or phonetop) solutions has grown considerably; in 2002-2006 it was kick-started by active idle screen (AIS) vendors like Abaxia, Cibenix and Celltick and tier-1 operators like Orange; in 2007-2009 it has been capitalised by Apple, HTC, Samsung, LG and increasingly Nokia, Android and Windows Mobile; In 2010-2011 we believe that the idle screen will be elevated into precious real-estate divided across the handset OEM, operator and service providers, led by Nokia. The role of AIS vendors in an evolving market Today active idle screen (AIS) solutions are available from Abaxia, ACCESS, Celltick, Cibenix, Insprit, Nuance, and SurfKitchen. mPortal, PointUI and SPB Software have also built custom AIS solutions. AIS vendors act as the commercial matchmakers across the disparate camps of network operators and mobile handset manufacturers; operators will always be looking to go a step further in differentiating on the most premium real estate on the handset, i.e. beyond what is available out of the box. For example, some AIS vendors are starting to offer post-sales idle screen management that is not yet available by OEMs. Moreover, as global operators manage regional device customisation requirements more centrally, so the need for AIS vendors will increase as the one-stop agent between the operator group and the manufacturers. European Tier-1 operators like Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone are developing or have already developed 100-200 people internal software development teams, but we don’t see this as denting the demand for AIS solutions much; operator know-how on successfully delivering software solutions across OEMs is still painfully scarse and their learning curve is slow. Naturally, AIS vendors will also have to morph and adapt in response to the times. Revenue models are shifting clearly away from per-unit royalties for all pre-load software (i.e. embedded in ROM before the handset is shipped). Software vendors, including AIS vendors will have to follow suit. As such, the more successful AIS solutions will be those that monetise through per-active-user or per inventory (primarily CPA or time-based) revenue models, which are better aligned with the interests of operators and ad publishers. In order to extract value during the post-sales phase, AIS vendors will have to add value in service delivery, service update, user profiling or targeting; here the fundamental premise holds: you can only extract value where you add value. Moreover, AIS vendors will have to move away from selling platform enablers to offering vertical solutions, managed and hosted on behalf of the operator. Such vertical solutions can be built around innovative applications like ‘signature’ user interactions, intelligent search, service storefronts, phonebook 2.0, inventory analytics, and the idle screen as a ‘feudal system’. I ‘ll next discuss these key applications that we believe will be hitting idle screens from 2009. Key applications: innovation on the idle screen During the last few years we have seen the idle screen function as a launchpad for device functionality, service discovery, advertising and contacts search. Such product features are now becoming commonplace amongst AIS vendor offerings. As technology is becoming less of a differentiating characteristic, we are seeing many new innovative applications surface. Signature interaction paradigms: the increase of handset functionality and applications put unhealthy demands on the idle screen for information compression. How can you cram 100s of features on a screen 2.4 x 4.5 inches? Answer: by innovating with new user interaction paradigms. We have seen user interaction paradigms evolve from soft key, to 4-way navigation, to gesture-based navigation with the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre. Interaction paradigms are particularly important when navigating dense information and this is where we believe there is considerable demand for innovation on the idle screen. Clever interaction paradigms involving sensors (e.g. accelerometer, compass and tilt sensors) will help in two important ways; firstly by adding multiple dimensions to the otherwise 2-dimensional idle screen; and secondly by allowing OEMs and operators to create differentiating and potentially exclusive user interaction paradigms. This will be an area of intense research in the next 5 years. Service storefront: The icon grid is becoming the de facto user interaction paradigm for both smartphones and feature phones. Placed on the idle-screen this icon grid paradigm is ideally suited for discovering and accessing new services; a paradigm lovingly associated with widgets. We believe that the icon grid paradigm will be increasingly used to implement service storefronts, where each operator service is associated with a icon that links to a web or WAP service or even displays service status as part of the same icon. The service store will revolutionise service discovery and delivery – think of the 100s of services today available via USSD, premium SMS and WAP that can tomorrow be exposed as icons or widgets. It will also allow service updates to be reflected on the service store much like the number of unread messages shows up on a Facebook iPhone icon; this should allow service usage to be extended way beyond the famous honeymoon period. Intelligent search: The idle screen is the starting point for all user journeys; it is therefore natural for the idle screen to provide shortcuts into functionality that is used most frequently, such as search – whether it is for contacts, voicemail summaries, free minutes remaining, where’s-my-nearest, what’s my Facebook status and many more creative search scenarios. We believe that the idle screen is ideally placed to aggregate all such information from third party sources in the internet cloud, the network and the device. Phonebook 2.0: as the starting point of every user journey, the idle-screen is also the pivotal point for placing the phonebook. We therefore see the idle screen merging in phonebook 2.0 functionality, i.e. integrating not only contacts, but also their location, presence and social networking status. Already, predictive phone book search from the idle screen is becoming commonplace in smartphones such as Nokia E-series and Windows Mobile devices but also feature phones such as Sony Ericsson K, W and C series models. The transition to phonebook 2.0 is the logical next step. Inventory analytics: it is well known that the idle screen is the most valuable real estate for ad inventory. What is less known is that as the starting point for each user task, the idle screen can track the beginning and end of every user journey, whether it is browsing a web site, looking up a contact, making a call or sending a text message. As such, the idle screen is the pivotal point for capturing usage analytics and therefore attaching richer profiling and segmentation information to the inventory. This implies a boost for the CPCs and CPAs on the idle screen,which are already at the highest valuation across the handset. The idle screen as a feudal system: Up until the Middle Ages, the land tenure and political structure in Europe was build around the concept of feuds; pieces of land owned and maintained independently. The idle screen has traditionally been a piece of real-estate that is near-impossible to divide  up for the lack of a standard measurement unit; it is common for handset OEMs and operators to hold months-long disputes on the placement of this service or that Start button on the idle screen. Interestingly, the icon grid paradigm, popularised in the notion of widgets, can be used to divide the real estate of the idle screen into distinct areas owned by different parties (OEMs and operators), much like land is divided up in a feudal system. Such a paradigm is made possible thanks to a new standard unit of measurement – a single icon – for dividing idle screen real-estate. We are seeing idle screen solutions such as Nokia’s Home Screen adopt this approach. More importantly this will lead to innovative revenue models where the idle screen real estate can be leased or sold by impression, length of time or active usage. This will allow handset OEMs to trade ‘land’ for a higher handset wholesale price, for a per-icon/per-month lease or a revenue share off operator services. Who will own the screen? And so we come to the perennial question: who will own the idle screen? Following DoCoMo, SKT, Orange and Vodafone we see all European Tier-1 operators issue RFIs for idle screen solutions, expanding to tier-1 operators in Latin America and the Middle East. These Tier-1 operators will want to leverage their purchasing power to deliver differentiation and accelerated service discovery on the idle screen. Tier-2 and Tier-3 operators will also be opting to customise the idle screen, thanks to variant management (off-the-shelf device customisation) options available by the OEM, starting with Nokia’s S60, Series 40 and Android devices. The big winner at the end of the day will be the user. A clear trend appearing is the move away from operator-centric customisation to user-centric personalisation. The idle screen will be no exception, where we see the widget paradigms favour user personalisation. In the long run, the idle screen, much like the customer’s wallet, will not be owned by any single party, but shared. In this economy, best placed are those who provide the technology platform and commercial brokering for service delivery on the idle screen and leasing of real-estate among multiple parties. What’s more, ownership and leasing will not be just about pre-load deals, but about post-sales management of the idle screen. We argue that, what will be important is owning the in-the-hands experience, not the out-of-the-box experience. It is the post-sales idle screen management where sustainable value and revenue will be coming from. Long term, we envisage that ownership of the idle screen will become as elementary as customer ownership; as ubiquitous as handset branding; and as important a monetisation tool as handset accessories. Comments welcome as always. – Andreas Bright thinker looking for bright readers? Join us at the VisionMobile blog, the stage for mobile industry thinkers.

[Is mobile technology all about Android, Apple and Symbian? Guest blogger Ben Hookway explains why the other 85% of the market is far more important and dishes out the facts to prove why the death of feature phones and the RTOS has been greatly exaggerated] Nobody seems to write about feature phones these days. The subject is not very sexy, not very well understood, and the people who contribute products and services to the building of feature phones tend to keep a low profile. The same applies to RTOSes (real-time operating systems) which power most feature phones. On the contrary, the mainstream tech publications breathlessly talk about open OS like Android, Symbian, Apple and WebOS and the smartphones that they power. I work in business development for Mentor Graphics, maker of the Nucleus RTOS which makes it into 100’s of millions of phones per year. I’ve spent the last 6 years (incl. as CEO of NextDevice, now Mentor) immersed in the business of mass market phones at all levels of the software stack. Real-time operating systems have low processing and footprint characteristics which make them ideal for powering baseband chips. As a result, RTOSes were for along time the only operating system found on phones and quickly became a key part of the mobile phone technology stack. The key RTOSes today are Mentor Graphics’ Nucleus and ENEA’s OSE, followed by WindRiver’s VxWorks. Feature phones though are obviously a very large and very important segment of the mobile handset space and reports the death of the RTOS have been greatly exaggerated. Most publicity is around the open OS space at the moment, which tends to eclipse the fact that feature phones and basic phones are the major volume players in this industry. Around 200m smartphones were shipped in 2008 which leaves nearly 1 billion feature or voice phones. Nucleus and OSE are each installed in circa 1.5 billion phones, or circa 32-34% of the devices sold. (see VisionMobile’s 100 million club). So how did these feature phone software platforms come to be? Some important facts on the history of feature phones and RTOSes: – OEM legacy. Feature phones from the big 5 handset OEMs are usually powered by in-house application frameworks which have been developed over 5-10 of years (and over a decade in some cases). They originally ran on the baseband chip of the mobile phone and therefore are designed to run on the real-time operating system (RTOS) which baseband chips run. – Feature creep. As available processing power on baseband processors increased, the sophistication of the feature phone platforms increased with them. The internal platforms gave birth to additional, more sophisticated features to take advantage of the increased resources. – The leap to application processors. Today, mid to high end feature phones run separate application processors in order to enable advanced multimedia capability, touchscreens, and so on. We now have feature phones adopting the same chip architecture as smartphones, and this explains why many application processor vendors are keen to have RTOS support on chips previously designated as only supporting high end OSes. The internal feature phone platforms the manufacturers use were designed to run on RTOSes, and therefore you need an RTOS to run on application processor chips so you can run your feature phone platform. Clear? Indeed, the RTOS based feature phone is far from dead and far from basic. Just consider one of the best selling phones in the UK in 2008 – the Samsung Tocco. Feature phone, touchscreen, advanced multimedia and good pricing and marketing made it a wild success. Indeed there are more and more touchscreen feature phones coming out. The Samsung Jet is a great case in point. It runs an 800MHz processor but is based on a Samsung proprietary OS. You can also look at the LG Voyager, Neon, Dare, Vu, and the Samsung Behold, and Instinct as top selling feature phones: they are all advanced touchscreen phones powered by OEMs’ in-house RTOS platforms. These Samsung and LG phones make up 5 out of 10 top-selling touchscreen  devices in the US, according to a Nielsen survey. As it turns out, manufacturers are not using open OSes, but RTOS platforms for their best-selling high-end devices. The death of the feature phone has been greatly exaggerated indeed. So what is going to keep the RTOS and feature phone important? Why is Android or Symbian not going to overwhelm the market as many analysts predict ? 1. Predictability. OEMs know these platforms inside and out. As a manufacturer, predictable model refresh rate is key. If you are releasing 100 models a year (as some OEMs do) you need to be very, very sure that you are going to hit release dates, otherwise your marketing and financial model breaks down. Internal feature phone platforms are not the greatest software platforms available, but they are far from poor, and crucially they are very, very well known by the internal device development teams building the phones. 2. Cost. RTOSes need less resources – and result in cheaper phones. A feature phone requires less hardware and resources than a smartphone. The BOM is smaller and low cost is important when your main customer is an operator who subsidises the phone for the consumer. For example, Digitimes reports that the overall production costs, including royalty payments and resources, for smartphones are 3-4 times higher than those for high-end multimedia handsets, while smartphones require 3 times more components (link – subscription required) 3. The ubiquity of the Application Environment. Historically, the weakness of the feature phone has been the inability to have a broad set of application available and good post-sales application download experience. App Stores and open APIs has been a key focus for the industry and the high end OSes (Android, OSX, Symbian). However, with the proliferation of application environments like Java, Flash, Qt and web runtime environments, manufacturers and operators can hope for both a diversity of applications – and a first-class App Store experience, thanks to solutions from Qualcomm Plaza, Comverse, Amdocs, Sun, Everypoint and many others. The hype / shipment paradox There is an obvious inverse ratio between OS hype and shipments; the high end OSes are commanding the lion’s share of media attention but don’t really ship in big volumes, comparatively speaking. The feature phone application frameworks running on RTOSes get almost zero coverage but are the mainstay of the industry. Behind the scenes, the economic drivers for RTOS based feature phones remain strong for the foreseeable future. RTOSes and feature phones may indeed emerge as a platform for true mass adoption of mobile services for consumers. – Ben [editor’s note: see VisionMobile’s side-by-side comparison of 16 operating systems and application environments, incl. ALP, Flash Lite, Montavista, Nokia S60, BREW, Qtopia, UIQ and Windows Mobile. A stark reminder of how radically has the mobile software landscape changed in the last 3 years] Bright thinker looking for bright readers? Join us at the VisionMobile blog, the stage for mobile industry thinkers.

[2009 might be the year of Android..  Google claims around 20 devices will be in the market by the end of this year. It would give a long-awaited boost to the proliferation of Android, but not necessarily a boost for developers. Guest blogger Gabor Torok looks at what the appearance of Android variants could mean in terms of fragmentation.] HTC Dream aka G1 was the first Android device offered by T-Mobile. It took quite a bit of time for the next Android-based mobile phone, HTC Magic, to appear and be available first in Europe by Vodafone, with Asia and North-America (MyTouch 3G or G2 from T-Mobile) to follow in H2 2009. Oddly enough, the third and last device to date will also be manufactured by HTC: it’s called Hero and unlike the previous two it is not Google-branded and can be purchased unlocked. Even if the number of models powered by this platform is relatively low, it’s worth discussing how developers may be affected by the differences between these variants. There are lots of on-line reviews comparing the two officially available handsets, Dream and Magic – visit HTC’s web site, for example, to see for yourself. The hardware specs of these devices are very similar (though Magic has more memory and no physical keyboard) leaving the software as the main differentiator. The Magic is based on Android v1.5 (codename Cupcake) and includes such features as on-screen keyboard, Home screen widgets, Live folders, video recording, etc. These handy software features are available for owners of older devices, too, such as G1 or the Android Developer Phone 1 (ADP1 in short). Whilst the firmware update must be performed manually in case of ADP1, T-Mobile takes care of upgrading the firmware of existing devices themselves. What does this mean for developers? Android developers haven’t had to worry about differences between platform versions and various handsets thus far. It’s simply because T-Mobile G1 had been left alone for a very long period and it was enough to write applications for that single device only. This has changed with the introduction of Magic and will be complicated further with the other upcoming models. First of all and most importantly, existing applications originally written for the first Android handset will run on new devices without any modifications, i.e. they’re binary forward compatible. At least in theory, since there are signs and reported difficulties indicating that some applications need to be re-built and build environments re-configured for a successful deployment with the new SDK. In any case, Google is trying to keep source compatibility between releases, too, however, one should not expect 100% accuracy in their attempt (see Android 1.5 Version Notes for removed APIs, for example). Obviously, backward compatibility is a different question: special care must be taken in an application to handle the lack of some hardware/software components in an older handset. Thanks to the fact that Magic is from the same manufacturer as Dream (HTC), one should not be surprised about forward compatibility. Nevertheless, the announced 18 new handsets for this year will surely make it more challenging to write such applications that handle the differences in handsets’ characteristics properly. Fortunately, the SDK already provides APIs that enable run-time query of device particulars, so API-wise it should not be a issue for applications to distinguish between different models and act accordingly. Without this support it would be nearly impossible to write a single program and design it to run on multiple models – however, even with this support it will put an extra burden on developers’ shoulders they will have to deal with. It would be great, too, if look-and-feel guidelines were available as well, and not just Google engineers’ guidance on how “your program should look and behave similarly to built-in system applications“. A useful addition to the Android SDK (which contains multiple platforms in one package) is the ability to fine-tune the target platform that one would like to build applications for. Developers can create an Android Virtual Device (or AVD in short), where the most important characteristics of a device can be specified, such as the availability of camera/physical keyboard/etc., screen dimension, choosing the system image emulation runs on, etc. The introduction of AVDs gives developers the freedom of using a single SDK for multi-platform development (read: multiple versions of the same platform, Android). End-users and the impact to UX There’s not too much to mention about the user experience on HTC Dream and Magic – the UX is pretty similar across the devices. Hero is different, though: HTC Sense UI provides a different user experience that is a departure not just from the Android UX, but from HTC devices themselves whatever platform they’re powered by (e.g. Windows Mobile, Android). A logical question arises: can older & non-HTC Android devices be updated with this framework? The answer is NO: due to licensing issues, “Google branded” devices (both G1 and Magic) are not allowed to be upgraded. This will surely result in fragmentation not only in software development, but in user experience, too. Network operators, app stores and firmware updates Both T-Mobile and Vodafone rely on the same central distribution channel, Android Market (AM). Returning the favour, Google-hosted AM takes carriers’ T&Cs into account when determining which applications can be submitted to each ‘market’. For this reason, some applications doing tethering, VoIP, etc. simply cannot be sold on Android Market – hence their developers need to go and find other markets. In other words, fragmentation exists at the distribution-level. As already mentioned, HTC Sense UI is not permitted on Google-branded devices. Consequently, network operators selling “with Google” and non-Google-branded handsets alike must be cautious which firmware can go to which phone so as to satisfy all legal restrictions. In Hero’s case, for example, the update process is two-level: UI layers (i.e. Sense) are updated by HTC, whereas the rest by Google. The situation can get more complicated as the update hierarchy grows in depth. Conclusion If we can believe in rumours, 2009 is the year when a massive number of Android-powered devices will hit the market. Big numbers and diversity, however, will not make it easy to develop for this platform and maintain software updated on existing devices. Fragmentation has inevitably come to Android. Looking forward to your comments, – Gabor [Gabor works as a mobile software engineer and has been in the industry since 2000. You can read more about his thoughts about mobility at mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com] Bright thinker looking for bright readers? Join us at the VisionMobile blog, the stage for mobile industry thinkers.