IN THIS ISSUE:

* Some Smart Phone Experiences and Thoughts

* Trying to Stab a Nokia 3650 to Death

* Series 60 Applications: In Search of a Mass Market

OK, it is time to pick up the pen again.  Plenty of trade show have passed - CTIA, CeBIT, Game Developers’ Conference and BREW Developers’ Conference.  Nothing major is happening in the industry, though, it is just maturing and getting traction at a constant pace.  What I am really waiting for is a couple of acquisitions that would stir up the competition, especially on the US market.  The situation here starts looking like World War I where folks dug themselves in waited for the other guy to bail out.

I do not want to be negative, though:  lots of progress is being made in SMS and J2ME games in the US, the rest of the world is probably preparing for a little Symbian revolution by the end of the year.

Best regards,

Tapio Anttila

tapio@anttila.net

 

SOME SMARTPHONE EXPERIENCES AND THOUGHTS

I have a new Nokia 3650 with a Cingular subscription.  Firstly, I have to say that contrary to common perception, Cingular’s GPRS works pretty well in Los Angeles.  I have a new app installed which I have programmed to play the Finnish national hymn every time I loose coverage.  I still get to feel patriotic a few times a day… 

But first a little positive note on the ailing Sony-Ericsson, as it is these days known by journalists:  the P800 actually sold 170,000 units in Q1 in Europe which was more than many thought.  Compare this to the 60,000 MS Smartphone sales in the same period in that geographic.  To early adopters, the best always sells no matter what  the price is and P800 is the best device out there at the moment.  The P800 - which actually was ‘technologically’ ready to be launched with the Lara Croft movie in May 2001 before the Sony JV kicked in - is according to my Nokia friends a mature masterpiece of Ericsson engineers (hopefully not their testament to the world?) enhanced by the Sony sex appeal.  I am getting the device any day now and will be excited to see how it matches to Nokia 3650/7650.

The US GSM operators have eagerly launched an offensive on the market with Nokia 3650.  AT&T was running a special campaign at Fry’s Electronics for a week or so, giving out subsidized 3650s - for free.  It might be fair to ask whether the value of this device could be somehow communicated to the market in other ways than giving out free products…  The volumes at a channel like Fry’s are according to the rep ‘20 per week per store’ whereas for example MS PocketPC Phone Edition devices sell at ‘2-3 per month’.  No wonder when you compare $0 to $499!  In all fairness, outside the campaign the 3650 price is $150 subsidized, still a great value for the money.

TRYING TO STAB A NOKIA 3650 TO DEATH

I have put my new Nokia 3650 to the ultimate stress test and on Saturday the I reached and important milestone:  a system crash and a prompt to ‘contact the retailer’.  Fortunately it went away and I have since then been able to apply heuristics to understand its psychology, a skill retained from the Microsoft PC environment.  Perhaps a few pieces of advice are useful to those owning or planning to own the device. 

Firstly, the amount of phone memory is still a problem and the first thing a user MUST do is to get a bigger MMC card (128 MB sells here for $49) and define an installation strategy whereby EVERYTHING will be installed on the MMC card.  Buy also an MMC adapter to the PC for $10 so you will not have to do awkward copying using IR (unless you have Bluetooth).  Also remember to redefine all messaging, images and video to be stored automatically on the card.  You will need the maximum amount of phone memory available when trying to install Quake on the device later…

Secondly,  forget the games for a while and go to www.my-symbian.com to download all necessary system utilities to figure out how the device is doing.  You need at least a system cleanup utility such as AppMan and a file browser such as FExplorer.  You might actually want to have these programs launched always at startup by installing an other app called AutoExec.  Now you are ready to go and can conceivably reach my state of device jihad with currently 42 applications installed… and it still works!  Kind of.

So - are there any interesting applications available?  Are they worth the money?  An average application for Series 60 on Handango or My-Symbian costs $10 so if you buy all the hundreds of products that means you are thousands of dollars poorer…  Take a look at my new MEOW! Labs where I have made available my finding so far:  http://www.anttila.net/meow/lab/main.htm.

The first thing one notes is the European-centric base of development.  Most applications seem to originate from UK, Germany, Finland, Russia and Poland.  The quality varies and although My-Symbian makes available a user-based rating system, there are still products from 100+ employee companies happily side-by-side with merchandise from the Charlie Browns running a business out of their bedroom.  Understandably this results in time-consuming quality assurance done by the consumer.  But if the alternative is to wait until an app reaches the mobile operator’s marketplace…  in most cases no thanks.  However, developers should remember to enable enough functionality in the trial version - I saw some sad examples out there…  If you cannot convince me during a trial and let me explore properly, I am off to the next alternative!

Regarding the capabilities of a smartphone, let me first put a record straight with my American colleagues who might think this is not comparable to a PDA:  The Nokia 3650 syncs with MS Outlook, including your contacts, calendar and tasks and you can define your own pop3 or IMAP email client settings.  My 700+ Outlook do not slow the device down in any way.  If you need to take notes on you handheld device you need to take a course on personal productivity in most cases…  One more thing, Psiloc in Poland has developed SystemTools which includes a functionality to disable the SIM in the phone and to use it in “flight mode”!

The Nokia PC Suite program is a drag, though.  According to my friends at Microsoft ‘Nokia and Sony Ericsson still cannot develop software without violating the Windows system dynamic link libraries’.  Installing the PC Suite was an ugly weekend job which resulted in a Windows personal settings meltdown.

SERIES 60 APPLICATIONS:  IN SEARCH OF MASS MARKET

If we leave the system utilities outside, what else is out there that is useful or entertaining and worth paying for?  The more I look at it, the more critical I am.  There are very few applications out there that go beyond “look, this is now also possible on a mobile phone!”

1) Opera Browser for Series 60.  Its optimized solution really changes my perception of the usefulness of browsing on a mobile phone over the GPRS/1X network.  Not that I would do it every day but if there is a need it is now very doable.  Plus the browser supports forms, SSL and other more advance user interface functionality.  The price is starting at $19.95 for a promotional period and on the web site they claim to start charging $39.95 for it…  Naturally a product like this will soon be bundled into operator and handset vendor offerings.  Or will it?  It requires 2.4 MB or RAM to run properly and the Nokia 3650 has 3MB available.  What are these Norwegians smoking?  You cannot dimension a product like that - a big minus.  Probably the P800 is better in this regard.  www.opera.com

2) FastChat for Series 60.  Fastmobile has built this integrated push-to-talk, MSN Messenger, SMS, email and picture messaging client which works like a dream on my Nokia 3650.  The company sells the service in the US for a flat fee $9.95 per month and on top of that one needs to count the GPRS data charges which easily add up with the prices US operators have.  The application consumers a lot of power and another big minus comes from the fact that it cannot be installed on the memory card…  FastChat could certainly easily be customized for branded communities or vertical applications.  Interesting!  www.fastchat.com

3) Moto-Racer from Digital-Red.  Take any of these 3D games, we have all seen them in arcades and on a PC.  In order for this to go beyond the usual school yard arms race, something more has to be added to the experience, something new and innovative.  This is not it, sorry.  These Chinese games were well-built, though.  In the same series WildPalm has produced a version of Doom on for Series 60.  I was not able to get it to work as it can only be installed on the phone memory and I understandably do not want to strip my phone naked just to be able to accommodate that experience. In fact, I was most impressed by WildPalm having written a Nintendo GameBoy emulator for Series 60.  At least that brings instantly hundreds if not thousands of familiar napsterized games available from the Internet free of charge. www.digital-red.com; www.wildpalm.co.uk

I will stop here, although there is a lot more to say.  There are a number of promising developments such as Macromedia Flash arriving on mass market smart phones such as Nokia 3650 (see www.mobiclip.com) - that will release a wealth of creativity into the industry.  There are “raw ideas” such as ring tune editors which don’t serve any purpose nor provide any compelling experience but can be transformed in the hands of advertising agencies into life-transforming announcements.  One wants to personalize a ring tune if one has a need to EXPRESS something, not because one wants to perform an autopsy on a music file!

My final comment goes for the availability of these games.  On the Internet-centric US market, the web plays a really important role, particularly for other operators than Verizon who have figured out how to serve a ‘game dial tone’ right off of a mobile phone with previews available (BREW rocks in this respect!).  For the rest of us it is (for the moment) a question of finding it on the web, reading all about it and deciding whether we want to spend money on it.  In this world the performance of even Nokia is judged by whether you can ‘Google it’.  If you cannot, it does not exist.  Google is more convenient than an operator portal, you see?  It does not ask questions, passwords and IMEI codes, it just delivers, from all over the globe and to the point.

So Google it is.  Let’s try to rip apart Nokia using Google.  First of all when you go to the Nokia home page and try to find games to buy you soon realize that you had better taken Google and typed ‘Nokia games’ - it takes you right there.  Finding content on any handset vendor web site is difficult because those folks are afraid of waking up the old angry bear Mr mobile operator and even hint any selfish interest to directly address end-users.  Google swiftly brings us to Nokia-branded “America’s Software Market”, powered by Handango which is brilliantly converting its lead in the dying Palm ecosystem into a mobile app wholesaler.  However, Google also gives another fairly predictable link www.nokia.com/games.  Under that link there is no mention of the smart phones such as 3650…  There is a mention that smart phone applications would be available under Club Nokia (www.club.nokia.com).  I cannot really test this as the site is down as I write this…  This is not the first time Club Nokia disappoints me, to me it was always the crippled child of mother Nokia, carefully kept cold and starving by the executives running Nokia’s carrier relations.

At the Nokia mart I will be able to buy some apps nicely categorized and rated, but this is a Disney store, not eBay ;-).  Everything available is targeted for the preppy mother’s sweet-heart who does his/her homework promptly before setting out to play games.  Nokia is the ‘Disney of the mobile industry’ as a brand and there is nothing wrong in that per se.

Surfing further on the Google list I run into mynokiagames.co.uk.  It offers a nice selection of Java games billed to the customers phone bill using IVR-based premium billing mechanism.  These games are that way out of my reach and available only to UK customers…  Yet another example how the telecom world is lagging behind in answering the challenges of globalization ;-).

My whole point is that finding attractive content is still not all that easy and operators are not making it easier in the US by enforcing their control over the end user selection. Content has to find itself into a context or embed itself into culture in order to create something sustainable.  Therefore the engineers will probably have to step aside to allow it to happen.

This month I have not provided the usual news section on new companies and applications.  Hopefully the next issue will have even more of them.

MEOW! EVENTS CALENDAR

by IBC. Learn more about the European experiences in advanced SMS and MMS service introduction.

http://www.ibctelecoms.com/

The big one for the game industry.

http://www.e3expo.com/

by van Dusseldorp Partners.

http://www.tvmeetstheweb.com/may2003/programme.php

by IBC. Learn SMS and MMS in Americas..

http://www.ibctelecoms.com/messaging

 

HOLLYWOOD MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT CAREERS

I have opened up a a whole job market on my website - see www.anttila.net.  Your submissions are welcomed. 

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Disclaimer:  Opinions presented herein are those of the undersigned and do not represent the position or message of any company I might be affiliated with.