Confessions of a Blackberry Addict – Two miserable weeks with iPhone and then…

3 Blackberrys, 6 years and time for renewal of contract and hence decision time on whether to switch to iPhone or not! Despite my unpleasant experience at Apple Store, my kids convinced me to try iPhone in the name of coolness. I decided to give it a try for my 30 day trial and here are my findings.

First some reasons on why I even looked for alternatives to Blackberry after 6 years of great friendship

• After switching from Microsoft Entourage to Gmail, Blackberry sort of lost its advantage and got really slow to use
• With 3 browsers on my Blackberry – one from AT&T, second from RIM and third one from Opera, neither one really worked well
• Any third party app I loaded slowed the system dramatically

My first two weeks with iPhone were miserable at best. iPhone is a great platform but certainly not the most intuitive.

First, what I liked about the iPhone

• One of the most beautiful displays – emails and web pages really come alive and readable much like a laptop
• Best browser of any phone I have ever used – and believe me I have used many phones
• Best conferencing interface of any phone – even my mom can use it

Why was I miserable with iPhone in the first two weeks

• Very difficult to get to the top of the contacts and hence find a contact quickly and call
• Inability to make calls while driving except to the recent calls
• Typing without the keyboard
• Limited battery life

I was ready to return my iPhone until I met some friends who showed me some shortcuts that made things better. So much for intutiveness! For example:

• Right flick that brings search button – a universal search that can search contacts, email or calendar
• Getting used to Voice dialing and calling out names in the way my phone understands – now with 90% success rate of calling someone from my contacts while driving
• Just type and not worry about correcting until much later

Now with 30 days of usage behind me, I am turning to be an iPhone fan not fanatics. It is far from being an ideal phone but considering its other good features, I decided to keep it. Oh, yes I do have a 3GS!

Should RIMM buy PALM or adopt Android like Motorola or Apple?

It is very clear that RIMM’s unique advantage of Blackberry push email is not sufficient for it to retain the market leadership. First Apple’s iPhone, then PALM Pre and now Verizon’s Droid are eating at its market share slowly and RIMM has to respond to stay relevant. One thing is clear that current OS of Blackberry has reached its limit and that is one area RIMM has to find an alternative while retaining its unique advantages. It needs developer community and a great web experience to compete – getting to new customer segments will be a nice bonus.

It has four possible choices

• Build a new OS
• Buy PALM
• Google surrender strategy
• Google enhancement strategy

Build a new OS

Building a new OS will not bring developers easily to Blackberry and so that choice seems impractical. Yes I know Samsung went against the common wisdom and introduced Bada its new OS but got a big yawn from the market so far.

Buy Palm Inc.

Buy PALM which is currently at a market cap of $1.65B and would probably cost close to $2B. What would RIMM gain is WebOS, a great Web experience but not necessarily developers. Yes it will get access to a younger market segment that PALM manage to penetrate but RIMM could put the $2B elsewhere for a better return.

Adopt Google’s Android

RIMM can finally eat its pride and make the right business decision by adopting Google’s Android. There are two ways to adopt this strategy

• Follow Motorola’s Lead or Google surrender strategy wherein the handset vendor just builds the hardware and adopt Android as is  – kind of like what Motorola did with Droid for Verizon Wireless ( In all fairness, Motorola did some work on its Cliq for T-Mobile)
• Follow Apple’s Lead or Google enhancement strategy wherein the handset vendor not only builds hardware but adds its unique values and controls the end to end user experience. This is similar to what Apple did with BSD UNIX and created Mac OS X.

Conclusion

RIMM should adopt Google Android and add its unique push email, sync, security and other goodies while continuing to control end to end user experience.  This will give RIMM a better OS, developers and continue to maintain its unique advantages.

What do you think RIMM should do? Share your opinions here.

R. Paul Singh

Which platform have you made more money on – Facebook, iPhone or Twitter?

Have you ever stop to think why Microsoft’s platform has a larger market share than Apple’s despite Apple having a better product? Why did Google gain market share compared to Yahoo and Microsoft? The answer is the same – Microsoft and Google made money for themselves but also created opportunities for developers to make money off of their platforms.

The rules of the game have not changed. Let us look at three popular platforms of today – Facebook, iPhone and Twitter. Facebook made money for itself while iPhone made money not just for itself but for its developers while Twitter makes money for its developers without making any money for itself.

Monetization on facebook, iPhone and twitter

Facebook was the first social networking site with an open platform, which attracted many developers; this increased Facebook’s popularity at the cost of then popular myspace. Facebook made money for itself but didn’t offer an opportunity for developers to make money directly off of its platform even though many developers have managed to use it as a good indirect channel for marketing and sales. It still remains popular, but is not the most preferred platform for the developer community anymore. So unless the Facebook platform offers a direct monetization opportunity for developers, it will not stay the most popular social networking site.

Apple’s iPhone platform was the first mobile platform that enabled software developers to easily make money with a clear 70-30 monetization model; this increased its popularity. Now, with a long waiting list of developers trying to get their applications certified, I hope Apple does something before other platforms start to gain the attention of developers.

Twitter is the only platform that has never made money for itself but offers many opportunities for its developer community to make money. Twitter’s altruistic behavior is one of the many reasons for its popularity; I just hope Twitter itself soon figures out a way to make money lest others that depend on its existence for revenue may have to look elsewhere.

What is your experience? Share your stories on which platform have you made more money on? Which platform is the most monetization friendly?

R. Paul Singh

Did your application get rejected by an App Store? Is it a monopoly case worthy of DOJ and EU?

App Stores – Rejecting many apps
The rise of app Stores like Apple’s AppStore, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace, Nokia’s Ovi and others from different mobile platform companies has been a boon to software developers as it offered a cheaper way of distributing applications. With 25,000 apps approved by Apple, I hear a very large number of apps are also stuck in the Apple approval queue.  How big is this issue – worth 3M pages on Google. I came across one great postindicating all the unofficial reasons for rejection of iPhone apps. In this business, application delayed is application rejected because the more you are delayed the more the chances of a competitive app being in the store and hence negating your app.

App Store rejections – Is there a reason?
Is there a criterion for rejecting an application? One common cause for rejection seems to be that it competes with what is already bundled with the platform like a dialer or browser. None of the vendors are explicit about the criteria they use for rejecting apps until Microsoft took the lead and actually published its criteria. Bravo, Microsoftand hope others will follow you so that some of the arbitrary rejections can be controlled. Google, with its Android is an exception as it seems to accept most apps but that might change over time as Android becomes more popular. Has your app been rejected by an app store and do you know the reason for it? Please comment here for others to understand and see.

Criteria for Rejection
In studying through Microsoft’s criteria here are a few key themes that emerged
If you compete with what we have bundled, no matter how bad, we can reject your application – last time I checked Microsoft went to great lengths to defend a law suit like this for Internet Explorer’s bundling on the PC.
If you compete with the channel we aim to please, we can reject your application. Is that legal?

Is it time for DOJ and EU to step in?
I am not a believer of wasteful regulation or litigation but it does smack of anti-competitive behavior against smaller companies/developers and above all for consumer who are deprived of many choices. Do you agree? I just hope that platform companies publish their criteria, act fairly and swiftly now when it is too early in the cycle so that we don’t see waste of our tax dollars in DOJ, EU and other authorities bringing law suits against these companies like it has happened to IBM, Microsoft and Intel.

Let me know what you think?

R. Paul Singh

Blackberry Email, Yahoo Mail or Google Gmail? – Experience of a Blackberry (BB) User

RIM’s Blackberry was only an Enterprise cell phone and so most people used it with Blackberry Enterprise Server which provided over the air sync of Emails, Contacts and Calendar events with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Domino. In the era of iPhone hype, many people like me still use Blackberry to stay in sync and so I went exploring many choices for users without an Enterprise Server and/or Microsoft Outlook and here is what I found. I had to spend days researching these choices and hope this blog will help save time for many others and also wake up Google, RIM and Yahoo to act to make their products better.

Criteria

My criteria was simple – an ability to automatically sync our Email, Calendar and Contacts over the air preferably without paying any more than $30 we were already paying AT&T.

Blackberry Client

I could get a hosted BB Enterprise Server solution but most of them cost in excess of $10/month – this alternative was very familiar but I wanted something free and so didn’t go with this choice. Despite marketing towards consumer markets, RIM has sadly not provided any over-the-air solution to the sync problem outside of Microsoft Outlook.

Yahoo!Mail Client for Blackberry

I was using Yahoo! Mail as my personal email so that was my first choice. I downloaded Yahoo’s mobile client for Blackberry. The installation was simple and did sync my emails well except that its sync was delayed many times by much as three to four hours. However, trying to sync Contacts and Calendar proved to be too difficult and after repeated attempts and reading lots of documentation I decided to give that up. One good thing or bad thing is that this email client looks just like the Blackberry native email client and seems to be very CPU efficient and didn’t change battery life.

Gmail Client for Blackberry

My next choice was Gmail even though I still don’t like Gmail’s presentation of email in conversation threads. Downloading Google’s mobile client for Blackberry was easy enough though not as easy as Yahoo. Once I downloaded the Gmail client, I realized that it had a different user interface – similar to one on the PC. It was much better than BB Email client for reading newsletters as it cleared all kinds of web links and made emails lot more readable on the phone. Is someone from RIM listening?

Sync client from Google choked couple of times as I had too many contacts and it took a very long time but once it synced, it got better for any other changes.  While I was on Google site, I also downloaded Google Maps. Pretty soon, my Blackberry Curve started becoming slow and battery life reduced. So, I uninstalled Google Maps even though I really liked the app. Now, my Blackberry is still not as fast as it was with native Blackberry Email client but I can live with occasional slow downs and reduced battery life. The one thing that Google ignored is the delete key on the keyboard and for anyone used to that key it will be sorely missed. Also if you have many contacts, Gmail takes a long time in bringing up your contacts and seems like it goes to the network to fetch contacts unless you only keep most used contacts which are cached locally.

Conclusion

In short, I use Gmail on mobile and desktop and it automatically syncs everything well for me between my desktop and Blackberry. I have still kept my Yahoo client on the Blackberry for those times when Gmail slows down my Blackberry. Hopefully Google will fix this problem one day or Yahoo will wake up and do a good job in syncing Contacts and Calendar or better still RIM will wakeup and provide this service for all the non-enterprise customers before their value is completely diminished by Google.

Did you have different experiences. Share here in comments sections for others to benefit from!

R. Paul Singh

In light of App Stores, Do Mobile Operators have a role to play in the Mobile VAS market?

It is widely believed that with the success of Apple App Stores and launch of new App Stores from all of the handset manufacturers, mobile operators have no role to play in VAS markets. (For the purpose of this article we will only look at applications that need data channel whether it is GPRS, EDGE or UMC and specifically exclude WAP and SMS type services.) The statement above has different applicability depending on the type of handsets and the markets.

The pricing for any data applications = Application subscription fee (one time or monthly) + data charges.

As long as mobile operators hold the key to data charges they will continue to have a role to play in the Mobile VAS market.

For  Android, Blackberry,iPhone,  and Windows Mobile phones, mobile operators have much less control because:

• Generally some minimum data bandwidth is included with the basic service and so leverage of data pricing from mobile operator is non-existent
• Users of these phones tend to be more savvy about uploading apps over the air and using it
• Users of these phones are more likely to own a credit card; a currency for buying from App Stores

In addition, mobile operator have very little leverage in markets where:

• Aggressive unlimited data plans have been offered like in the US where $20 buys you unlimited data plan on most phones
• SMS spamming of users by the operator is not acceptable like in the US and some Western European markets
• WAP portals of mobile operators never really attracted a whole lot of attention from its users like in case of AT&T in the USA

So, is there any market where mobile operators have leverage? Look at the case of a photo and video sharing application on a Nokia N Series phone. If a user uploads about 20MB worth of media a month and is charged per MB, the cost adds up and user is unlikely to use the app from Nokia’s Ovi App Store when their monthly bill arrives or when their pre-paid account dries out. This is where an operator can offer a zero rated plan and charge a fixed price for the app irrespective of the data usage.

Bottom line is mobile operators can continue to play a role in VAS markets where:

• They can control and bundle data and app pricing in a unique way
• When the app extends to wider phone types and choices beyond iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Examples include Nokia Series 60, Series 40, Sony Ericsson and others
• Credit cards are not readily available and Pre-paid is the dominant platform as operators can act as currency brokers
• Can access and get their users to act in a cost efficient way like SMS and WAP
• Mobile operators subsidize handsets and can bundle any app wherein discovery problem can be addressed inexpensively

So before pundits declare death of operator VAS markets they need to look at each individual market before making a generalized statement based on iPhone App Store or only the US market.

I invite you to share your experiences from different markets here for others to learn from!

R. Paul Singh

Finally some good news from MWC 2009 — Can we now build $100M Mobile VAS companies?

One of the significant news from MWC 2009 (mobile world congress) was the culmination of rumors with official announcements of app stores. Now we have a long list of Application Stores including:

• Apple is the innovator and king of this and called it Apple App Store
• Google called its app store as Android App Market
• Nokia extended its service brand Ovi to Ovi application store
• Microsoft may call its service SkyMarket and its own service as My Mobile for Windows Mobile phones
• RIMM called it Blackberry Application Store Front
• Samsung for its smartphones created Samsung App Store

Why is this significant for the Mobile VAS (mobile value added services) market?

Until now, Mobile markets have suffered from 3Ds:

• Distribution
• Discovery
• Dollars or whatever Currency you prefer

Theses announcements solve two of the problems -  that of Distribution and Dollars.

With smartphone sales estimated at over 60M units in 2008, it is clear that software developers only working on smartphone now have access to a large market. Should VAS developers even bother with lower-end phones? We will tackle this in a later blog.

How did we reach the 60M units number – based on many articles and estimates with the best one from Eric Zeman at Information Week.  Here is the breakdown which may cause many arguments and surprise many:

• Apple shipped 14M in 2008
• Microsoft shipped 20M in 2008 – yes more than Apple
• Nokia shipped 18M in 2008 with N and E-Series counted as smartphone
• RIMM shipped close to 14M in 2008 of Blackberry Curve and up

With an average price of $20 per application/application pack for the life of smartphone, there is room for many $100M software companies in the mobile VAS space with focus only on smartphone. No need to have large expensive sales forces calling on many mobile operators worldwide as distribution is now possible from the app stores which in most cases give 70% of the revenue to software developers rather than 20-50% which operators are giving to the software developers. So what does this mean for Mobile Operators – relegation to being a dumb pipe or? Of course, it is different for different geographies – we will tackle that in a later blog.

Now comes the third problem something that has plagued most application stores including that of facebook, myspace and hi5. Yes that is the problem of discovery and this is where virality, usefulness and marketing becomes ever more important. We will tackle this in the next blog.

R. Paul Singh

2008 had three, how many will it be in 2009?

The rising star of 2008 was IPhone which turned the mobile world upside down not just because of its sleek interface or first usable mobile web but also because of availability of numerous applications in every category. Google, with its Android, took the distant second spot but expect to see more from it in 2009. There were many also ran – all the way from LiMO to various proprietary J2ME implementations. Yes, I am talking about the mobile industry and the advent of three new operating systems in 2008.

There is a school of thought that there may not be room for any new mobile operating systems in 2009. The fact is there are already three new operating systems expected in 2009. Palm WebOS already kicked off the new year with lots of press articles. Symbian Foundation and Qualcomm’s BREW Mobile Platform are expected to be finally released in 2009.
Bottom line is Defragmentation in the mobile industry is here to stay.

How many new operating system will mobile industry get in 2009? Tell me what you think?

R. Paul Singh

The Search For An “Open” Mobile OS

I remember the battle for capturing the title of “Open” in the computing world and now it seems that the same battle is making its way into the Mobile Computing world with the launch of Google Android. Let’s look back at a bit of computing history for reference: Microsoft used the word “Open” in their battle with Apple and we all know the history after that. Sun Microsystems was the king of “Open” when it bet the whole company on this word until Linux arrived and took the title away by confusing “Open” with “Open Source”. Is history going to repeat itself in the Mobile Computing world? In this Blog, we will address Mobile Computing Platforms and which of the platforms qualify for the word “Open”.

What we learned from the PC experience was that the Mobile Computer has to be open not just to application software but also to third party hardware. So next time you’re shopping for a Mobile Computer/Phone ask about the following to establish if the Mobile Computer is Open from a hardware perspective. Does the device offer the following?

- An ability to change your battery without having to pay an additional hefty fee to the manufacturer?
- An ability to easily add memory without having to go back to the vendor or ship your device to the manufacturer?
- A standard computer connectivity interface like USB or Bluetooth?
- A standard RCA headphone jack that can be used with the hands free device of your choice?
- A power supply that works across global power outlets or at least offers the ability to charge the device from your PC?
- GPS that doesn’t drain the battery every time you use it

If you evaluate mobile phones on these features, some will fail. So, my conclusion is that we are still far away from getting to the Open Mobile Computing world from a hardware perspective.

So now you ask what will make your mobile computer/phone more open from a software perspective. Well that’s where the Mobile OS openness counts more. Here is a somewhat simplified version of questions you should ask to establish if a particular Mobile OS is more open than others in no particular order of importance. Does it offer:

- An ease of software development in form of software tools, documented APIs, development kits and application examples?
- Support of software developers in form of bulletin boards and developer forums?
- The ability to run applications in the background?
- A light OS in terms of limited demands on hardware requirements?
- A secure OS so that damage caused by viruses and worms can be prevented?
- A simple or Universal Application Signing where an application that has already been certified once can work on any mobile network?

From an end-user perspective an Open OS results in the ability to have many applications running in the background, but hopefully your Mobile Phone won’t be prone to the same performance problems that have plagued our PCs.

Here’s a sample of popular mobile OS’s and how they compare to one another:

R. Paul Singh CEO
PixSense, Inc.

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A Question of Mobile OS Congestion

If I were to ask you what operating system your computer runs on, chances are that you could answer without a second’s pause. But if I were to ask you the same question about your mobile phone, it’s likely that you would draw a blank. And who could blame you, really? Even if you were familiar with the names of five, or maybe even ten Mobile Operating Systems (OS), knowing which one runs on your phone is a challenge because of a lack of standardization and consolidation in the mobile industry. It’s clear that we’re moving into this new territory of Mobile Computing where even today’s low-end mobile phone is more powerful than many of the early PCs (CPU power and memory).

What will it take for Mobile Computing to become reality? Imagine a world where mobile phone users everywhere intuitively know what their mobile handset has to offer and how to use all the new power at their fingertips. A reality where applications, that simplify a consumer’s daily life, will be the primary reason for buying a new mobile phone – and the aesthetic sex appeal of the mobile handset takes a distant second. A reality where there would be fewer, more uniform mobile operating systems, just like the PC. Needless to say, many things have to come in play for Mobile Computing to take hold and be embraced by masses. I will devote some of my next few blogs to this topic. Let’s begin with the issue of the Mobile OS.

The Mobile OS is one of the few topic where the metaphor “variety is the spice of life” does not apply. While there are enough claims by “industry experts” for each new OS launch that it will become the unifying factor, much like MS DOS, there are an equal number of claims, if not more, that such universal integration will not occur. Since the beginning of 2008 alone, at least three new mobile operating systems, including iPhone, LiMo, and Google’s Android, have been released. As if the existing plethora of proprietary operating systems (Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia’s recent purchase Symbian, J2ME and its various incompatible cousins, Qualcomm BREW and Mobile Linux) were not enough.

Theoretically, in the worldwide mobile industry, where four to five hundred new handsets are launched every year, the market would weed out less common or less popular operating systems in favor of moving towards a somewhat unified platform. The results are just the opposite, as new ones keep coming out of the woodwork while the old ones continue to linger, thereby forcing application developers to support several operating systems in order to become marketable. Can you imagine the plight of mobile application developers who have to support all these environments? The test matrix for supporting a single application across most of these operating systems is almost cost prohibitive.

The only beneficiaries of this rapid and rampant deployment of new mobile operating systems are the OS developers and the press, who gains yet another product subject to write about. However, this situation leaves virtually everyone else on the losing side. It’s time for all mobile software developers and users to rise together and begin boycotting new Mobile OSs rather than embracing them. It’s time for every mobile phone consumer out there to be aware of the operating system their phone uses – and its limitations – and demand a unified platform so that the era of Mobile Computing can become a stabilized evolution for new applications.

R. Paul Singh
CEO, PixSense, Inc.

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