Noble enough, canny enough, bold enough. Except that no one’s talked about the gamble that’s implicit in the move.

Let me explain.

Suppose Google enhances its web applications using Chrome’s new capabilities - which it will. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader - now run almost as well as desktop applications. But only on Chrome. Now, these applications are more dependent than ever on the browser. In other words, Google is encouraging users to install a thin layer (of Chrome) on top of Windows to run their web apps. Perhaps Firefox will follow Chrome’s lead. That means 20% of the user base will be able to run the next generation of Google web applications.

But there is the remaining 80%. For that 80% of users, Internet Explorer is the receptacle through which they interact with the web. If Microsoft chooses to not play nice, Gmail, Google Docs, Reader will “break” on IE - that is, not render/function properly.

The average Joe’s reaction is to blame the “website”, not the browser. Example: The other day, the Yahoo! India mail website “broke” on Internet Explorer. My sister’s reaction was “Well, looks like Yahoo! mail’s not working properly, let me try Gmail”. Not “let me see if it works on Firefox”. Or my personal experience in cyber cafes in India: If the site doesn’t render correctly, “We’ll try after some time”. Not “Hey cybercafeowner, do you have Firefox on this box?”

In other words, if IE decides not to implement Chrome’s under-the-hood architectural innovations, it will end up discrediting Google’s own web applications, not IE or Microsoft. The average user is happy with his/her webmail (or other such apps). He/she won’t shift to a new browser, he’ll demand that the “email” work “as before”, or he’ll/she’ll switch to a new “email”.

No prizes for guessing that MS is hoping the new “email” is going to be Windows Live Mail.

Which is all very fine. Until the day you die.

What happens to your digital possessions after you’re no longer around? It’s a question without a good answer, mostly because it hasn’t been asked often enough. Understandably. The Internet’s only been around some 15 years, and we’ve only begun putting personal info on the Web (Here’s a broad list) for about 5 or 6 years. In other words, very few of us from the Internet Age are dead yet.

But we’ll need answers in the next few years. Archiving and preserving a departed loved one’s online possessions is going to be a huge opportunity not so long from now. I say opportunity because things aren’t as straightforward in the online realm as in the physical, and there’s plenty of scope for smart thinking and innovative solutions.

Imagine you’re a startup that specializes in archiving digital creations. You’ve been commissioned by the departed’s relatives to preserve digital memories. Consider three issues you’d face:

Tracking:

What did your client (well, client’s loved one anyway, let’s just call him/her the client) create on the Internet? You can cover the obvious - email/chat/blog/microblog/photos/videos/social network. Then you get to the hard stuff: all the comments he/she’s posted on websites, forums he/she’s been active on, scraps/wall posts on friends’ social network pages, old email accounts he/she might have had in the past. and so on. 

Right now there is no reliable way of tracking this. How will you go about this?

Ownership:

Who owns data that your client had put up? The answers for some of these are straightforward - does Google own your videos on YouTube? Does Yahoo own your photos from Flickr? Read the fine 
print. But what about the scraps/wall posts your client wrote on his/her friend’s Orkut/Facebook profile? Comments on his/her friend’s blog? One view is that since they’re on the friend’s Orkut profile, they belong to the friend. The counterview is that scraps belong to whoever wrote them. 

Matters are further complicated if the client had stated before death that he/she wanted this sort of data deleted post-death. Will the owner of the blog that your client had commented on allow it?

Another question is about transfer of ownership. If Alice has had an email conversation with Bob that she would not want anyone other than Bob to view, should she have the right to veto the transfer of his email account to his next of kin? Perhaps she revealed her birthday and birth year to Bob. Could she veto the archival of his calendar?

Context:

This is closely related to ownership. Often, data by itself is useless without the context it was originally created it. A comment your client left on a blog post has very little value without its original blog post. A scrap/wall post or a “reply” tweet even less so. A pretty picture your client clicked and uploaded on Flickr is greatly diminished in value, significance and memory without the comments it sparked. A social network profile without the accompanying network is hardly social. But archiving the context along with your client’s content will raise the above ownership issues.

These are problems we haven’t faced with physical possessions because these problems never applied to them. How we sort them out is a both a tricky business and a business opportunity.

Also, a few months ago, Nokia released the E71 smartphone. Sporting a QWERTY keyboard, a thin form factor, and attractive metal casing, the E71 is Nokia’s first serious enterprise phone. Its predecessor, the E61i, was a capable phone hobbled by a miserable plastic body, poor build quality and bad branding (the E61, E61i, E62 [1]). The E71, in contrast, is simply beautiful.

A combination of the application and the phone, then, is supposed to demonstrate that Nokia is now serious about the Enterprise. That it is the first choice when a company’s IT department chooses a smartphone to mobilize its workforce.

Not so fast. Research in Motion’s Blackberry series of phones rule the roost in that space. And it doesn’t look like Nokia’s in a position yet to unseat RIM.

Nokia’s Enterprise Problem

Nokia’s problem are two-fold. One, any enterprise phone has to have a physical QWERTY keyboard, since it’ll mostly be used for email on the go. Nokia only has one device in this form factor. Its history with such phones, as we saw, doesn’t inspire confidence. And it doesn’t have a product roadmap around its QWERTY phones. No organization’s IT department is going to fit its executives with a phone like that. Not when the alternative is Blackberry [2].

Nokia has also never tried to seriously sell to the Enterprise. Sources tell me that in India, the phone is mostly being sold via the retail channel; corporate deals have been non-existent. It doesn’t surprise me. Most of Nokia’s previous Eseries phones had been pretty, Wifi-equipped toys with all sorts of form factors (candybar, clamshell, slider), and tiny 9-button dialpads [3]. Not the sort of product line a sales guy would be proud demonstrating to a firm’s CIO.

Blackberry’s massive brand is also going to be tough to compete with. As things stand today, given a choice, an executive would almost always choose a Blackberry over an E71. Features don’t even matter; just that he/she wants to be seen carrying a Blackberry. RIM has achieved what even Apple hasn’t been able to - ubiquity as well as desirability.

How can Nokia compete in the Enterprise?

1. Concentrate on winning accounts at companies that haven’t set up a mobile device infrastructure for their workforce, instead of converting existing WinMobile/Blackberry accounts. Few IT departments want to support more than one device family. But a surprising number of large firms haven’t gone mobile yet, and there’s where Nokia can leverage one crucial advantage: Price.

2. Reduce price through reduced margins. Nokia commands massive margins on its Eseries phones currently, I’ve learnt. It could win any bidding war by cutting those margins. Blackberry will make it a neck-and-neck affair on features, but Nokia could win on price.

3. Over the next 18 months, build a product portfolio around mobile devices with QWERTY keypads, with a 3-tier low-end, medium and flagship strategy. Nokia’s own Nseries 7x, 8x and 9x models are a good example of this. And retire the 9-button keypad Eseries models [4]. They aren’t going to win Nokia any accounts.

Conclusion

Nokia’s crafted a brilliant entertainment devices strategy around its Nseries branded phones. Not so with its enterprise strategy. While the Eseries brand is strong, Nokia has problems both with its Eseries phones as well as the marketing around them.

Either the company can pull along anaemically, selling “business” phones through its retail channels, or it can take on Blackberry by winning more corporate accounts. That’s going to require changes in its product, pricing and marketing strategy. Tall ask, tall results.

Footnotes:

[1] There were 3 models, nearly indistinguishable externally. The E61 did not sport a camera but had WiFi and 3G. The E62 had neither a camera nor WiFi/3G. The E61i had both. And all 3 were ugly. (back)

[2] Of course there’s Windows Mobile, which runs QWERTY phones by Samsung, Motorola and Palm. Nokia’s E71, in my opinion, trumps Samsung’s Blackjack II and Motorola’s Q9c. Palm practically invented the smartphone market but is now in a dead slump. Then there’s iPhone. Unless it gets a physical keyboard, Apple isn’t winning any deals. Open and shut. I’ve used both the iPod Touch and the Blackberry Curve, and there’s no contest when it comes to doing email. Neither of these are game-changers in the Enterprise smartphone market. (back)

[3] Ironically, with the release of the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, RIM has decided to go the other way and test the clamshell market. (back)

[4] There have been repeated calls among the Nokia enthusiast community to bring some Eseries-only features to Nseries devices, notably the ability to display additional information and notifications on the home screen, ability to define “modes” - a collection of active standby shortcuts and themes, the enhanced calendar, a fully functional version of Quickoffice, among others. The E51 and E66 with enhanced cameras (they’re cheap to put into a phone) and standard 3.5mm audio jacks could function admirably as Nseries devices with the above features.

Alternatively (and controversially), it could create another brand for small businesses, (Eseries Lite? Ugh.) that need the business capabilities of Eseries, but for whom the E71 and its ilk are too expensive. (back)

Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

This is about as anti-competitive as it gets - applications that threaten iTunes’s monopoly over loading content to/from iPhone/iPod Touch will not be allowed on to Apple’s iPhone App Store. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has more to say about Apple’s exclusionary policies.

So some apps are banned. So what?

This is a big deal because App Stores are becoming an important way (and for iPhone/iPod Touch, the only way) to add functionality to a mobile device - whether it’s from Apple or Nokia or Android. Installing applications on your mobile phone is tricky at best and throw-your-hands-up-it’s-impossible at worst, which is why such App Stores (which make the job much simpler) will gain a lot of traction in the months to come. This places enormous power in the hands of App Store owner - either the handset or mobile OS manufacturer.

Simultaneously, as mobile devices become ubiquitous, more capable and more functional (because of these apps), an application ecosystem will begin to form - there are already over 3000 applications for iPhone/iPod Touch on Apple’s App Store, with small startups entirely dependent on the money they make from sales through the Store. Indeed, Kleiner Perkins has set up an iFund to invest in startups that make apps for iPhone, and there’s a RIM-backed Blackberry Fund too. How much longer before we start seeing the same interest in Nokia/Android application startups?

But this rosy picture could be in jeopardy if such rejections - either arbitrary or anti-competitive - become more commonplace. It’ll scare application developers, and drive away investors. And a multi-billion dollar (because of the sheer numbers of mobile devices) global opportunity could be lost, lost even to the party behind the App Store itself.

What are mobile app startups and users likely to do?

There are two things, both of which are likely to happen:

1.) Web apps that try to offer the same functionality will pick up speed. No App Store will be able to restrict what web-based applications users choose to use. Tomorrow, the Twitter client Twitterrific might be in the soup (because it has a built-in browser and mimics the functionality of Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser - you never know),  but the web-based Hahlo twitter client for iPhone/iPod Touch will face no such problems because Apple has nothing to do with it (and vice versa).

Ordinarily, I’m a strong proponent of native applications for mobile devices (at this stage of the industry). But circumstances are going to push app developers harder to write Good Web Apps.

2.) More jailbroken iPhones. Ironically, this warranty-voiding way of installing third-party applications is also the most open, offering several more native applications with fewer Apple-enforced restrictions. Developers will work harder to make it easier for customers to jailbreak their iPhones and iPods Touch.

Both these trends will represent a move away from the App Store.

Conclusion

As the technology industry becomes more open than ever (open software and hardware standards, community-based platforms for communication, convergence of desktop and mobile), this move towards closed application ecosystems is an anachronism.

More restrictions will mean more effotrs to circumvent (or just abandon) the App Store - whether from Apple or Nokia or Google’s Android. From the App Store owner’s ponit of view, this will be killing the golden goose - and the loss of possibly billions of dollars in revenue.

I was playing around with a colleague’s HTC Touch Cruise the other day. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and, in summary, is a full-featured smartphone with decent multimedia capabilities. That’s not what this post about though.

It’s about two clear observations I made - that we’re stuck in the late 90s when it comes to mobile touch-based input devices, and that UI designers still use the desktop paradigm when designing for mobile touch screens. While Windows Mobile is what triggered this post, with PalmOS, and UIQ too.

Poke, poke

Turns out that it’s a huge pain navigating the WinMobile interface on the 2.8″ touchscreen with your fingers. The buttons are tiny, the menu options are awkward, and it’s next to impossible to grab and drag a scrollbar. I gave up.  It’s clear - the best way to navigate a Windows Mobile is using the accompanying stylus. 

But a stylus is a hopelessly outdated tool. Along with the physical QWERTY keyboard for desktops/laptops, the stylus is a tool for mobiles that stubbornly refuses to die. Perhaps it’s easier - and commercially attractive - for touchscreen phone manufacturers to add applications and features than to rework a familiar, though suboptimal interface.

iPhone/iPod Touch have changed that. iPhone may not pack the sheer number of applications the HTC Touch Cruise does, but its interface is revolutionary. It lost the stylus. In fact, with multitouch - flicking, pinching, dragging with multiple fingertips - your hand is more effective than a stylus. You may not agree with iPhone the device (I don’t) - but you have to admit iPhone’s set the benchmark for all touchscreen interfaces.

Honey, I shrunk the desktop

Windows Mobile 6.1 has a task bar, a system tray, a Start button and a drop-down Start Menu. With nested menus. On that tiny 240×320 pixel screen.  

After spending a while with the device, I realized that Windows Mobile is essentially a shrunk-down version of the desktop Windows interface. The widgets are smaller, but the paradigm is the same. The result is a cluttered interface and a frustrating navigation experience.

Someone’s psyched the WinMobile team into believing that their biggest strength is that their mobile interface looks just like their desktop interface. That may have been true when mobile applications were very simple, but it doesn’t hold true any longer. It’s hurting usability and innovation.

There have been several calls for this, and I’m going to say it here again - the WinMobile team will do themselves and their legions of developers and enterprise customers a world of good if they rethink their interface. 
 

Note: I think Samsung and LG also have very good touchscreen interfaces. But this is merely an observation from Google Image Search results. Haven’t tried them out first-hand, so no comparisons.

In a nutshell, iPod Touch is iPhone without the phone, SMS, camera and Bluetooth. Which is great, because those were the very features that iPhone was criticized for. Fortunately, the N82 excels at all of these. Here’s my take on using the 16GB iPod Touch and the Nokia N82.

Price

8GB iPod Touch + 2GB Nokia N82 = Rs. 17000 + Rs. 19000 = Rs. 36000. 8GB iPhone = Rs. 31000.
16GB iPod Touch + 2GB Nokia N82 = Rs. 22000 + Rs. 19000 = Rs. 41000. 16GB iPhone = Rs. 36000.

So the combination costs Rs. 5000 more than the equivalent iPhone. We’ll see what you get in return for that amount of extra money.

Connecting the iPod Touch to the Internet via the N82

The chief difference between the Touch and its iPod predecessors is Wifi. This transforms the Touch from a music and video player into a full-fledged Internet access device that also happens to do music and video. In fact, there’s evidence to show that iPod Touch owners rarely use the device for music. The corollary is that if you don’t have a Wifi signal, your iPod Touch is little more than a very expensive iPod with (comparatively) tiny amounts of storage.

Enter Joikuspot. This marvelous application converts your GPRS/EDGE/3G-capable Nokia phone into a WiFi hotspot. Most recent Nseries and Eseries phones have Wifi capability, including the N82. This means that I can connect to the Internet by simply selecting the N82 Wifi hotspot from my iPod Touch.

This give your iPod Touch a whole new lease of life. No mobile device matches the Internet experience on an iPhone/iPod Touch. I can’t quantify this, but mobile Safari renders pages in a way that makes the Internet connection seem faster than on the N82 browser.

Finally, the $9.95 iPod Touch software upgrade gives you access to the iPhone App Store, where you can install anything ranging from the Twitterific twitter client to the New York Times news reader app, to iPhone Wordpress client to literally hundreds of free and paid applications and games.

What’s better on the N82

The N82 does a splendid job at whatever the iPhone is poor at. The best example is the superb 5MP camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. The camera can also record videos at up to 30 frames per second. Check out the quality of photos and videos from the N82 on my Flickr stream.

I can use Bluetooth on the N82 to transfer files, sync with my PC over the air and pair with hands-free headsets. The crippled iPhone Bluetooth implementation only does headset pairing. Nothing else. The N82 can be used as a modem for my PC. For reasons unknown, iPhone cannot do this. The only third-party app that could do this was pulled from the App Store within a day. The N82 also supports copy-and-paste and can forward text messages, features inexplicably left out of iPhone.

There are thousands of S60 applications that aren’t part of the iPhone App Store. Nokia’s Sports Tracker and Nokia’s Map Loader come immediately to mind, as does Fring (which only runs on jailbroken iPhones/iPods Touch).

Finally, there have been no reported performance issues with the N82 3G chip. Not so for iPhone, that has had issues so severe with the onboard 3G chip that it has spawned rumors of a handset recall.

What’s better on the iPod Touch

Internet Experience, iPhone App Store – I’ve already spoken about this earlier. Once you’ve experienced the Internet on iPhone/iPod Touch, nothing – nothing – will make you go back to any other mobile device. Its crisp colors, smooth fonts, elegant multi-touch controls are streets ahead of the competition.

The iPod Touch is also a very elegant, capable PDA, comprising Contacts, Calendar (with support for multiple calendars), Tasks and a Mail client capable of displaying rich text/HTML. The Contacts and Calendar sync with Outlook. The Mail client, in addition to supporting POP3 and IMAP accounts, can also connect to a corporate Microsoft Exchange setup.

Lest we forget, the iPod Touch is also an iPod. With 8GB or 16GB of storage, it can hold a big chunk of most music collections. Because of the high-quality display, video playback is exquisite – you forget you’re using a mobile device. Videos also begin playing from the point you left off last time. And yes, almost as a footnote, it’s great for viewing large photo collections too. The iPod Touch multimedia experience is a generation ahead of what the N82 offers.

Conclusion

For Rs. 5000 and one gadget extra, you a great camera, video recording, functional Bluetooth, functional SMS, 2GB extra storage, ability to use your GPRS/EDGE/3G connection from your computer, access to thousands of S60 apps and reliable 3G. As with the iPhone you also get a top-of-the-line PDA and a gorgeous multimedia device.

Sounds like a good deal? To me, it was a no-brainer. What do you think?

…a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.

Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.

Techcrunch has put into words what I’ve felt since the day the Kindle was announced. After all, Amazon isn’t in the hardware business at all; it’s in the product and content retail business. I can imagine that in the initial days of the Kindle launch, Amazon needed its own device to build a strong association between Amazon’s brand and the mobile ebook model. Now that that purpose is served, manufacturing and selling the Kindle hardware is an overhead that Amazon could avoid.

Just like Associates?

This isn’t very different from the masterstroke that Amazon played years ago with its Associates affiliate program. Before Affiliate Marketing became the wild jungle that it is today, Amazon launched a series of innovative tools - aStore, Omakase Links, Product Previews - to let publishers (people who owned websites/blogs/suchlike) add links to Amazon’s content onto their web pages. These publishers then earned a cut of the sale generated by clicks from the links on their web pages.

Kindle is Associates all over again, except instead of web-based tools, we’re talking hardware specs.

For instance, Amazon’s aStore let developers build their own focused online “stores” (which displayed Amazon’s books). (A religion-focused website would be able to draw viewers and sell that category of books better than Amazon.com itself.) In the same vein, a student version of Kindle with access to e-textbooks and additional bookmarking features would be better marketed and sold by a third party which is focused on only that market.

With such an Affiliate/Franchise/Licensing model, manufacturers would fall over themselves for a chance to access Amazon’s massive ebook and newspapers database - and a cut of the subsequent revenues.

The Mobile Opportunity

Once third party manufacturers have licensed the Kindle specs, they are no longer restricted to building anything that looks like the Kindle today. I can readily think of well-designed iPhone/iPod Touch ebook applications like the New York Times app. This fits in with American universities doling out iPods Touch and iPhones to their incoming freshmen.  A market for Nokia’s S60 devices would be many times larger.

What do you think? Would you purchase a Kindle application for your mobile device?

Aside: Of course, manufacturers would then be free to choose the carrier of their choice for wireless content delivery. That sure isn’t going to make Sprint-Nextel happy.

It isn’t about features

There was a time when the only competition Nokia’s smartphones had was from the odd, super-expensive PDA-phone that was more the former than the latter. Over the last year though, the competition has dramatically upped the ante in terms of what it packs into a handset.

A case in point is the near-simultaneous release of Nokia’s new flagship phone, the N96, and Samsung’s Innov8. The Innov8 outclasses the N96 on nearly every count, making it a widely-awaited contest. And that’s not the only notable example: the Samsung Blackjack II is a very capable Windows Mobile QWERTY phone, matching Nokia’s E61i. The Samsung Instinct was hailed the iPhone killer, offering a full-face touchscreen with touch feedback - touchscreens are something Nokia doesn’t even have in the market yet. LG’s not far behind in the race either. The LG Viewty, released around the same time as the N95 sported a 5MP camera with “image stabilization”, and a touchscreen.

Yet, in spite of these releases, both Samsung and LG lag far, far behind Nokia in the Indian smartphone market. Admob’s June 2008 Mobile Metrics review states that 97% of ad requests from smartphones were from Nokia handsets. It’s more or less clear that Nokia’s built a solid reputation in India as *the* smartphone brand. And at the heart of that is its N and E series branding strategy.

Nokia’s smartphone strategy: Product, Brand, Distribution

Nokia’s strategy of creating two lines of positioning for entertainment (Nseries, with advanced imaging, video, internet and gaming capabilities) and business (Eseries, with focus on connectivity, productivity and email) certainly seems to have paid off over the last 3 years.

Nokia’s used these brands to create multiple, successive communications campaigns around the terms “Nseries” and “Eseries”, which marked a break from the number-oriented labeling custom. Consider Nokia’s own phones; could you infer anything at all about the 3650 from its name? The 7610? The 9200? Contrast that with, say, the N81 - I can tell at a minimum (because its an Nseries) that it’s a phone with reasonably good looks, stereo music, large storage capacity and a 2MP+ camera. Here’s a decent article about Nokia’s efforts to build the Nseries brand. Ditto for the Eseries.

Finally, think about the massive investment Nokia’s made in its dedicated priority and concept stores. While it already has an extensive distribution network for its low-end line (see the section “The Distribution Edge” in this article on Knowledge@Wharton - free reg. req’d), these stores are a great way of showcasing your top-line phones to people for whom the purchase is a high-involvement decision.

Samsung’s strategy (or the lack of it)

While this is a discussion about Samsung, it holds equally - if not more - true for other handset manufacturers.

In contrast, Samsung’s strategy seems to be all over the place. No, let me correct that - I don’t think they have a strategy. They know at a minimum that their phones need to do music, video, photos, the Internet, and that touchscreens are good to have. That’s about it.

From a product perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any great deal of thought on timing launches (relative to market conditions or relative to previous releases). Further up the development cycle, what features go into which product (or, more importantly, what features to leave out). Or even further up the cycle, what OS to use on their phone (they use several).

On the marketing side, from a branding perspective, each phone seems to be a brand unto itself. What can explain names like Innov8, Instinct, Glyde, Blackjack, F-480, SGH-i780, U900 Soul? (All are recent releases packed with features). There’s no consistent product look (you can, in one look “tell” that a phone is an Eseries device, can’t you), color or name.

If your phones don’t use a consistent Operating System (the way Nokia uses Symbian+S60), it’s impossible to develop an active developer community. If you don’t have a consistent brand identity, it’s difficult to develop ambassadors for your phones. If you keep developing a different website for each of your phones, its impossible to build communities online.

What markets is Samsung chasing? What positioning is it considering for its phones to gain share in these markets? More abstractly, what do Samsung’s phones “stand for”? What is the message they’re trying to get out? Even SonyEricsson has a rudimentary strategy that says “We make entertainment-centric phones. Some of them make great music devices - the Walkman series, other are great for photography - the Cybershot series”. HTC has a less clear strategy around its Touch line of phones, but at least they’ve got a consistent name and OS in place.

From an advertising perspective, the only shred of consistency I’ve seen over the past months is the “Next is What?” Samsung campaign. However, I don’t see the campaign tied to a product that anyone will remember. Nokia, on the other hand, has run periodic campaigns for each generation of devices it releases - in print, on TV, online.

From a distribution perspective, I don’t see why Samsung doesn’t leverage its extensive distribution network for its home appliances and entertainment devices - it’s a channel where it has one heck of a headstart on Nokia. I see digital cameras and Indian-manufactured laptops sold in those sorts of electronics stores. Phones seem to make just as much sense.

Conclusion

While the Indian mobile market is (still) seeing explosive growth, the high-end of the market is maturing. The implication is that features are no longer the USP for a smartphone; brand is. And how well you communicate that brand to your audience. Nokia has done a stellar job since 2005 by investing in its Nseries and Eseries strategy - in product design, marketing and branding, advertising and distribution. The competition seems to already have the engineering capability to match Nokia. But it needs to get its act together if it needs to take on Nokia in the marketplace.

Right now, your instant messaging contact list, and your phone/SMS contact list are disparate and independent. Your contact’s IM status tells you nothing about where he/she is, or if he/she can take a call. Is it possible to

• Integrate both contact lists into one?
• Set one real-time status that all your contacts can check?

The answer will, very soon, be yes.

Same Network

A mobile phone is already capable of making calls, receiving SMSes and running an instant messaging client. But since phone calls and SMS are sent over one network type (Voice) and Mobile IM over another (GPRS/EDGE/3G), there’s no unification between these services.

However, when WiFi coverage is widely available, or when you can make and receive calls over your packet-data oriented 3G network, the line begins to blur, and then altogether disappear. Applications like Fring, which integrate your phone contacts list and Gtalk list, already make that possible. If you can make VoIP calls, you can talk to your contact by voice or text.

The Possibilities

At that point of time, your status message indicates you real-life communication status. One could, for instance, check if a contact is open to receiving SMS only, or having a short IM conversation, or receiving calls, or none at all. This goes beyond the “Available”, “Busy”, “In a meeting” statuses.

If you’re on a phone call, your IM status could indicate that automatically, so people getting in touch with you could leave you an SMS/IM message without having to first call you and check if you’re busy on a call. You could indicate if you’re driving, sleeping or having dinner and have it show up on your friends’ mobile chat list.

If you’re in a meeting, simply setting your IM status to “Busy” could automatically cancel all calls made to you and pop up an IM chat box on your caller’s phone so he/she can send you an IM instead.

Stretching this, implementing a multi-way voice conference wouldn’t be any different from a multi-way chat. Additionally, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text, some participants could write and read text, others could speak and hear voice - in the same conversation (say one’s in a movie hall, the other is driving - they’d never be able to speak with today’s state of tech).

Adding location to the mix throws up some interesting possibilities. If you can display your location as part of your IM status, your friends nearby could sign up for notifications and call you to meet up - all from the same device. Or if you’re waiting to call someone until he/she reaches office? Set an alert for when your contact’s location changes to his office locality.

Conclusion

Not only are we “integrating voice and data” - that’s been on the cards for long - but we’re also integrating people and devices, using features of one to enhance our experience with the other.

How long do you think it’ll be before we get here? Will telecom companies try to block this, given that they won’t be able to charge per-call any longer?

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates - all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows - invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature - viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?