Bad news: This blog has pretty much run its course. Nothing very interesting (to me) has happened in this space for a long time. I won’t be updating twopointouch anytime soon.

Good news: I’ve started a new blog, called gamethinks.com, which is about computer games. I know this won’t interest a lot of my regular readers, but it does interest me, a lot. Give it a go. Maybe I can convince you.

image credit: C J Isherwood

I’d hate to think that anyone imagines this is some sort of attack blog about Carphone Warehouse customer service. It really isn’t. The difficulties I had (that still figure quite prominently on Google searches) were resolved and now we’re all happy.

However, a friend of a friend is having similar difficulties getting through to anything human. If you’re out there and listening, and care about the reputation of the company — please look after Anjali.

Somehow this sort of thing, which I see everywhere, doesn’t entirely work for me. Maybe I’m fussy.

This is a guide to creating great newsletters. In it, we’ll explain how to create great newsletters. So if you want to create great newsletters, join us as we explain all about creating newsletters, that are great.

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So what’s the plan with these sorts of sites? I can see how they can (and do) climb to the top of Google. But you’d only visit them once, wouldn’t you? I guess there’s three possibilities:

1. They run adwords-style advertising and guess that “readers”, having been lured in, will click on anything, even an adwords banner to get out again. Since they cost nothing to make, pumping out a few dozen could potential result in incomes of ermm… pennies.
2. They’re desperate to ‘win’ on particular keywords. The only way their boss/client measures the success of the site is in page impressions and search position.
3. They went on a really bad course about SEO. I think this is more common than you might think: I read this sort of keyword-infatuated garbage on a lot of sites that genuinely well-meaning.

But I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether I like it or not, or whether it really works, because the content farms and idiots are already winning. Conducting a search for product advice is likely to yield dozens of rubbish reviews on the first page. The web starts closing down again, whereby learning the name of a decent source of information becomes a matter of word-of-mouth. Thank goodness, we now have the social web etc. to help us find those things. It’s something I’ve historically been a great fan of, and still am, theoretically. But, when push comes to shove, and I want to know which telly to buy, it becomes very clear how basic those things still are.

image credit: freezelight

Today, I reached the end of my patience when I couldn’t take part in a Skype video call. My downstream had plunged to 446kbps, as opposed to the (already pretty feeble) 6mbps I had 12 months ago.

For a little while, when I first noticed this drop, I was told it was because I had downloaded too much stuff. I probably had. But not within the last six months.

So anyway, I got on the phone.

• Ten minute wait in the queue. Bad – but I’ve had a lot worse.
• Annoying “is it plugged in?” style diagnostics. Bad – but not idiotic.
• Can you unscrew your phone socket from the wall and try this. That’s a new one – but I prefer this to a 2–3 day wait for an engineer.
• Ah yes, you need a new router. Promising – I’ve had my current Voyager 215 for about five years with no offer of an upgrade.
• But you need to agree to a new 12-month contract…

No, I don’t think so. Give me a workable internet connection and then I might trust you. So, no – can I have my Mac code [this lets you move more easily to another provider] please?

Him: Can I tell you about the best offers we have for you right now?

Me: No, I’d like my Mac code.

Him: Well, the best we can do is… [actually a quite good offer]

Him: … and shower you with loads of free stuff.

Me: Can I stop you there? Because I was told I’d have to take out a new contract to see my broadband connection fixed. And I don’t want to do that.

Him: Ah, yes. That is the case.

Me: Well, I don’t want to do that because I don’t trust BT to be able to deliver, based on my experience.

Him: Ah OK.

Me: So can I have my Mac Code, please?

Him: Just getting your code now. Two minutes pass.

Him: The system’s just generating it now. Another five minutes – no joke.

Him: I’m just going to go and get it Another two minutes.

Him: I’m sorry about the delay, Mr Delaney. I’m just getting it now. Another two minutes. Or was it ten? I am dazed now.

I don’t like to be mean about call-centre people. I don’t think it’s fair. They have a rulebook that was written by people hundreds (sometimes thousands) of miles away. They are the ones to blame, not the first woman I spoke to or Iqbal Hani (actually he was a total dick – really rude) or the other guy in retrieving-really-angry-people I spoke to today.

But really. You lost a customer today because you were too inflexible and you don’t really care about your customers. I’m paying my bills, why didn’t you just fix the problem? Why didn’t my router get upgraded years ago? If you have this new speed enhancer doodad, why didn’t you send it out to your existing customers?

I know why, of course. Because subscription businesses are based on customer inertia. Because you make more money putting effort into converting or acquiring new customers than in showing great value to existing ones.

But that’s shit. And there, I said it. You were shit today, BT.

Will our mobile phones continue to evolve at the rate they have done over the last fifteen years? Most technology sort of runs out of steam after a while. Computers today aren’t really much better than they were five years ago, for example. Televisions haven’t particularly improved for about ten years. However, there are some reasons to believe that mobiles have a bit more scope for improvement than those things.

Like all the other recent posts, this piece first appeared in the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

I remember the day in (I believe) 2002 when one of my colleagues arrived in the office with one of the first mobile phones with a colour screen. It was the Nokia 3510i. A crowd of us gathered in awe of its one-inch, 12-bit colour display. He then stunned us all by reading out the latest headlines from the BBC, courtesy of the GPRS WAP browser.

Immediately, all our monochrome devices — the standard office issue was the Nokia 3310 — looked like steampunk antiques, relics of a much earlier era.

That’s how it is with technology, particularly if you work in the sector. The new minimum specification seems to have a screen larger than 3-inches, an 8-megapixel camera, gigabytes of storage and a processor that could outplay Deep Blue. Next year, it will respond to thought commands and project a four-metre holographic display. The year after, phones will have become sentient beings and they’ll be telling you who to call.

Or will they? Not the robot uprising thing, but the idea that phones will become ever more powerful devices. Sometimes I am sceptical. There surely comes a point where further improvements actually become gimmicks.

In my opinion, for example, televisions stopped evolving usefully quite some time ago. The innovations in recent years — 3D, yet more speakers, screens bigger than your wall — probably appeal to a lot of people, yet for me, don’t add a lot to the core proposition of watching the TV. Similarly, computer keyboards, mice, desk fans, toasters, kettles and hairdryers. They’ve reached a natural end-point for improvement. People come up with new twists on these things, but they don’t really seem to take off.

The other side of this, though, the more optimistic side, is to make the point that all those things are single-use devices. Smartphones, by their definition, are converged devices. They’re a phone and camera, an entertainment console, a laptop, a television and a music system. When you look at that way, there’s still years to go, even at the breathtaking rate at which the technologies are being improved.

There’s a back-to-basics school of thought which says, “Ian, look, I’ve still got my Nokia 3310 from 2001 and it does the job.” But when I hear that, I pick up my phone, put on my headphones and watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica in HD.

image credit: Tarter Time Photography

The idea of mobile as a media platform is both very modern — by definition, it couldn’t have been conceived of before about 1985 and colour screens didn’t arrive until the mid-90s. But it’s also something that people seem to have been banging on about for ages, without anything in particular happening. At the start of every year, we’ve been reading “this year mobiles become an entertainment and information hub” in everyone’s list of predictions. At the risk of ridicule in a year’s time, I think it’s going to happen in 2011.

It was originally delivered as part of the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

Mobile is widely recognised as being the seventh mass media — after the web, television, cinema, radio, print and sound recordings. It’s also thought to eclipse each of those because of its unique advantages.

Mobile is more widely spread than any other media. There’s already far more mobile phones in circulation than there are televisions or radios. Mobile phones are found in places where they’ve never seen a newspaper.

It’s also a personal and personalisable media channel. Your phone and what appears on it is yours. Many people form intense attachments to their phones, as we’ve discussed before. And it’s always with you and — pretty much — always switched on. Increasingly, we’re discovering ways that mobile content can be contextualised to the time and location in which it’s being viewed.

So it’s very powerful stuff. Potentially.

Sadly, though, when you look at what is actually available, the experience leaves a lot to be desired. Sites that aren’t readable on mobile devices. Sites that are, but have achieved this by stripping out everything that was interesting about the site in the first place. Web-connected apps that take ages to load and don’t do as much as the websites they replicate. Even the really, really good mobile sites offer an experience that’s way behind the other ways that exist to engage with the media they present.

Why’s this? Partly, it’s because mobile is still very new — people haven’t developed the grammar of mobile media in the same way that conventions have been honed over time for other media. It simply takes time and experimentation.

Partly, it’s because of device fragmentation. A mobile site that’s made with the Nokia N8 in mind probably won’t look so good on your Nokia 3210, and vice-versa. And that’s without people’s bizarre insistence on occasionally buying models from other manufacturers…

And partly it’s because mobile is still treated as secondary by media owners. They’ve made a website — and it took a lot of time and money. Rather than starting again for mobile, they’d much prefer to repurpose what they’ve already got.

Exactly the same thing happened when the Web arrived. Media owners took their existing assets, be it words, sounds or pictures, and dumped them into HTML files. It’s taken twenty years for even a handful of websites to start taking advantage of the interaction and personalisation that the Web offers, let alone to start developing interfaces that people can actually use.

So will it take another twenty years for mobile media to develop its potential? Maybe. But the Web has matured a lot faster than it took television to mature — about 30 years. And television matured a lot faster than cinema — 40 years. We’re getting more adaptable, I think, and the inevitability and opportunity presented by new media is becoming welcome rather than feared.

I think that mobile mass media will start reaching maturity in the next two to three years. Exciting times ahead.

image credit: Kapungo

I think it was about this point — maybe six weeks in — that I started to ‘get it’, as they say. To understand why mobile is quite so important. More important than computers and the Internet in many respects. You might disagree: I have, after all, been brainwashed by mysterious Finns in black suits. First published here, I may well come across as a little gushing in this piece, but they are ideas I certainly stand by and will expand on in upcoming pieces.

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A terrific blog post by Steven Hoober of Little Springs Design offered me inspiration this week. He starts:

Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It’s not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.

Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it’s fashionable. It’s not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.

Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people.

And he’s right. Everything that’s good about mobile technology is about the way it enhances our ability to be better human beings. We can communicate more often and more effectively. We can work more efficiently. We need never be alone. None of this technology matters for its own sake: it’s about what it lets us be and do.

I’d rather touch another person than the most incredible device imaginable. But that’s not to discount devices — and this is where I disagree slightly with Mr. Hoober. The amazing thing is that the device allows me to touch others, remotely. We become superhuman in our abilities with the aid of technology, but we don’t stop being human. People talk about the advent of augmented reality, but our reality is already augmented by the way our mobile devices allow us to do things people simply couldn’t twenty years ago.

When you leave your phone at home by mistake, that wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach isn’t because you might miss an important message. It’s because you’ve been stripped of your powers. It’s Superman faced with Kryptonite.

It’s easy to forget that when you work closely with new models and new technologies. We get hung up on how many megapixels or megahertz. And of course those things are important — but it’s like comparing the ability to jump 30 feet into the air with the ability to jump 35 feet. I’d rather have the latter, but hey — did you see how high that guy could jump?

Nokia’s tagline is ‘Connecting People’, because that’s what’s core to what it does. Mobile is not — ultimately — a technology business. It’s a business about making people’s lives better.

image credit: Xurble

It was with some surprise that I discovered that built-in RFID chips aren’t the preserve of high-end smartphones. They’re actually more likely to be found at the bottom-end. It’s a technology that needs to be available to millions, rather than thousands, for the likes of retailers and transport companies to want to support such devices. I wrote a thing about it, which first appeared here.

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There’s not much chance that Nokia is likely to change its brand slogan — ‘Connecting People’ — any time soon. But the scope of what you do with your phone seems to widen with every passing year.

Something that’s getting the alpha-geeks very excited at the moment is the emergence of something rather unglamourously called ‘the web of things’. The idea is that, just as objects on the Internet — pages, files, pictures — all have unique addresses, so this will extend to objects in the real world. More or less anything from shirt on your back to the door of your house can and is likely to be connected to the Internet and have an address like http://you.yourstuff.yourblueshirt. At the moment, it seems most likely that these items will each have a tiny radio chip installed, called an RFID chip. The technology of getting your phone and other devices to interact with these things is called Near-Field-Communications (NFC). There’s a Nokia document explaining it here.

Why is that useful, you might wonder? Well, in the case of your shirt, it would mainly help the people that you bought it from. They could use the technology to track deliveries to individual stores. They might sell you the shirt by you tapping your phone on it. It would also make shoplifting a thing of the past, since they could identify and find items that haven’t been purchased at any point. Activating your door would be more useful to you, though. Again, you might use your phone to unlock it rather than keys. You could tell remotely who was in the house, and tell them to put the kettle on when you’re coming home. Actually, you could probably activate the kettle yourself.

Mobile phones are already very much part of the web of things. Across the world, trials are being conducted to replace tickets on public transport with a wave of your phone across the barrier. So called “smart” posters are created that reveal extra information on your mobile device with a wave. Building entry cards are similarly being replaced with identification using your mobile.

So why isn’t this already widespread? It’s a bit chicken and egg. Manufacturers won’t want to go to the extra cost of installing RFID chips until everyone’s phones support it. Phone manufacturers won’t want to create readers unless there are sufficient ‘things’ with which they can interact. It’s happening, though. Nokia already has three models with NFC, so do a number of other manufacturers. Public transport systems — where ticket machines, finding change and queues are a perpetual problem — are likely to be an early win. The Finnish city of Oulu, for example, has been running such a system for several years.

One of the main bones of contention when it comes to comments on the Nokia blog is product launch dates. Put simply, they are always either too early or too late. Too late because some people want to buy the products as soon as they’re announced, and any launch date thereafter is wrong. Too early, because sometimes there are bugs and they have to be fixed with firmware updates, both of which are, in some people’s minds, evidence of gross negligence. I tried to tackle some of the demands for an early release in this piece, which first appeared here.

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In the world of the Web, the expression “release early and often” has gained a lot of currency. It refers to the way web companies like Google and Yahoo! seem to have a brand new product every week. Smaller companies are in on it too. If you read blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch, you’ll find new, often innovative web services every single day. They’re labelled ‘beta’ — because they might not work the way you expect. But they’re often free, so nobody can complain too much.

Another way this is sometimes put is “fail early, fail often”. The advice makes a lot of sense when it comes to particular types of product. Try to do something. Put it out there. If it works, then great, and if it doesn’t, try again. But keep moving quickly so you can retain first-mover advantage over your competition. If your service isn’t evolving, it’s suggested, then it is decaying.

This philosophy seems to work very well in some markets. It’s probably not great advice when it comes to making phones, though.

When people buy a phone on contract, they’re making a big investment. Currently, 24-month contracts at £30 a month or more are common for smartphones in the UK. That’s £720 for your phone. Depending on the model you choose, there might be an additional payment up-front.

When you’re making that sort of investment, then you don’t want a product that’s been released early. You want something that works as advertised, out of the box. Getting a new phone is a big decision: you want to feel justified that you’ve done the right thing. You want to be able to pat yourself on the back for being so clever, not worry that you may have got it wrong this time.

Then there’s also the fact that phones are made of metal, glass and electronics. If you don’t get those right from the start, then the product is ruined. You can’t download a patch for a wonky catch or a flickering screen. Of course, firmware upgrades can upgrade or improve some aspects of your phone — and they’re very welcome — but getting something that doesn’t work right in the first place is a definite no-no when it comes to big purchases.

But where this Web 2.0 philosophy of continual releases and upgrades does work very well is in extra services. Things you weren’t paying for that you get for free. For example, no-one who bought a Nokia smartphone before January this year expected to be given voice navigation through Ovi Maps for free. But that’s what many of them got. It’s not only nice to be gifted something valuable by the people who made your phone, it makes you like them more and means that you’re more likely to come back to them when the next contract is due.

So yes, release early and often. But only when it comes to the added extras.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

Over the spring and summer, we ran a campaign called ‘Design by Community’, in which members of the Nokia blog’s community voted for their ideal mobile phone, having been given some ideas of the constraints that actually apply to manufacturers.

It was a massive success, with hundreds of thousands of votes cast and intense discussions on the virtues of various design decisions. This piece was a slightly meddlesome and contrary reminder that asking the users is one part of the design process.

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There are two schools of thought when it comes to canvassing other people’s opinions on designs, and they both have strong arguments behind them. Many of these were aired when we unveiled the draft sketches of the Design by Community concept device.

On the one hand, some people would prefer that design was left up to experienced, professional designers. After all, they’re trained and paid to do the job, and know how to balance the hardware requirements with appearances. They are also responsible for having some sort of design vision, so that the whole thing fits together properly. What’s more, they might argue, if you ask 1000 people, then you’ll get 1000 answers and the product ends up compromised, trying to balance too many wishes at once. Design classics aren’t voted on, they say: they come from inspired vision and expertise.

Those are good points, but the other side of the story is that locking your designers in a room until they’ve come up with a new phone model isn’t going to work either. Phones aren’t just electronic sculptures, they are also business ventures. If you haven’t done some homework, then your venture will fail. You need to know what people want from their phones, what’s seen as fashionable and how much people are prepared to pay. You don’t need to be a slave to that, otherwise nobody would ever come up with anything new, but in-depth market knowledge is definitely one ingredient of a successful new model.

The other thing to point towards is the power and capability of the Open Source movement. Most of the Internet is made by unpaid contributors sharing their knowledge and craft for free, both the content and the technology behind it. Wikipedia is arguably the greatest repository of knowledge that humanity has ever created, and it was done without payment. Large numbers of people can and do group together to produce really excellent things. Jimmy Wales might be the architect of Wikipedia, but he hasn’t written a meaningful proportion of its content. It’s Encyclopedia by Community.

What I think is that the truth probably lies somewhere between these extremes. Artistic vision and a tight focus are really important parts of product design. But so is understanding, anticipating and researching what it is that people want. That’s a big part of why we wanted to conduct the Design by Community project. So we can unravel together the current state of people’s expectations, learn a little bit more about the ingredients of a successful product and hopefully influence the path of future devices.

picture credit: arquera