This is fantastic news and I hope that this is the start of all the networks adjusting their pricing to something more realistic for consumers.

OK for those who use the internet everyday this is not as cheap as £7.50 per month from T-mobile and Vodafone or £5 per month from 3. However it is much better for the occasional user who currently has to pay about £1 per day though – and it is the occasional user that we want to attract to the internet.

The Nielsen Online report showed a 25% increase in mobile internet usage in the UK between Q2 and Q3 – perhaps news like this might continue that trend.

Our research has shown us that unpredictable internet charges are a main fear of consumers about using anything connected to the internet on their phone.

UPDATE From Virgin Mobile: It is amazing what 30 peas can do!

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Is it a great phone? yes.

Does it have all the input methods a user could ask for? yes

Is this a great phone for media caputure? yes

Is this a phone priced / aimed at the majority of students? no

Is having a keyboard more important than a large set of applications? no

Are Nokia moving in the right direction? yes

Is it easier for Nokia to add an App Store equivalent to the iPhone, than it is for Apple to add a keyboard? no

Is the iPhone still the best example of a platform to deliver educational applications and content on? yes

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iPod Touch 2G

Another week – another enthusiatic iPhone story from Al!

This is just a round up of some stories and stats that have been around this week about the App Store going over the 10,000 application threshold.

Before the App Store stories here is a quick note that Apple now own the second most popular smartphone operating system. They have now captured 16.6% of the smartphone market globally – ahead of Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Also note this does not include the iPod Touch – not a phone – but it must be the biggest selling PDA in the world now.

OK App Store news:

148apps.com have put together a page with the icons for all 10,000 apps and have some statistics breaking down the details of the applications on the right. You can see a breakdown of apps by date submitted, price or category. Category shows that there are now 770 apps marked as education in the App Store which by my calculation is 7.7%. This should probably be watered down a little as many of the language applications have the same application many times each with different vocabulary sets e.g. French, German, Russian etc.

Let’s call it 7% of the whole set of applications for the sake of argument. I have no real data about how PC software breaks down in terms of categories – but I think this number must be about right as a proportion of a software market place.

For those wanting more stats you can visit Oreilly Radar for a breakdown of prices that indicates in the US App Store the average price of a top 100 application was now $2.60.

Finally MobileCrunch lists out the top apps in various categories broken down by paid and non-paid. There is not much to be learnt from this – apart from how healthy the market place is and how diverse some of the entries in the Top ten apps are.

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Nokia N97 in use

Nokia yesterday unveiled the N97 their latest smartphone which is being dubbed (not by Nokia) as their iPhone Killer.

[UPDATE: Post now available in the much simpler Simon Cowell style of delivery]

The talk of an iPhone killer is premature and Nokia know this – they have a long way to go yet to catch up with Apple – and a lot of it is not about creating the right device. Nokia have no App Store, lack a single platform and have a brand that is more about utility and reliability than it about innovation, cool and media as Apple’s is. The price for an unbundled device will be €550 which means it is aimed at high end users and not even being put to compete with the iPhone.

I have yet to get my hands on a N97 – so my thoughts are based solely on the images I have seen on the Nokia website, engadget and from the always enthusiastic Robert Scoble.

The device could be thought of as a N810
phone, but it’s O/S is S60 not Maemo and this makes a difference in
terms of how this device will be useful. In terms of the physical
device it seems to be slightly smaller than a N810 and similar in width
and height to an iPhone – but almost half as deep again.

As you would expect from Nokia the camera is 5 Megapixels and can do
DVD quality video, which is a great improvement over the iPhone.

There are three very striking things about the device:

• Slide out QWERTY Keyboard
• Touch screen
• Simple button design – as I understand it when the keyboard is not shown – there is really only one button and the touch screen (sound familiar?)

Reports say that the touch screen interface is good – but not as reactive as the iPhone screen. The reason for this is the technology used for the touch screen. Nokia use a ‘resistive’ touch screen to support pen based input (important for inputting Chinese and Japanese characters) which is something the iPhone apparently doesn’t do well. More importantly the S60 user interface has been greatly improved – but I am not sure yet if it still matches the simplicity of the iPhone. A user interface is ‘only’ software and can be improved upon. There is a problem with the ‘only’ software issue though – are software updates as easy for the N97 as they are for iPhone users?

The obvious differentiator between the devices though is the keyboard – and as I have often argued this is key for educational purposes. Nokia seem to have chosen to keep things simple with the keyboard – it looks easier to use than the N810 which is even better. The N97 continues to show that Nokia devices are great at capturing input (pictures, videos and typing). Improvements to S60 may make using Nokia phones simpler and easier, but the iPhone platform is simple and better for consuming media – from music and video through to applications.

At the moment I still think the iPhone / iPod Touch are the better platform for education even though this device is starting to show Nokia is moving in the right direction. Educational applications will probably always make up about 10% of all applications available for a platform. Until Nokia boasts as many applications as the App Store there will never be as much educational content for a Nokia phone. The number of applications in the App Store (10,000 last week) is an indication of how successful Apple have been in lowering the costs of development for 3rd parties, by providing a single (non-fragmented) platform, handling distribution and billing and guaranteeing the 70% revenue share. Nokia need to address these problems if they want to have a large set of applications and as a result of that educational content.

I think that Nokia need to do the following if they want to generate as successful application platform as Apple:

• Provide a single platform for application developers to work with phone and non-phone devices (Maemo would fit the bill well and there are indications Nokia think this also).
• Provide a simple integrated application delivery mechanism – just like they have done on the N810 with Maemo – the Over the Air updates are really simple
• Provide a simple developer payment mechanism like Apple’s 70%
• Find a brand that means something to consumers that shows Nokia is a media company  (N97 ! come on what does that mean to a consumer?)
• Make sure this device always ‘Comes with Internet’ and consumers understand this is an internet and application phone

The N97 shows that Nokia have moved in the right direction and have been able to change themselves and rise to the threat from Apple (which is more than can be said of RIM and Microsoft). This also shows what a competitive market does for innovation in mobile technology which can only be good.

For mobile phones in education – it is still clear that if you want to use the phones in people’s pockets you need to have a cross platform solution (such as uHavePassed) and for anything complex you can only aim at a small percentage of phones. The iPhone platform will have 40 million users by the end of the year and is very attractive as a single device. The N97 will not impact on the position of the iPhone – but it shows that a future device from Nokia way well do just that.

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On seeing the headline I thought this would be an education related story but the iPod prizes are used as an incentive for the students to eat more healthily.

The overall story is one that we already know – iPods are extremely attractive to students.

I am left with the thought – wouldn’t it be great if they were being used not just to encourage healthy eating but to encourage and increase engagement in education.

I’m preaching to the converted here though!

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http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/iphoneipod_touch/

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The mobile internet is also shown to have a bias towards younger audiences (15-24) as this graphic from the report shows:

Source: Nielsen Online, Q3 2008. E.g. 16% of Britons aged 15+ active on PC-based Internet are aged 15-24 years old

It would be interesting to see if the percentage of PC-based internet usage by 15-24 years is also changing (ie reducing) – but there is no indication in the report.

The article mentions the sites most visited by mobile users (Google, BBC, facebook and email)  – no surprises there.

It is a shame there are no details of devices within the report – so we don’t know how much the increase of 25% can be attributed to the iPhone.

Ofcom report

I recently looked through the details of the 2008 annual Ofcom report about the changes that they have seen in user consumption of media.

The Communications Market Report is huge and it can take a while to find the interesting bits (hint the most interesting bits are in the second PDF).

On page 345 there is a break down of children’s access and usage of both internet and mobile phones:

Source: Ofcom research, fieldwork carried out by Saville Rossiter-Base in April to May 2008 Base: Children aged 5-15 (132 Boys aged 5-7, 150 Girls aged 5-7, 189 Boys aged 8-11, 178 Girls aged 8-11, 187 Boys aged 12-15, 189 Girls aged 12-15)

The graph has a few too many colours for my liking but in the 12-15 age range you can see that access and ownership is highly skewed towards mobile phones.

In the right hand part of the graph we can see that there is a significant difference between boys and girls (again only looking at 12-15) in their daily usage of internet and mobile phones. Girls use their mobile phones more than the internet (+13%) but boys use the internet more but the difference is not as big (+5%).

The report states that across the UK population only 5% use their phones to access the internet (the studies were carried out in April before the 25% increase reported by Nielson ;-D) but this is 8% for 12-15 year olds:

Source: Ofcom research, fieldwork carried out by Saville Rossiter-Base in April to May 2008 Note: Yellow arrows indicate statistically significant differences from Q2 2007. Base: Children aged 8-15 with their own mobile phone (213 aged 8-11, 347 aged 12-15). NB Base too small for 5-7 year olds

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iPod Touch 2G

The mainstream press is now analysing the attack Apple is making into markets that have been dominated by Nintendo and Sony previously as discussed here and here previously.

A Wall Street Journal article states that large / established game publishers such as Sega are turning to the i Platform in addition to smaller startup and niche publishers like ourselves. The article puts part of the attractiveness of the platform down to the low costs of entry and simple distribution mechanism.

In the article Sega talk about how attractive the platform is to them and inferes that the difference to them in terrms of profits on a $10 iPhone game compared to a $40 ds lite game is not much.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that this Christmas will really shake things up and that the holiday sales of the device could shift the iPod Touch into being considered a gaming device by both consumers and publishers.With the 2000 titles already available for the platform about 25% of those downloaded have been games.

The article also highlights how a lot of games are either free or advertising supported – which is another interesting trend to watch.

The Wall Street Journal mentions an iPhone user who has sold his PSP and will sell his DS lite as he plays far more on his iPhone and loves the single device and ability to listen to his music whilst playing.

An opinion piece in Business week talks about how suprisingly good the iTouch and iPhone platform is for games. It also provides estimates for the sales of iPod Touch and iPhones globally at 40 million by the end of the year. Which would put it ahead of the DS lite which has sold 42 million devices – but in 18 rather than 12 months.

All very impressive and mean that Apple is continuing to highlight to the mobile operators how wrong they have got both supporting devlopers and providing simple distribution systems for users and developers.

For education I think this means that the i platform is extremely attractive to students as the overlap into their own interests and needs means purchasing and using a device is not a barrier.

If only there was a keyboard on it – I think Apple could rule the education marketplace too.

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If anyone would like a demo I will on Stand 5 with Sums Online – demoing uHavePassed and looking out for people to trial uHavePassed at their own institution.

Whilst there you can contact me on my mobile +44 7973 623337.

More details on uHavePassed for Institutions will be available after mLearn.

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