Blackberry outage was like a crazy Stephen King novel

23 December 2009

Yesterday’s Blackberry outage was eye-opening.  There are mixed reports all over the web about the extent of this outage and what caused it, but I lost email, PIN messaging, Blackberry messenger, and had intermittent problems across all other apps on my device.

I was traveling with a Blackberry-wielding colleague.  Usually this would make us feel like business Samurai, ready for anything.  Yesterday, this overconfidence caught up with us.

Emails to my travel agent never made it through, and there was no rental car waiting for me in DC.  Even at Hertz, I had one of those “not exactly” moments, and it took an interminable half hour to get a car.  In transit from the airport to meet people for dinner, neither of us could get wireless data connectivity.  No ability to search for the hotel and restaurant by name.  No ability to use Google Maps to get directions.

Also, we kept dropping calls.  Even calling to get directions was not as smooth as usual, but eventually this is the “old fashioned” way we found our destination.

Me:  “I can see the mall on my left, and the XYZ company on my right.  No, I don’t know what street I’m on.”

Friend/colleague on other end:  “I think I know where you are; go 1 mile, then turn left.”  (Not so long ago, this would have seemed miraculously cool – like in the Matrix:  “I need an exit!” – now it seems pretty pedestrian and painful.)

This sort of event brings home how much we depend on technology on a daily basis.  And how quickly we’ve become spoiled by technological capabilities that are relatively new.  It reminds me of a sort of post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel, where the protagonist needs to find their way through the world using their feet and their wits, but they are suddenly bereft of all modern technology and convenience.

Without Google Maps (and frequent United flights!) I’m not sure I’d make it to Denver in The Stand.  I’d probably jog right past.  Would you make it?

Perhaps more importantly, this has me seriously questioning my loyalty to Blackberry.  From a competitive analysis perspective, this is a disaster for RIM. Two major outages in a week.  A general degradation in service over the past year.  Meanwhile, my partner is having great fun with his iPhone, and my wife’s Droid Eris seems pretty darn cool.

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Posted by Moe Kelley

From 4G World: Smartphones need 4G, but (more importantly) 4G needs smartphones

16 September 2009

This morning at 4G World in Chicago, Bill Morrow, CEO of Clearwire, described the need for 4G networks to support bandwidth hungry applications on smartphones, and we can’t agree more.

He demonstrated the difference between an iPhone’s performance using AT&T’s 3G network and an iPhone using WiFi to connect to Clearwire’s 4G WiMax network.  The difference was impressive:  Clearwire’s network performed beautifully for both streaming video and Google Earth, while AT&T’s network was sluggish.

Unfortunately, it is exactly this need of 4G smartphones for data capacity that will likely spell the downfall of WiMax.  By our estimates, smartphones will be responsible for roughly 50% of mobile data traffic within the next five years.  But the iPhone is not available with WiMax – and neither are any other mainstream smartphones.

Yesterday Kris Rinne opened the 4G World conference by laying out AT&T’s plan to forego HSPA+ and move directly to LTE, with commercial rollouts beginning in 2011.  This is slightly behind Verizon’s aggressive LTE deployment across 20-30 markets planned for late 2010.  The iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices, and a wide variety of Android devices will all be available to run on these LTE networks.

WiMAX is a great technology, but the window of opportunity is short.  Ultimately, the availability of leading smartphones, apps, and content will determine 4G winners and losers.

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Posted by Moe Kelley

Make my (Moe’s) day!

9 September 2009

Although we all spend a great deal of time experimenting with different devices and services, so that we have real -world, first-hand experience of their usability, we do have our personal preferences. We’re a Mac shop, albeit with a mix of BlackBerry addicts and iPhone loyalists. For our BlackBerry users, such as my colleague Moe Kelley, today is a good day; as Boy Genius Report notes, it looks like BlackBerry Desktop Manager may go live today:

The tweet that made Moe's day

The tweet that made Moe's day

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Posted by Michael A M Davies

Not a touch screen

27 August 2009

“This may sound a little weird, but can I take a picture of that?”

A point of sale terminal at a Jiffy Lube with an apparently disappointing user interface

A point of sale terminal at a Jiffy Lube with an apparently disappointing user interface

I was in a Jiffy Lube, of all places, paying for an oil change, and I saw a powerful example of something that we’ve been discussing with clients over the past few months:  Great user experiences in one product area can drive user expectations across a wide variety of other products, services and use cases.

In this case, the touch screens on iPhones and other leading mobile devices are changing people’s expectations about how things should work on everything from televisions to digital cameras to point of sale terminals like this one.  Apparently, Jiffy Lube customers and employees keep trying to use this as a touch screen even though it isn’t one!

A similar example comes from the TiVo and DVR experiences many of us have become used to.  Haven’t you often wished you could pause or rewind your car stereo?  Or listen to the usual 8:00AM broadcast team even if you were on your way in to the office earlier or later than usual?

People are now coming to expect an incredibly rich, interactive, and easy to use experience from all the technology in their lives.  The benchmarks are products like the iPhone, the iPod, TiVo, and Blackberry, and you will be judged against these standards regardless of what price point you are trying to hit or product category you think you are in.

Does your product have a touch screen?  Tens or hundreds of Gigabytes of storage capacity?  The ability to stop, pause, rewind, time and place shift content?  The ability to move instantly and seamlessly between applications or functions?  WiFi or wide-area cellular connectivity – or, better yet, both?  Perhaps it should.

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Posted by Moe Kelley

The $99 Value Menu

30 July 2009
The $99 heavyweight

The $99 heavyweight

In the past couple years, even months, we’ve seen a sharp decrease in the price of smartphones.  With these high power devices more and more becoming necessities instead of luxuries for mobile consumers, and revenue from data and content based traffic rising, carriers are becoming more willing to subsidize these pricey devices to put them in reach of the average consumer.  And recently the $99 price level, previously reserved for more value oriented feature phones, has been shocked by the introduction of a true smartphone heavyweight: the iPhone 3G.

Even with other carriers beginning to increase value priced smart offerings, such as the newly announced $99 BlackBerry Storm, the value per dollar ratio still leans heavily in favor of AT&T and its iPhone 3G.  To back that up, here is quick overview of the best phones currently available on the value menu:

Verizon

  1. LG Dare – A resisitive touch screen feature phone offering haptic feedback and a 3.2 megapixel camera.  Limited by a smaller 3″ screen and lack of a true smartphone OS.  Plus the web browsing experience leaves much to be desired
  2. BlackBerry Storm – RIM’s first foray into touch screen phones running the standard Blackberry OS 4.7.  While it carries all the enterprise friendly Blackberry features, it has been criticized for having a cramped keyboard and being sluggish.

T-Mobile

  1. BlackBerry 8820 – An aging offering from RIM now eclipsed by the Curve 8900.  Usual RIM enterprise features, but suffers from a lack of a camera.
  2. Samsung Behold – Another resistive touch screen feature phone lacking a true smartphone OS.  Has sub-par web browsing and lacks WiFi.

Sprint

  1. Samsung Instinct – A resistive touch screen phone lacking WiFi and with bad web browing UI.  Also lacks sizable internal storage.
  2. Motorla VE20 – Barely deserves mention in this category.  No full web browser, WiFi, or enhanced OS.

AT&T

  1. iPhone 3G – Capacitive touch screen device running the iPhone OS, with good web browsing experience, WiFi capability and sizable internal storage.  Lacks expandable memory.
  2. BlackBerry Pearl 8110 – WiFi enabled trackball device with limited internal storage running BlackBerry OS.

This overview shows that there simply isn’t a contender to compete with the $99 iPhone 3G.  As these prices continue to drop, smartphone penetration will increase and it will become ever more necesarry to have true smartphones available at this value menu level.  And of course, this topic begs the question: How long will it be before we see the rise of free smartphone offers?  At that point the feature phone may become obsolete and this current value price level may be reserved for even smarter, heavier hitting devices.

1 Comment | Apple, BlackBerry, smartphones | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Brad W Hagedorn

The Kung Fu Panda Problem

20 July 2009

Leading smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone or RIM’s BlackBerry, are having an enormous impact on the mobile industry.

Within five years about half of US users will have upgraded to a smartphone and these customers will represent nearly 60% of industry revenues.   These smartphone users will also represent approximately 75% of wireless data traffic from cellphones (excluding laptops and MiFi) as applications, games, and multimedia content on the go become mainstream.

The Market is Upgrading to Smartphones

The Market is Upgrading to Smartphones

In addition to bringing significant change to the mobile ecosystem, this mass-market upgrade to smartphones is finally making convergence a reality.  Apple iPhone users are seamlessly moving content between their computers, iPods, iPhones and televisions using iTunes and simple docking station connectors (or, better still but a bit expensive:  AppleTV).  Other lead users are cobbling together ‘DIY’ solutions with products such as SlingMedia’s SlingBox, Roku’s Netflix box or TiVo with Amazon Video On Demand (VOD).

Smartphone’s were the missing link for convergence, and now they will play a critical role in consumer decision-making for content and service providers.  Companies that do not offer a complete solution, including smartphone integration and seamless transfer of content across TV and PC, are beginning to face what we call, “The Kung Fu Panda Problem.”

This past winter our family went skiing in the mountains of Maine.  For the four-hour trip, I purchased ($14.95) and downloaded the movie Kung Fu Panda, so my daughters could watch it on my iPhone.  The user experience for my daughter was pretty good, but the really interesting thing is what happened later, when we were home and they wanted to watch it again.

In today’s world, we seemingly have a myriad of options on how to purchase and watch video across TV, PC, and mobile:  Mobile TV, streaming video, Comcast VoD, or DVD – either purchased or through Netflix.  For a long time, DVD was the best format for covering a wide-variety of circumstances and use cases.  But carrying around a huge collection of DVDs isn’t great.  Once I purchased Kung Fu Panda from iTunes, we could watch it on TV (with a simple connector cable), on our family’s MacBook, on an iPod or on my iPhone.  Perhaps most importantly, I always have it (and any other videos I’ve downloaded) with me.

Here’s a comparison of alternative approaches to anytime, anywhere video:

Currently, only Apple and the iPhone enable me to seamlessly move content between mobile, my computer, and my TV

Currently, only Apple and the iPhone enable me to seamlessly move content between mobile, my computer, and my TV

Hence, the Kung Fu Panda Problem:  Not only am I now unlikely to buy the Kung Fu Panda DVD or to rent Kung Fu Panda from Verizon or Comcast On Demand, but – having experienced this just once – I am also unlikely to purchase or rent any video from these providers until they can match the value and seamless integration provided by Apple.

Worse yet, every day thousands of new iPhone users discover this for themselves, and this pattern will extend beyond iPhones and into WebOS, BlackBerries and Android devices as the multimedia smartphone experience improves.  It is likely to be easier to move from smartphones back into other devices in the home than the other way round for a long time to come.

3 Comments | Apple, convergence, video | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Moe Kelley

Blackberry App World: No news is *not* good news

8 July 2009

Last week, I posted a quick analysis of Apple’s App Store, which is on pace for over 3.2 billion application downloads by year end.  We tried to do a similar analysis for other platforms such as BlackBerry and hit a snag:  There is little or no information available for BlackBerry App World.  See below:

Blackberry App World has not released download stats

Blackberry App World has not released download stats

As we dug deeper, we found good reasons for this dearth of data.

First, BlackBerries sold through major network operators do not come with App World pre-installed; hence one of the key questions is how many BlackBerry users have downloaded, installed and set up App World.

Another challenge is that users can get BlackBerry apps from a variety of alternative sources, including:

  • developer websites — for example, the excellent Google and Facebook apps for Blackberries are often acquired directly from the web and sent via email link
  • Handango website — may be the leading single source for Blackberry apps
  • Handango InHand — a pretty good 3rd party app store, downloaded to many BlackBerryies after Apple’s App Store became popular and before RIM’s own BlackBerry App World launched
  • network operators’ websites — verizon.handango.com, for instance
  • network operators’ app stores — mostly focused on ringtones and games; VZAppZone and AT&T Media Mall are examples

All this choice is confusing for both end users and for application developers.

Moreover our survey of retail store personnel at major US network operators found that they were either or both ignorant or unsupportive of App World when asked about how to get apps for BlackBerries:

  • Sprint personnel did not know of any way to get applications onto a BlackBerry and began pitching the Palm Pre as a better device for apps (despite the fact that at present it only has 30 apps, and it’ll be late summer before the SDK has widespread availability)
  • T-Mobile personnel knew there was a BlackBerry source for apps, but did not know the name or how to get it
  • Verizon’s sales people pushed VZAppZone as an alternative for BlackBerry applications
  • only AT&T front line personnel immediately knew about Blackberry App World and described how to find and install it (is this in someway a spillover effect from their learning with the iPhone and its App Store – experience that sales people at other network operators just do not have?)

Given little or no support from network operators, App World must first be discovered and downloaded by users; like any innovation, without information there’s no adoption. In addition, users must have a PayPal account or sign up for one to purchase apps on App World.

Here is a step-by-step comparison of first time use for Blackberry App World vs. Apple’s App Store:

Typical App World vs. App Store first time experience

Typical App World vs. App Store first time experience

Guess which application storefront has “Billions and Billions served” and which one has so far been less than forthcoming with performance metrics?

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Posted by Moe Kelley