Endeavour Partners - Blog

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.

David Pogue has a review today of Motorola’s Droid which includes some discussion à propos how to categorize and name devices of this type.

Motorola Droid

He promotes the noun ‘app phone‘ for them, attributing it to @mentalworkout.

[Cool app, BTW, for those who have fear of flying. I took the Virgin Atlantic flight to London earlier this week; if you're lucky enough to fly in Upper Class, it's such an extraordinarily soothing experience that you probably don't need the app.]

I really like ‘app phone‘ , and suggest that we all adopt it for this class of devices:

• Apple’s iPhone
• all current Android ‘phones
• most modern BlackBerrys – post Curve
• Palm’s Pre
• Nokia’s N97 and N97 Mini running the latest version of Symbian

This post re-surfaced for me, however, one of the key topics that we have found ourselves debating frequently over the last many months; what is a ’smart phone’, and what should we call it?

This is a common challenge in high-tech; how do you think about new phenomena? How do you build robust mental models? We believe that having the specialist expertise to do this, and the relevant experience of having done this, is one of the key things that differentiates Endeavour Partners.

First, what are the key criteria:

• downloadable applications – in which case do BREW and Java devices qualify?
• user interface, such as (responsive) touch screen or QWERTY+touch pad/trackball interface to allow easy navigation for the web and similar applications
• running multiple applications – which disqualifies the iPhone?
• great at browsing – typically with a full WebKit browser
• third party applications have to be available, affordable and accessible
• what about size – is there some constraint here, because otherwise a laptop could qualify?

And what about the additional capabilities that are now part of the competitive benchmark:

• fast graphics – for video, browsing and gaming
• accelerometers
• GPS – for location services
• WiFi

There are several specific devices or types of devices that illustrate this challenge, and the grey areas involved:

• older BlackBerrys with thumbwheels but without trackballs – great at e-mail web but suck at browsing
• the Nokia E71, a great (particularly when it launched) device handicapped by its click-pad for navigation (which on one occasion proved enormously frustrating as the cursor moved in clicks that circumnavigated a small target without ever being able to actually click on it, on a site that should have been designed with mobile devices in mind – Handango)

Nokia E71

• many of Nokia’s myriad Symbian S60 devices that have 12-key keypads, lacking either a touch screen or a viable navigation method for browsing
• and what of the forthcoming Nokia N900 – is this a smartphone, or not?
• and given how unresponsive the touch screen on the N97 and N97 mini can be, and some of the usability challenges that remain with Symbian, do the N97 and N97 Mini qualify?
• almost all Windows Mobile devices, that lack a touch pad, requiring a stylus or arrow keys for what is enormously painful navigation (Sony Ericsson’s Experia X1 is one of the few devices that overcomes this challenge)

On purely pragmatic grounds, and notwithstanding flame wars from some purists and Verizon’s new advertising campaign, clearly any definition that excludes the iPhone on the technically focused grounds that it does not run multiple applications at once, except for some built-in apps such as Mail and Phone, does not make much sense. Although this may be an important consideration, it clearly does not deter users, and the ease of switching amongst applications mitigates this significantly.

The related question was what to call these things? We tried the term ‘smart device‘, to emphasize the that the capabilities went way beyond making a call. Unfortunately that promotes confusion as it embraces some very devices that do not have ‘phone capability at all.

So, let’s endorse the term ‘app phone‘ for these high end devices, and use the term ’smart phone’ for the broader group of which these are a subset.