My wife was bugging me before Christmas for a nice toy that I would like as a gift, so I thought that it couldn't hurt to get Barnes & Noble's new Nook ebook reader, which, at the time, was due for delivery before the holidays. With a hybrid eInk display for text and Android-driven touch interface for navigation combined with ePub-formatted documents, at least it would be a "walking the talk" gizmo that reflected how I saw what publishers should be doing with ebook distribution.
Unfortunately on Christmas day I got a nice new traveling case and screen protector, but only a placekeeper for the unit itself, which finally arrived the day that the Apple iPad was launched. Hmm, interesting timing. There's really no comparison, though, between the "whats" and the "whys" of an ebook reader like the Nook and a device like the iPad. The nook is all about simplifying and in some ways enhancing the process of relating to printed material, where the iPad is about the multi-sense world of Web media, with books a nice part of its capabilities but one not necessarily likely to appeal to many of its core Web-raised customers.
The Nook definitely has a leg-up overall on its Amazon Kindle rival, in the sense that it combines both the sophistication of a touch interface with a very simple and enjoyable page-turning experience via its eInk interface. I had my doubts about this combination, but, while not perfect, it works out pretty nicely overall. You can swipe your finger across a row of book, newspaper and magazine titles like you would on a touch-screen phone interface, tap once and start digging in. A second or two after your text is displayed, the color touch interface powers down and you're enjoying crisp eInk text, which only improves its readability in bright daylight. That's a boon when on a beach or in a sunny train or plane seat where moving to a better spot is not an option.
The physical controls of the Nook are bone simple. An "on" button on the top of the unit, a bar between the eInk display and the color touch display that activates the touch screen, and page-turning buttons on either side of the screen. The page-turning buttons are just about perfect and a joy to use. Each page-turning button has a pinhole-sized protrusion in its middle, which makes it a no-eyes procedure to get your fingers in the right place, and no edges. It's a seamless case, so there's no place for dirt, dust or sand to get into the controls or to spoil the smooth look of the unit. Best of all, the buttons are repeated on either side - a huge plus for righty-lefty usability and for when you get in those wierd positions that feel great put that put your hands at odd angles.
Downloads of new and updated materials are smooth and effortless, with simple and well-designed procedures. It's a no-brainer to use for all of its basic functions. Searching the Barnes and Noble store is simple and easy via a touch keyboard, which overall is no worse than Kindle's weird Chiclet-style physical keyboard but has rather slow typing response and an early-release Android look and feel that leaves something to be desired compared to the Android-based Nexus One phone that hangs next to me most of the time. Barnes and Noble also provides its own content via "The Daily," a daily newsletter that includes a listing of your latest content downloads. You can accelerate download performance by powering up your Nook on your local wireless network, but it will drain your batteries fairly rapidly. Without a wireless LAN connection or a lot of use of the color display, your batteries can last for days, typically, since the eInk display is not powered once a page is displayed.
While I am certainly open to reading book content on powered displays, I really like this "off" nature of eInk. After a day of staring into backlit computer and phone displays, there's an "unplugged" aspect to the Nook that fits the nature of book reading nicely. Reading books is about sharing some "quality time" with the thoughts of another person. The simplicity of the Nook encourages me to tune out many of my typical daily electronic distractions and to focus on one relationship. Want Web browsing? Go to your PC or phone, please. The only other significant function of the Nook is its ability to play downloaded music, which is a nice complement to reading, if I am willing to tax the batteries a bit. Downloading tunes from a PC is easy via the Nook's standard USB cable, which doubles as the charging cord when plugged into a special AC converter. Economy of design and purpose is the theme with Nook, and overall it delivers on that theme well.
However, the Nook is far from perfect. The delay in getting this unit to market was doubtless getting some of the product development kinks out, some of which still shine through. The most glaring problem with the Nook is its overall performance. Loading large books for reading can take several seconds in many instances, and some large ebooks did not load at all (possibly due to being formatted an older proprietary format not compatible with Nook). Page-turning is quick and smooth enough and bookmarking functions simple enough, but the bookmarks themselves cannot be given easy-to-use human names; you're stuck with a geekish, URL-like name based on chapter numbers that is hard to understand. At times it seems that bookmarks were not being saved. The note-taking capability on the Nook is decent but nominal at best, not something that's likely to satisfy a real student or scribbler often. You can bump up font sizes in the eInk display, but there's only three settings overall for font sizes. An extra-large font setting would be nice for those days when your eyes have had far too much work. Combine these rough spots with the touch keyboard issues, and it's a fair bet that the Nook needs a newer version of Android ASAP to improve performance and a few interface tweaks to boot.
And while the online store interface is smooth and features millions of books from Google Books, Barnes and Noble's own ebook title offerings are still a little bit thin; you'll get most major titles, but don't expect too much peripheral content beyond Google's offerings. Some of the ecommerce for newspapers and magazines is still a little rough also. The online store, for example, lists The New York Times as a $13.99 subscription. For, what, a month? A year? It doesn't say. The subscription provides only a subset of NYT information, which is a bit annoying, but you get at least the highlighted stories that you're likely to want to spend time with in an "unplugged" mode on the Nook.
Finally there's the color touch display, which feels comfortable to use if you're used to touch-screen phones and is generally a pleasure to use, with easy-to-use menus and features that are well-designed overall. The main annoyance here, though, is that after a day of touching the screen of my Nexus One, it feels kind of awkward to look at content in the eInk display that's controlled in the touch display below it. A full-touch display such as in Plastic Logic's new Que document reader would be ideal, but I am not interested in hauling that much hardware around. A Nook slips comfortably into my parka pocket and is not hogging up any significant space on the coffee table next to my favorite reading chair. And again, since book-reading is about getting into the words more than fiddling with features, I am willing to live with the compromise.
I am not really sure that you can call the Nook clearly superior to the Amazon Kindle as a machine, but it's definitely a sleeker and more flexible unit overall with better design and more potential for improvement via its Android underpinnings, as well as more potential to get your content to play nicely in other ebook readers via its use of the ePub formatting standard. I was unable to test out the book-sharing feature yet with another Nook user, but this is certainly an important first that deserves at least a nod of appreciation for the many efforts that Barnes and Noble has put in to replicating some of the most important parts of the book-reading experience. Nook's titles are a little pricier than those found in the Kindle store, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to use content on other ePub-compatible readers. Lock-in to the Kindle system is the price to pay for it's cheaper titles, a price that I am not willing to pay.
And I suppose that's the point of the Nook at the end of the day. It's a great little reader that will allow one to prepare for any number of great new ebook-displaying products that will be coming out in the years ahead. With the Kindle, or, for that matter, materials on the iPad purchased via Apple's online store, you're likely to have a more restricted range of technology options moving forward. It's not clear that standalone ebook readers will be with us much longer, but for those wanting simple functionality in a rugged unit with great battery life that will be highly usable in any number of conditions that would be daunting to many advanced display units, the Nook offers a good reading experience and the ability to escape without hauling around a pound of books - or Jeff Bezos' business model hangups, either. That's good enough for me today, at least.
I don't jump often at first-generation technology for most things, so it's no surprise that I waited a while to get a smart phone. But in a sense I have waited for the first generation of what was termed a "superphone" in today's announcement of the Google Nexus One, a Google Android-based mobile device built by HTC and sold directly by Google from its own online store. The Nexus One goes toe-to-toe with Apple's iPhone in many ways but it also begins to challenge the content industry to consider what today's proliferation of mobile devices means for their marketing strategies.
Unlike the Apple iPhone, you can choose to order a Nexus One "unlocked" from Google's online store, meaning that you can get it without having to be locked into any telephone company's contract or service plan. You can then, if you choose, get the voice and data plan of your choice with a technology-compatible vendor (T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US, and most non-U.S. carriers) or, if you choose, just use WiFi and to get connectivity to data and Voice over IP services on the Web.
I ordered the "unlocked" version of the phone within a few minutes of the online store going live, a bone-simple process. I noted on the order page that Verizon will offer "locked" access for this phone soon, marketed under the "Droid" moniker it uses currently for Motorola's Android phone offering on Verizon. For the time being I have decided to use the Nexus One as a "data only" phone, using VoIP when I am in WiFi hotspots. This may allow me to use it as a replacement for my desk phone, since it's always in range of my local WiFi (let's see what happens when Google announces its integration of Gizmo5 VoIP services for Google Voice). I think of it like having Skype in "walkabout" mode with a trendy earpiece that has Web access. Once the service plans for data-only access to phone company networks have improved a bit and I can suss out what to do with my last remaining copper phone line, I'll think about which U.S. telco vendor will be best to choose to fill in the gaps for WiFi service.
If you look at most coverage maps for mobile data access and the ability of emerging networks to support both voice and high-speed data more reliably on a single network connection, why would I do otherwise for an advanced phone? If voice is moving towards being a service on consumer data networks, as it is already in most major enterprises, and voice services such as Skype and Gizmo5 are providing increasingly reliable VoIP phone-like connectivity almost anywhere, then I wonder whether it makes sense to lock into any traditional voice services for a superphone. I'd rather use a simple mobile phone as a voice backup service for those hard-to-reach spots that Google Voice can ring as needed and go superphone for voice on a good data-only network for the rest.
As voice becomes more integrated with Web applications and content services, the need for their integration is going to become more obvious fairly rapidly. One of the demos at the Nexus One press briefing was of dictating text messages and emails. It wasn't a particularly spectacular demo, and I am sure that less carefully tested examples may fare worse, but going to and from voice and text as a standard interface is more likely to make the combination of voice and data an essential factor in information services in the next few years. Since the Nexus One is pretty well positioned for the most advanced high-speed data networks rolling out over the next couple of years, I think that I am covered on that front for now.
As for the phone itself, I hate to say it, but technology changes so quickly these days that it's almost unimportant beyond a certain point whether it's a perfectly awesome phone or not. You can look at the Engadget review and judge for yourself, but overall it's as good as an iPhone but without two-finger touch software (which will come soon enough, since the hardware handles it, apparently) though trumping the current iPhone with a screaming 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Most importantly, though, it's built on an open platform developed by a company that believes in the Web as the real unifier of content services, not proprietary networks or platforms. With all of the tablets, readers and other gizmos coming out this year that will try to pretend that the Web isn't very important, it will be nice to have a mobile device that puts the Web experience for content first, with some neat-o applications in a spiffy, sleek package to boot. That'll do. For now.
As exciting as Amazon's Kindle has been for many early adopters of content technologies, its screaming limitations and awkward business model have been threats all along to its long-term success. But as long as really viable alternatives were not available, few people seemed to focus on the potential for Amazon to be painted into an uncomfortable box. With the nearing launch of the Nook device from book retailer Barnes & Noble, that time of unchallenged supremacy for the Kindle seems to be drawing to a close.
As much as Kindle has been hailed as a breakthrough for eBooks, I do think that Nook will be a far greater breakthrough for the average book reader and for book publishers and retailers. The Kindle was a nifty piece of breakthrough technology, but it did little to improve the lot of publishers looking at dwindling margins and nothing to help book retailers who are able to shoot cannons through their stores oftentimes without hitting a customer. Nook is well thought-out through and through from a technology standpoint, a customer standpoint and a retailing standpoint.
First, the gizmo itself, which will be available for sale in a few weeks. It uses eInk display technology for the book content, as does Kindle, and it can download books via wireless connections like its Amazon brethren. It has access to millions of books, a convenient online store, and tons of storage and battery life. But this is where the stories of these two devices begin to diverge. Where the Kindle is a completely proprietary platform, the Nook is based on Google's up-and-coming Android operating system for mobile devices, which ties it in immediately with dozens of other Android-enabled devices hitting the marketplace this fall and next year. Barnes and Noble sees clearly that proprietary devices are not going to be a viable barrier to entry when devices based on open source software and Web standards are setting the pace for electronic content access. Using Android enables the Nook to have a slick touch-sensitive color display in addition to the eInk text display that allows for book covers and other attractive graphics to be displayed. Instead of waiting for eInk to solve the color display problem, this is a simple and useful solution that opens up the Nook to other Web functionality and slicker feature navigation more effectively.
Behind the hardware and software is wireless connectivity both for wifi hot spots and for broadband wireless Web networks, a two-fer combination that bests Amazon broadband-only access but also opens up interesting possibilities for retailers. Nook owners who are visiting Barnes & Noble stores will be able to read books via Nook in their stores for free. What a great way to attract people to their retail outlets - and, eventually, what a great way to transition to site-licensing free content access on a subscription basis via affiliates such as high-end coffee shops, university and community libraries and so on once print-on-demand services can be packaged by Barnes and Noble more effectively. Having the right physical context for content remains a winning strategy for content packaging, and Nook's marketing strategy promises to get the 'where" of content right.
Nook also gets many of the "hows" of book content right. Purchasers of eBooks can use Nook to share a book with other people for up to fourteen days and will be able to mark them up with personal notes. Lending can be enabled across both the Nook itself and other portable devices enabled for ePub-formatted eBooks. This also opens up Nooks for library books using the ePub format, in addition to PDF-formatted eBooks that are popular on the Web - and not supported at this time by Kindles. The combination of these features finally offers readers the kind of usability for eBooks that they have been used to having as print readers in an electronic format. Instead of making the hardware and software artificial barriers to a full experience, Barnes and Noble has embraced the experience - and, in the process, has enabled the Nook to be a much more "must-have" place to consume and share content.
Finally, the Nook comes in at a comfy $259 price, twenty dollars less than the current price for the original-size Kindle while offering a display as large as the Kindle2 model. For a fully wireless-enabled device, this will give the Nook a strong advantage going into the holiday season in a lean year - and strong traffic in both their online outlets and retail stores. And while I can't vouch for the hands-on experience, the look of the unit promises to be at least as rewarding as the Kindle. Lacking a physical keyboard, one assumes that the Nook will make use of the Android software-managed touch keyboard capabilities, which, while not an ideal interface, cannot be worse than the amazingly awkward keyboard on Kindles.
So let's see. Great interface, great physical package, great rights management, standardized electronic format, use and share content the way book readers like to, good reasons to visit their retail outlets, go-anywhere networking, Android compatibility - yep, I'd say that Barnes and Noble has just leaped into the center of the new-hotness race for electronic content consumption. I think that it's safe to say that Barnes and Noble is poised to become a major player in electronic book retailing with a device and a marketing strategy that is likely to heat up the book services race to a raging boil. But don't count out Amazon yet - especially with their recent efforts to re-invent the business of local retail delivery. Local contexts is where the money is in content delivery, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble will have a shot at new approaches to local markets in the years ahead. As for me, well, if a Nook showed up in my holiday stocking, I won't be thinking that it resembles a lump of coal.
I had an interesting exchange on Twitter today with Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent.org and a person who I respect and admire greatly for his insights into the content industry (not to mention for having blown the socks off of many a trade pub over the past several years). Rafat had pointed out in a post on paidContent that The New York Times had started to use barrier ads on their iPhone applications, something that he found to be very intrusive. I couldn't agree more on this point; most media companies view mobile applications as little more than Compuserve-like kiosks from which they can serve slightly jazzed-up versions of their Web page content. With that in mind, it shouldn't surprise us that the NYT or any other media company will be intent on carrying over its ad strategies to these walled gardens.
As a follow-up, though, Rafat pointed me towards a good post on pC's mocoNews site that outlined the case for Apple's approach to mobile apps versus Google's more Web-centric approach. Tricia Duryee points out in this article that Apple had considered emphasizing the browser as the focus of delivering content on the iPhone, but then shifted to its App Store as a preferred method for getting people excited about the potential of mobile devices for delivering useful content and services. As she notes:
[T]he biggest problem facing Google will not be convincing developers, but consumers. Apple’s steroid-enhanced marketing machine has drilled into the public thinking that “there’s an app for that,” not that there’s a URL. Clearly after logging 1.5 billion downloads within a year, Apple is on to something and vigorously training the mobile users of tomorrow.
Sorry, Tricia, but I have to smile at that one. While Apple rolled out a very savvy strategy for the iPhone given its market position as a high-end product oriented towards proprietary intellectual property, I think that it's worth noting that a lot more than 1.5 billion Web pages, many of them with embedded applications, are downloaded every day on the Web. The iPhone's app strategy has certainly made mobile technology platforms far more usable and understandable for its early adopters, much as early premium online information services such as Compuserve and the original AOL made the still-crude world of networked information delivery more palatable. Similarly, early PCs benefited from a galaxy of packaged software that used to line the shelves at local stores, providing "user-friendly interfaces" that made still-crude PC technology more palatable.
But today the walled-garden services of Compuserve and AOL are distant memories, and packaged software for PCs is almost non-existent in most local stores, except for a few have-to-buy items like Microsoft Office software (about the most expensive items to be found on any of the shelves at our local Staples office supply store), accounting systems and tax preparation tools. Why? Because for the most part these products and services were attached to more mature technologies that no longer required packaged IP to help people get to the good stuff. In the instance of software, many of the functions that used to require packaged software are now available via cloud computing services, including tax preparation, bookkeeping, spreadsheets and word processing. In the instance of services like Compuserve, it also became a matter of scale: 65,000 or so iPhone apps sounds like a lot of services, but good luck finding any of them once you begin to scale up to more broad markets. Walled gardens are great when you have a cozy crowd, but most people's interests won't be content to stay in them very long when a good search engine can help them to find the next movable feast easily.
This isn't to say that there is not a valuable place for mobile applications in the mix of marketing strategies for publishers and technology companies. Good functionality with good content being fed into it is a winning combination on any platform. But if we were to speed up the clock and have this discussion a year from now, I don't think that people will be waxing as sanguine about the App Store as they are today - and not just because of Google's Android mobile platform hitting the scene. Real applications, as opposed to the lightly gussied-up browser substitutes that most publishers toss up as mobile applications, take time and thoughtfulness to develop and to roll out carefully.
Yes, a Safari browser is a somewhat different platform than a Chrome browser, and so on, but it's not very realistic to compare the relatively minor differences in how these packages handle largely open Web standards such as HTML compared to the larger, glaring differences between iPhones, Palms, Blackberries and Android phones. Mobile applications will be useful, but there is no practical way to expect publishers to deal cost-effectively with this broad array of approaches simply to get their content to and fro. No amount of seductive ads by Apple or any other platform manufacturer is going to be able to conceal this basic fact, it would seem.
The truth is, of course, that many Web pages are in fact driven by very sophisticated applications already, a fact that will be only accelerated by the emergence of HTML 5, which does more to merge programming functionality into the Web environment than previous versions of the basic code for Web pages. The architecture of today's Google Chrome browser hints at where this is really taking us. When you have more than one page open in a Chrome browser, each tabbed page is its own separate program process on your computer. If one tabbed page has a problem, it can stop functioning without affecting the other opened pages. In other words, Chrome as a browser is actually a multi-process program execution environment.
To put it another way, it really doesn't matter whether you're running a Web page or an application, as long as you can get to it easily in a standardized access environment. Why bother with a page of apps and a separate set of Web page bookmarks when you can have one unified environment where you can access whatever is important to you? Once you have that kind of environment, people will want to have billions of choices filtered by a good search engine or recommendation service rather than a few thousand apps that have to be "mother-may-I"ed through Apple before they can be accessed.
The iPhone App Store has been a very clever and useful marketing mechanism that has allowed Apple to make its platform more palatable and useful in a highly controlled way that's appropriate for any emerging technology. Let's face it, the mobile Web is still a work in progress, making the more sophisticated displays of some mobile apps far more appealing than dealing with the almost-good mobile Web functionality that's available on most platforms today. But given the already mature nature of the Web that's awaiting better browsing via Chrome and other platforms that will not intentionally cripple Web functionality to make more proprietary approaches more palatable to consumers, it's not likely that this artificial Compuserve-like era of iPhone applications can be expected to dominate the mobile content landscape very long.
iPhone apps will endure and even prosper for quite some time, to be sure, just as those early online services such as Compuserve managed to endure for several years after the emergence of the Web. But it won't take long for most content consumers to realize the difference between a transitional technology designed to bolster the margins of publishers and a more satisfying technology that connects them more effectively with the world at large. As long as companies like Apple can create new frontiers of technology that entertain and delight high-end mobile content users, we'll be hearing, "Yeah, there's an app for that" for quite some time. But if history is any guide to the future, it's not likely that any one company will be able to keep that phrase rolling off of their clients' lips when more powerful substitutes are available that intrigue more people more easily. Yeah, there's a Web for that, all right.
A few years ago I blogged about Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates' appearance at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, in which his brand was sharing a good deal of the CES limelight with Google and Yahoo. No longer did the Microsoft brand alone command the attention of tech mavens: it was content and content-oriented features that were carrying the day. While Microsoft still enjoys an enviable position in the marketplace, there is no doubt that its ability to project presumed dominance in consumer and enterprise markets faces many challenges.
Ticking the clock ahead to today's world, it would appear that Apple may have had a similar passing of the market mojo moment at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Steve Jobs failed to deliver the event's keynote address, presumably due to health issues, but it may also have been because Apple's usual razzamataz had few blockbuster announcements off of which to leverage. The news from WWDC was about incremental changes, all good, but mostly about trying to deal with the challenges of positioning Apple as a premium brand in a world that is pushing pricing down on many bright, shiny objects.
By contrast, bright, shiny objects were found everywhere at very reasonable prices at the recent Computex Taipei event across the Pacific from WWDC. Computex featured an abundance of netbooks and thin client desktops and tablet panels running many different kinds of operating systems software, including Google's new Android O/S that was seen running alongside smart phone and netbook versions of Microsoft Windows. Windows was the first cross-platform operating system to start driving down the cost of content delivery electronics, and Android is following in its footsteps with an open-source operating system that helps to drive down the price of a smaller, cheaper and more portable generation of electronics significantly.
Apple has always managed to create a unique niche for its products by focusing on highly appealing designs and features. For example, at WWDC announcements included a slot for SD memory cards in some of its lighter new Macbook laptops - perfect for the photo and graphics afficionados who form a strong core of Apple's support. Great stuff, but ultimately still the stuff of niche brands. Call it the BMW approach to content delivery: ultimately, a Macbook or even an iPhone doesn't do much that a Windows or Android-equipped device won't do similarly, but dang, it just makes some folks feel so, well, you know..."in." Some people will always pay a premium price to be a part of that club, whatever is on the inside of it, so Apple-branded devices are not going away any time soon.
From a content industry perspective, though, the Apple wave queued up by the soaring success of the iPhone is about to gain a new sense of perspective over the next several months as netbooks and tougher competition from newer smart phone models begin to elbow into the limelight. The real star of the show is the Web, with cloud computing resources the co-star. Yes, mobile applications are helping to fuel up excitement about smart phones and other devices, but when a device with 1GB of memory can handle virtually any multimedia content display requirements, it's not realistic to think that proprietary hardware or operating systems are going to enable publishers to have technology partners that can help to buffer them against the competitive forces of Web publishing. You can increase storage for downloads to enjoy when you're not Web-enabled, but for most people the content that they want resides in the cloud and appears on whatever standards-compliant device makes it useful. Toss in the increasing availability of wireless broadband Internet connectivity and the "why" of platform-captive content makes less and less sense.
More and more inexpensive appealing devices to deliver content are pouring out of Taipei, China, South Korea and other low-cost producing markets every day, many of them aimed at global markets that have participated only marginally in the Web experience so far. While many premium content producers continue to focus on the upscale content platforms as their salvation, already more than a billion YouTube videos are viewed daily around the world. A premium strategy will work if you can attract people's attention well, but at this point in time there are really not enough fundamental technology differentiators in Apple or any other existing technology platform producer's products to justify a strong reliance on premium platforms as a buffer for intellectual property licensing. In short, the battle between the Web and platforms is over, for now, and you can put the crown securely on the virtual noggin of the Web.
If content producers want premium platform barriers to entry for their products they will have to have technology partners that are investing much, much more heavily in breakthrough innovations that deliver real differentiating value. The iPhone was merely the first in a wave of devices that are providing incremental improvements in performance in what was already a marketplace headed towards commoditization of mobile technology platforms. In the meantime, a floundering world economy is pushing more people towards cost-effective content technology solutions. Dear publishers, say goodbye to your love affair with the iPhone - before it's too late. Learn to love netbooks, a galaxy of smart phones and any other device that can get you people who whant your content on the line, and then prove your value from there.
The mobile phone world was a-twitter with word that Nokia has purchased mobile software maker Symbian and will make the core of its software an open source resource some time later this year via a new Symbian Foundation, with other open-source assets to follow. Engadget notes that the Symbian foundation will include many of the mobile industry's biggest names and will include technology donated from both Nokia and many others, including Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoM. Other members will include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and, interestingly, AT&T, which has had great success as of late with the proprietary Apple iPhone platform.
Clearly the impending launch of Google's open source Andriod mobile platform, delayed in launch until the fall but looming nevertheless, has forced the hand of mobile equipment providers and network operators to consider the potential impact of having their highly proprietary approaches to mobile technologies "googled" away to the demand for more common mobile standards for software to power more content services development. By creating a common core of technologies based on a company with which it's had a long-standing relationship Nokia gets to expand the value of their knowledge of the platform in a way that may transform their business model over time from one of manufacturing to one of enabling systems development. Given the demand for mobile services in developing nations this will enable companies like Nokia to have a hand in those markets without having to bear the full cost of either hardware or software development through the Foundation's partner network.
But more importantly for the content industry this puts at least as much pressure on providers Microsoft, Palm, Apple and Research in Motion to recognize that there is ever more pressure on proprietary operating system solutions to justify their ways. With speed wireless broadband network services opening up the Web to mobile devices the ability to deliver platform-specific content services will become icing on the cake for those who want new status toys but for the bread-and-butter corprorate worker or mobile entrepreneurs and family members it may take more than just a few proprietary services and a delightful interface to keep people locked into a proprietary platform. For content suppliers looking for new "choke points" via proprietary platforms the short-term news via suppliers like Microsoft, RIM and Apple looks good, but the picture over the horizon is likely to look vastly different in less than a year. Be it via the Symbian Foundation or Android platforms, publishers need to stop looking again and again for new ways to activate old business models via mobile platforms and look far more aggressively at how they will survive and thrive in a world enabled with open and universal access to Web-enabled content sources.
Google may not always be great at creating products, but they sure do know how to create markets. In introducing its new Android open-source mobile phone platform via the Open Handset Alliance, Google has opened the gates for any and all software developers to develop new applications that can take advantage of Android's capabilities - already impressive in demo form.
This could catapult Andriod into a competitive position with Microsoft and Apple in relatively short time frame for mobile platforms if ambitious developers take up Google's challenge - and Google is making it easier for them to consider that challenge with USD 10 million in prize money for them to consider. The question is, though, will mobile carriers intent on maintaining proprietary control over their platforms to control services be willing to take on such an open platform?
According to Engadget the likely candidate for early adoption of Android for mobile devices in the U.S. is Sprint, which is the American telecoms carrier most aggressive in building out high-bandwidth, long-distance WiMax mobile Intenet infrastructure that could bring the mobile Web to the masses. Engadget speculates that perhaps Google would acquire Sprint to help accelerate WiMax growth, services fueled by Google mobile advertising revenues that might make mobile more affordable or, perhaps, free. Nice thinking, but with so many different communications technologies in play, including the impending action of soon-to-be-former analog television frequencies in the U.S. it's far more likely that Google will be looking towards an alliance with Sprint that would still leave the door open for Android via other carriers.
In the meantime Sprint has much to gain in working aggressively with Google. Slow to the mobile services dance as it grew incompatible network scale via its Nextel acquisition, Sprint needs an edge to catch up with rivals well entrenched with iPhones, Blackberries and other intelligent handsets. In doing so Sprint may be able to catch the next wave of mobile communications focused on both full-screen Web services and advanced messaging capabilities that can leverage WiMax efficiently while other technologies fall into place for even more mobile Web access.
The Zune-sized touch-screen demo unit with a Blackberry-like keyboard that Google's Sergey Brin used to show off Android certainly underscores that Android has the potential to develop features that can run with the current mobile big dogs very quickly - and begin to create a price war between Android-equipped units and currently pricey iPhones and Blackberries that might be just the trick to unlock the chicken-egg equation that seems to have slowed the growth of mobile Web services.
This is a long way of saying that we should expect Android to open up highly affordable Web access via mobile units far more quickly than other platforms are likely to do via telecommunication partners seeking to maintain status quo services pricing. While high-end content services will certainly find a home on Android it's the prospect of reaching people for whom a mobile phone is a necessity and high-speed Internet access via a PC a luxury that content producers and advertisers should consider most important in this rollout of content technologies.
The Web is about to get that much more powerful and affordable via Android-enabled devices and networks - and that much more important to marketers seeking audiences with limited attention spans. Pop in Google's OpenSocial initiative for social media services on top of an Android-enabled device and you have a thoroughly compelling platform for content development that other platform providers are going to be hard-pressed to match soon. Google's definitely in catch-up mode in mobile services but it looks like through Android they might be catching a big break at last.
