The Mobile Handsets Family Snap

I have been reading and thinking of how the mobile phones have changed our lifestyle. A typical morning starts thus: Office dress? Check. Car keys? Check and finally- Mobile Phone? Check... Reached the main gate; something seems amiss. Oops, forgot wallet! More intriguingly, its interesting to think of how the mobile phones themselves have changed. The way mobile phones have developed in the past three years has been unprecedented. 

In this post I'll attempt a silhouette of this handset super-family snap and try to outline their places in the family.

1. The Young, Bold and Beautiful (TYBB)

Apple created a usability paradigm that was not just incrementally better than what was otherwise available but was transformational. It created and set standards that others have yet to surpass and has created an eco-system that others are trying hard to replicate. A techie may still call the iPhone a duh! phone, but if the queues at Apple stores and the buzz when Steve makes his "This is the most amazing thing ever invented" speeches are anything to go by, thats a killer product.

Google went ahead created a mobile OS called Andriod, where it had no prior experience. Amazingly, it succeeded in creating a worthy competitor to Apple. Actually a lot of manufacturers realized that if they had to compete with The Quick and Dirty pack (read on to know more about them), they needed to adopt an OS that would provide them the competitive flexibility of being able to churn out more designs and faster- Andriod proved to be a good bet. HTC Mobile is a great company that has innovatively adopted Android. Even Samsung has made some bold moves with it.

2. So Yesterday, Yet Trying (SYYT)

Lets start with a pioneer of cellphone technology: Motorola. Motorola literally created this market, saw its culmination and complacence in the Razr series and has been struggling to find its grounding ever since. Its recent forays into the Android with Xoom seem promising- thats officially the tablet space; its certainly lost its ground in the cellphone category.

Nokia has been a corner stone in the mobile telephony revolution that has certainly changed India. Rewind a few years, in the mobile app development world, Nokias used to be the targets for the Gold builds. The first two builds that would come out from most studios would be an s40 and and an s60 build. All the other builds would normally be ported out of these. I'm not sure if the case remains. I guess most studios now focus only on the iPhone version, the Android build and perhaps one for the BlackBerry. I'm sure Nokia still gets a spot, but the point is - its no longer the spotlight. Thankfully, to its credit, India is still flush with the Nokia torch phone (the so called 'made in india' 1100, 1200 series), second hand N Series and third hand S40s and S60 that still make it a majority by existing numbers. Some of its new avatars also seem to show some promise. Again, far from its glory days.

Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Sagem - heard of them lately?

Windows Mobile. The reviews for Windows 7 interface have been rave, but lets face it- these guys have been around for a long time (remember the iPaq days?) and have not been able to make a worthy dent in this domain; very unlikely that they could.

The Symbian OS. Once considered a powerhouse OS designed for the mobile platform, it was a developer's nightmare platform. Sigh, even its parents don't love it anymore! Nokia recently announced that it plans to orphan Symbian and has already adopted Windows (a case of: you're sinking, I'm sinking, lets party and try not sink together?). 

BlackBerry from Research In Motion is one helluva 'ol timer that seems to have been able to stand on its own amidst waves upon waves of assault by dozens of old and new handsets. It seems to have succeeded in packaging itself youthfully afresh, despite its age. RIM bastion has been its rock solid messaging interface, instant push emails to instant messaging- RIM has simply got this spot on, not to mention its messaging friendly key layouts both soft and hard.

3. The Quick Guns. (TQG)

In 2007 (I think) a miracle happened. This miracle was a chipset made by a Taiwanese company called MediaTek. Its SoC (System on a Chip) dramatically reduced the component count, the time taken and the cost of building a cellphone. At the same time, it dramatically increased the number of people who had access to the reference design, increased reliability as a platform and suddenly unleashed a wave of handsets that have swept TYBBs and the SYYTs off their feet.

Another miracle that happened was Shenzhen. Shenzhen is an electronics manufacturing powerhouse. And the scale I've read, is mind boggling. Read this blog to get a feel of its size and this one (also has a video) to read its scale. In India 'China Phone' is a known acronym and customers come asking specifically for it. But Shenzhen has something much more interesting. It churns out three categories of devices: 

1. Original handsets. 

2. Handsets that look like original handsets aka fakes/ phonies 

3. Handsets that are are ingenious. 

Suddenly new models began to get churned out every week and even days! while earlier the So Yesterdays painstakingly churned new ones out every quarter or two.

I'm not sure, but am led to believe that a spate of companies in India owe their origins to MediaTek and Shenzhen. These pack is led here by the likes of Micromax, Carbonn, Lava, Lemon and a bevy of names that just seem to keep popping up. Slowly but steadily, this pack began to corner a significant share of the market which was till now being held by Nokias and their likes (SYYTs) by focusing first on the tier-2, 3 and rural markets. They also focussed on features like music, video, radio and multi-SIM. Despite the fact that on most devices usability sucked, the sheer variety and incredible cheapness seem to have gone their way.

Micromax is an interesting company which I believe is trying to mature from being cheap-shenzhenish-copy-plus-a-few-features phone seller to a new-feature-centric phones churner. One innovation from its stable has been the Micromax A60 'My first Android'- the cheapest and a pretty decent Andriod phone for the masses retailing first hand at about Rs. 6500 when I had last checked.

The road ahead?

For TYBB, they need to ensure that they always remain a few notches ahead of the rest of the pack. Youthful looks don't really last that long.

For SYYT, they are bound to be sandwiched from the top by TYBB and the bottom by TQG. They need to ensure that they find their sweet-spots. Real fast.

For TQG, the very fact that they can themselves be engulfed by another TQG clone launched today means that they need to move from being simple phone sellers to value sellers.

Update:

Check out the stats from Business Standard India (http://business-standard.com/india/news/reconnect/432525/) that support this story with some numbers!

Powering the next billion cell phones

Despite the state of affairs with the world economy, there seems to be a sense of a treasure hunt as far as mobile companies' approach to the developing world is concerned.

Considering all the 'little' insights seriously could go a long way in ensuring the viability of a product or service in such a challenging environment. In other words; I think that the best way to approach this market is with a clear sense of the opportunity it presents and a much clearer sense of its constrains.

From a recent trip to rural India undertaken as a part of a usability research team, I realized that the biggest constraint to the uptake of mobile phone there was not money. From our conversations with existing users, we found that almost all of them used really basic handsets, some even bought as second/ third hand refurbished devices where the cost was just a couple of hundred rupees ($4 or 5!).

Connectivity was also fast becoming a non-issue with major operators trying to set up really extensive rural networks and even competing with each other to offer 'lifetime' pre-paid connections for less than half a dollar! We even saw how local village stores (each, just about the size of a small car) had morphed into outlets there selling small value airtime recharges.

The major concern there was finding a means to recharge ones phone! and to find a phone that required shorter recharges and lasted longer. I'd like to share two interesting developments (thanks again to textually.org) in the past week give some hope here.

Solar powered phone.
Heres a launch news from Samsung and LG - earlier this year. I think these should become as ubiquitous as solar powered calculators. Rural India is blessed with enough sunshine to at least supplement the need for (non-existent) power sockets!

Ambient radio powered phone.
This is more interesting, though it sounds slightly more ambitious. I have always wondered why this could not be done! There is enough 'free' radio noise around to feed some power circuits. I remember having experimented with Crystal Radios (basically AM receivers that do not need power source) when I was into hobby electronics (the most difficult part I remember was getting the ear-piece right). All one needs to do is have a gazillion tuned circuits to harness the spectrum. Anyways, the good news is that Nokia allegedly has done just that!. This makes for an exciting powering solution for the mobile phone, especially in the Urban context.

I don't know if the news links are really trustworthy news sources, but I do know that these are relevant pointers in the right direction and at scale their cost should be really low.

On a side note, I think it is constraints that push the human ability to innovate and every era and region has its fair share of the same. If all was well with the stone age, I would have been engraving this blog post on a stone tablet now :) - Flintstones anyone ;)?

Mobile and the non/semi literate

One of the roles that I take on at Eko is that of a an observer of the mobile-and-user relationship. While yesteryear's India might have been defined by a turban-clad snake charmer, a man on the street clutching a mobile handset very much describes an average Indian today.

A mobile based service (like eko) which aims at reaching out to a billion such 'mobile' Indians today has to contend with another truth - illiteracy. If this Times of India article is right, our illiterate population equals the entire population of the USA!

At Tinfo Mobile, this fact had driven me to design an application series titled TeachMe Akshara which would run on even the basic mobile handsets supporting Java (which were then being given out by Reliance Communications for prices as low as 500 bucks). The purpose of this app was to teach its users the basic alphabets of Indian languages. This news article on Digit magazine talked about that app. Unfortunately, that app never got formally deployed and I've moved on.

What was amazing about Eko was that the great folks here had put in a great deal of research and thought into this problem and had come out with a mobile interface that could be used by even the most basic mobile user, because the solution involved nothing more than dialing!

Resonating with the Eko team's findings, is this research paper published a few years ago by the Nokia Research Center authored by Jan Chipchase - a pioneer in mobile usage research. Here is a link to the research paper titled: Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication

The following excerpt is particularly interesting:

...
The simple answer is that non-literate mobile phone users can call, but cannot message or use the address book. The subtleties are more interesting than this.

Two basic tasks were easy for almost all our participants to complete: turning on the phone and answering an incoming call. Beyond this, there were various degrees of success. Dialing a local phone number is relatively easy, but problems can occur when there are variations such as dialing a national or international number, or using IP telephone prefixes. ...

Mobile handsets as gaming devices. Part III

(...Continued from Part II)

The following graphic depicts a rough time-line. Most of the handsets like the Motorola T720 and the Nokia 7650 are now extinct.


A notable and notorious handset as far as mobile gaming is concerned was the N-Gage and the N-Gage QD from the Nokia stable. Though visionary in its purpose, it failed in its execution at being a mass market gaming device which could also make phone calls. The take-away from its life was the fact that until the technology so matures, mobile phones are not a hard-core gamer's first port of call. They will always have their PS3s for that.

However, what is notable is the progress made in handset technology over these few years (you may note that a major part of this whole 'history' I am talking about has unraveled in just about half a decade! The growth IS that frantic and this means that the cool phone that I carry today will be tomorrow's junk. This rapid evolution can be tracked using the following attributes which are relevant from a developer's perspective.

a. Screen resolution
The following representation should give you a good idea:

...2001...

100 x 80

...2002...

128 x 128

...2004...

176 x 220

...2005...

240 x 320

...2007...

480 x 320, 160 dpi - The iPhone

b. Keypad and its layout
Undoubtedly the most used and abused parts of most erstwhile digital devices. More so for phones used as gaming devices.

......2001...

Number keys only.
Other keys did not exist except for make / break call ones.
Even if other keys existed, their use inside apps was undefined and unintended.

...2002...

Standard layouts.
Soft-keys defined.
4-way simple joysticks incorporated and used in menus as well as simple games.

...2003...

Additional game specific keys prominent.

...2005...

Six+ way joysticks.
Simultaneous multiple keypress detection.

....

Other innovations in human interface including screen-touch and camera motion detection.

c. Processing power

...2001...
Very slow, inefficient processors, primarily intended to feed text only screens and very simple computational needs.

...2003...
Playable frame-rates for arcade style games. Reasonable number crunching.

...2004...
Good frame-rates, even 3D gets introduced, advanced screen rendering algorithms.

.....
The lines between personal computers and personal mobile phones is blurring further and further. Some devices as capable as earlier PCs and some like the iPhone carving a niche for the way in which the UI and power has been designed to give a superior user interface.

d. Memory
All the graphics, sound effects and rendering code need space - the more the better. More space translates into a better ability to pack in richer textures, detailed sprites and backgrounds with a good color-depth and range. Also, games gobble a good amount of working memory - the stack and the heap to give a better gaming experience. There is a lot of data associated with any game instance and these must be buffered for quick access. In simple terms abundant heap and stack space translates into a smoother and richer game-play.

...2001...
32 to 64KB jar size
200KB heap

...2004....
200KB jar size
512KB heap

...
Jar size in Mega Bytes
Introduction of Virtual memory...?

This pretty much sums up the evolutionary pattern being followed by mobile handsets. I'm sure as technology progresses, these parameters will be redundant - but until then and even beyond, they're welcome to stay on my journal ;).

In the next piece I intend to list out a few notable games that can be called milestones in the handsets' journey of evolution. Till then - adios!

Mobile handsets as gaming devices. Part II

(...Continued from part I)
Around the same time, Qualcomm launched BREW - a rival platform for CDMA phones running on its chip-sets. While J2ME had a mass following due to a high number of Java developers available, BREW had a smaller following.

Many would argue that despite the ease of coding and huge developer network, BREW had an edge over Java for the reason that it was built as a product with a monetization mechanism built it, while the engineers at Sun Microsystems were more intent on building a 'standards platform'. That apart from the fact that BREW code works closest to the machine and hence has potentially better performance.

However, considering its reach, J2ME (now known as JavaME) which is available on almost all GSM phones and a few CDMA phones is unrivaled.

The following is the first Java enabled phone from Motorola - the i3000

Year 2001. Motorola i3000. Screen 110 x 110 px. Black and White

Siemens too launched its first Java handset the same year- the SL45. For many J2ME enthusiasts, the Siemens SL45 was an introduction of sorts.

Year 2001. Siemens SL45. Screen 100 x 80 px. Greyscale (better than BW :) )

Not to be left behind, Nokia too came out with its classic Java enabled phone. The rugged and handy Nokia 3410 candybar was perhaps the first mass market J2ME MIDP 1.0 device.

Year 2002. 3410, Nokia Series 30. Screen 96 x 96. Greyscale

The 'other' platforms

It was not as if there were no other mobile development platforms around, infact there were a handful of them, some very good ones too - alas, not all are as successful as J2ME and BREW.

The most notable among the 'other' platforms was Mophun. Mophun was a revolution of sorts. Initially built for the Sony Ericsson T300 (We called it the soap-box phone ;) ), it was the first arcade level mobile gaming platform with a freely download-able SDK. The T300 was one of the first handsets to have an 100 x 80 color screen, sound effects support and a joystick. It even supported an external camera ;)

Year 2002. SonyEricsson T300. Screen 100 x 80. 256 colors

Infusio meanwhile developed another Java based platform name ex-en. It featured on a few Sagem, Philips, Toshibas and its likes.

Another notable platform was Do-ja. Again Java based (J2ME based to be more specific) with the exception of having a proprietary Profile originally built for the Japanese telcos.

The year 2002 and beyond witnessed mobile technologies literally leapfrogging. The screens kept getting better, the processor got faster and memory was bigger. The mobile world as we know it can be called the post 2002 era which we will explore in the next article.
(To be continued ...)

Mobile handsets as gaming devices. Part I

The humble mobile phone has come a long way. There was a time when this device was available only to the elite few, looked like a brick and cost a fortune to have and to keep. Heres how it all started. Though many wireless devices did exist before this brick, it holds the distinction of being the worlds first 'cellphone'.

Year: 1984. The Motorola DyanTac 8000x.

Nokia (which started in 1865 as a wood pulp mill!) debuted its first GSM mobile phone only in 1992 with Nokia 1011 (though it too had made the first transportable phone in 1984)

Year 1992. The Nokia 1011

Mobile phones were pretty serious business till some geek at Nokia decided to add some fun to it and along came Nokia 6110 with Snake on it!

Year 1997. Nokia 6110 - There's a snake on board!

Nokia's Snake is considered the 'pioneer' in mobile gaming.
The enormous interest on this mobile game, even among the typical 'business' folk is legendary, with people vying with each other to break the high score record. For a few years, games such as Snake were production-embedded on handsets.

All that changed in 2000-2001, with the Java platform claiming a new playground. (... To be continued in part II)