Ubiquitous Computing
An insightful article over at JoeydeVilla.com that explains why one type of fast food apple pie failed while another did not, and why the netbook will fail as a product category, while smartphones and laptops will not. What’s the connection? Joey contends that the netbook sets up expectations for an experience with best parts of laptop and smartphone usage, but delivers neither. A crappy fast food apple pie tries to look and taste like Mom’s apple pie, unsuccessfully, and you can’t eat it while driving. The fast food apple pie that worked was portable, and if it wasn’t as good as Mom’s it was a whole lot better than no pie at all.
Joey’s post ends:
The people are going with smartphones, and as developers, you should be following them.
This struck a bit of a chord, so I’ll indulge in a little Sunday morning speculation.
I agree with his thesis, that netbooks are an unsustainable category, but IMO the ’smartphone’ is also on its last legs too, as phone functionality becomes such a small part of what these devices do. See the Digital Media Minute post on ‘the incredible disappearing phone‘ earlier. Notice how people talk about MP3 players less than they used to, as lots more functionality gets rolled into our little devices? Maybe it’s just semantics; we see how nicely the hardware is evolving, and what that facilitates. But by the way, why have cool apps been so slow to come to the device in my hand, until recently?
Sooner or later people will be using handheld devices, the size of today’s smartphones, as their main computers. It’s not far off. The point of this post is this:
Developers, not boardrooms, will drive full computer capability into these hyper-capable handheld platforms by creating so much functionality for them that consumers cannot say no. Delivering better functionality that I can hold in my hand will then be paramount for hardware makers.
Developers are starting to see iPhone, for example, not as a mobile device, but as a ‘handheld console’ that happens to be mobile. Check this interview with the Secret Exit guys, makers of Zen Bound, as they enthuse over the new landscape, while their fellow Finnish developer friends at Nokia are experiencing death by 1000 handsets.
….And certainly, we would love to be developing for a Nokia platform if they have solved the same problems as elegantly as Apple has delivered their solution. But the fact is that for the same success as the iPhone has become, you need an unfragmented platform on the hardware level. You need a good SDK.
JL: Include enough base level of hardware. It can’t be some software rendering or no hardware rendering chip. And the fragmentation, it creates this awful disparity of the games, so you have to support software rendering and make everything scale to that. Any high end games use the hardware rendering, but that’s a lot of cost to make it two times.
With something like iPhone’s standard API, Open GL ES, etc., coupled with easy distribution that enables developers to bypass publishers, they can avoid the endless hardware fragmentation of the ‘mobile space’ entirely. But this isn’t just about iPhone. It’s about the development model. It’s winning commercial votes in the way consumers are embracing the App Store, and the Android Market gains traction for the same reasons. Better hardware specs and cooler handsets weren’t enough to spur developers to create the 50,000 apps that are in the App Store now–device fragmentation made it too formidable and expensive a task for almost everyone. But release excellent hardware coupled with a great SDK and the developer community beats a path to your door. Release outstanding open source Android and handset makers will handle the hardware side for you, and developers likewise get involved. Consumers are showing how much they want the applications that spring from this firestorm of competition.
We are no longer stuck with very limited software applications for hardware. People see how much more they can do with the box in their hand, and they are carrying it already anyway. The pieces are in place for ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous functionality, and strangely the developers, not the hardware makers, are driving it.
