if connected

People’s unofficial use at work of personally-bought smartphones will lead to personal devices and personal information being managed by corporate IT departments. RIM has just announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a new product to help companies manage the proliferation of employee-bought smartphones and tablets connecting to company networks.

Fusion has support for employees to use a single device for both work and home, the ability to manage multiple devices per person — critical in an era where individuals routinely use smartphones, tablets and notebook PCs in tandem — and self-service for individual employees to lock their phone if it’s lost or stolen.

But consumer smartphone owners already routinely have many of these abilities, even if their smartphones are not used for work, or provided by their employer. While RIM has been slow to extend its core expertise into the consumer market, other than with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM),  numerous other companies have jumped into the fray and offered consumer versions BlackBerry’s enterprise features upon which RIM’s phone success was originally built.

The ‘ITization of the Person’ is already well underway. Here’s a selection of the many examples where consumers have corporate-style IT tools to manage their digital lives:-  Read the rest of this entry »

RIM’s BlackBerry customers are experiencing a further outage as the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) fails again (BBC News coverage) for the second day of problems. The issues started yesterday, on Canadian Thanksgiving. RIM is a Canadian company. These service faults cover a wide geographical region across Europe, Middle East and Africa but not North America. BIS is the network service that powers consumer email, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and other BlackBerry Internet functions for consumers. SMS and voice calling is unaffected.

This isn’t the first such problem with BIS (or see here), but the timing is horrific, for multiple reasons:

• BBM rival iMessage arrives tomorrow on Wednesday, October 12. iMessage is a part of the iOS5 update for iPhones, iPads and recent iPod Touch models. Similarly to Facetime’s integration with voice telephony, iMessage replaces an iPhone’s SMS app and automatically delivers the improved messaging experience if the phone knows a recipient is also an iMessage user. It also uses Apple’s cloud service to sync messages across the iPad and iPod Touch that lack SMS messaging ability.
• The new version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, is imminent. While Apple is the key competitor for all high end smartphones, it’s Android-powered phones that threaten to eat into RIM’s Curve & BBM toting young customers.
• RIM is suffering a fall in device unit shipments. That’s perhaps too mild a summary, RIM has reported a terrible set of results for its most recent quarter combined with appalling sales for the PlayBook tablet. RIM needs to be able to devote its resources and prestige to expand with new innovations and not run to stand still by patching old services such as BIS for existing users.
• RIM is midway through a risky technology transition. Current BlackBerry smartphones run an evolved version of the same software they have for years. The new QNX software is in development and is on which RIM’s future depends. RIM will have to persuade current users to transition to this new product range that will almost certainly have some irritations for long term users, even if QNX smartphones are excellently executed. Long term users often dislike small changes that new users wouldn’t notice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies again for the title pun.

Now the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is official, everyone has set out their view of how well it will do. Almost all of these forecasts are positive.

But all of this analysis has been based on a tiny little assumption: That the product works as described, is quick, elegant and bug free. Ok, it’s not such a small assumption. It’s massive.

At the event yesterday, Amazon controlled access to the Fire. Attendees were not able to test it out free form. Amazon staff showed it, yes, but they also pressed the buttons, browsed the web, scrolled the screen, and played the music and videos. PC World columnist Harry McCracken tweeted about Amazon’s demo control first. Now, Engadget reports it wasn’t able to go hands-on, as do Venturebeat, Gizmodo, and This is my Next and others. Kindle Fire tablet demo videos from the event all have in common Amazon staff holding the Fire, they look similar: see Techcrunch ; WSJ etc. etc.

This lack of access to the Fire this close to launch is suspicious.

By not allowing attendees to try it, Amazon is implying that the current Kindle Fire software is sluggish, buggy, or not yet fully implemented. The last time I saw a tablet shown in this way was behind closed doors at HP’s Mobile World Congress booth back in February. There they showed me the Touchpad but wouldn’t let me use its apps myself. As history records, the Touchpad launch wasn’t smooth. Early buyers complained the software was sluggish and HP killed the whole Touchpad line just 48 days post launch.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I started this blog last November I agonised over the name. Implicit in “Being Connected” is the idea of an always-on Internet. But “always-on” is a term that we all use blithely without thinking about it.

Most of the time, we still use a PC to browse websites or create content. But the PC isn’t an always-on device, or if it is always-on, it’s not where people actually are living for large parts of every day. Home broadband connections may be “always-on” but only the infirm live their lives exclusively at home. Laptops enable people to enjoy mobile broadband out and about but laptops are too bulky to carry all of the time and take too long to set-up on a flat surface to deliver anything other than a part-time Internet.

The devices that create an always-on digital life are the increasing numbers of Internet mobile phones. These are carried 24×7 and  are carried in easily accessible pockets for instant Google, email, Facebook or whatever.

The mobile phone isn’t significant because it’s mobile. If mobile was the most important aspect of the mobile phone, then mobile’s role in people’s lives would be limited to ‘away from home’ or ‘out of the office’ situations. But people use their phones inside the home as much if not greater as outside: studies on mobile TV and mobile phone calling show very high usage at home. Plus people don’t leave their personal mobile phones outside of the office. No. They carry their personal digital lives into work on-board those personal mobile phones. This increases the collision between work and personal lives.

What’s important about the Internet mobile phone is that mobiles deliver a 24×7 digital life. One where people are connected all of the time, should they choose.

I’ve started writing about this idea, in the increasingly misnamed “day” job here:
How Mobile Handsets Will Deliver 24×7 Social Computing

Bootnote – If people carry Blackberries or work mobile phones 24×7, is it still a “day” job?

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

Too many firms are building their mobile strategies as a mere extension of the PC Internet, and are missing out on what’s now possible when mobile, but which remains impossible using a PC.

A PC is always going to be limited to deliver a part time Internet experience. They are too bulky, too heavy, too power hungry, and increasingly too dependent on the assumption that a super fast fixed-quality broadband connection is present to be something that people will have with them all of the time 24×7. If a PC evolved to be suitable for 24×7 use it wouldn’t be a PC anymore.

Today’s Internet mobiles offer people that 24×7 digital life. People are becoming connected 24×7 through their Internet phones and that must transform the strategies that firms adopt. Mobile enables a 24×7 relationship between brands and consumers. Mobile enables people to interact with websites 24×7, both to consume — read and browse — and to contribute. Mobile opens up new business models through the fusion of location awareness and a 24×7 Internet-connected device.

The first and clearest example of this new world is what’s happening with social computing. People are now able to lurk on Facebook or Bebo at anytime, or post photos onto Flickr that are taggged with where they were taken (as well as when).

Read this new report for more on 24×7 people:-
How Mobile Handsets Will Deliver 24×7 Social Computing

I’ll be developing this theme in future reports this year.

What is it that makes one app outstanding? What is it that deliver a better experience than clicking a link to a mobile website? It’s not the home screen icon as it’s easy to place bookmarks onto an iPhone home screen and in fact half of the icons on my first page are indeed web bookmarks.

• Offer an offline experience. Too often I’m in an area with a 2g signal or no signal at all. Bookmarks are useless. But an application that stores information locally on the phone and so just works truly anywhere anytime — even without coverage — is outstanding. Automatic sync is the ideal experience, but it has to work completely reliably: Sync that mangles data is worse than useless.
• Are fast to respond to screen taps. Jumping from one web page to another always results in a delay. On the desktop clever use of plug-ins and javascript combine with low broadband ping times to overcome this issue. On a mobile, network responsiveness is much slower and even the iPhone’s Safari browser is lacking. Storing content locally enables both a really speedy experience as well as offline working.
• Tie into handset hardware functions like GPS or speedy 3D graphics. Native apps still have close handset integration to themselves.
• Make me smile. Seriously. So many iPhone apps have a real sense of fun about them, even dull utilities. It doesn’t have to be the app itself, other updates from an apps’ developer may write to me with a human voice.
• Are designed for use on the move. Apps need to remember state without the user needing to hit ‘save’ or navigating to a particular point in the UI. A phone call could come in at any time. The app needs to be able to be interrupted on an instant’s notice. Fast app loading must be a given.
• Works with my other websites and existing data on day one. Apps that force me instantly to switch everything just don’t get tested out. They need to work with what I’m already committed too. Over time, I may be prepared to take the time to migrate data.
• Are free or have free trial/lite versions. I don’t care how good the reviews are. Unless there’s some free way of trying something out I’m unlikely to play with an app. For me, even a 59 pence charge is an extra barrier too far for testing something out on top of the time to download and install.
• Are loved. Apps that are regularly updated and improved tend to endear themselves to me. I love the feeling of enjoying improvements for free.

So, what characteristics am I missing?

Doesn’t matter how fast a gadget or a PC’s components are on paper. All that matters is how fast something feels in use. Examples:

• Writing a letter on a PC is only faster if the user types faster than handwriting. Give someone an unfamiliar azerty keyboard and the same PC will feel slow.
• Crashes don’t just lose data, they slow users down even if no data is lost, as users have to re-launch apps or reboot.
• Same kit can behave at different speed. This laptop shuts down in between 30 seconds and two minutes in Vista. But in Mac OS it takes just 8-10 seconds.
• iPhone feels fast as it shows a stock image of each application while the app loads. There’s also no hourglass to remind the user that something is happening slowly.
• Having to slide out the qwerty keyboard on my Windows Mobile TyTn then typing an SMS, takes longer than tapping on the iPhone keypad to send a short SMS.
• Nintendo DS games automatically remember what stage a player is at; PSP games often don’t. Or on resuming, many PSP games force players to go back to a checkpoint. The gameplay repetition that results makes the PSP feel slow.
• Downloading a game in the latest PS3 OS software feels faster than it did. Why? It’s now possible to download in the background and for the console to auto-power off when the download finishes. Result: user doesn’t have to sit and wait before being able to turn off power. Download still takes the same length of time.

All users care about is how fast something feels. Not what the hardware specs say.