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 »

Everyone knows the biggest battles in technology are today being fought by a small number of large organizations. We intuitively know who these great powers are: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft. But we’re not so clear on what it is that makes those particular companies the key protagonists rather than other equally large digital companies — Samsung, Sony, Nokia and Yahoo! among them — who appear to be sidelined.

Calling this a battle, or “The Great Tech War of 2012″, misses the point. It’s far too negative a sentiment when these companies’ main focus is on long term strategy. They are aiming to construct a future in which their products and profits will prosper.

These great digital powers are now building Digital Civilizations, rather than a series of mere products, individual platforms or even ecosystems (around a platform). They are pursuing strategies that reach far beyond the confines of existing markets. They are causing widespread market collisions as they push industries to overlap, merge or cease to exist. They are outflanking and disrupting companies that follow less ambitious corporate strategies.

These new Digital Civilizations use identity to tie numerous disparate products, many devices, multiple platforms and product portfolios together into their long term strategy. Each Civilization has hundreds of millions of active users — often with credit cards attached — far more than even the largest telecom operators or media companies. They straddle industries rather than operating within legacy market sectors. They have an organizing ideology underlying their strategy that motivates and attracts talented employees, excites partners, and is the foundation for the marketing that entices users to become their customers.

What defines these Digital Civilizations? What makes them new and different? Many organizations, companies, industry consortiums, and companies have parts of this strategy in place within their current products. But the new Digital Civilizations have all of the following characteristics:  Read the rest of this entry »

If you buy an unlocked iPhone you’ll see why “SIM-free” won’t be like freedom, to misquote a famous Apple superbowl advert.

Unlike other manufacturer’s SIM-free phones, “unlocked” iPhones continue to behave differently based on the network SIM inserted — see the screenshots below. This sets a precedent for future iPhones that may dispense with any need for a physical SIM card.

An unlocked phone allows a consumer to use their phone with any operator. Such iPhones have long been on sale in many European and Asian countries and Apple US has just started selling unlocked and contract-free iPhones on the online US Apple store. As consumers pay the full unsubsidized price for these iPhones, buyers expect to have complete control over their devices. Network operators should have no say on how they’re used. But that’s not the whole truth.

Apple has just secured a patent that will allow them to ship an iPhone with no need for the for the tiny operator-provided smartcard known as a SIM. This is being widely reported as an attack on operators by threatening their customer relationship.

If operators are smart, this won’t be the outcome. Instead, end users will be the ones whose freedom is squeezed by such a future iPhone.

Why? Current “unlocked” iPhones show that Apple is prioritizing their carrier relationships over end users, even for those that buy iPhones at full price, with no operator subsidy or contract lock.

On these “unlocked” iPhones the network settings available to the phone’s owner depend on what operator SIM is placed into the phone. Read the rest of this entry »

The iPod is now 10. The original 5Gb scroll wheel model launched in October 2001. In the years since, Apple has shipped 321m units.

Everyone looks to Apple’s current dominance — who could have imagined writing that phrase a decade ago — and contrasts it with the troubled mid 1990s period when the company almost failed. The iPod was the turnaround product that proved that Apple could diversify outside of the computer business. It established a new revenue source and boosted morale. Without the iPod, Apple would not have tackled the smartphone and tablet markets in the way they did.

For those seeking to understand the iPod and learn from Apple’s turnaround in the last decade, here are the ten key iPod takeaways:

1. Success does not happen overnight, companies have to persevere with a strategy. In its first year on sale the iPod sold just 376,000 units. To compare, in Apple’s most recent quarter it took on average five days to sell that many iPods. Also, RIM shipped 700,000 tablets in its first six months — many more than the initial iPod — and yet that product line is widely considered to be troubled and struggling.
2. Product quality is more important than being a first mover. The iPod wasn’t the first mp3 music player. The market had started in the late 1990s. Apple launched the iPod against multiple players and initially it cost much more than other devices that had more features. What Apple executed differently was that the iTunes sync software made it supremely easily to transfer music from a Mac or PC onto the player. Apple set sync to be automatic once a user plugged their iPod into a computer. At the time, competitors argued ‘drag and drop’ was easier. They may have been right that it was easier to set up initially as users did not need to install any new software on their computer, but drag and drop took much longer to do each time a person wished to update their iPod than a painless automatic sync. Drag and drop was a hassle in day to day use. Apple’s solution was fast and elegant.
3. Apple leveraged openness and compatibility to establish the iPod and maintain its lead. Like Sony, Apple has the reputation of being highly proprietary. While there is truth in that generalization, it’s far from the whole truth. Apple has repeatedly leveraged open standards in its products and been selective about which parts of a product to keep closed and where to allow third party development or standards. The original iPod was mp3-compatible, unlike Sony’s ATRAC-only portable media players of the same era. Apple’s adoption of the AAC format and DRM copy protection was added much later. Apple rapidly moved to offer a Windows version of the iPod in July 2002 which dramatically widened the addressable market for the iPod, rather than tying the iPod to be solely a Macintosh peripheral as would have been the reaction of many companies. With the third iPod design, Apple added the dock connector and created a vibrant market for third party accessories that acts as a significant barrier to competitors seeking to overtake the iPod due to the numerous  iPod peripherals available as a result.
4. The iPod drove people to the iTunes music store, not vice versa. The music store launched 18 months after the iPod, but to begin with only in the US. By the time the store opened in three European countries in spring 2004, Apple had already sold 3.7m iPods. Unlike competitor music stores of the time, Apple integrated the music store into their PC and Mac app — rather than delivering it as a website — this placed the music store right alongside the tools people used to update their iPod and listen to music. In retail, store location and in-store product placement is everything. Apple made sure their digital store emulated traditional retail strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

[updated October 19 with the latest Q3 Apple results and the official name of the new Nexus]

A new version of Android will be available in November, initally on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Much of the analysis of this Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android is focused on the implications of it running on both smartphones and tablets, where older versions of Android ran on one or the other (1), as well as shiny new gimmicks such as face recognition to unlock a handset.

This unification of smartphones and tablets is a red herring. Other things matter much more for Android.

Android tablets are failing in the market, while Google’s smartphones sell in enormous numbers. This is a major issue for Google.

In tablets, Google’s own numbers show the extent to which Android is struggling. There are approximately 3.4m Android tablets running the official version of Android intended for tablets (2). This is small compared with the tablet market leader from Apple. Over 39.9m iPads were shipped up to the end of September this year. In the third quarter of 2011 alone, Apple shipped over 11m iPads, almost three times that of all official Android tablets to date.

Android smartphones are a massive success. Given the above Android tablet figures, the vast majority of the 550,000 Android devices activated each day must be smartphones. Google has already caught Apple in smartphone adoption. There are 190m Android devices in use compared with 250m Apple iOS devices. But in smartphones the adoption numbers show that Android is already ahead: Apple has shipped a total of 146m iPhones to date (end September 2011) — some of those units are over three years old and will no longer be in use — while there are approximately 180m Android smartphones (3).

Google is succeeding with smartphones, but not tablets, as a solid media strategy isn’t essential for success in the smartphone market.

Why?

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 »

Today’s round-up of recent wireless, smartphone, tablet, and other mobile data.

There’s a summary of the data at the top with more figures, analysis and links to all of the sources included further down after the break.

1. comScore: August 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

In one of its key countries, the US, RIM is really struggling. RIM sees a decline of 1% in share of the mobile handset market and a dramatic 5% fall in share of smartphone OS platforms in just a three month period. But these figures pre-date the introduction of RIM’s completely new portfolio of low end Curves and higher end Bold’s and Torch’s all running BlackBerry OS 7.

Despite widespread sentiment that Apple is losing out to Android in the US, the company’s share of the total US mobile market edged up by 0.7% between May and August. This reflects continued strength for the iPhone 4 although the handset design is a year old.

2. Apple: Latest iOS, iPhone and other Apple statistics from the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event

Apple’s own figures from the iPhone 4S launch re-enforce how well it was doing on the eve of Steve Job’s death. Some of the many metrics (many stats further down after the break):

• 250m iOS devices sold, including iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch models.
• 18m total app downloads cumulatively.
• 500,000 iOS apps in the store, of which 140,000 are for the iPad.
• 67m Game Center users.
• >16bn songs sold by the iTunes music store.
• $3bn paid out by App to app developers to date

3. Nielsen: In U.S. Market, New Smartphone Buyers Increasingly Embracing Android

Data on new smartphone buyers shows that Android is growing dramatically and now represents 56% of recent smartphone acquirers. However, Apple is maintaining its smartphone market share (28%) when comparing recent smartphone acquirers and all smartphone subscribers. Result: More bad news for RIM and Microsoft Windows Phone, it’s these other smartphone platforms that are being squeezed by the rise of Android, not Apple.

4. J.D. Power: The Right Blend of Design and Technology is Critical to Creating an Exceptional User Experience with Smartphones and Traditional Mobile Devices

Customer satisfaction is greatest for thin and light devices, even among smartphone users. Current feature phone owners demonstrate the same trend as smartphone owners for portable devices but have a lower tolerance for weight with their satisfaction levels dropping off when devices weigh over 4 ounces compared with a threshold of 5 ounces for smartphone owners.

My take: This explains partly the success of the iPhone 4. Apple’s handset is a particularly thin and light smartphone that has wide appeal to normal mobile customers, not just savvy users. J.D. Power data picks out the iPhone as the highest rated phone for satisfaction.

5. Nielsen: 40 Percent of U.S. Mobile Users Own Smartphones; 40 Percent are Android

Apple and Android are neck and neck in appeal for those adults that intend to buy a smartphone in the next year: Both appeal to 30% of prospective buyers. But among an “Innovators” group of early adopters 40% intend to buy an Android smartphone compared with 32% for iOS. My take: This data demonstrates that the iPhone has broader appeal across mainstream users than Android.

Read the rest of this entry »