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Welcome IMR Executive's Resources Page!

We will regularly update this section with a range of useful tools that will be of interest and help to you!

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Interesting Articles:

 

Going backwards

Someone once described progress as Father Christmas. As a boy you believe in Father Christmas, as a man you don't believe in Father Christmas, as a dad you are Father Christmas.

Predicting the future is something I spend a lot of time doing and it's quite upsetting when things are regressing rather than progressing. On a big scale we can lament that there are no longer any supersonic passenger jets, and no-one has stepped foot on the moon for thirty years. In the mobile phone world we can look at how the trends of a decade ago have gone into decline.

In the early days of mobile phones contracts put the emphasis on the first syllable, phones were big, ugly and had to be charged every day. Then came the progress. Battery life improved. We saw the Nokia 1610 with the best part of a week's standby, the beautiful 8810, StarTac and Genie

Today the rush into touch screens means that all phones look something likie an iPhone, Blackberry or an N97. All phones are slabs either with our without keypads. There is no innovation like the Danger Hiptop or Motorola Mpx. Even Motorola which could once be relied on to do something interesting if not necessarily tasteful seems to be on planet boring with the DEXT. In a bid not to look like a Razr it looks like everything else. There are flashes of brilliance like the new Sony Ericsson Pureness but what the handset world has not learnt is that trying to compete with the iPhone by looking like one is a mistake. If you want to compete with iPhone by being like one start by founding a new religion and then build a product. Otherwise run away and build something every bit as desirable but completely different: like the Pureness.

Only a tiny fraction of users install applications and fewer pay for them. The great advantage of a smartphone is that as a platform it allows operators to bundle applications - like a facebook client - and customize the front end.

I'm convinced that users of the current generation of smartphones will be looking for something cooler and with better battery life when it comes to upgrade time.

Unfortunately that upgrade period slips further and further away. The convention of one year contracts and the enlightenment of three month and one month notice contracts has gone away. Just like the mid 1980s people are tied into 18 months and two years. It won't be long before we see minute billing.

This presents an interesting challenge for networks who want to sell more services. If applications generally come with new phones they need to promote people buying them, but if they are locked into a contract they need to get one SIM free, something that's expensive unless you find it waiting under the tree at Christmas.

Important stuff:
There is massive growth potential in the Senior Market. Readers of this column can learn about it at www.seniormarket.co.uk or book with a discount at www.seniormarket.co.uk . You'll get 15% off if you use the discount code CAT.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column the previous Friday by subscribing here, and follow me on Twitter.

 

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A bunch of letters

I'm not sure how I know about lace, maybe it's from spending too much time shopping for underwear and friends wedding dresses, but I do know that the Nottingham lace industry uses unpronounceable acronyms for security.

No one company does the whole production process. Lace is made in huge sheets with some threads made of a plastic that dissolves in acetate. A separate company will dip the sheets to get the strands of lace and a third will dye it.

The network of competing and allied companies is almost as intricate as the patterns on the lace itself and it's a horribly protective industry. No-one wants outsiders to understand who is doing what part of the production process so while the companies all have proper established names they are all referred to by those in the know by initials. Done to shut out customers, like the dress manufacturers, who might get too good a price if they knew who did what.

But what is the excuse for the mobile world? Why do we use acronyms which even when you spell out the terms don't give a clue as to what they mean. Group Special Mobile begat GSM, which then became translated to Global System for Mobile communications. It's ironic that while the acronym doesn't fit, today you could say "Global System for Mobiles" and it would mean something to the vast majority of people, as mobile has come to mean a device much as video has.

Very few of the acronyms mean anything. GPRS? EDGE - which is an acronym including an acronym and best of all LTE. Long Term Enhanced. How long is a long term? It's 3G LTE because the committee which defines it wasn't allowed look at anything other than 3G technologies, so while it might happily have been called 4G it had to pretend to be 3G. It uses a different type of radio, which of course comes with its own acronym (ODFM), different cell planning and will require very different devices. The relationship to 3G is only through the people and the name.

Of course it's not just the mobile industry which hides behind acronyms, all industries do it but at least the others, when you spell them out have some semblance of common sense to the name. They also do a better job of making them colloquial, the use of 'sequel" for SQL.
But of all the mispronunciations it's the name of the dominant phone manufacturer which most riles. You only have to listen to a Finn to hear the correct version. Nokia is pronounced by Americans like a refusal at a South Korean branch of Avis, when they have run out of Kia cars to rent. No Kia. To get it right it should sound like someone tapping on a wooden lughole: Knock Ear. Maybe that's why the biggest phone manufacturer in the world has such little success in the USA. American's can't pronounce it. Perhaps they should create a sub-brand, but they'd only choose a acronym that no-one could decode or pronounce.

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They do it in their pyjamas

One thing I don't do on this site is phone reviews. That's mostly because it's a more mobile site than you'd believe. It's written on planes and trains, in lounges and waiting rooms. I can't be bothered with the logistics of chasing kit and waiting for courriers, then finding all the bits, parcelling it up and sending it back.

But I do think reviews are important, although not for the obvious reason that they tell people who buy phones which one to choose. First you need to understand the circumstances under which reviews are written. Mobile phones are tested at manufacturers and operators in conformance labs with network and environmental simulators. The people doing the testing are engineers who understand the properties of antennas and what gain is. Phones are tested to standards with scripts run and empirical measurements taken. It's rigorous and scientific.

Reviews are written by people who are employed more for their skills with the written word and the ability to hit a deadline. People who are not necessarily phone experts and they do it by playing with the phone for a few days and reading bits of the manual. Sometimes manufacturers help out with guidelines for reviewers. this isn't done in a lab (unless it's Connect magazine in Germany), but the office, or in the reviewers home. Many are freelance and they'll fit the phone review in among their schedule of other things they have to write. Forget about regular office hours the testing and reviewing takes place at any time of day. And when the deadline looms the writing becomes more important than getting dressed. Reviews will be finished over tea and toast in a dressing gown to get the copy filed before the editor arrives at the office.

This all sounds pretty shoddy. Someone who isn't a qualified expert spreading their opinions which are formulated with limited experience and in a rush.

But it's important because it's honest. British reviews in particular don't pull punches, and it's the first time a device will have encountered someone who doesn't have a vested interest. All through the year or so that a phone takes to get from portfolio planning to network acceptance it's been looked at by people with an interest in its success. Those working on it are too close. The networks who have it for testing will say that it isn't as good as rival products and they want it cheaper as a purchasing gambit. The sales people will say it's too expensive. No-one really measures the coolness, the key factor in the velocity with which a phone moves from the shelves into the consumers hands.

The reviewer isn't important because he or she shapes the opinion of the consumer but because they give the coolness feedback. They are not just the person who has seen your phone first, they've seen the rivals. They have a unique insight into where your phone fits in the imminent landscape of the shop shelves. It's where all the competitor analysis comes home to roost. Did you need to go for 8 megapixel or would 5 have been good enough? Do stereo speakers matter? The reviewer has used dozens, perhaps hundreds of phones. A good reviewer can get to grips with the features very quickly and assess how likely they are to be used.

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Things that never go away (and should)

Sleeping with an ex is always a mistake, yet there is a dreadful compulsion to do it. Assuming that neither of you are with anyone it should be harmless, but there is a reason why the ex has that status and it remains so.

The same is true of oh so many ideas for mobile phones. One of them is the distributed device. The phone which has a radio module, a headset, a numeric keypad and a qwerty one. Ask people about the idea and they like it. But focus groups are fickle. You need to understand how to ask a question. Perhaps the best example was a company which had a range of products in bright colours alongside the normal black and silver. The interviewees all said they liked the bright ones. At the end of the long session interviewees were told that as a reward for their participation they could choose one of the products to take home. They all chose the black one.

What people say they will buy and what they buy is very different.

The distributed handset sounds like a good idea but experience has shown that accessories like attachable cameras, the Ericsson Chatboard or the Zeemote just don't get used that much. They sound like a good idea and might be great at selling a phone as a value add but usage tails off. Particularly when one of the components runs flat. Keeping all the bits charged is too labour intensive.

Even more common an idea is the watch phone. Every eighteen months someone launches the 'first serious watch phone'. There have of course been watch phones for years, a Google of Chinese phone web sites will turn up an armful of designs, but no-one has ever taken any of them seriously which is what allows each new launch to claim to be the first in some way or other. The mobile phone has killed the utility of a watch and doesn't need to be turned into it. Watches as jewellery, particularly watches with cogs and springs, or to steal from the second greatest writer ever "all done in hardware", are a different things.

The next one that won't go away is the kids phone. Typically with four buttons to call their parents or someone with some authority, and GPS so the kid can be found when lost. This fails to understand kids. By the time they are old enough not to be under adult supervision they know phones. Say "chocolate" to a 12 year old and they think LG not Cadburys. There have been lots of attempts. None have succeeded. GPS is rubbish for finding people because it doesn't work indoors or in pockets and runs down the battery. Cell ID and a good idea of where within that cell a particular child is likely to be is a far better mechanism.

So if you are a product planner don't fire up PowerPoint and propose a kids phone that is a wristwatch with separate models for other functions. And don't sleep with your ex.

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Touch is so 2009

Shoes this season are big and clumpy. And so are phones. It seems that everyone wants to build an iPhone, so whatever the operating system they have a big touch screen and a fast processor. Be it an HTC Hero, Nokia 5800 or Blackberry Storm, every phone is begging to be touched or stroked. The touch screen is the high heel platform of the moment.

And just as the footwear isn't ideal for everyday purposes neither is the two handed phone.
Oh yes, you can do plenty of things with touch screen phones using one hand but it's not easy as it is with something a lot smaller and with real buttons. Reaching across the width of a big phone with your thumb isn't as easy as using a traditional clam, but like all these things phones move in fashions. A narrower phone with real buttons is much easier if you are holding a bag at a bus stop or standing on a train.

As much as the iPhone hs changed habits it's only done so for the tiny percentage of people who got one and even then not all of them. The vast majority of smartphone owners have never installed an application, much less paid for one. They've got a touch screen because it's the season's thing to have. It's what the man in the shop told them to get.

What will happen when the users who don't exploit the functionality of the big powerful phones go to their next upgrade? The first thing they will ask for is something with better battery life. The pain of daily charging having taken its toll. The second is something that fits better in their pockets or purse.

The device that needs to be waiting for them is the ballet pump of phones. While Uggs, Crocs and platforms come and go the lightweight ballet pump just sells year in year out. For mobile phones, which need to demonstrate technical progress this year's simple clam needs to be thinner and maybe lighter than last. Not too light or it will feel like a toy. There is a magic figure a little below 100g, but above 60g where the density of the phone implies quality. A metal finish and snap shut. Think Zippo lighter rather than Cricket.

In the absence of a next fashion there will be a retreat to the staple. A phone that is thinner (you can never be too thin) and cooler. The great thing is that the technology is around to do it. OLED not only looks great, it doesn't need a back light, and can be double sided so a single screen can serve as the CLI when the clam is shut and as the main screen when it's open. That reduces the thickness by two-thirds. OLED is also less power hungry than TFT with a backlight so you can have smaller batteries.

Budget chipsets are small to save money and every element of phone design from SIM holders to chassis are available with a low fat variety. You won't get a high quality image on the camera but 8gig on a micro SD is now common and as that's 2,000 songs it's plenty.

But what's special about the thin phone, is that like the ballet pump it doesn't have to wait for the current cool trend to die before it can come in. There is plenty of scope for the thin phone to sit in a bag alongside a Storm: one a work phone the other for play.

It wasn't that long ago that we were asking "clam or slider" and that time will come again. 2010 will be the year of the thin phone.

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Teaching machine

It's rumoured Apple is to launch its internet tablet: The great device we've all been waiting for. Mobile access to the web with a decent sized display. Something that you will enjoy watching movies on in bed. And yes, that kind of movie too.

But there is a greater opportunity and it has a lot more value because it ticks a lot of boxes. It provides for an unmet need. It has a business model as an end to end service and it doesn't compete with other areas.

It's the tablet as a teaching device.

While Windows tablets have failed to find any great acceptance they are loved in the classroom. They allow students from elementary to PhD to work collaboratively. To read papers and make margin notes, and then share those notes. Devices can be attached to the classroom projector so others can see some great work. IWay more portable than a satchel of textbooks. In one experiment the eight year old kids loved their tablets so much they made special bags for them. The teachers felt very guilty when they had to ask the pupils for the devices back at the end of the project.

It's not a Kindle. It's far more interactive and suits the mobile comms model very well. Like any good tool it can remove drudgery and let everyone concentrate on work. Handing in homework, automating the collation of marks.

This touches at the holy grail of the modern mobile device. The end-to-end service. Represented by iTunes, Blackberry mail and Kindle. It fits with a world trend to take education from being government sponsored to being privately paid for. Taking a degree as a hobby, re-training for a better job or particularly learning a language. in many parts of the world learning English makes a major difference to your career prospects.

The service provides an additional revenue stream - selling a skill not just communications - with benefits for subscriber acquisition and retention. Even the magic parents guit "buy this to make your kid smarter".

Where networks have a choice between being providers of end to end services or bit pipes they are ideally suited to bring together the worlds of commercial education and device manufacture. Indeed it's only the networks who are ideally placed for this. They have the financial clout with the hardware manufacturers and the relationship with the consumers.

History however, has shown us networks are slow at picking up on such things. In the UK the BBC has done a lot more with mobile comms and education than any of the networks. Which is why Apple is the great hope. Of course all this is true of a notebook and Apple has been there before with their Newton based notebook, but there is something special about a slate. Apple was great at getting computers into schools. Let's hope they don't see their tablet as only being the thing for watching movies in bed.

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Blackberries are not for the lonely suit

Meeting a friend for coffee turned into collecting her daughter from school. In the playground among a gaggle of women one was tapping away on a Bold 9000. I love this, it reminds me real people with real jobs use things we discuss earnestly in boardrooms and conferences. I asked "Do you like your Blackberry?". "Yes", she said, "my husband had been on at me for ages to get one but I've only just given in.". Not the answer I expected so I pushed a little deeper "So it's not a work phone". "Oh no she said, I don't work".

This was the consumer segment Disney had in mind with its failed US MVNO. "Mom as CEO". Mother runs the family, from ballet to baseball, Spanish to supper.

It didn't work for Disney, but does seem to be working for Blackberry and it's pretty much unintended. Blackberry is aimed not just at business people but at business people with IT departments. If you've gone from working for a large company to a small one, or even for yourself you are likely to find things you took for granted just don't happen.

The main one is the switch from BES to BIS. You might expect if you buy a Blackberry from a carrier and pay a monthly charge for "Blackberry service" you'd get the full fat version. Email on your office PC synced with your Blackberry. That the "Blackberry service" provides you with an enterprise server so mails sent from the Blackberry would be in your PC outbox, you could set "out of office" when you were out of the office and if you lost your Blackberry delete your data or lock it remotely.

All of these things are part of what makes a Blackberry special, but lightweight BIS doesn't do any of those. All it does is read the same online mail as your PC.

Plenty of other things do that. It lets the iPhone close the gap on the mail experience. It means Windows Mobile is almost as good and Android integration better. Blackberry is still the best mail device but for the lone businessman Gmail the best mail service.

One of the most commonly asked questions on internet forums seems to be "Blackberry or iPhone", or "I've got a Blackberry, but it's time to upgrade what next?".

It's tricky. Blackberry is still the best when it comes to mail. Or text, or IM, the keyboard and trackball are well resolved. Things like intelligent insertion of full stop and @ in email addresses, long presses for capitalisation and a well thought out UI make it the best device for typing on, although I've stopped short of writing one of these columns on one. Blackberrys however seem to have RF problems when they are new models, GPS is very slow to fix, they don't have an FM radio, music player functions are limited and the camera weak. There is nothing like Sony Ericsson's face or smile recognition.

The iPhone keypad takes a lot of getting used to. Of course the zealots put the effort in but a touch screen is never going to rival 102 real buttons. Beyond that the iPhone is better at pretty much everything else. Not least because there are a zillion apps which means, if you can find it, there is something to do what you want, and while you are looking you'll have downloaded a dozen things which felt like a good idea at the time.

Windows Mobile devices are getting better since Microsoft stopped being precious about the UI. HTC have pretty graphics but not enough horsepower to drive them. I look forward to having a proper play with the 1GHz Toshiba, but it's still, well, Windows Mobile.

The Nokia N97 is the device the fans of the Psion 5mx have been waiting for. With a proper keyboard and Activesync it might be the best small enterprise option.

The space is very crowded and Blackberry needs to go some to distance itself from its rivals.

In the crazy financial markets world doing well means the next quarter you have to do better or else everyone is disappointed and downgrades you. Blackberry as the most successful device in the US will feel the pain if they only do OK.

There is a growing youth market. Blackberry messaging is the cool way to communicate. If as a teen you don't have it you miss out on the school gossip and parties. Your PIN is your passport to a social life. And you don't get a Pin unless you have a Blackberry. Cross IM platforms like Trillian or Palringo can't talk to Blackberry Messenger. But there is a very real danger Blackberry will get complacent about the importance of this. These are teens and they are the most fickle of markets. Today's Blackberry messanger is tomorrow's ICQ.

Blackberry is working on a netbook, but then who isn't? It makes sense for anyone with a good consumer base, a growing apps store and superb messaging to go for something a bit more diverse. It's the step Psion made with the original Netbook and the Series 7 and Palm got cold feet on with the Folio. But for the netbook to work outside the corporate market they really need to solve the BES problem.

Then the bell rang and the kids streamed out. As they bluetoothed music and ringtones to each other I looked at what they had. Lots of iPods, a few iPhones, quite a lot of pre-pay specials: Nokia 6110 and Sony Ericsson T280s, but what surprised me at this posh girls school was number of Blackberry Flip Pearls. A phone I'd dismissed as a bit of a flop. It seems the combination of colour, looks and PIN are what found favour. And the kids don't care about BES. Facebook is their idea of a server based app, and the Blackberry facebook app is excellent.

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One day all phones will be made this way.

When you first went to school you learnt the basics. Reading, writing, not spilling your milk and being nice to everyone. Then as you grew up you started to have subject teachers.

The Latin teacher didn't care how you did at Science so long as you worked on your declensions. The Science teacher didn't care about history so long as you memorised valencies and the history teacher didn't care about Latin so long as you worked on the important things like Henry VIII died in 1547.

I'll wait a bit now while a few of you go off to Wikipedia to see if I was right about that. Back now? OK. Good.

Mobile phones are now at the age where they have gone from school for toddlers to school for eight year olds and they have just discovered subjects. Only in the mobile phone world the teachers have been replaced with apps vendors. The look at what the enablers for their apps require, how little they cost and assume that one day all phones will have their enabler. So VoIP companies say "one day all phones will have WiFi", navigation companies "one day all phones will have GPS", video content companies "one day all phones will have high def displays".

The thing is that all these, and more "one day" things add a few dollars to the price. In truth the main thing that most phone buyers care about is looks. The second thing, a long way behind, is battery life. The third thing, again a long way behind the first two is price.

To all the apps vendors the enabler they want for their subject only adds a few dollars to the price, and it's selling for a couple of hundred dollars so what's the problem?

The problem is that in the scenario where all devices have the feature they want, then all the devices have to have the features the other schoolmasters, sorry, the other apps vendors want too. This adds too much to the cost and so has a significant effect on the price.

So they are not going to get their specialist features. Worse they affect the primary functions. More features mean a little more thickness to a phone and more buttons. They are not good for making phones look cool. A good way to improve the battery life of a smartphone is to switch off the GPS and Wifi. A smaller screen helps too. We've not progressed to subjects but gone back to spilling milk.

We won't see non-core features spread the way cameras have, not least because it's dubious that cameras have paid their way.

So next time you hear "one day all phones will have GPS/Wifi/big memory/touch screens" remember you can't have it all and the person telling you this is probably looking at the proposition without caring about when Henry VIII died.

 

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