A new paradigm for Mobile and Tech Industry must come
Autor: rodrigottr | Publicado: 2011-10-20T23:25:00-07:00


On this post I'm going to write about something that deeply motivated me to start this blog years ago. The choice of the name of this blog, as in Portuguese "apito" means whistle, the instrument used by referees in soccer games. And "mercado" means market, of course. My intention was to point out how big companies, just like in soccer, exceed themselves on competing and most of the time lose the focus on answering to consumer needs. Driven by the eagerness of competing, start fighting uselessly each other. Sometimes even against consumer needs and interests. As I believe, our function as bloggers, is to be aware of these market trends and point out what is better or not for us, the users, the consumers, those who pay the bill and keep all this shit working. Just like the soccer referee there must be someone to keep the competition on fair play and keep the game a show. Not a messy carnage like Maradona is doing here. (&lt;&lt; please watch) Even without the same powers of a referee, we can use the power of awareness and choice to make things work. &nbsp;

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The present paradigm of mobile is making everything more difficult&nbsp;

You have an iPhone but you miss the good battery and the build quality you had on your Nokia. And the simplicity to manage and share files without an iTunes and the great maps experience. You have a Nokia and you miss all those amazing apps like Ebay, Amazon, apps for banking and other brilliant services. Having any of thse you will also miss the best integration with Google services, the largest screens on the market, the largest portfolio of different hardware types, with fisical or virtual keyboards you can have on Android. Having an Android you miss the solidity and stability of apple's software and solidity and stability of Nokia's hardware.&nbsp; Having any of those you miss the great experience of messaging and email, from RIM's Blackberry. And if you need security of you information Blackberry's service is still the best. If you are a developer, you probably gonna have to renounce to some platforms for chosing only one or two of them. Even if the best was to have presence on all. No ecosystem performs better then the others in all user needs. Each ecosystem is better designed for one or other kind of user. So you have to choose. What is the most important for you? Security? Design? Stability? Screen size? Battery? Another problem is the way our phones interact with reality. Using our phones we are always 'head downs', constantly looking it and unable to connect ourselves with what is around us. That is partially caused by a paradigm where most explored possibilities are inside the phone, not outside. Apps, messaging, Internet, games. What we have is just a pocket computer. But mobile should be much more then that. Mobile should be the remote control for the reality around us. Using the words of a brilliant guy I believe is one of the few who can see this, Tomi Ahonen.&nbsp;

"First think of the light switch at your home. Wherever you have a light switch, you can go and turn the lights on, or turn the lights off. All of us have been to that situation one time or another that we wanted to control the lights, and find that the light switch is not where we would want it to be. That ‘light switch interface’ was decided by the architect and had to have the electrical wiring installed into the wall and then connected to the ceiling where we have our lamps.Now imagine a ‘magical’ light switch that worked from everywhere. And then think that it could be used to control not just our lights, but literally quite anything. So let’s start simple.In India there are farmers who use mobile phones to control their irrigation systems. Pretty nifty! What about public toilets? In Denmark you can use mobile phones to open the locks of the toilets. Coca Cola has been installing vending machines that accept SMS based mobile payments – they invented this way to pay – for twelve years already and still find that enabling mobile phone payments will increase vending machine sales by 14% on average."&nbsp; &nbsp;For T Ahonen mobile should be the digital interface to the REAL world! Until now mobile has only been a interface with DIGITAL world itself. Only shy exceptions are geo positioning services like Foursquare and Layar or Wikitude. But this full potential of mobile will only be unlocked when ALL phones have the power to interact with reality around us EQUALLY.That was the dream of MeeGo OS. That is why it was so important for MeeGo the project over car GPS, TVs, netbooks and tablets. Our devices shouldn't fight each other. Our devices should talk to each other and interact with each other. No matter if my TV is Samsung, my computer a Mac and my phone a Nokia. I should be able to rule my TV from my computer and to rule my computer remotely by my phone. And I should go a museum and find a NFC application that works with anything and makes my museum experience more interactive, help me buy my coke and pay the taxi driver. And as was very well pointed by T Ahonen. Those things were possible more then 10 years ago! SO, It is not a matter of technologies. Is a matter of industry standards. AND a matter of lack of vision by those who are ruling this industry today. From that point on, there is a bit of blame over Apple, Google, Blackberry and, also, a bit less of Nokia. Have you ever tried to share some picture or movie you just shot with your iPhone with your friend? You could use Facebook, Twitter, email, Instagram and even MMS and a lot of other services. But the easiest and most obvious, and the best, the bluetooth, you couldn't. So, If your friend has a smartphone that is not a huge problem but if he has a featurephone then bluetooth would be, maybe, your only option without losing the photo quality. In other words, Apple just excluded your featurephoned friend. Why? It is said that it is a matter of security of the OS. But it is also a way of keeping the user more connected to Apple then to his featurephoned friend. It is part of Apple branding, of course. Exclusivity: "Think Different" "Be different" "Be better" "Be cool". That is why mobile still is not a digital interface to real world. The industry standards are being driven through a logic of building market reserve and a forced loyalty on users, developers, partners and all other players. Everything attached to the corporation behind: Apple. &nbsp;Of course Apple didn't invented monopolies and this standards where not developed before the iPhone came. But no other company was that aggressive on being closed and controlling the user.Naturally Google followed the same paradigm and build it's own OS fully attached to his services, but also, no connection with the world around you. Full connected with Google services. Blackberry's point over security sound's a bit more true. As the appeal of BB is over business men, for the sake of keeping their billion dollar information safe, there should be this full attachment to BB services. Anyway BB seems not to be as closed as Apple is. And Nokia has a bit less blame as it was the first to show some integration to other non Nokia devices. As an example, the N95 with TV out. The N8 with HDMI and USB OTG. But still very little for the potentials of Mobile. A light in the end of the tunnelAs open source MeeGo project, conducted initially by Nokia and Intel, was "strangely aborted" by Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, and ex-Microsoft. Now Intel has a new partner fully capable of providing this environment: Samsung. As the initial intention of MeeGo was to develop a free open source platform capable of being used on car GPSs, TVs, computers and tablets Samsung is a much more capable manufacturer. Recently Sammy has surpassed Nokia as a smartphone manufacturer and seems to be on the way to surpass also Apple with more then 20 million smartphones shipped. That seems to be the perfect moment for that a native OS. Also, Samsung seems deeply concerned with not being fully dependable on other people's software. And keeps following religiously the safety rule of never putting all the eggs in the same basket. And that is why is trying to be less dependable of Google's Android. Since Google bought Motorola that concern seems to have grown as Samsung has just announced new Windows Phone devices, beyond possessing the Bada OS and joining Intel for the new Tizen, ex MeeGo. Tizen brings some new concept updates as it is HTML5 centered. And that is why I'm so excited. Most of people don't know the power of HTML5. The experiences with it showed that it is ready for providing a common app experience for users. Since Financial Times bypassed AppStore with its HTML5 web app, capable of running videos on the iPad, and of running offline, lots of attention was drawn to what might have maybe reached the "write once, run everywhere" status.&nbsp; &nbsp;Someday everything will run a browser. And HTML5 makes possible for everyone to have an app experience everywhere. More recently Google with Rovio showed an example of smooth gaming experience running Angry Birds fully on HTML5. And offline.With HTML5 most of initiatives for non monetized apps would need no native apps anymore. And those are the most important like facebook, twitter, ebay, foursquare, banking apps, reading apps, cloud services apps. Perhaps gaming would have to wait a little before HTML5 can handle it. But I'm sure there would be gaming alternatives on the web, of course, being less complex. Or maybe using flash. Another promising project is Mozilla's B2G, the boot to gecko. Mozilla's proposal is to use the Android Linux kernel, using all drivers and stuff, to power a all browser OS. Where everything would be made for powering the browsing experience. In which browsing means running web apps on and offline. In other words, you would never need again to install an app. Just point the browser and shoot. The new chanceThose projects, HTML5 based, could lead us to the principle of "code once, run everywhere", at last. Not that everything needs to run in a HTML5 browser. T Ahonen examples showed how powerful is SMS on being the largest interface that mobile still have with real world simply because SMS runs on any GSM phone. Making possible for anyone who wants a coke to just buy it on a vending machine. With absolutely no need of an iPhone app!! Yes! Coca-cola knows non iPhone smartphone owners drink as much coke as iPhone owners. And also are the majority. Perhaps HTML5 as the future's base of mobile will make corporations aware that standards for creating a digital interface with reality must be pursued, not, jeopardized, as they are doing now. Otherwise will be disrupted one or other way. And for the sake of users, not their. Again I make this question: what do we want? Our gadgets to fight against each other or to cooperate with each other on our benefit? &nbsp;