Does it have the GBs and the Wifis?

There's an amusing video doing the rounds on YouTube.  It has a fictional user going into a fictional phone store to buy an iPhone 4, the store, having none, suggests a HTC EVO, there ensues much hilarity with the iPhone user wanting to have nothing but an iPhone, even if, as the store person suggests, the HTC can grant you every wish you'll ever have including an iPhone 4?

We come across this a lot and part of that is a dirty secret of ours, which is, at the moment, we still haven't finished our iPhone port.  There's a reason for that, we're doing better business on other, non-iPhone platforms, and there are elements of the iPhone App Store process that concern me.  For a start, I'm not convinced that I could get the pentagram and goat's blood out of the office floor while we get our test certificates for development devices.

iPhone is a fantastically successful consumer device, but just as Oranges are not the only fruit, Apples are not the only smartphone and as I've said before, consumer electronic trends can be very fickle.

We're just delivering our first work on the new Samsung Bada platform.  It's not been terribly widely publicized, especially in the US, but Bada is the core operating system that Samsung have developed to replace their Real Time Operating System Smartphones.  The Wave, the first Bada device, is a slick handset, nice form factor, 8MB camera, SD card slot music, a nice OLED display which also runs applications which you can buy on the phone.

They went on sale in June in the UK on Vodafone, and Italy on TIM - since then they've sold over 1 Million units.

Yes, that's right, in their first month they sold a million units in two markets.  Ultimately Samsung state they want half their phone shipments to be Bada phones - that's something in the region of 80M units a year, or twice the number of iPhones and iPod Touch units sold SO FAR.

They're also cheap.  In the UK, the Wave is free on a contract.

So who is going to get these phones?  Well, teenagers, less phone savvy people who don't want to spring $200 for a new phone and so on.  But they're almost certainly going to be buying and using apps, especially Brand Related ones.  So my question always becomes, after I've been asked about the iPhone, who are you actually targeting with your application?  Because if you're building one because you think you need one, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

At the TechCafe2.0 lunch yesterday, the Ben Huh made a great point about not really caring about their market size, because it was so enormous it really didn't make a lot of sense to measure it in a dollars or users way.  I'd make the same argument about the Mobile Market - how big is it?

Well, there's now 5 billion mobile phone users in the world, and thanks to stuff like Bada, in a few years, it'll be the main way that most of them access the internet, especially outside of the US and Western Europe.  So, if you want to think about what the market for your mobile service should be - look at the web, think about web enabled TVs, add in those 5 billion mobile users and think to yourself - why am I so focused on a few million users of the iPhone?

Phones are consumer electronics...

Many people didn’t think the iPhone would be a success.  Myself included.  Or rather, I thought it would be a cool device, I was concerned from the get go that it would be a dreadful phone.  Having had one for a year or so now I can confidently say the following.  It's a cool device AND it's a dreadful phone.  So, two out of three ain't bad.

Part of the problem with the iPhone  is the architecture they have to use to keep the cost down and to avoid doing a deal with Qualcomm.  So you've the radio modem sitting separately to the application processor.  This isn't just a plumbing nightmare  but leads to huge bottlenecks in internal communication around the phone itself.  Add in the "extra" fun of AT&Ts network and you've a perfect storm for a bad experience.

But, regardless of the short comings, the dropped calls, the hung data stack, the weird battery issues, it's a lovely piece of kit and I like mine.  But the thing is, it's a piece of consumer electronics and a short shelf life one at that.   Even with 2 year contracts phones get swapped out and what's hot now, hasn't proven to be a guide for what's hot in a year, let alone two.  Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola have all had their spots as top selling "shiny" providers - Apple is having their run at the moment but drawing any conclusions from that, or, for that matter, drawing a linear upward curve of sales is a huge mistake in the phone business.

Which, via a roundabout route, brings me to my point.

Don't define your strategy around the current shiny consumer must have - because consumers are fickle and will change their minds.  Sure, Apple will have a die hard fan core of users, but that isn't necessarily the market you are going to be needing next year, or even now.

We've been working with Samsung on the BADA platform.  BADA is a real gamble.  It's YAMOS (Yet Another Mobile Operating System) running on Linux with a C++ application layer.  But that's not the thing which interests me.  The Samsung Wave, the first BADA phone is shiny.  It's actually a lovely piece of kit.  Great screen, amazing camera, simple and clean  UI, and, more importantly, it's cheap.  On Vodafone in the UK they're offering them free with a 25GBP a month contract.  Oh, and it runs apps…

Samsung want to sell 20M units this year.  And, with the quality of the device, the scale of Samsung and price point - they probably will.  Or, to put it another way - they're planning to ship in 6 months more than Apple shipped in 2008.

The App market is changing as smarter phones work themselves into the market place previously only served by fairly crappy Java based games.  That's a potential game changing and are you ready for it?

Building that 1st iPhone app might have been easy.  The 2nd generation one, after you realized what you wanted, probably was too.  The 3rd one might be becoming an irritation.  What's the plan for all the other platforms that will be out there in millions of teenage hands, or their parents - the people who wouldn't spring for an iPhone but will for a Wave?

It's worth thinking about.

For my next trick I'll also show why Web Apps really aren't the way to go either :)

More Changes Coming - BADA!

We'll be making a more formal announcement about our work for our new customer, Samsung, later in June when we've delivered the solutions they taking from us.  We're very excited to be working on the BADA platform.  Our first impressions are extremely good, great screen, good camera, amazing performance.  We're providing ViaNewz, ViaSearchz and a new Travel Application which we'll also be announcing.

We're also working on getting the website finished properly, which some of you might say is about time too...  but we keep having customer projects which get in the way.