The Current State of Personal Internet Devices

Recap

For those who are not familiar with me, I've used almost every mobile platform there is, and gone through four or five handsets each year for the past decade. I also spend most of my time designing applications so care a lot about getting the most out of my mobile experience. This post is purely based on my personal experience, but may be interesting if you want to get the most out of the personal internet.

What a difference a year makes. It's interesting to see Firefox demo it's mobile browser (currently known as Fennec), on a Nokia 810. I have the same device in my collection and a year ago it was my main PID (Personal Internet Device). Now the only thing I do with it is to check out if there are any useful updates, which there aren't since Nokia has discontinued support for the device, in effect, less than a year after it was released. The main reason for this is that the new Maemo OS which drives the N810 will only support the new generation of chips. The reasoning for the decision must have been quite simple for Nokia: the old generation is much too slow.

The iPhone is in the Lead, Can it Extend it?

The fact is that the personal internet experience must be fast to be engaging. The latency of the network means paradoxically that the devices themselves and the applications running on them need to be even faster. The current winner is hands-down the iPhone 3G. It's an absolute no-brainer that Apple should bring out a larger device, with a keyboard, running a variant of the iPhone OSX. In fact this does look like it's about to happen, and I for one will be queueing for it if it does. Apple is also solving most of the actual phone issues with the OS3 generation coming out this summer which will enable essentials such as Bluetooth, copy / paste and more effective SMS / MMS messaging.

Nokia Goes All Out

The reality is though that the iPhone is not currently a very good phone, short battery life, poor reception, poor Bluetooth etc. which means that a second phone is a must. My current 'Phone' handset is the Nokia 5800 and it's something of a mixed-bag to own one of these devices. The last week though has seen the experience improve a great deal. The negatives, for me, start with the terrible look and feel: cheap plastic and rubber, ugly screen and icons, lack of kinetic scrolling and an adherence to old, worse, user interface elements in the name of keeping things consistent with older devices.

Nokia, forget about backward thinking and look forward. The iPhone user interface is superb, and the metaphors it's introduced such as kinetic scrolling are not going to be complex for people to understand, especially when compared to the painfully slow metaphors currently used for scrolling in the 5800. The other basic problem is that the screen is too small. It makes things too fiddly, and in turn slows things down considerably. The final basic is that the 'home screen' is well short of what it should be in terms of giving you rapid access to key applications (actions). Instead we're faced with a tripple interface approach through the Media Bar, Home Screen and Application menu which just slows you down.

What's changed in the last week for my Nokia experience is three-fold: New OS, an upgrade from the previous 1.1 to 2.0 release. There's nothing obviously new in that, but it does seem a bit faster, and more importantly i can now download BBC iPlayer videos to watch when travelling. The second thing is that the 5800 now has a great Twitter client called Gravity. What makes it quite exciting is that this is the best mobile twitter client I have used on any device. It's interface does everything that Nokia's don't. What makes the experience even better, is that unlike the iPhone, the client can run in the background.

The third aspect which has me excited about my personal internet future from the Nokia side is the announcement that thousands of vendors have signed up for the Ovi Application Store. The store should allow Java, native apps (including Python) and Widgets to be sold / distributed directly through to the device, much as the iPhone App store does. This will greatly reduce the cost of rolling out applications to the Nokias, which in turn should mean lots of great apps, and a greatly improved experience.

Nokia really is pulling out all the stops for the N97 in a way that it never has before for any device. It's going to be the device which either sees Nokia regain it's leadership crown, or the end of an era. What's more I believe Nokia knows this and is doing everything it can to make it work out in the same way that the N95 was the clear leader when it was launched.

Android Still Sucks

For me the most over hyped player is the Android platform. Without the iPhone I would consider the G1 a complete breakthrough device, the problem is that the iPhone exists. I've blogged earlier on just how disastrous I think the G1 is, and the recent Cupcake upgrade hasn't really changed anything for me. The problem is that it isn't as good as the iPhone as a PID and it's applications are light-years behind, and it also is a bad phone, in fact it is rubbish. All the mock-ups I'm seeing of next generation devices don't seem to add anything either, and the new generation of apps all seem to be second-rate iPhone app copies. In practice it is now sharing the same role as the Nokia N810 (bag & desk but not pocket).

Blackberry Must Lead in More than Email

I'm not a big mobile email person, since 90% of my email requires more than a simple yes / no. If I was I sould no doubt have swapped my Nokia 5800 for a Blackberry Bold. Blackberry is announcing an endless rush of firmware updates and new (but very similar) devices. It's leadership in email is for me the main thing going for it, but is something that it will need to build on quickly if it's not to be eclipsed. The Storm suffers from too many poor UI decisions to warrant much of a lookin.

Palm Pre, The Dark Horse?

The Palm Pre does look like it could be a great device, but I don't see myself buying it. Why, because it doesn't have a full landscape QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to mini vertical one). The notifications screen, already on Android and coming to the iPhone 3OS is the hot feature for me, but the key will be how many 3rd party apps are developed, which means that I'm unlikely to buy this handset for some time.

The Others

The most notable absentees are probably Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG. My problem with all of these is that they don't seem to have the right mix of handsets and ecosystems. The HTC HD handsets seem to be leading when it comest to Microsoft devices, and Microsoft has made a fair amount of headway with it's own ecosystem developments, but it seems to have stalled when it comes to developing the user interface of its mobile paltform.

Samsung and LG are probably too wedded to Korea to make much headway, in particular with services. Samsung is quite agressive at partnering, but that won't be enough to become the future leader. Sony looks like a 'dead-man-walking', whilst Motorola just looks dead.

What I Expect to be Using

The next gen devices I'm expecting to be using later this year are the Nokia N97 and the next gen iPhone, but time will tell. The dark horses are the update to the Nokia N810 (although I'm feeling a little burned with this product line) and the Pre if it turns out to be a great phone as well as PID.