Steve jobs just announced the availability of new iPod Touch. In fact the whole iPod product line is refreshed. The new introductions are iPod Nano (fatty!) -Video for everybody on a small 2” QVGA screen with new UI. A slightly thicker iPod with 160GB capacity is now available for $349 allowing you to carry 40,000 songs in your pocket.

For the iPhone lovers, the new iPod Touch is only 8 mm thick, with the same touch screen functionality of iPhone. Think of it as iPhone - phone, and a lot thinner. Wi-Fi has been missing in the iPod line-up for a long time, iPod Touch brings this much wanted feature to the iPod fans along with the very familiar Safari Browser, but no built-in speakers. Now you can watch your favorite YouTube videos while on the move.

With the built in browser in iPod Touch, now you don’t need to be at a computer to buy music. Now you can directly browse the iTunes store customized for Wi-Fi access using iPod Touch and preview or buy music to your hearts content. This new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store will also be available via iPhone.

Apple is offering some interesting Wi-Fi and music mash-ups. One of the official mash-up feature is Starbucks Music integration through Wi-Fi. So next time you are getting your cup of Latte and like the music which is playing at Starbucks, with a dedicated button on your iPod Touch you can now buy that track instantly from iTunes store. In case you want to buy this track latter, your iPod Touch remembers the track which was playing when you visited Starbucks. We expect lot of open source hacks and applications in coming days from the creative folks.

This is great as Apple is making music more discoverable and tapping into the long tail of the market. What better place to sell music when customer is ready to buy it. True Web 2.0 customer experience and integration - When you want it - how you want it. Starbucks has 5800 WiFi enable stores nationwide, all of which allow free Wi-Fi access to iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store by 2009 in a phased roll-out plan.

My guess is that iPod Touch is going to become new status symbol however storage capacity offered is tiny as compared to normal iPod line-up. Probably apple is betting that the folks would use iPod Touch mostly for consuming online content through Wi-Fi. iPod Touch’s pricing is way too high for it to become a mass market product - you have to shell out $299 for 8GB version and $399 for 16GB version. This may be due to the expensive touch screen parts, but we may expect price drop or more capacity from Apple in next 4 to 6 months.

For more detailed live coverage of todays iPod Touch Launch, head over to Engadget.

Crunchgear is also covering the event live.

Update 1:

Zoli makes an interesting point, “iPhone without AT&T baggage”

And Dave Winer is not impressed

Steve Jobs said that Apple decided to make the iPhone because everybody hates his/her cellphone. For a company that has built up a cult around designing the coolest gadgets that folks want, this was a new foray.The media went nuts with the coverage over Apple’s iPhone. The gushing and drooling went overboard.

What’s Cool About the iPhone?

We Americans get the crappiest phones thanks to the carriers. Here was someone who tried to set things right. Powered by Apple’s unconventional approach, a terrific design, brilliant execution and savvy marketing, the iPhone forced everybody to sit up and take notice.

It has tons of great stuff and most folks have written enough about it. Its crowning piece is undoubtedly, the software driven user interface. Apple has invested well over 200 patents to protect its efforts.

The iPhone has spurred the competition and galvanized other players into action. The latest gizmos from Nokia, Samsung and others reflect the touchscreen that the iPhone provided. Others are ramping up to come out with iPhone lookalikes. Clones of the Apple baby are supposed to be almost as good or in some cases, even better than the original.

What’s Not?

Ignoring Texting

While US lags the rest of the world in texting/SMS, it is catching up in a big way. Can the iPhone users hammer away with a single finger on the glass surface without looking at the letters? Tomi Ahonen put it bluntly that unless Apple addresses this ‘killer-app’ within six months, it is out of this game.

Locked Phones and Subscribers

The US mobile carriers love their customers too much to let them go or give them choices. Even though Apple got AT&T wrapped around its little finger in this deal, they should and could have done much more. There is enough evidence that making it easy for the customer to unlock his/her phone has worked wonders for the original providers in both Europe and Asia. It has also missed a golden chance to prevent the two-year contract for subscribers, which could have actually benefitted AT&T in the long run.

Locked API

Not for nothing, the OpenMoko’s offering is called ‘anti-iPhone’. Having an open platform and allowing all third parties to develop applications is the right way to foster growing, open and secure innovation.

Slower 2.5G Network

The claim is that it is more pervasive - ah ha, to sell more cheeseburgers. Who cares about moving to the later, better network so that the carriers can be forced to upgrade quickly and provide a better service to customers? So what if the rest of the world has moved on.

No Personalization

Even if Apple is synonymous with ‘Cool’, the lack of personalization is a drawback. Of course, bulk of the buyers lay their hands on the iPhone just to flaunt that they belong to the Apple club, and nobody dares to bring this up in the Apple context.

Battery problems

Enough has been said and written about this. The user cannot change it and it has to be sent to Apple for replacement.

Lack of Other Features

For a convergence device priced such as this, it offers a pretty poor feature-set: poor camera resolution; no video recording; no GPS, etc. Feature-to-feature, the Nokia N95 for example, beats the iPhone hands down.

Enterprise Space

The iPhone needs to work with MS (Direct Push), RIM (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) or Motorola (Good Mobile Messaging) technologies to work in the enterprise. It will have to offer enterprise-class VPN software. It is possible that Apple is coming out with a new version that addresses these issues. There’s already a hubbub about this.

While most of the above arguments apply to the US market, the arguments against Apple’s success are stronger when it comes to Europe or Asia. Compared to these markets, US lags way behind in almost every aspect and since Apple plans to introduce the iPhone to the European market by end of this year and in the highly advanced Asian market
in the first quarter of next year, its challenges are far greater to break into those markets where it has little or no foothold.

Conclusion

While I commend Apple for an excellent first attempt in this sector, could we have a more balanced view of the iPhone please?

After Trolltech released their first Greenphone last year, lots were eagerly awaiting the release of the Openmoko GNU/Linux open phone. This will give developers true opportunity to innovate, customize and develop their own stuff.

So much so that it has been dubbed the ‘anti-iPhone’ because of its open nature. The name pays homage to the year 1973, when Dr Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call. Apple…are you watching?

Further Reading:

LinuxToday’s coverage of this news-release On Slashdot
The blog post on Linux
Cult Mathew Hamrick’s proposal for a completely open phone
Another post on Linux Tricks

Rounding up on my three part series on design, in this post I look specifically at design in the ‘mobile arena’.

Bjarne Stroustrup , the originator of C++ said, “I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.”

Like the old times when there were monopoly on landline phones and we had only few choices available through carriers, the current state of design in mobile devices is dismal. The services are pathetic, and there is little incentive to improve because the customers are normally shackled with the two year contracts. But in this new Mobile 2.0 era, all of this is bound to change.

Here is a concept design for Google phone. When you are carrying the full internet in your pocket, it better be a delight to handle it. It is a much bigger challenge to get the usability right on the smaller devices with tiny screens. Yankee Group predicts that ‘a culture clash of epic proportions is shaping the boundaries and business models of the Anywhere Internet’. Identifying the correct needs of the customer, coming up with brand new business ideas and thinking will just be parts of the big puzzle. Even after you have a solid foundation of fulfilling a genuine customer need and a ‘reasonable’ business model, the design of the mobile device and its user-interface will decide who wins or loses. The same holds for services - it will not be enough to have something put together, but to come up with truly innovative approaches that make it easier for the customer to make his/her choices. With ubiquitous connectivity and services for anything and everything, the user should be able to intuitively understand, handle, navigate and productively use his/her mobile device/service.

Most of the players understand the importance of this and are racing to come up with all sorts of solutions. For instance, Samsung is relying on optical sensors to provide joystick control and ‘Smart Lighting’ for the user. Motorola is giving a big push to Personalization, so that devices actually learn and adapt according to the individual’s usage patterns. It sees three key models to enhance user experiences with mobile and fixed communications devices: user interaction, content and service personalization. DoCoMo is betting on an ‘All-in-One’ gizmo. In a shrinking global playground, where sales in Asia will rise faster than in America or Europe, cultural issues and milieu come to the fore. One needs to understand the global user. As Motorola’s Padmashree Warrior has pointed out, to many across the globe, the mobile phone will be the very first computer they will come in contact with. This means, that the need to pause, study, think, feel and then design is more crucial than ever before. And those who do, will win handsomely.

Phillip Mobin and Touraj Parang founded Jaxtr in Oct 2005 with the aim of bringing voice to social networks and blogs.

Using their free service, users place a Jaxtr widget on their online profile or blog. This widget is linked to their phone number of choice (kept completely private). Callers worldwide can then call a local number and leave voice messages for the Jaxtr user. Jaxtr is aiming at all the social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc.

A public beta version was released in Mar of this year and now they have users well north of 100,000. Funded by prominent investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson, The Founders Fund, Richmond Management and angel investors like Ron Conway, Rajeev Motwani and Reid Hoffman, the company has lured Konstantin Guericke, the co-founder of LinkedIn to steer the ship.

Will this fly in the face of the stiff competition? There are others jostling to take a slice of this pie, albeit in different ways (Jangl, GrandCentral - which was recently acquired by Google, Jajah, Talkster and Talkplus).

Let us examine the others too and then then see what shakes out.

Further Reading:

One of Om Malik’s posts regarding Jaxtr
One opinion on the Webware site
Jaxtr on PodTech
On Red Herring
Another blog post on the rising audience of Jaxtr

If you use GPS systems, you know that their unreliability is proportional to the importance of your journey. There are numerous reasons for this. And now, the brains in labs are working to solve at least some parts of this. Check this out in a recent issue of Technology Review, where the GPS provides a resolution down to one meter accuracy! Yes, they do call it the GPS that never fails, but the skeptic in me keeps my expectations in rein.

Now, that opens up exciting possibilities for mobile devices, although that is still far ahead. Initial systems could be used in a car (it uses 4 cameras and needs lots of juice for processing), but the results could be downloaded to your mobile. Later versions could use the horsepower of more powerful mobile devices.

Further Reading:

A pretty good article in the Mobile Business Magazine
One blog that focuses on LBS
Plenty of market research speaks glowingly about GPS on mobile phones
Another good source of information in this sector
Check out GPS Business News site

In a previous post, I said we need things to be simple. Let me elaborate.We need to get past the usual rhetoric. “Simplicity at any cost” is not the answer. Likewise, do not get carried away by just the headline “Simplicity is highly overrated” . It is important to separate the wheat from chaff. It is a fact that the majority of websites have bad design. It is true that many things out there are so poorly conceived, that not only are they useless, but they even lead to severe reactions. In a mad rush to beat the competition, anything ships, even with feature-bloat. To make things worse, human-stupidity adds another dimension to this discussion.

As technology progresses, we definitely get more done. The information sources proliferate, calling for better handling. This is where the design can be a boon or a bane. Let’s face it, our gadgets are going to have more and more features crammed into them. Doing more naturally increases the complexity that goes into a product. But does it have to be dumped on the end-user? Don Norman, the Guru of Workable Technology has put it aptly: “Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability — they should go hand in hand.”

As we move forward, it is imperative to learn from the mistakes of bad designs. Tom Kelley of IDEO has said, “Don’t let your cloud of features blur the simplest, common use of your product.” The ’simplest, common use of your product’ could vary by market segment. Learn to separate the real need from perceived need. That could mean that one size does not fit all. Adopt a User Centered Design. To come up with a successful product, you have to get the whole ecosystem right. When only 13% of Americans believe technology products in general are easy to use, it is a direct reflection of the failure to be simple.

Further Reading:

A dated but relevant article on Digital-Web
Business Innovation Insider
Another slightly old post on the same topic
An interesting site with lots of resources
A post on Innovation Blog

In a previous post, I talked about giving simplicity the focus. There are, of course a number of references elsewhere on this topic. John Seely Brown has done a lot of work on this. In his book Bringing Design to Software, he eloquently says, “Context and content work together efficiently as an ensemble, sharing the burden of communication. If the relationship between the two is honored, their interaction can make potentially complex practices of communication, interpretation, and response much easier for designers and users alike. This relationship is the essence of keeping things simple.”

And here, both Sergey and Schmidt of Google talk about the need to emphasize on simplicity.