01 5th, 2009My computer is nearing the end of it’s professional career (it’s almost four years old), and about ready to head into its golden years of volunteer service to advantaged children.
It has given me a good opportunity to think about applications, functionality, and priority: Which applications do I use/need every hour? Which every week? Which every month? Which less often?
The Big Four
The every-hour ones come to mind quickly: Email (Mail), Contacts (Address Book), Web browser (Firefox), and Calendar (iCal). Rarely does a quarter of an hour go by without my using all of those applications. My “Big Four”.
Every day? PDF viewer (Preview), iTunes, To-Do list tracker (Things), Basic word processor (TextEdit), iSync. Most of these I use several times a day, but they’re not in constant use in the way that the Big Four are.
Every week? Page layout (Pages), PDF distiller/editor (Acrobat), Photo managment (iPhoto), Presentation application (Keynote), Photo manipulation (Photoshop), RSS reader (NetNewsWire), OmniOutliner (simpler for tracking many data sets than Numbers or Excel), MicroSoft Office suite: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, for reading files created by other people.
Monthly or less: iMovie and iDVD, QuarkXPress (down in the ranking since its heyday as my every-minute-core-of-the-workday application), Illustrator, Numbers / Excel, Skype.
There are “luxury” applications, of course, that I use frequently, but can get along without, like Twitterific and Calculator.
But with my computer having difficulty coping with the activities of daily life (and thus qualifying to collect on its Long Term Care Insurance), I’m reminded that the most critical functions aren’t even used hourly: they’re used every minute, or even every second.
Functions like the keyboard (working, and working as expected), mouse, real-time operating functions that let applications use resources in the most efficient priority order, display activity (including the ability to show presentations on a second screen), on/off, power management (and battery charge), trackpad and trackpad button reliability (the latter not an issue for new MacBook users — whether you like it or not), internal clock accuracy, a functioning internet connection (OK, that’s not necessarily part of the computer).
If any of these aren’t working, go see how impossible it is to manage for an hour, let alone a week.
But this isn’t a gripe post. I want to dig a little deeper; I want to look and see why the above is actually a product trend driver.
Several years ago, a team at Nokia started studying “mobility” in general, and “what people take with them when they leave the house” in particular. What they found? Three things that people don’t leave the house without: keys, money, cell phone. There’s a lot to learn from this about human needs, but for now, I’d just note that there’s been some nice progress in incorporating the money (and less so, the keys) right into the mobile phone. That’s a nice trend, but at it’s core “unnecessary”, because people will carry those three items even if they represent three discrete packing hassles.
It gets more interesting when you start looking at “luxury” mobile technologies. If you manufacture a mobile product (eg., camera), you’d darn well better make it integrate-able with a cell phone, or it will be(come) a niche product.
If You’re In, You’re In. If You’re Out, You’re Out.
You have only to look at the camera industry to prove the point: from film to digital to camera phone, just think of how our expectations about picture taking have changed in the last decade: we accept lower quality photos in exchange for the potential to snap a memory at any moment. “The best camera is the one you have with you” — that means the camera in your cell phone. The same goes for video recorders; the same goes for watches; the same goes for GPS devices, PDAs, handheld gaming computers, portable DVD players, even iPods sorry, personal music players.
Today, the Blackberry isn’t just the hallmark of high-flying businessmen (well, in countries like Israel, where BB is still only available under corporate contract). Blackberry Pearl, Palm Centro, Apple iPhone, Nokia E62, T-Mobile Sidekick… these have brought smartphones to the masses, and the masses want them badly.
Why? Look back at my Big Four applications: Email, Web browsing, Contacts, Calendars… those are served adequately by a good smartphone, such as Nokia E71, Blackberry series, Palm or iPhone, although each of these has strengths and weaknesses in these applications. Voila! I don’t need to carry a laptop if I leave the office for a couple of hours.
The smartphone represents the integration of the Big Four application needs right into your mobile phone, alongside your camera, your wallet, and your watch. You’re going to take that phone along with you in any case, right? Getting those applications integrated into the mobile phone makes them necessities — everything else is just a niche product.
Which brings us to…
* * *
The Birth-Pangs of the Netbook Computer
What about the applications that I can’t get through the day without? PDF reader, iTunes, To-Do list tracker, word processor, iSync. PDF reader? Lousy for mobile. iTunes? Good if you’ve got an iPhone; not worth mentioning otherwise. To-Do lists? Depends on the phone you have, and the tracking software you choose. Word processor? Nada nada nada. iSync, OK.
Which means that if I go out for the day, I do need to take my computer, otherwise I’ll need to defer a lot of activity until I get back (blog posting, reading attachments, significant letter writing, major document creation, etc). Laptop computers are mobile. They’re also heavy. Either I’m shlepping a heavy laptop (after an hour’s hike through Frankfurt airport, or six hours walking a convention floor, you’ll see what I mean), or accumulating a backlog of tasks. Ouch.
Ouch!
This “Ouch” is what drives the growth of the new UMPC (ultra-mobile personal computer, or “netbook”) computer market. It’s a market category that seems obvious: make a laptop that’s light enough to really carry around, and that can get you through all your normal daily application needs, and most of your weekly application requirements. It meets a true need, so long as the real fundamentals (reliability, trackpad, etc.) are well-met.
Why did the netbook market take so long to gain traction, and why is it finally moving now?
Netbooks aren’t in the top-three items people won’t leave their homes without. So while they do meet a need, they don’t meet a Need, if you catch my drift.
For a netbook computer to make sense to me as a consumer, it needs to fulfill more needs than my smartphone, and offer some kind of major advantage over a laptop. Why? Because I’ve already got a phone of some sort (and won’t give that up), and I’ve already got a computer of some sort (which may as well be a laptop).
The netbook can’t replace my cell phone in any case; the best it can hope to do is replace my laptop (unlikely, unless I prefer a desktop computer as my main computer) in situations where I simply cannot manage on a smartphone alone. In other words, a netbook is a luxury.
So, what has changed, then? Why has this market now gained traction? How has the netbook moved itself from luxury to necessity?
Their Heads in the Clouds
Essentially, it boils down to the critical “back-office” functions: hardware, software, OS, broadband mobile data connections, and cloud-computing competence (to keep the applications and data available, usable, secure and in sync). Of those functions, the latter two are not under the control of the computer manufacturers, who have had to wait for them to catch up.
That “wait for them to catch up” vulnerability has, to some extent, been responsible for the move of mobile phone manufacturers into the internet content space (Nokia with Ovi, Apple with MobileMe, RIM with Blackberry Internet Service for individuals). You can focus on their sales of content, but that represents the raindrops — the real focus should be on their ownership of the Cloud. When you own the Cloud, you don’t have to wait for someone else to build it in order to provide the service.
The mobile phone manufacturers “got it” — the computer manufacturers didn’t (well, with the exception of Apple, which is probably why they became mobile phone manufacturers in addition to creating a cloud). So the netbook manufacturers sat and languished for years, trying (mostly futilely) to bundle cellular broadband cards into their machines, which just didn’t go far enough.
Today, though, the Cloud has grown. It has developed so drastically as to be competent to take over synchronization of personal computing functions that represent daily, weekly and monthly needs (email, documents, calendars, photos on Picassa and Flickr, etc.). While it’s still true that “cloud computing” exacts a toll in lag time while data is accessed, that inconvenience is bearable for applications that aren’t accessed on a constant basis. Google in particular is building the back-end infrastructure that allows the netbooks to succeed on a functional level.
With the support of the Cloud, a netbook can handle almost every personal computing need — at half the price of a laptop computer. It is the that Cloud takes the computing and storage burden off the mobile devices, allowing them to provide the necessary applications without actually providing them.
The ultimate set-up, of course, is a transparent set of perfectly synced devices: phone, ultra-mobile, and desktop sizes, from which any documents and data sets can be retrieved. Whether those devices are actually one core device with a number of corporeal states (a la Modu), or cloud-computing-served units (iMac + MacBook Air + iPhone) is a question of technology and security.
(Technology = Can the synchronization be maintained for discrete devices? vs. Can the cloud have little enough downtime and great enough bandwidth to be able to serve up the data on demand? Security = Distribution of multiple hardware units containing sensitive data? — think of UK government security issues, with computers and data files left on public transport — vs. Can the cloud be secure enough to entrust with all sensitive data?).
We anxiously await mobile utopia.
Predicting user intention has a long history. There’s always the hope that you can train a computer to anticipate the user’s next move and launch the desired application or function at just the right moment, without requiring a user command.
The question is, how do you predict? How do you know what a user wants to do next?
The traditional methods can be generally categorized as:
- Statistical methods. Study ten or a hundred or a thousand people using your program, and discover which functions are usually requested after which other functions. A common example: you might find that after launching Word, 90% of the time users next create a new blank document. Therefore, when launching the program, automatically cause a new file to be created immediately. Another common example: Apple Mail recognizes an email address format or internet link format in text, and automatically creates a clickable link within the mail body. There are mountains of ethnomethodological studies that try to provide relevant data for predictive use.
- Track individual user habits. Allow the application to track a user’s actions, and learn the user’s behavior patterns. Then activate functions automatically based upon past use.
A non-real-life example — more of a wish — from JK On The Run:
After I finish doing my email, or even before I’m done if there are too many emails to do them all, I want to go to Google Reader to check all the items from my RSS feeds overnight. I can open up Firefox or just say “check the feeds” or the equivalent and the [Intuitive Interface] knows to fire up Firefox with the Google Reader page loaded. The key to the learning capabilities of the [Intuitive Interface] is that just because I use Firefox doesn’t mean you do. If it’s learned from your actions that you use Opera or Internet Explorer then that’s what it will use for you. No overt training required, the [Intuitive Interface] can learn volumes about your preferences and what you normally do just by paying attention when you do them. After just a short time of doing this the [Intuitive Interface] can be working WITH you, not just for you. It will become a very intelligent personal assistant that works the way you do when you do. It’s always watching what you do and WHEN you do it as most people’s work days are very routine when it comes to schedule.
3. Allow the user to control and register actions and preferences. Photoshop does this by recording your action history, and then letting you not only undo actions, but also “record” sets of actions for future application to other documents. The Mac OS does something similar in helping you set which applications are used to open which documents.
What everyone yearns for is something like the first two categories — where the user does nothing, and the computer comes up with the right action “like magic”. The problem is that in real life, only category three is really useful. Why?
Consider the following two reports:
One of the features on my three-year old Acura that I’ve come to enjoy is its keyless entry and ignition feature. Walk up to the car, touch a button on the door handle to unlock it, and start the car without inserting the key. All while the key stays in my pocket. It’s a feature now found on many cars and eliminates the need to find your keys in a pocket, briefcase or purse.
It can even tell the difference between my key or my wife’s. This can have some unintended consequences. If my wife enters the car first from the passenger side with her key, all of the radio stations and other settings default to hers. (She thinks that’s great as it reminds me to be a gentleman and open her door first.)
[from Phil Baker’s Concept to Consumer blog]
***
Blackberry has this nice feature where you type a word without bothering with capitalization or punctuation, for example, typing “im” for “I’m”, and it changes it on the fly. (Funny, because there’s no actual spell-check…) It’s a feature that’s convenient, although I tend to under-use it.
Anyway, little glitch, I tried to send someone my Israeli email address the other day. It ends with @netvision.net.il. Except that my alert Blackberry insisted it was @netvision.net.I’ll. I went back to erase/change/fix maybe 6 times, unsuccessfully. Not a helpful feature, in this case! Why should I be in a power struggle with my cell phone? […]
Found another one: can’t type the word “id” (as in Freudian), or the initials for identification or industrial design (ID). I just keep getting “I’d”.
When is the tradeoff of 95% accuracy offset by the 5% error rate (uncorrectable errors)? Another long tail question? Kind of.
[from Feature Power Struggle, posted in this blog]
You get the idea. I’m sure you can draw examples from your own life. Unless a use-case prediction is true 100% of the time, the frustration of an incorrect prediction has to be allowed for. If the error is minor or easily corrected for, then the predictive action may be worthwhile (eg, having applications create new documents at launch — closing the new document window is a minor inconvenience, and the extra wait is unnoticeable). If the error is harder to correct, or more annoying (How do you tell the car who is really driving? How do you override Blackberry’s auto-punctuation?), the frequent convenience may not outweigh the occasional frustration.
It’s worth pointing out that anything in categories 2 or 3 will benefit from unshared use of the device. Sharing machines/phones/computers/cars when preferences have been customized or learned for a particular individual will entail even greater frustration than if there had been no customization in the first place. Which leads us to more “Me”and less “We”.
[Disclosure: I work for Power2B, who are developing a 3D touchscreen and interactive TV interface that predicts user activity by tracking actual trajectories in real time, rather than through any of the above systems.]
Of the five or six mobile phones that I’ve had in the last couple of years (including a Blackberry 8700, Nokias 6230, 6680, E65, the odd — very odd — Motorola i85, plus a Samsung disaster), the keys on the Nokia 1208 are by far the most satisfying. Just the right amount of pressure is needed, and each key is easily distinguished by feel from its neighbors, despite the one-piece keyboard top layer.
Click click.
Yeah, just right.
The only keyboard to beat it is my old Nokia 3330, a phone that still sits at the top of my list for all-time great usability. We still haven’t retired the 3330 unit; it’s got a pre-pay card SIM in it, and gets used by international guests.
An interesting trend is emerging: the downward percolation (can you say that?) of the stylus/touchscreen to mid-range devices. (I define mid-range as $75-$150.) While the consumer electronics business has always had a steady trickle-down of features from high-end to mid-range to low-end, touchscreen devices never made that migration. The assumption was that touchscreen features were too expensive / bulky / overwhelming to succeed in the basic / fashion-conscious / mass-consumer markets.
The frenzy over the iPhone has changed all that. (How much impact has the iPhone had on industry attitudes to touchscreen interfaces? I attended more than one meeting last Spring in which a participant started a sentence with, “Since January 8th…” — i.e., since the iPhone marketing launch. That was before the product was even released in June.)
Of course, Apple were not the first to realize the power of the touchscreen. They just executed so well that no one could afford to ignore direct input anymore. The market response with “iPhone killers” (many of which were planned for release well before the iPhone was announced, of course) is only the beginning.
Take a look at Palm’s Centro:
The higher Centro sales, though, are another case of good news/bad news. It’s great the the Centro is more popular than even Palm had expected, but its low cost (and thus low margin) must sting a little. [via Treo Central]
***
Over the past 18 months, almost every major cell phone manufacturer has come out with a product to address this market. RIM introduced the BlackBerry Pearl, a slimmer version of its BlackBerry device with an abbreviated QWERTY keyboard for typing. Motorola came out with the Q, and Samsung introduced the BlackJack.
But up to this point, price has been a major barrier to truly penetrating the consumer market. Most “consumer”-oriented smart phones have still been initially priced above $300. The iPhone retailed initially for $500 and $600. Prices are starting to come down, but experts say the hefty price tag of these devices has prevented them from reaching the mass market. [via ZDNet]
Mid-range device touchscreen input is not just a fluke, it’s the (overdue) future. I’ll go further, though: I’ve been predicting for over a year now that touchscreens will show up on low-end phones, too, in the next 3 years.
Never mind One Laptop Per Child… the one computer that is entering every single home in the developing world is the cell phone. The cell phone is where illiterate women and children will learn to read (a pet project / dream of mine). The cell phone is where contacts, photos, correspondence, business and banking will not only originate, but be archived. To me, the trickle-down of expanded interaction and handwriting input is blazingly obvious. (Of course, I expect to see those phones enabled by Power2B’s technology, but that’s another story!)
You heard it here first.
Sometimes you hear a story that just makes you want to cry.
A woman who lives not far from us has a hard life. She’s in her 30s, single, childless, and with severe health problems (physical and emotional) that prevent her from holding down a job. She lives on her welfare benefits.
She’s nervous, and although she hasn’t got much money, she calls taxis to get around — always from the Ramot Alon taxi company. The drivers got to know her over time, and decided together to give her a flat-rate price of 15 NIS anywhere in the city (typical in-city fares range from 15-40 NIS).
Last month, this woman went to get a haircut. As she left, she asked the receptionist to call her a cab. The woman responded, “Why order a cab and pay the extra fee, just catch one outside?” She did, and ended up unawares in an unregistered (=illegal) taxi. When she arrived and opened her purse to pay, the driver snatched the purse, pushed her out the door, and took off. She started screaming; a Ramot Alon cab was passing by, heard her, went after the first cab, caught him, and called the police.
The Ramot Alon drivers decided to give this woman free transportation for two months… The whole entire company. Each and every one of them. It’s what “little” they can do for her.
If you’ve think that Israeli taxi drivers are looking to rip you off… just think again.
Written on my Blackberry from the back seat of a Ramot Alon taxi.
Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. […]
The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired.
The study, published in the The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys’ cognitive abilities but made their brains look “awake” in PET scans. [via Wired]
There will be obvious and valuable uses for a drug like this: doctors, soldiers, pilots, intelligence agents and other key personnel who are occasionally called upon to perform under suboptimal rest conditions. There will also be lots of people who want to use this drug (if it comes to market) to avoid “wasting” time sleeping, or to cure jetlag, or to get a day’s work in after a night up with the baby.
Would you take this drug (or another like it — it’s not the first; there are others already in use for night shift workers, for example)? Would you worry about long-term (or even short-term) physical effects of tricking the body out of its physical needs? Do you love to be up, or love to get your shuteye?
What effect will drugs like this one have on cultural expectations of stamina? Of neediness? Of being “always on” in a 24/7 world?
The changes are already happening, although they are subtler: expectations generated by the ubiquity of laptop computers, cell phones, and Blackberry PDAs. Executives report setting their Blackberry alarms to wake them in the middle of the night just to shoot off an email to a colleague, in order to “prove” that they work around the clock. Still, saying “I got your email first thing this morning” is still an acceptable excuse for an eight-hour delay. Will that change?
Alternatively, will the backlash finally trigger a situation in which people start being more aggressive about drawing lines between their personal and working lives?
Stay tuned. Don’t fall asleep.
Jan asks:
Other ways that people tweak time? The relatively common practice of trying to ‘buy time’ by setting one’s watch or alarm clock a few minutes ahead of the actual time; inter-city drivers trying to talk up the time it takes to travel between two points to talk up an all inclusive fare; setting meeting’s ahead of time to account for late arriver’s.
In real life, our office tweaks time by just trying to keep it from jumping unpredictably.
When I travel (monthly), I do not adjust my computer or my cell phone clocks to the new time zone, nor do I allow my devices to automatically update their time settings from the network. If I do, all of my appointments will be out of whack.
When I enter an event into my calendar, I’m usually in Israel (GMT +2). The meeting is at 9.00am? I enter it for 9.00am on my calendar. When I get to Japan (GMT +9), my 9.00am meeting doesn’t show up until 6.00pm… hard to explain to the person you’ve come thousands of miles to meet. So the times stay set on Israeli time, and my friends and family are left to puzzle as best as they can at the oddball hours at which they are hearing from me. (Or not. In the midst of jet lag or work overload, my communication times appear to be perfectly normal when viewed from many timezones away.)
Why not set the appointment for the appropriate time zone in the first place? I’m sure many programs support that feature (as far as I can tell, iCal for Macintosh does not support timezone definitions for events on an event-by-event basis, although that’s hard to believe). But who has time to mess around and find out if the Macintosh solution matches my Nokia phone, or my Blackberry? If something in that loop doesn’t work, and the “synchronization” process ends up unsynchronizing my life… I’m in deep trouble.
Noted last night in real time on my Blackberry
Sitting inside the plate glass window of a cafe. Two men come in, one younger, maybe 25, and one older, about 45. They order coffee (”Latte?” “What do you mean latte? I want real coffee”) and take it to an outdoor table to drink.
20 minutes later
Two police officers, long guns slung over their shoulders, approach them. Subconsciously, I assume they know each other, this policeman and this older member of the coffee drinkers, and are having a chat.
Eventually, my eye is caught by the body language being projected through the storefront window beside which I sit. They are standing there too long, they are not smiling. The men at the table grow more serious. Another man is waved forward; he is accusing them of something. The police ask for an explanation. The two at the table are shaking their heads, making controlled little hand gestures; they are denying something. They are amused, then taken aback, then angry. The third man is drawn aside by the tall policeman. He is wearing a red hard hat, and lights up a cigarette. The younger man keeps talking to the policewoman, pointing at his cup of coffee emphatically. He seems to be saying that he has been here, drinking coffee, the whole time. He gets more agitated. The older man (his father? No — the relationship doesn’t fit. Maybe an uncle?) keeps trying to hold him back, calm him down. He gets up yelling. The policeman (and he is really big) starts to close in tighter. He’s in the young man’s personal space. He exudes menace. He’s got out handcuffs now. They walk the young man away, but he’s getting worked up again. He’s offended and angry. He’s wrestled to the ground, on his knees, his head pressed down low, handcuffed, hoisted back to his feet. The uncle (?) stands right next to them, looking helpless, and afraid to interfere any more.
Without hearing a word, I admit, I don’t think the police needed to be so aggressive. The young guy was so obviously upset, but also not about to jump on anyone. It was almost as if they were looking for him to get angry enough to justify physical restraint tactics. My sense is that if they had asked him to come with them for questioning, he would have.
Who were these people? The accuser in the red hard hat, still quietly smoking his cigarette? The slight policewoman, ducking behind her partner? The religious and supportive but impotent uncle? The open-looking young man with contradictory clothing? The intimidating officer?
What are their stories? What chapter are they writing at this moment?
30 minutes later
Sequel: The “uncle” just came back… to pay for the two cups of coffee. Mi keAmcha Yisrael. His honesty inspires. Perhaps they are at the police station just two blocks away?
Was he trying to help out his young friend without realizing what he was up to? Was he in the dark completely — maybe the young man was in a hit-and-run on his way over? Was the whole thing a mistake? I’ll never know.
I watch him walk away in the rain.
The picture? Their table, as they left it. Never did get a chance to finish the coffee.
I recently mapped the left-side softkey of my Blackberry 8700 to the keypad lock function, and I’m experiencing a startlingly big improvement on a daily basis. I had previously had that key mapped to the profile selector, so that I could quickly shut off the ringer when going into meetings, without fumbling through the desktop, down to the profile icon, etc. It took me this long to realize that since the Blackberry is not actually my primary phone (except in the U.S.), I wasn’t using that feature much. I do use the Blackberry daily for data (mostly email) all over the world. It’s a pity that I never realized this before!
Making the switch has revealed an odd quirk: If I press a key while the phone keypad is locked, I get a message saying: “Keypad is locked. Press * ‘enter’ to unlock.” Not very different from my older S40 Nokias’ unlock messages. This is a pain, however, since finding the asterisk and enter keys requires more attention on a Blackberry than on an ordinary 16-key phone.
Oddly (but more usefully), if I scroll the scrollwheel up from a locked screen, I get a different message: “Keypad is locked” followed by three clickable button options: Unlock, Emergency Call, Cancel. The default is on Unlock, which can be selected by clicking the scrollwheel.
It turns out that a quick scroll-up followed by a click is far simpler than a tap and two specific key presses. I learned quickly to unlock via the scrollwheel.
But why on earth are there two different messages in the first place?
Everyone talks about Blackberry Thumb. I get Blackberry Shoulder, holding it up so I can write in bed…
