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Why You Can't Build a Smartphone

237 points by joshmarinacci 13y ago

willvarfar 13y ago
I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant. I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it. We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee. But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention. Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae. I imagine it was much the same in Finland too. The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?
- bobbles 13y ago
  Well they do have that "Special Projects" division.. I'm sure they'll be cooking up something nice for 2014.. at least I hope so
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    Yours is not an uncommon sentiment, but it’s not really a fair picture: Observers often see the Apple of the past decade as releasing a category-definer every few years (iPod, iPhone, iPad), and awaiting the next one (iWatch! iScreen!). Really, though, Apple's blockbusters of the 2000s are best seen as one continuous thing: the iPod paved the way for well-designed, vertically-integrated mobile devices (that it was a music player is almost incidental) and the iPhone and iPad are really bookends of a single smart device revolution. Seen this way, Apple has had two world-changing category definers in its history, the Mac and the iOS device. That’s one every 24 years, if we count to the midpoint between the iPhone and iPad introductions. Will they do it again? Maybe, but I wouldn’t expect it to be just around the corner.
    - seiji 13y ago
      Huh whatnow? The original iPod (and modern iPods minus the Touch) don't run iOS at all. The iPod gave Apple the time to stall until they could build what Steve wanted to make in 1999, but the world didn't have the capacity to create yet. These days, Apple is the forefront of both industrial design and fabrication capacity. They aren't in the past—they are in the present and they are moving the world along with them, not waiting for it to catch up to them anymore.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Your parent is grouping iPod/iPhone/iPad. Yes, the original iPod didn't run iOS, but he's just using it as a moniker. We could call them iDevices if that pleases you more. The iPod wasn't just an infusion of cash to keep the company alive, to me it really looks like the start of the whole mobile line that today runs iOS.
      - CmonDev 13y ago
        "they are moving the world along with them" You tried iOS 7, didn't you? I sure hope they are not using "Apple Maps" to move themselves and the world.
        hrrsn 13y ago
        Apple Maps has come a long way since the iOS 6 launch. Google Maps is still undoubtedly better, but Apple have been working hard on it. iOS 7 is not bad. People are still afraid of change (look at what they said about the original iPhone, now look where we are) but ultimately it was in need of a refresh.
        CmonDev 13y ago
        But they are not "moving the world" in any way except for hardware. iOS 7 is derivative.
        hrrsn 13y ago
  - rubinelli 13y ago
    It depends on whether upper management gives special projects the importance they need or not. Almost every large company has a research division, but in most, it is the playground where they keep the guys that are too smart and competent to fire, but that have ideas too radical for main divisions' heads to accept.
- girvo 13y ago
  UIQ3 was amazing, and my M600i had the greatest keyboard on any phone ever. Thanks for making the OS for one of my favourite smartphones :)4
  - Blara 13y ago
    I miss that keyboard, I really do prefer physical keyboards to software ones.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I really thought phone manufacturers at the time where aiming for better Windows Mobile phone, and had nothing like the iPhone in mind or at least nothing more than a napkin corner with a 'moon' tag attached to it because some R&D/Designer broke someone's b*lls enough to get a little attention.
- downer93 13y ago
  design ascetic The words are supposed to be "design aesthetic".
  - mcv 13y ago
    Maybe they're going for something extremely minimalistic.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Aqwis 13y ago
This guy is missing the fact that in a lot of European countries, and elsewhere in the world, carriers mean squat. The carrier is often simply the provider of the SIM card you put in the phone, so carrier support is in no way needed for a phone to succeed. You don't need to be successful in the US to be successful.
- girvo 13y ago
  All these articles do. It's annoying.
  - paulftw 13y ago
    Every european country has own laws, culture and language. They are individual markets, and each market is too small to break even after all the R&D and hardware costs.
    - EdwardDiego 13y ago
      > Every european country has own laws, culture and language. You're completely disregarding the EEC and European Parliament. As an aside on language, while on the train to Brussels from Köln, I was chatting with some Young Greens who were en route to a pan-European Green conference. One was from Serbia, one from Germany and one from France, and we were all speaking in English, it tends to function as a lingua franca, so language has never been a barrier for me yet. The multilingual capacity of Europeans really puts me to shame, my German barely goes past "I would like a beer" and "I would like a coffee". But yes, they have different languages, so i18n is a thing you have to pay attention to, and yes, they have different cultures and markets, so how you sell and engage people can differ. But you can recruit a small cadre of local sales experts to do your sales - a sister company of ours develops in the Czech Republic and sells in Poland, Romania and Turkey. The European market is hardly as balkanized as you make out. If what you say was true, then iPhones would have presumably never impacted in Europe - after all, every european country has own laws, culture and language.
      - paulftw 13y ago
natural219 13y ago
Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.
- sologrrl 13y ago
  I guess the point is that it will become like the PC desktop ecosystem. There are new OSes all the time, but which OS broke the 4% mark in the last 20 years? Perhaps OS X, but Mac sales are dropping. The PC market is being disrupted not by another PC but by a change in paradigm to mobile. The mobile market is fast approaching a place where it takes risking billions just to start competing.
- gbvb 13y ago
  The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business. So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
  - fembot__ 13y ago
    I think you've got the tone right. Also... I hope you're right about Neural implants! I've wanted one ever since I read that MT Anderson book in JR high school (minus the dystopian homogeneity and fields of filet mignon). Maybe Amazon will debut them on 60 Minutes prior to cyber monday 2014!
    - nekopa 13y ago
      I'm sorry, but fields of filet mignon sounds great. Make it fields of bacon-wrapped filets and I would call it my own personal utopia (for as long as my heart held out)
kosei 13y ago
I think many of the author's points are valid, but I do still believe that companies like Blackberry and Nokia can build Android or Windows Mobile phones successfully, as they won't have to deal with a) user inertia from changing to a new OS or b) developing entirely new UI and operating systems. As far as I can tell, there won't really be any new carriers or any new operating systems, but that doesn't preclude competition in the hardware space.
- hrrsn 13y ago
  I hope Blackberry and Nokia can produce some decent phones in the future. Android has come a long way, but Windows Phone is still pretty awful (more importantly, Nokia are never going to produce an Android with Microsoft as an owner). I used a HTC G1 and Motorola Milestone (1.6 and 2.something) as well as a Galaxy S3 (on 4.something) - back at 1.6 it was nothing special, the S3 on 4.x was hugely improved and a joy to use. If I wasn't so heavily vested in iOS it would be a worthy contender. Windows Phone on the other hand I can't say so much for. Most of the people I've spoken to that are non tech-literate don't have favourable experiences. A family member (electrician by trade) had a high-end Nokia Lumia for a year and didn't have a whole lot to say about it, until he took it in for repair and they gave him an iPhone 4S. He couldn't stop talking about how much better he found it to use, and thus as soon as they demanded it back he switched to an iPhone. Until these manufactures delight the user in the same way that the iPhone does, or differentiate themselves enough, there's little hope.
avmich 13y ago
With a bit of tongue-in-cheek... 1. Data networks It's an open question of using WiFi as the universal carrier - we're not at that point yet; but it's not a question of using existing GSM networks. It's going to be hard for carriers to deny, after some point, minutes to paying customers. 2. The cost of entry - OS, cloud store, apps This happened time and again. Remember when Linux has appeared on the stage? Seen porting projects, like Wine, PetrOS, Mono? Realize that Android was built not from scratch, at least concerning interfaces? Second time is almost always cheaper - and in our times, by a wide margin. 3. Access to hardware components - need good hardware... No. I don't care much if the phone is 5 mm or 2 mm thick, 100 g or 250 g heavy - just like a word processor user doesn't care if letter appears on the screen in 10 ms or 90 ms after he hit the keyboard. At some point it becomes irrelevant, and competition shifts elsewhere. See Firefox phone as another example. 4. Retreat to the low end Yes, you see it. The fact that the product is a commodity doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 5. A disruptive UI It was surely a pain to switch from sleeky Nokia UI to strange future of IPhone, no? How about Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child project, which was done anew? 6. Be realistic? I certainly see a point in what you're saying; but don't you see the power of fashion - ones all important things are by default? As soon as changes become unimportant, returns dwindling and defaults good enough, attention goes to other things - a similar thing happened in automotive world, where a lot of customers buy not the functionality, but trendiness.
- Aloha 13y ago
  femtocells (wifi size cells) are virtually never cost effective, not enough density to support the infrastructure. a combination Microcells and picocells, however might be doable, you use mesh networking to tie the picocells to to each other, and back to the microcell, ideally its a slow speed low power network, around 900 mhz, providing a access method for text messaging, and push notifications (sub 100kbps, think of it as a faster control channel), Data could be mesh even between handsets, passing (some) data thru to the nearest base. A higher speed network used for more intensive data use situations that goes directly to the nearest micro or picocell, For voice calls or in rural areas, you could default to the regular BTS.
- walshemj 13y ago
  wifi is not designed or has the bandwidth to support the density of devices that the mobile phone network needs
jamestomasino 13y ago
There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful. A new phone with a bare-bones linux-like OS designed to piggy-back on existing networks may have a small place in the market, and others like Jolla that seek to grow toward something big may pick up fractions of a percent as well. Even surviving a decade with a low, but consistent, share is a success (e.g., Apple in the 80s). Finally, there's the novelty and growth of industry to consider. The current big players in the smartphone market are already scrambling to address the emerging wearable revolution. The "internet of things" is right on the horizon as well and there's no telling where the chips may land. To be fair, the author did mention innovation as a key to potential success. We should consider the grander implications of a constantly evolving business model and offering in that sentiment, though. It's not just a matter of making a neat new feature, but of the entire game changing every 5 years. While the author makes plenty of good and valid points, I don't think the outlook need be so bleak.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- TheLegace 13y ago
  Exactly rather than focusing why a smartphone can't succeed, I'd like to see how and why a phone can succeed. If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are not addressed by market players today, and the overlap between them can wedge a dent in the market. Google has serious weakness in hardware, and it looks like they will never get over that hump. Can you honestly expect them to optimize performance and battery life, if they can't even make their own devices. Niches like: Open-Source/Flexible development environment Sustainability Emerging Markets Actual Innovation Disruptive technologies and emerging markets shouldn't be counted out either. Nor should finding ways to monetize open-source. People, developers especially are increasingly looking for open platforms/devices, that market is NEVER going to get smaller only bigger. Imagine actually being able to use Javascript or Python or Clojure for your apps, or scripts. Will you actually discount a platform where you can program without managing a thousand configuration files or worry about the gatekeepers(Google/Apple). See these problems aren't necessarily problems in Linux(not to say there aren't other drawbacks). The great(maybe not?) thing about innovation is that if your to busy looking at the technology today your going to completely miss out what is coming next. - At least it's great if your competing. I can't help thinking about what Jobs says, "Experts" are clueless. >Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. [1] [1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned... People seriously underestimate the power of a great product. Products that don't rely on massive feature lists that mean nothing a day after buying your device. I regret falling into this trap and wasting precious time instead of thinking about creating a better product experience. But again this is easier said than done.
namenotrequired 13y ago
* A few new Android manufacturers may join the game* For anyone interested, Fairphone are doing so pretty successfully right now. http://fairphone.com/ http://fairphone.com/
- CanSpice 13y ago
  Fairphone's website says they've sold 25,000, and have another 8200 on the way. Apple sold over 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c models in the first weekend they were for sale. While it's impressive that an independent group is putting out a phone, their sales are orders of magnitude away from what Apple puts out in a single weekend. Sure, they're "joining the game", but they're not in the same league.
  - samspenc 13y ago
    I think its impressive, nonetheless. I do wonder what prices they were able to get components when they sold a "mere" 25,000 though.
  - benjamincburns 13y ago
    This comparison is just silly. Look (guess) at Apple's development budget for the iPhone. Look at Fairphone's (or again, just guess). Look at the size of Apple. Look at the size of the Fairphone team at the Waag Society. I don't think I need to say anything else. This is majorly impressive.
    - namenotrequired 13y ago
      Of course, you're both right - it's very little compared to the market leaders, but for a new player it's definitely impressive. Especially considering they were all sold before they were even made.
      - mcv 13y ago
        The power of crowdfunding! That is really the major game changer that hasn't been taken into account yet.
contingencies 13y ago
This guy is so ex-Nokia, it's sad. He rates the latest Maemo/whatever as a higher chance of market presence than Firefox OS. OK, Nordsman... we understand you are grieving for your lost mobile device business... but you can do it in private. Linux, via Android, commodified smartphone platforms by giving away the OS and thus commodifying the position of mobile device hardware manufacturers. This was coming anyway, but was a brilliantly timed commercial play by Google to head off Apple's strength in devices. Google's allies were the carriers, who were unhappy with Apple owning (via signup-time credit card) who they perceived as their customers. FirefoxOS and that new Jolla thing the Nords are working on basically use exactly the same hardware and OS platform (ie. Linux). There's no huge investment there, the investment is in higher layers of the software stack, and in FirefoxOS' case in marketing to different segments (the developing world, which still has 'growth', and necessitates less competitive component acquisition for manufacturing batches). To say a small team can't do something similar is plain wrong. I'd say the effort required is similar to launching a new Linux distribution. As long as there is a niche you can cater to, there is no reason it won't survive and thrive. CyanogenMod is only the beginning: cross-pollination is a good thing. Start with preferably https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/ https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/ (or otherwise http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html) and begin thy mission to conquer portable computing! (Edit: Added content after the initial paragraph after it was downvoted. Fair enough, it was a bit snarky :)
- davb 13y ago
  First paragraph snark aside, I agree. To say that any tech market is completely closed to new entrants seems slightly ridiculous. Sure, the barriers to entry have increased - if you're chasing mass-market appeal, a strong app platform is as important as excellent hardware. However there will always be some niche to serve or an opportunity to tackle bloated or less open, established competitors. I think Josh's option is very biased and colored by operating in a certain type of environment. Not that it's any less valuable or valid than any other, but I disagree with him.
- sharpneli 13y ago
  The approach by Jolla and FirefoxOS guys is actually quite brilliant. How to get into markets where it's relatively cheap to make a new android phone but anything else requires very expensive contracts with the manufacturers? Solution: Just use the android drivers directly. In my Jolla phone there is the good 'ol android /system/lib/. As an example the libGLESv2.so (the OpenGL ES 2.0 library) in /usr/lib/ simply opens the counterpart in /system/lib with android_dlsym and calls the equivalent functions (and in case of floating point arguments moves them to int registers). And what's the overhead of this? 9 instructions and 2 loads (for the function pointer). So it's essentially completely free. Same approach applies to rest of the system. They just take the core of the android and run on top of that with just the bionic -> glibc layer on top. Brilliant. The actual lib can be found at: https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris That means they can basically just walk to some SOC vendor (like they did to Qualcomm) and say "I want to buy a mid range Android SOC" and they have everything ready.
Pxtl 13y ago
> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch. It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
- mason55 13y ago
  > Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage. Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price. If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
  - patmcc 13y ago
    >>they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price. Or they just need to accept a lower gross margin than the ~50% Apple gets.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Samsung made a line called Galaxy Player. The cheapest one was $150 and sported a 3.6in 480x340 pixel screen, at a time when you could get an iPod Touch for $200. There expensive one, the Galaxy Player 5, cost more than Apple's offering. And they all ran Android 2.3 Similarly, there was Archos. They made a whole family of Android player devices at the 2.3 era, and where infamously buggy. Sony made the Walkman Z as a phoneless counterpart to the Xperia Z. It was $250. Supposedly a fantastic device, but that's not really undercutting Apple very well when Apple was selling iPod 4 devices for less. I mean, Black Friday doorcrashers this year were iPod 4 at $130. I can't think of any android counterpart I'd want at that price. Maybe Motorola can figure out a phoneless Moto G with the right nudge from Google. A big problem is also marketing - these companies are only now figuring out how to market their handheld devices in the carrier-controlled countries since up until then they just handed the devices off to carriers and maybe put up a few ads. Meanwhile, Apples had their own stores. Samsung could stop shoving money into ads and could start putting together coherent store-displays of their non-carrier product line. Sony should revive their store-brand too - they were Apple back when Apple made beige boxes. Sony could be Apple again - they've stopped the race to the bottom and seem to be investing in quality. I'd love to see Sony put together a coherent adversary for Apple using the Android/Win8 ecosystems. They even have the kind of market breadth and to put together a counter to the iTunes/App Store with their gaming and media holdings.
wdewind 13y ago
Please, especially if you are going to write a blog about design, do NOT use an animating logo that sticks with the page as you scroll. It makes it impossible to read the content without being constantly distracted.
mmahemoff 13y ago
"I owned a string of PalmOS devices during this period. Their ‘app store’ was literally boxes of software in a store which you had to install from your computer. No different than 1980s PCs." That's not really true. Mobile devices around that time were designed as peripherals of the PC, so you could download apps to PC and install them by cable-syncing. Palm apps were just .PRC files. It really wasn't too complicated and was a far sight from buying shrink-wrapped software in a physical store. It's just a shame that Palm, MS, and other platforms left this stuff to third-party websites instead of making it a more seamless experience for users and a more profitable one for them.
- csixty4 13y ago
  There still were shrink-wrapped PDA apps available in stores, though, which is probably how a lot of people acquired them. I never owned a PDA back then, but I'm assuming they were just the same files with a shiny installer.
- r00fus 13y ago
  I'd say that downloading software on my original iPhone was probably the 2nd most OMG moment of owning the device (the first being the capacitive IPS display that made the icons seem painted-on). Seeing an app download over a 2G cell connection and be usable in 2 minutes - that was amazing. No clickwrap installer, no license keys, no entering payment details. It foretold the doom of non-AppStore software sales in a wonderful zen moment.
- bdarnell 13y ago
  There were some early (third-party) online app stores too - sites that would handle payment processing and host your .prc files for you (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20020124152252/http://www.palmgear.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020124152252/http://www.palmge...).
justin66 13y ago
Mr. Ondesign (can I call you Josh?), your website sure does use a lot of CPU when it's in the foreground. What is the deal there exactly?
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Animated spinning ... things... rectangles? Around the planet logo. Rendered into a canvas without any throttling.
  - joshmarinacci 13y ago
    Hmm. I could have sworn I was using requestAnimationFrame.
    - lotyrin 13y ago
      Maybe. If you are, then you're doing so at 60fps at least, when this scene seems like it'd be fine slower than that.
Aloha 13y ago
This should be called "Why You Can't Build a Smartphone Ecosystem" Building the phone itself is easier, license the software from google, develop some cool hardware, build and sell it. Admittedly, selling it is probably the hardest part, hard to innovate on features, you can innovate in packaging, price, assembly place, any number of other things. If you have a big enough bucket of money, you could build a new ecosystem, it wont be easy though. Even without the bucket of money you could build a new ecosystem - but you might only capture 2-5% of the market.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Another far-out option is building a solution not dependent on the carriers, which have already captured the IP space. There is no more internet, it's all just "telecom" now. That's the first mistake people make when starting an "internet" business. Business is reliant on communication and your communication is reliant on telecom. It's pretty much the same landscape as before the internet existed.
joshmarinacci 13y ago
I'm the original author. You can probably guess this from the blog, but smartphones don't interest me anymore. I loved my time at Palm, but I'm working on new things now. Stuff that needs good innovation right now: * Internet of Things, esp. on the usability side. * 3D printing. making it more useful and accessible. * Changing how we teach math and science. I can't stress this enough. * Improving programming. We still do it like it's the 1970s.
- collyw 13y ago
  Did they not do it on punch cards in the 70's? I think things have improved in the ten years or so I have been in the industry. Java was the hot language in those days, because you could write it once and run it anywhere.
fingerprinter 13y ago
cough Ubuntu cough In all seriousness, if he means smartphone from a hardware perspective, I might actually agree. The startup costs there are crazy high. But, if he means software, no. Ubuntu is doing it and doing it very, very well. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. All Android using hardware manufacturers are crazy to continue with Android now that Google owns Motorola. Look at the Moto X. Nothing can compete with it and no one will be able to in the future. Samsung and the rest should very actively be looking to remove Android from their handsets as quickly as possible. Ubuntu is by far the best choice.
- joshmarinacci 13y ago
  Ubuntu is doing it well? How many phones have they sold? What is their installed base? What % of marketshare?
  - colinbartlett 13y ago
    Somewhere around 0.0M units with an approximate 0.0% marketshare.
  - fingerprinter 13y ago
    It's this type of comment that really disappoints me about HN these days. Ubuntu just released V1 of their phone in October. Anyone who knows phone manufacturers and carriers knows how long they soak something in their labs. Ubuntu has all the pieces in place to be an awesome option. Plus, they have their carrier advisory group with some great names showing their is some carrier interest. Ubuntu has a company behind it and an owner who seems to want to compete in this market and has very deep pockets. Ubuntu itself has pedigree and history as well as working with hardware manufacturers and chip companies. I mean, if your only metric of what is possible based on what is current numbers, Android would never had made it out of the gate, or should have folded after the Nexus One or even their next phone (can't remember the name), both of which were TERRIBLE and sold poorly.
    - ac29 13y ago
      Canonical released a phone in October? I think you're mistaken.
fembot__ 13y ago
I began reading his article hoping to have him talk a little bit more about smartphones in emerging markets, but he barely touched on it. Africa has arguably the fastest growing middle class in the world right now. They're also poised to make a cultural leap far greater than that of China's in the 90s. I read that 60% of Africans will have smartphones in 2019. The continent is already using smart technology in innovative/cost saving ways (i.e. sending funds via sms). It seems to me that if I am looking to join the smartphone industry, I make myself indispensable to Africa. I think Africans are less likely to care for features like Siri or luxury components. My thought is that developers for devices in that part of the world will have the freedom to think outside the box--what will a smart phone look like on a continent with minimal financial resources, but avid interest in quick data and communication? What do people want from their phone when they don't have necessarily have a computer or strong infrastructure?
mathattack 13y ago
I think the point of carrier relevance is importance. Somehow Apple still seems to capture much of the volume. I have to believe there is still room for disruption at the bottom of the market. Someone could devise a very cheap way to just deliver texts. Or a safe simple network for kids, that they would somehow stick with. Just when firms seem most invincible, they are also most at risk.
delicious 13y ago
I once read a lovely article online (which I've never been able to find again, I think it was by a founder of tripod?), recounting the early days of search engines. He was thinking of starting one, but the market was already filled... then came another search engine, and now there really was no room for another one... this iterated over several engines til he finally got to google. And added: now it's really filled... Of course, today google still rules, yet they act incredibly threatened by facebook; and niche engines like duckduckgo are making inroads. Is this true for smartphones? All we can really say is that he (and I) can't think of a way to enter... but that doesn't mean there is no way. Just as I wouldn’t suggest anyone build a new line of PCs or cars Like electric cars...
z3bra 13y ago
Microsoft loves this kind of guy!!
biftek 13y ago
I've been thinking this for a while, but I have a feeling there is a decently large market (at least enough to sustain a small company and team) for really nice "dumb" phones. No data; just text, and talk (and in my vision a really nice camera) with the ability to sync/backup contacts etc.
swframe 13y ago
My bet is a device like google glasses (or contact lens) with a sleek headset that has mind controllable sensors. I don't want to type, or talk to control it. I just think of calling my friend and the phones dials, and I see her image. I am willing to carry the computing unit in my pocket so the glasses can remain light. I bet that it is 5 years away. If it is like the cellphone, it won't be google that builds it because there is just too much technology that is not yet ready/affordable.
ThinkBeat 13y ago
I understand where the author is coming from but I disagree completely. Imagine trying to build a smartphone 15 years ago, that would be really hard. You need a decent screen you need a good cpu etc. All of that is off the shelf now. Anyone can buy it and its cheap. (esp in volume) In a market in China (I dont remember the name) there are vendors upon vendors who sell all sorts of electrical parts, gadgets etc. You can literally walk down the isles and pick the parts you want in your new smartphone. So hardware wise, now is a good time. Sure you wont get as polished as the big players right away, but prototypes or a limited set sure. Now software. There is quite a bit of software that will run on the arm board. With all the hacking on the android platform (sadly a lot more than on the Windows or Apples phones), you can (if you want) at least create a very customized different Android based OS if you want. (would make updates a bitch). But you can also get some version of linux working and I am sure some other strange os. But there has never been a time when it was easier to get some dev boards, and start writing the next mobile OS. Its something you can get started on at home now for less than $1000. As far as the cloud services and integration that has never been nearly as easy. We have all sorts of providers with stable and "open" APIs. Providers like MS azure provides a full stack. Database, Data storage, device sync, messaging, computation etc. and they are not the only ones. I cant think of how much building and setting up all that cloud stuff would have cost in itself. Its out there now, and if you are tesing and writing your app, or have it deployed with low values its very cheap. Sure you wont have your own Music store right away (but licensing is the biggest issue there) but you can piggy back Amazon mp3. So we have good access to cheap hardware. We have development tools, boards and compilers. We have excellent possibilities cloud sync, integration, etc. We have open source operating systems we can hack at, learn from and understand how things work. As others have pointed out the future is probably pure data phones. That is a great market to attack right now. Forget the 1984 "phone" part and the nobody really uses anymore SMS.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  But that's the thing though, companies like Apple pretty much ignore the whole "phone" and SMS thing, Apple has even shot the operators in the back with iMessage. You're right that it's easy to make a phone nowadays with off the shelf components, like the article mentions that's exactly what the chinese/asian OEMS are doing now. The question is whether you will be able to make something that can compete with Apple / Google / Samsung. Even HTC is having a hard time doing that with some pretty decent phones.
untog 13y ago
Curious that the article doesn't mention the word "patents" once. That's what stops you from even starting to build a Smartphone of your own - you'd violate dozens of patents and be sued into oblivion. The only reason manufacturers are able to do it now is because they all have portfolios of their own and are in a state of cold war with everyone else.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    I work in the software industry and have never once worried or even thought about patents in the things I work on. It really depends on what field you work in.
    - Kliment 13y ago
      This is only a valid strategy until you have enough money/exposure. Then you get targeted by asshead extortionists and the law is on their side. After the first lawsuit, you will never "never once worry" again.
    - bottled_poe 13y ago
      Well that and whether you are making millions from software sales.
  - e12e 13y ago
    "Most things"? Haven't we just learned that if you make a smart phone that looks like a smart phone (rounded rectangle, button below screen) you can (and will) be sued? I suppose the fact that stuff like that is the area where big legal battles are fought, does imply that a lot of the "hard" patents (radio spectrum/coding, noise cancellation, audio encoding etc) are indeed covered by FRAND patents, though. It still seems to be a bit of a leap to go from there to saying that you'd not run into patents when making a smart phone?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Now that it is officially not possible I am sure it will happen :-) I agree that it would be exceptionally hard to build a smartphone to the same design formula of the iPhone or Android, as an exemplar we have Microsoft who as spent billions on it and has yet to succeed. However, you might have said the same thing before Apple entered into the game and you would have been right. Had Apple tried to build a Blackberry or Nokia equivalent slab phone they would have had a hard slog. They went back to first principles, imagined a new kind of "phone" and rolled it out. So the next smartphone isn't going to look like an iPhone or a Galaxy S4, but it might look like Google glass, or like a pebble watch an earphone and a wallet sized thing you carry in your backpack. Or a communicator badge you clip on your chest. But agree it won't be a clone of the iPhone.
moron4hire 13y ago
I agree with the basic premise that a typical hardware company is not ever going to have the management style necessary to beat the iPhone or Android. But I don't agree that the current horses in the race are invincible. Who is to say that cellphone networks will even be relevant in 10 years? What if city-wide, state-wide, country-wide WiFi were to be developed? Such a public works project would blow the market completely open. And in emerging markets, mesh-WiFi might be the only way to get data to everyone.
gcb0 13y ago
The article is kinda paradoxal... > the iphone changed the game > no device can enter the market without carrier help. The iphone was successful exactly because it sold to rich people before, with no carrier help. in fact, in the beginning the carriers would throw anything at you to move you from an iphone. In fact, the reason you have to pay a "smarphone fee" until recently was because AT&T greedily charged a mandatory $30 extra for "iphone data" if you ever wanted a subsided iphone.
- paulftw 13y ago
  iphone started without carrier support, maybe. (There was some sort of an at&t deal, i dunno, doesn't matter) But the point is that was then, we now live in a different world. Apple gave invented the smartphone market as we know it. Nowadays market is mature - it's nearly impossible to disrupt it.
  - gcb0 13y ago
    apple is for a long time ridding the frivolous upgrade market. I bet if it wasn't so easy to sell your phone on the grey market (for it to be consumed on the grey market overseas) nobody would be justifying upgrading to the latest number or "s" every year. That is a fragile market as the market nokia had before. which everyone assumes to be "nearly impossible to disrupt" as you put it.
hoi 13y ago
Article is fine but misses a few salient points. Appstores did exist, Docomo created the first appstore and any phones that were released by the carrier had to comply to Docomo's requirements. Nokia created an appstore with N-Gage, it didn't work and created a carrier backlash. What Apple did was to stealth in their app store. It was all due to a strategic mistake by AT&T. Sure the Apple was a great device, but remember, the first version was 2G with a crappy camera and an amazing UI/UX and already seen as obsolete in developed 3G markets like Japan (I was working at Nokia in Japan at the time). AT&T's mistake? Unlike any previous carrier or vendor relationship, AT&T ceded control of software updates to Apple. Apple could update the phone any way they wanted. They already had enough market power in the US that would prevent carrier boycott. At the time, all the carriers were trying to copy Docomo and push out their own appstores, and this decision by AT&T killed it. In terms of smartphones being a commodity, it already is, anything that sells int he hundreds of millions is effectively commoditized, that doesn't prevent new players from coming in to try and disrupt the market. This is probably the third disruption in mobile phones, from dumbphones -> feature/early smartphones -> current smartphones, however it may be 'too soon' as each cycle has been around for about 10 years each.
- collyw 13y ago
  I always considered App stores the same as Linux repositories with a payment option.
headgasket 13y ago
I disagree. Apple is in a serious lull innovation wise. Google has won the eyeballs of the majority, and their ad business is not an innovation driver. MS is stuck in a deadly dance trying to isolate developers from themselves and/or direct hardware access with their closed source Apis and CLR. I think firefoxos has a serious chance of pulling a ... Er... Firefox circa 2002 if the threat does not force the hand of their financial supporters.(google) Thanks to google, there is a ref platform now, it's mostly a software problem; necessity is the mother of invention. With apple blocking anything remotely menacing off their app store(coinbase? Seriously? Who does that?) and android being a boring spying endpoint, cool hardware like the nexus 5 could get an new skin with a cool cloudphone thingamajigger.
gwu78 13y ago
I don't want a "smartphone". I want a handheld computer, the size of a "smartphone", with a cool form factor like a "smartphone". But, it needs to have Ethernet ports, USB ports, SD card slots, CF card slot, etc. An RS232 serial port would be nice too. I want versatility: inputs and outputs. I do not need to connect to any cellular networks. I do not want a closed source baseband operating system, SIM cards, etc. I want an open source bootloader, like U-boot. And I don't want to be forced to run Linux. It has to run BSD, too. So, I don't need to build a "smartphone". I only need to build a handheld computer.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I want a handheld terminal for a belt-mounted computer. A belt can easily support quite a bit more battery, for hard core computation, longer-range transmitting, and GPS.
  - ewzimm 13y ago
    A belt with integrated batteries throughout and a micro USB cable would be so useful, and the batteries could easily be integrated fashionably. I don't know why anyone doesn't make that. You could charge your phone in your pocket
- collyw 13y ago
  Rasberry Pi sounds pretty like what you are describing. Just doesn't come with a display as far as I can tell.
  - gwu78 13y ago
    Perhaps we eventually see generic Retina displays with open standards ports.
- pjc50 13y ago
  Ethernet port on its own is thicker than most smartphones. Having said that, I had almost all of those things you mention on my Toshiba Libretto back in 1998. Wouldn't fit in a trouser pocket but would fit in my coat's inside pocket.
busterbooth 13y ago
Let's just build a Wine-like linux variant that can run ios apps
hankcharles 13y ago
The one possible exception to the rule outlined in this piece is probably Xiaomi. They have successfully cornered a really meaningful market, specifically middle class Chinese that is responsible for a big push in revenue. I believe their phones currently run on Android, but with a very strong revenue stream and probably government support where they need it, in time I wouldn't be surprised if they round out their own platform.
enscr 13y ago
I agree you can't just build a smartphone. Heck, even building a dumb phone from scratch is a monumental task, let alone being successful with it. What was Apple thinking... Oh wait, they redefined the rules of the game. So that's what you do to shut up the naysayers.
hooctawnfonix 13y ago
This is an interesting perspective but it also fails to imagine a shift in paradigm. The way I see it and the way the article acknowledges it to some extent, you can't build a new smartphone with the existing paradigm where carriers have control. What happens if the communication infrastructure that they control gets disrupted is anybody's guess. But maybe by then what we call a smartphone isn't called a smartphone anymore...
zmmmmm 13y ago
Seems to me it's easier than ever before to build a "smartphone": Android has everything you need and is open to everyone. What's hard is to build a smart phone operating system. And in some ways (not all!) that's a good thing - you need a pretty big justification to reinvent a giant wheel. If you have one, great. If not, do your innovation on top of Android.
- qznc 13y ago
  Agreed. I am still waiting for the Facebook Phone. They already have a fully customized Android Home Screen. The biggest problem is probably that Facebook has no experience in selling physical products. Anybody could slap together an Android customization. On the other hand, what is the point? If you do not profit from selling the hardware (like Samsung) or the software (like Google), then why sell a smartphone? Maybe Salesforce could sell enterprise smartphones bundled with their software.
jahagirdar 13y ago
I disagree with the article. I am still waiting for the device which can be a complete replacement for my laptop. That means * Ability to "dock" to get a keyboard+mouse+monitor Interface. * True multi-tasking (The music should not stop just because I switched apps) * A full fledged command line terminal (xterm). * support for ssh, Perl, python, ruby, C/C++ etc. This device may not start out as a phone, May be it will be a raspberry type hobby device with a computer on chip running linux which will "grow" to acquire a pluggable phone module, a touch screen and a docking station. Still waiting for it.
- Andrex 13y ago
  The latter three are covered by Android, and the first was covered by the Motorola Atrix (which bombed) and the upcoming Ubuntu phone.
- dharma1 13y ago
  check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install The docking functionality is still in the works, will land in a future release of Ubuntu. Eventually the desktop OS and the touch OS will become the same Ubuntu.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
From the article: > Small to medium businesses will use apps on standard devices like iPads I used to get lunch at a Specialty's sandwich place in SF. You could place your order at the counter (to a human, who would mess it up) or use their iPad app at the self-service counter (this got the order right every time). The iPad app worked well, but it was a source of bemusement to me that the self-service counter was just a counter with a row of iPads mounted on it. I once hit the home button on one, to see what would happen, and was taken to the home screen. I feel like for business use you might want more of an ability to lock the device down.
- tajddin 13y ago
  You can lock down iPads via the Ease of Access feature. Apple uses it to lockdown iPads in their stores, for example. The restaurant didn't have them properly configured, although it is an oddly termed feature in the settings.
- wingerlang 13y ago
  A sushi place* I went to had an iPad on each table with an app that let you order stuff to the table, very handy I must say. *Sakae sushi in Beraya Times Square, Kuala Lumpur.
erikb 13y ago
I believe that smartphones are actually a slice of the embedded systems development market, the same as desktop computers. They are probably the most profitable slice, but that is exactly why the biggest players in the market pay top budget to compete about the shares. Because of that understanding of mine, I think you don't really get into the "smartphone market" as a start-up, but you get into the embedded systems market. And that is quite possible. You just need to find a slice of the market that is not so highly competed in and you can enter there, e.g., producing small Linux computers for public transportation companies with different, very specific tasks, or building remote controls for model airplanes/quadrocopters. There you get all the know-how of building your own computers, working on your own operating system, finding suppliers and when you are really, really good, you might even come up with a platform of some sort that you can get other developers on to make Apps for, just in the business-to-business area instead of the tough endcustomer market.
tehwalrus 13y ago
> Carriers request features, change specs, and pick winners. I'm not sure this is true outside of America, where we have less of a carrier mono/duopoly. Certainly here in the UK - carriers are required to unlock phones if you ask nicely, >6 months after purchase, and most smartphones can be bought unlocked (I've bought my last 3 smartphones this way.)

237 points by joshmarinacci 13y ago

I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant. I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it. We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee. But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention. Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae. I imagine it was much the same in Finland too. The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?

bobbles 13y ago
Well they do have that "Special Projects" division.. I'm sure they'll be cooking up something nice for 2014.. at least I hope so
- mortenjorck 13y ago
  Yours is not an uncommon sentiment, but it’s not really a fair picture: Observers often see the Apple of the past decade as releasing a category-definer every few years (iPod, iPhone, iPad), and awaiting the next one (iWatch! iScreen!). Really, though, Apple's blockbusters of the 2000s are best seen as one continuous thing: the iPod paved the way for well-designed, vertically-integrated mobile devices (that it was a music player is almost incidental) and the iPhone and iPad are really bookends of a single smart device revolution. Seen this way, Apple has had two world-changing category definers in its history, the Mac and the iOS device. That’s one every 24 years, if we count to the midpoint between the iPhone and iPad introductions. Will they do it again? Maybe, but I wouldn’t expect it to be just around the corner.
  - seiji 13y ago
    Huh whatnow? The original iPod (and modern iPods minus the Touch) don't run iOS at all. The iPod gave Apple the time to stall until they could build what Steve wanted to make in 1999, but the world didn't have the capacity to create yet. These days, Apple is the forefront of both industrial design and fabrication capacity. They aren't in the past—they are in the present and they are moving the world along with them, not waiting for it to catch up to them anymore.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Your parent is grouping iPod/iPhone/iPad. Yes, the original iPod didn't run iOS, but he's just using it as a moniker. We could call them iDevices if that pleases you more. The iPod wasn't just an infusion of cash to keep the company alive, to me it really looks like the start of the whole mobile line that today runs iOS.
    - CmonDev 13y ago
      "they are moving the world along with them" You tried iOS 7, didn't you? I sure hope they are not using "Apple Maps" to move themselves and the world.
      - hrrsn 13y ago
        Apple Maps has come a long way since the iOS 6 launch. Google Maps is still undoubtedly better, but Apple have been working hard on it. iOS 7 is not bad. People are still afraid of change (look at what they said about the original iPhone, now look where we are) but ultimately it was in need of a refresh.
        CmonDev 13y ago
        But they are not "moving the world" in any way except for hardware. iOS 7 is derivative.
        hrrsn 13y ago
- rubinelli 13y ago
  It depends on whether upper management gives special projects the importance they need or not. Almost every large company has a research division, but in most, it is the playground where they keep the guys that are too smart and competent to fire, but that have ideas too radical for main divisions' heads to accept.
girvo 13y ago
UIQ3 was amazing, and my M600i had the greatest keyboard on any phone ever. Thanks for making the OS for one of my favourite smartphones :)4
- Blara 13y ago
  I miss that keyboard, I really do prefer physical keyboards to software ones.
agumonkey 13y ago
I really thought phone manufacturers at the time where aiming for better Windows Mobile phone, and had nothing like the iPhone in mind or at least nothing more than a napkin corner with a 'moon' tag attached to it because some R&D/Designer broke someone's b*lls enough to get a little attention.
downer93 13y ago
design ascetic The words are supposed to be "design aesthetic".
- mcv 13y ago
  Maybe they're going for something extremely minimalistic.
deleted 13y ago
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Aqwis 13y ago

This guy is missing the fact that in a lot of European countries, and elsewhere in the world, carriers mean squat. The carrier is often simply the provider of the SIM card you put in the phone, so carrier support is in no way needed for a phone to succeed. You don't need to be successful in the US to be successful.

girvo 13y ago
All these articles do. It's annoying.
- paulftw 13y ago
  Every european country has own laws, culture and language. They are individual markets, and each market is too small to break even after all the R&D and hardware costs.
  - EdwardDiego 13y ago
    > Every european country has own laws, culture and language. You're completely disregarding the EEC and European Parliament. As an aside on language, while on the train to Brussels from Köln, I was chatting with some Young Greens who were en route to a pan-European Green conference. One was from Serbia, one from Germany and one from France, and we were all speaking in English, it tends to function as a lingua franca, so language has never been a barrier for me yet. The multilingual capacity of Europeans really puts me to shame, my German barely goes past "I would like a beer" and "I would like a coffee". But yes, they have different languages, so i18n is a thing you have to pay attention to, and yes, they have different cultures and markets, so how you sell and engage people can differ. But you can recruit a small cadre of local sales experts to do your sales - a sister company of ours develops in the Czech Republic and sells in Poland, Romania and Turkey. The European market is hardly as balkanized as you make out. If what you say was true, then iPhones would have presumably never impacted in Europe - after all, every european country has own laws, culture and language.
    - paulftw 13y ago

natural219 13y ago

Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.

sologrrl 13y ago
I guess the point is that it will become like the PC desktop ecosystem. There are new OSes all the time, but which OS broke the 4% mark in the last 20 years? Perhaps OS X, but Mac sales are dropping. The PC market is being disrupted not by another PC but by a change in paradigm to mobile. The mobile market is fast approaching a place where it takes risking billions just to start competing.
gbvb 13y ago
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business. So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
- fembot__ 13y ago
  I think you've got the tone right. Also... I hope you're right about Neural implants! I've wanted one ever since I read that MT Anderson book in JR high school (minus the dystopian homogeneity and fields of filet mignon). Maybe Amazon will debut them on 60 Minutes prior to cyber monday 2014!
  - nekopa 13y ago
    I'm sorry, but fields of filet mignon sounds great. Make it fields of bacon-wrapped filets and I would call it my own personal utopia (for as long as my heart held out)

kosei 13y ago

I think many of the author's points are valid, but I do still believe that companies like Blackberry and Nokia can build Android or Windows Mobile phones successfully, as they won't have to deal with a) user inertia from changing to a new OS or b) developing entirely new UI and operating systems. As far as I can tell, there won't really be any new carriers or any new operating systems, but that doesn't preclude competition in the hardware space.

hrrsn 13y ago
I hope Blackberry and Nokia can produce some decent phones in the future. Android has come a long way, but Windows Phone is still pretty awful (more importantly, Nokia are never going to produce an Android with Microsoft as an owner). I used a HTC G1 and Motorola Milestone (1.6 and 2.something) as well as a Galaxy S3 (on 4.something) - back at 1.6 it was nothing special, the S3 on 4.x was hugely improved and a joy to use. If I wasn't so heavily vested in iOS it would be a worthy contender. Windows Phone on the other hand I can't say so much for. Most of the people I've spoken to that are non tech-literate don't have favourable experiences. A family member (electrician by trade) had a high-end Nokia Lumia for a year and didn't have a whole lot to say about it, until he took it in for repair and they gave him an iPhone 4S. He couldn't stop talking about how much better he found it to use, and thus as soon as they demanded it back he switched to an iPhone. Until these manufactures delight the user in the same way that the iPhone does, or differentiate themselves enough, there's little hope.

avmich 13y ago

With a bit of tongue-in-cheek... 1. Data networks It's an open question of using WiFi as the universal carrier - we're not at that point yet; but it's not a question of using existing GSM networks. It's going to be hard for carriers to deny, after some point, minutes to paying customers. 2. The cost of entry - OS, cloud store, apps This happened time and again. Remember when Linux has appeared on the stage? Seen porting projects, like Wine, PetrOS, Mono? Realize that Android was built not from scratch, at least concerning interfaces? Second time is almost always cheaper - and in our times, by a wide margin. 3. Access to hardware components - need good hardware... No. I don't care much if the phone is 5 mm or 2 mm thick, 100 g or 250 g heavy - just like a word processor user doesn't care if letter appears on the screen in 10 ms or 90 ms after he hit the keyboard. At some point it becomes irrelevant, and competition shifts elsewhere. See Firefox phone as another example. 4. Retreat to the low end Yes, you see it. The fact that the product is a commodity doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 5. A disruptive UI It was surely a pain to switch from sleeky Nokia UI to strange future of IPhone, no? How about Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child project, which was done anew? 6. Be realistic? I certainly see a point in what you're saying; but don't you see the power of fashion - ones all important things are by default? As soon as changes become unimportant, returns dwindling and defaults good enough, attention goes to other things - a similar thing happened in automotive world, where a lot of customers buy not the functionality, but trendiness.

Aloha 13y ago
femtocells (wifi size cells) are virtually never cost effective, not enough density to support the infrastructure. a combination Microcells and picocells, however might be doable, you use mesh networking to tie the picocells to to each other, and back to the microcell, ideally its a slow speed low power network, around 900 mhz, providing a access method for text messaging, and push notifications (sub 100kbps, think of it as a faster control channel), Data could be mesh even between handsets, passing (some) data thru to the nearest base. A higher speed network used for more intensive data use situations that goes directly to the nearest micro or picocell, For voice calls or in rural areas, you could default to the regular BTS.
walshemj 13y ago
wifi is not designed or has the bandwidth to support the density of devices that the mobile phone network needs

jamestomasino 13y ago

There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful. A new phone with a bare-bones linux-like OS designed to piggy-back on existing networks may have a small place in the market, and others like Jolla that seek to grow toward something big may pick up fractions of a percent as well. Even surviving a decade with a low, but consistent, share is a success (e.g., Apple in the 80s). Finally, there's the novelty and growth of industry to consider. The current big players in the smartphone market are already scrambling to address the emerging wearable revolution. The "internet of things" is right on the horizon as well and there's no telling where the chips may land. To be fair, the author did mention innovation as a key to potential success. We should consider the grander implications of a constantly evolving business model and offering in that sentiment, though. It's not just a matter of making a neat new feature, but of the entire game changing every 5 years. While the author makes plenty of good and valid points, I don't think the outlook need be so bleak.

deleted 13y ago
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TheLegace 13y ago
Exactly rather than focusing why a smartphone can't succeed, I'd like to see how and why a phone can succeed. If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are not addressed by market players today, and the overlap between them can wedge a dent in the market. Google has serious weakness in hardware, and it looks like they will never get over that hump. Can you honestly expect them to optimize performance and battery life, if they can't even make their own devices. Niches like: Open-Source/Flexible development environment Sustainability Emerging Markets Actual Innovation Disruptive technologies and emerging markets shouldn't be counted out either. Nor should finding ways to monetize open-source. People, developers especially are increasingly looking for open platforms/devices, that market is NEVER going to get smaller only bigger. Imagine actually being able to use Javascript or Python or Clojure for your apps, or scripts. Will you actually discount a platform where you can program without managing a thousand configuration files or worry about the gatekeepers(Google/Apple). See these problems aren't necessarily problems in Linux(not to say there aren't other drawbacks). The great(maybe not?) thing about innovation is that if your to busy looking at the technology today your going to completely miss out what is coming next. - At least it's great if your competing. I can't help thinking about what Jobs says, "Experts" are clueless. >Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. [1] [1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned... People seriously underestimate the power of a great product. Products that don't rely on massive feature lists that mean nothing a day after buying your device. I regret falling into this trap and wasting precious time instead of thinking about creating a better product experience. But again this is easier said than done.

namenotrequired 13y ago

* A few new Android manufacturers may join the game* For anyone interested, Fairphone are doing so pretty successfully right now. http://fairphone.com/ http://fairphone.com/

CanSpice 13y ago
Fairphone's website says they've sold 25,000, and have another 8200 on the way. Apple sold over 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c models in the first weekend they were for sale. While it's impressive that an independent group is putting out a phone, their sales are orders of magnitude away from what Apple puts out in a single weekend. Sure, they're "joining the game", but they're not in the same league.
- samspenc 13y ago
  I think its impressive, nonetheless. I do wonder what prices they were able to get components when they sold a "mere" 25,000 though.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  This comparison is just silly. Look (guess) at Apple's development budget for the iPhone. Look at Fairphone's (or again, just guess). Look at the size of Apple. Look at the size of the Fairphone team at the Waag Society. I don't think I need to say anything else. This is majorly impressive.
  - namenotrequired 13y ago
    Of course, you're both right - it's very little compared to the market leaders, but for a new player it's definitely impressive. Especially considering they were all sold before they were even made.
    - mcv 13y ago
      The power of crowdfunding! That is really the major game changer that hasn't been taken into account yet.

contingencies 13y ago

This guy is so ex-Nokia, it's sad. He rates the latest Maemo/whatever as a higher chance of market presence than Firefox OS. OK, Nordsman... we understand you are grieving for your lost mobile device business... but you can do it in private. Linux, via Android, commodified smartphone platforms by giving away the OS and thus commodifying the position of mobile device hardware manufacturers. This was coming anyway, but was a brilliantly timed commercial play by Google to head off Apple's strength in devices. Google's allies were the carriers, who were unhappy with Apple owning (via signup-time credit card) who they perceived as their customers. FirefoxOS and that new Jolla thing the Nords are working on basically use exactly the same hardware and OS platform (ie. Linux). There's no huge investment there, the investment is in higher layers of the software stack, and in FirefoxOS' case in marketing to different segments (the developing world, which still has 'growth', and necessitates less competitive component acquisition for manufacturing batches). To say a small team can't do something similar is plain wrong. I'd say the effort required is similar to launching a new Linux distribution. As long as there is a niche you can cater to, there is no reason it won't survive and thrive. CyanogenMod is only the beginning: cross-pollination is a good thing. Start with preferably https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/ https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/ (or otherwise http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html) and begin thy mission to conquer portable computing! (Edit: Added content after the initial paragraph after it was downvoted. Fair enough, it was a bit snarky :)

davb 13y ago
First paragraph snark aside, I agree. To say that any tech market is completely closed to new entrants seems slightly ridiculous. Sure, the barriers to entry have increased - if you're chasing mass-market appeal, a strong app platform is as important as excellent hardware. However there will always be some niche to serve or an opportunity to tackle bloated or less open, established competitors. I think Josh's option is very biased and colored by operating in a certain type of environment. Not that it's any less valuable or valid than any other, but I disagree with him.
sharpneli 13y ago
The approach by Jolla and FirefoxOS guys is actually quite brilliant. How to get into markets where it's relatively cheap to make a new android phone but anything else requires very expensive contracts with the manufacturers? Solution: Just use the android drivers directly. In my Jolla phone there is the good 'ol android /system/lib/. As an example the libGLESv2.so (the OpenGL ES 2.0 library) in /usr/lib/ simply opens the counterpart in /system/lib with android_dlsym and calls the equivalent functions (and in case of floating point arguments moves them to int registers). And what's the overhead of this? 9 instructions and 2 loads (for the function pointer). So it's essentially completely free. Same approach applies to rest of the system. They just take the core of the android and run on top of that with just the bionic -> glibc layer on top. Brilliant. The actual lib can be found at: https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris That means they can basically just walk to some SOC vendor (like they did to Qualcomm) and say "I want to buy a mid range Android SOC" and they have everything ready.

Pxtl 13y ago

> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch. It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.

mason55 13y ago
> Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage. Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price. If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
- patmcc 13y ago
  >>they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price. Or they just need to accept a lower gross margin than the ~50% Apple gets.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Samsung made a line called Galaxy Player. The cheapest one was $150 and sported a 3.6in 480x340 pixel screen, at a time when you could get an iPod Touch for $200. There expensive one, the Galaxy Player 5, cost more than Apple's offering. And they all ran Android 2.3 Similarly, there was Archos. They made a whole family of Android player devices at the 2.3 era, and where infamously buggy. Sony made the Walkman Z as a phoneless counterpart to the Xperia Z. It was $250. Supposedly a fantastic device, but that's not really undercutting Apple very well when Apple was selling iPod 4 devices for less. I mean, Black Friday doorcrashers this year were iPod 4 at $130. I can't think of any android counterpart I'd want at that price. Maybe Motorola can figure out a phoneless Moto G with the right nudge from Google. A big problem is also marketing - these companies are only now figuring out how to market their handheld devices in the carrier-controlled countries since up until then they just handed the devices off to carriers and maybe put up a few ads. Meanwhile, Apples had their own stores. Samsung could stop shoving money into ads and could start putting together coherent store-displays of their non-carrier product line. Sony should revive their store-brand too - they were Apple back when Apple made beige boxes. Sony could be Apple again - they've stopped the race to the bottom and seem to be investing in quality. I'd love to see Sony put together a coherent adversary for Apple using the Android/Win8 ecosystems. They even have the kind of market breadth and to put together a counter to the iTunes/App Store with their gaming and media holdings.

wdewind 13y ago

Please, especially if you are going to write a blog about design, do NOT use an animating logo that sticks with the page as you scroll. It makes it impossible to read the content without being constantly distracted.

mmahemoff 13y ago

"I owned a string of PalmOS devices during this period. Their ‘app store’ was literally boxes of software in a store which you had to install from your computer. No different than 1980s PCs." That's not really true. Mobile devices around that time were designed as peripherals of the PC, so you could download apps to PC and install them by cable-syncing. Palm apps were just .PRC files. It really wasn't too complicated and was a far sight from buying shrink-wrapped software in a physical store. It's just a shame that Palm, MS, and other platforms left this stuff to third-party websites instead of making it a more seamless experience for users and a more profitable one for them.

csixty4 13y ago
There still were shrink-wrapped PDA apps available in stores, though, which is probably how a lot of people acquired them. I never owned a PDA back then, but I'm assuming they were just the same files with a shiny installer.
r00fus 13y ago
I'd say that downloading software on my original iPhone was probably the 2nd most OMG moment of owning the device (the first being the capacitive IPS display that made the icons seem painted-on). Seeing an app download over a 2G cell connection and be usable in 2 minutes - that was amazing. No clickwrap installer, no license keys, no entering payment details. It foretold the doom of non-AppStore software sales in a wonderful zen moment.
bdarnell 13y ago
There were some early (third-party) online app stores too - sites that would handle payment processing and host your .prc files for you (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20020124152252/http://www.palmgear.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020124152252/http://www.palmge...).

justin66 13y ago

Mr. Ondesign (can I call you Josh?), your website sure does use a lot of CPU when it's in the foreground. What is the deal there exactly?

lotyrin 13y ago
Animated spinning ... things... rectangles? Around the planet logo. Rendered into a canvas without any throttling.
- joshmarinacci 13y ago
  Hmm. I could have sworn I was using requestAnimationFrame.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    Maybe. If you are, then you're doing so at 60fps at least, when this scene seems like it'd be fine slower than that.

Aloha 13y ago

This should be called "Why You Can't Build a Smartphone Ecosystem" Building the phone itself is easier, license the software from google, develop some cool hardware, build and sell it. Admittedly, selling it is probably the hardest part, hard to innovate on features, you can innovate in packaging, price, assembly place, any number of other things. If you have a big enough bucket of money, you could build a new ecosystem, it wont be easy though. Even without the bucket of money you could build a new ecosystem - but you might only capture 2-5% of the market.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
Another far-out option is building a solution not dependent on the carriers, which have already captured the IP space. There is no more internet, it's all just "telecom" now. That's the first mistake people make when starting an "internet" business. Business is reliant on communication and your communication is reliant on telecom. It's pretty much the same landscape as before the internet existed.

joshmarinacci 13y ago

I'm the original author. You can probably guess this from the blog, but smartphones don't interest me anymore. I loved my time at Palm, but I'm working on new things now. Stuff that needs good innovation right now: * Internet of Things, esp. on the usability side. * 3D printing. making it more useful and accessible. * Changing how we teach math and science. I can't stress this enough. * Improving programming. We still do it like it's the 1970s.

collyw 13y ago
Did they not do it on punch cards in the 70's? I think things have improved in the ten years or so I have been in the industry. Java was the hot language in those days, because you could write it once and run it anywhere.

fingerprinter 13y ago

cough Ubuntu cough In all seriousness, if he means smartphone from a hardware perspective, I might actually agree. The startup costs there are crazy high. But, if he means software, no. Ubuntu is doing it and doing it very, very well. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. All Android using hardware manufacturers are crazy to continue with Android now that Google owns Motorola. Look at the Moto X. Nothing can compete with it and no one will be able to in the future. Samsung and the rest should very actively be looking to remove Android from their handsets as quickly as possible. Ubuntu is by far the best choice.

joshmarinacci 13y ago
Ubuntu is doing it well? How many phones have they sold? What is their installed base? What % of marketshare?
- colinbartlett 13y ago
  Somewhere around 0.0M units with an approximate 0.0% marketshare.
- fingerprinter 13y ago
  It's this type of comment that really disappoints me about HN these days. Ubuntu just released V1 of their phone in October. Anyone who knows phone manufacturers and carriers knows how long they soak something in their labs. Ubuntu has all the pieces in place to be an awesome option. Plus, they have their carrier advisory group with some great names showing their is some carrier interest. Ubuntu has a company behind it and an owner who seems to want to compete in this market and has very deep pockets. Ubuntu itself has pedigree and history as well as working with hardware manufacturers and chip companies. I mean, if your only metric of what is possible based on what is current numbers, Android would never had made it out of the gate, or should have folded after the Nexus One or even their next phone (can't remember the name), both of which were TERRIBLE and sold poorly.
  - ac29 13y ago
    Canonical released a phone in October? I think you're mistaken.

fembot__ 13y ago

I began reading his article hoping to have him talk a little bit more about smartphones in emerging markets, but he barely touched on it. Africa has arguably the fastest growing middle class in the world right now. They're also poised to make a cultural leap far greater than that of China's in the 90s. I read that 60% of Africans will have smartphones in 2019. The continent is already using smart technology in innovative/cost saving ways (i.e. sending funds via sms). It seems to me that if I am looking to join the smartphone industry, I make myself indispensable to Africa. I think Africans are less likely to care for features like Siri or luxury components. My thought is that developers for devices in that part of the world will have the freedom to think outside the box--what will a smart phone look like on a continent with minimal financial resources, but avid interest in quick data and communication? What do people want from their phone when they don't have necessarily have a computer or strong infrastructure?

mathattack 13y ago

I think the point of carrier relevance is importance. Somehow Apple still seems to capture much of the volume. I have to believe there is still room for disruption at the bottom of the market. Someone could devise a very cheap way to just deliver texts. Or a safe simple network for kids, that they would somehow stick with. Just when firms seem most invincible, they are also most at risk.

delicious 13y ago

I once read a lovely article online (which I've never been able to find again, I think it was by a founder of tripod?), recounting the early days of search engines. He was thinking of starting one, but the market was already filled... then came another search engine, and now there really was no room for another one... this iterated over several engines til he finally got to google. And added: now it's really filled... Of course, today google still rules, yet they act incredibly threatened by facebook; and niche engines like duckduckgo are making inroads. Is this true for smartphones? All we can really say is that he (and I) can't think of a way to enter... but that doesn't mean there is no way. Just as I wouldn’t suggest anyone build a new line of PCs or cars Like electric cars...

z3bra 13y ago

Microsoft loves this kind of guy!!

biftek 13y ago

I've been thinking this for a while, but I have a feeling there is a decently large market (at least enough to sustain a small company and team) for really nice "dumb" phones. No data; just text, and talk (and in my vision a really nice camera) with the ability to sync/backup contacts etc.

swframe 13y ago

My bet is a device like google glasses (or contact lens) with a sleek headset that has mind controllable sensors. I don't want to type, or talk to control it. I just think of calling my friend and the phones dials, and I see her image. I am willing to carry the computing unit in my pocket so the glasses can remain light. I bet that it is 5 years away. If it is like the cellphone, it won't be google that builds it because there is just too much technology that is not yet ready/affordable.

ThinkBeat 13y ago

I understand where the author is coming from but I disagree completely. Imagine trying to build a smartphone 15 years ago, that would be really hard. You need a decent screen you need a good cpu etc. All of that is off the shelf now. Anyone can buy it and its cheap. (esp in volume) In a market in China (I dont remember the name) there are vendors upon vendors who sell all sorts of electrical parts, gadgets etc. You can literally walk down the isles and pick the parts you want in your new smartphone. So hardware wise, now is a good time. Sure you wont get as polished as the big players right away, but prototypes or a limited set sure. Now software. There is quite a bit of software that will run on the arm board. With all the hacking on the android platform (sadly a lot more than on the Windows or Apples phones), you can (if you want) at least create a very customized different Android based OS if you want. (would make updates a bitch). But you can also get some version of linux working and I am sure some other strange os. But there has never been a time when it was easier to get some dev boards, and start writing the next mobile OS. Its something you can get started on at home now for less than $1000. As far as the cloud services and integration that has never been nearly as easy. We have all sorts of providers with stable and "open" APIs. Providers like MS azure provides a full stack. Database, Data storage, device sync, messaging, computation etc. and they are not the only ones. I cant think of how much building and setting up all that cloud stuff would have cost in itself. Its out there now, and if you are tesing and writing your app, or have it deployed with low values its very cheap. Sure you wont have your own Music store right away (but licensing is the biggest issue there) but you can piggy back Amazon mp3. So we have good access to cheap hardware. We have development tools, boards and compilers. We have excellent possibilities cloud sync, integration, etc. We have open source operating systems we can hack at, learn from and understand how things work. As others have pointed out the future is probably pure data phones. That is a great market to attack right now. Forget the 1984 "phone" part and the nobody really uses anymore SMS.

gnaffle 13y ago
But that's the thing though, companies like Apple pretty much ignore the whole "phone" and SMS thing, Apple has even shot the operators in the back with iMessage. You're right that it's easy to make a phone nowadays with off the shelf components, like the article mentions that's exactly what the chinese/asian OEMS are doing now. The question is whether you will be able to make something that can compete with Apple / Google / Samsung. Even HTC is having a hard time doing that with some pretty decent phones.

untog 13y ago

Curious that the article doesn't mention the word "patents" once. That's what stops you from even starting to build a Smartphone of your own - you'd violate dozens of patents and be sued into oblivion. The only reason manufacturers are able to do it now is because they all have portfolios of their own and are in a state of cold war with everyone else.

gnaffle 13y ago
Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  I work in the software industry and have never once worried or even thought about patents in the things I work on. It really depends on what field you work in.
  - Kliment 13y ago
    This is only a valid strategy until you have enough money/exposure. Then you get targeted by asshead extortionists and the law is on their side. After the first lawsuit, you will never "never once worry" again.
  - bottled_poe 13y ago
    Well that and whether you are making millions from software sales.
- e12e 13y ago
  "Most things"? Haven't we just learned that if you make a smart phone that looks like a smart phone (rounded rectangle, button below screen) you can (and will) be sued? I suppose the fact that stuff like that is the area where big legal battles are fought, does imply that a lot of the "hard" patents (radio spectrum/coding, noise cancellation, audio encoding etc) are indeed covered by FRAND patents, though. It still seems to be a bit of a leap to go from there to saying that you'd not run into patents when making a smart phone?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Now that it is officially not possible I am sure it will happen :-) I agree that it would be exceptionally hard to build a smartphone to the same design formula of the iPhone or Android, as an exemplar we have Microsoft who as spent billions on it and has yet to succeed. However, you might have said the same thing before Apple entered into the game and you would have been right. Had Apple tried to build a Blackberry or Nokia equivalent slab phone they would have had a hard slog. They went back to first principles, imagined a new kind of "phone" and rolled it out. So the next smartphone isn't going to look like an iPhone or a Galaxy S4, but it might look like Google glass, or like a pebble watch an earphone and a wallet sized thing you carry in your backpack. Or a communicator badge you clip on your chest. But agree it won't be a clone of the iPhone.

moron4hire 13y ago

I agree with the basic premise that a typical hardware company is not ever going to have the management style necessary to beat the iPhone or Android. But I don't agree that the current horses in the race are invincible. Who is to say that cellphone networks will even be relevant in 10 years? What if city-wide, state-wide, country-wide WiFi were to be developed? Such a public works project would blow the market completely open. And in emerging markets, mesh-WiFi might be the only way to get data to everyone.

gcb0 13y ago

The article is kinda paradoxal... > the iphone changed the game > no device can enter the market without carrier help. The iphone was successful exactly because it sold to rich people before, with no carrier help. in fact, in the beginning the carriers would throw anything at you to move you from an iphone. In fact, the reason you have to pay a "smarphone fee" until recently was because AT&T greedily charged a mandatory $30 extra for "iphone data" if you ever wanted a subsided iphone.

paulftw 13y ago
iphone started without carrier support, maybe. (There was some sort of an at&t deal, i dunno, doesn't matter) But the point is that was then, we now live in a different world. Apple gave invented the smartphone market as we know it. Nowadays market is mature - it's nearly impossible to disrupt it.
- gcb0 13y ago
  apple is for a long time ridding the frivolous upgrade market. I bet if it wasn't so easy to sell your phone on the grey market (for it to be consumed on the grey market overseas) nobody would be justifying upgrading to the latest number or "s" every year. That is a fragile market as the market nokia had before. which everyone assumes to be "nearly impossible to disrupt" as you put it.

hoi 13y ago

Article is fine but misses a few salient points. Appstores did exist, Docomo created the first appstore and any phones that were released by the carrier had to comply to Docomo's requirements. Nokia created an appstore with N-Gage, it didn't work and created a carrier backlash. What Apple did was to stealth in their app store. It was all due to a strategic mistake by AT&T. Sure the Apple was a great device, but remember, the first version was 2G with a crappy camera and an amazing UI/UX and already seen as obsolete in developed 3G markets like Japan (I was working at Nokia in Japan at the time). AT&T's mistake? Unlike any previous carrier or vendor relationship, AT&T ceded control of software updates to Apple. Apple could update the phone any way they wanted. They already had enough market power in the US that would prevent carrier boycott. At the time, all the carriers were trying to copy Docomo and push out their own appstores, and this decision by AT&T killed it. In terms of smartphones being a commodity, it already is, anything that sells int he hundreds of millions is effectively commoditized, that doesn't prevent new players from coming in to try and disrupt the market. This is probably the third disruption in mobile phones, from dumbphones -> feature/early smartphones -> current smartphones, however it may be 'too soon' as each cycle has been around for about 10 years each.

collyw 13y ago
I always considered App stores the same as Linux repositories with a payment option.

headgasket 13y ago

I disagree. Apple is in a serious lull innovation wise. Google has won the eyeballs of the majority, and their ad business is not an innovation driver. MS is stuck in a deadly dance trying to isolate developers from themselves and/or direct hardware access with their closed source Apis and CLR. I think firefoxos has a serious chance of pulling a ... Er... Firefox circa 2002 if the threat does not force the hand of their financial supporters.(google) Thanks to google, there is a ref platform now, it's mostly a software problem; necessity is the mother of invention. With apple blocking anything remotely menacing off their app store(coinbase? Seriously? Who does that?) and android being a boring spying endpoint, cool hardware like the nexus 5 could get an new skin with a cool cloudphone thingamajigger.

gwu78 13y ago

I don't want a "smartphone". I want a handheld computer, the size of a "smartphone", with a cool form factor like a "smartphone". But, it needs to have Ethernet ports, USB ports, SD card slots, CF card slot, etc. An RS232 serial port would be nice too. I want versatility: inputs and outputs. I do not need to connect to any cellular networks. I do not want a closed source baseband operating system, SIM cards, etc. I want an open source bootloader, like U-boot. And I don't want to be forced to run Linux. It has to run BSD, too. So, I don't need to build a "smartphone". I only need to build a handheld computer.

dllthomas 13y ago
I want a handheld terminal for a belt-mounted computer. A belt can easily support quite a bit more battery, for hard core computation, longer-range transmitting, and GPS.
- ewzimm 13y ago
  A belt with integrated batteries throughout and a micro USB cable would be so useful, and the batteries could easily be integrated fashionably. I don't know why anyone doesn't make that. You could charge your phone in your pocket
collyw 13y ago
Rasberry Pi sounds pretty like what you are describing. Just doesn't come with a display as far as I can tell.
- gwu78 13y ago
  Perhaps we eventually see generic Retina displays with open standards ports.
pjc50 13y ago
Ethernet port on its own is thicker than most smartphones. Having said that, I had almost all of those things you mention on my Toshiba Libretto back in 1998. Wouldn't fit in a trouser pocket but would fit in my coat's inside pocket.

busterbooth 13y ago

Let's just build a Wine-like linux variant that can run ios apps

hankcharles 13y ago

The one possible exception to the rule outlined in this piece is probably Xiaomi. They have successfully cornered a really meaningful market, specifically middle class Chinese that is responsible for a big push in revenue. I believe their phones currently run on Android, but with a very strong revenue stream and probably government support where they need it, in time I wouldn't be surprised if they round out their own platform.

enscr 13y ago

I agree you can't just build a smartphone. Heck, even building a dumb phone from scratch is a monumental task, let alone being successful with it. What was Apple thinking... Oh wait, they redefined the rules of the game. So that's what you do to shut up the naysayers.

hooctawnfonix 13y ago

This is an interesting perspective but it also fails to imagine a shift in paradigm. The way I see it and the way the article acknowledges it to some extent, you can't build a new smartphone with the existing paradigm where carriers have control. What happens if the communication infrastructure that they control gets disrupted is anybody's guess. But maybe by then what we call a smartphone isn't called a smartphone anymore...

zmmmmm 13y ago

Seems to me it's easier than ever before to build a "smartphone": Android has everything you need and is open to everyone. What's hard is to build a smart phone operating system. And in some ways (not all!) that's a good thing - you need a pretty big justification to reinvent a giant wheel. If you have one, great. If not, do your innovation on top of Android.

qznc 13y ago
Agreed. I am still waiting for the Facebook Phone. They already have a fully customized Android Home Screen. The biggest problem is probably that Facebook has no experience in selling physical products. Anybody could slap together an Android customization. On the other hand, what is the point? If you do not profit from selling the hardware (like Samsung) or the software (like Google), then why sell a smartphone? Maybe Salesforce could sell enterprise smartphones bundled with their software.

jahagirdar 13y ago

I disagree with the article. I am still waiting for the device which can be a complete replacement for my laptop. That means * Ability to "dock" to get a keyboard+mouse+monitor Interface. * True multi-tasking (The music should not stop just because I switched apps) * A full fledged command line terminal (xterm). * support for ssh, Perl, python, ruby, C/C++ etc. This device may not start out as a phone, May be it will be a raspberry type hobby device with a computer on chip running linux which will "grow" to acquire a pluggable phone module, a touch screen and a docking station. Still waiting for it.

Andrex 13y ago
The latter three are covered by Android, and the first was covered by the Motorola Atrix (which bombed) and the upcoming Ubuntu phone.
dharma1 13y ago
check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install The docking functionality is still in the works, will land in a future release of Ubuntu. Eventually the desktop OS and the touch OS will become the same Ubuntu.

thaumasiotes 13y ago

From the article: > Small to medium businesses will use apps on standard devices like iPads I used to get lunch at a Specialty's sandwich place in SF. You could place your order at the counter (to a human, who would mess it up) or use their iPad app at the self-service counter (this got the order right every time). The iPad app worked well, but it was a source of bemusement to me that the self-service counter was just a counter with a row of iPads mounted on it. I once hit the home button on one, to see what would happen, and was taken to the home screen. I feel like for business use you might want more of an ability to lock the device down.

tajddin 13y ago
You can lock down iPads via the Ease of Access feature. Apple uses it to lockdown iPads in their stores, for example. The restaurant didn't have them properly configured, although it is an oddly termed feature in the settings.
wingerlang 13y ago
A sushi place* I went to had an iPad on each table with an app that let you order stuff to the table, very handy I must say. *Sakae sushi in Beraya Times Square, Kuala Lumpur.

erikb 13y ago

I believe that smartphones are actually a slice of the embedded systems development market, the same as desktop computers. They are probably the most profitable slice, but that is exactly why the biggest players in the market pay top budget to compete about the shares. Because of that understanding of mine, I think you don't really get into the "smartphone market" as a start-up, but you get into the embedded systems market. And that is quite possible. You just need to find a slice of the market that is not so highly competed in and you can enter there, e.g., producing small Linux computers for public transportation companies with different, very specific tasks, or building remote controls for model airplanes/quadrocopters. There you get all the know-how of building your own computers, working on your own operating system, finding suppliers and when you are really, really good, you might even come up with a platform of some sort that you can get other developers on to make Apps for, just in the business-to-business area instead of the tough endcustomer market.

tehwalrus 13y ago

> Carriers request features, change specs, and pick winners. I'm not sure this is true outside of America, where we have less of a carrier mono/duopoly. Certainly here in the UK - carriers are required to unlock phones if you ask nicely, >6 months after purchase, and most smartphones can be bought unlocked (I've bought my last 3 smartphones this way.)