Why Have PDAs Failed In The iPod Era? 623
mikejz84 writes "As the owner of a PocketPC PDA I am a very happy camper, with wifi internet access, Skype Voip, video playback, and of course the ubiquitous mp3 playback. In an era were everyone seems to talk about the Video iPod, and the next generation of mobile devices, it leaves me wondering - I already have all those abilities in a PDA that costs about as much as an iPod. My question for Slashdot: Given that modern PDAs have almost all the functionality of these separate devices, how has Palm and Microsoft/PocketPC developers failed in making PDAs a force in this new era of portable media devices? It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?"
I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
bad media apps
public perception
do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media
Storage capacity (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you sprung for extra storage, the space on your PDA is measured in tens of megabytes. On an iPod, it's measured in tens of gigabytes.
40 Gb Hdd? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?
iPod is just a glorified HDD which makes it important. Your PDA is a teeny weeny computer which makes it not-so-important. Plus,what is the biggest HDD you can put in it? Apple understands the low-profile-market better
simplicity and capacity (Score:5, Insightful)
Clue 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Its the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
This might comparing be apples to oranges, but if this were true, then why does virtually everyone cell phone on the market come with so much more functionality than what a phone should ever be used for: pictures, video games, music, text messaging, etc. etc.
How about storage space? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've got a treo. It's a nice phone/organizer and it'd suck donkeys for playing mp3's. Why? Because it has no storage space.
I think, quite honestly, it comes down to a decision about the intention of the devices. PDA's are marketed to business people. So part of that marketing choice involves trimming out features that would make them well suited to being mp3 players. Why does a business traveller need 10GB of space? It'd be nice, but in the grand scheme, they don't need it and they wouldn't be able to convince their employers to shell out for it.
The other thing to keep in mind is the costs involved. An IPod is basically a disk drive with a very minimal interface to manage the music. Simple input and simple output using relatively low cost parts. If you tried to build a PDA with similar capacity it'd get a lot more expensive quickly and then who would buy it? Business execs would compare it to a blackberry and think it overpriced. Consumers would compare it to an ipod and think it overpriced.
Laptops (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Clue 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
PDAs haven't failed... (Score:5, Insightful)
People who make generic statements such as "PDAs have failed" are just simply wrong.
My View... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. No use. I have a laptop, a desktop, a cellphone, and iPod. The laptop and desktop are meant to be ubquitous devices. They handle anything I throw at it. The iPod is for use for my huge music library (50 Gigabytes). No PocketPC could handle that. And my cell-phone is my phonebook.
2. Price. A PocketPC is around the price of an iPod. However, why didn't I buy a PocketPC instead of an iPod? Simple. Refer back to reason 1. I have no use for a PocketPC. I have no need to addictively log on to Technorati, Digg, or Slashdot. Also, checking e-mail every 5 minutes gets old. To me, the PocketPC doesn't do any one factor well. The iPod does music extremely well. What does the PocketPC do well? Organization? Well, between the back of my hand, my memory, and my pen and paper, I do got that base covered.
3. Price of Internet. Lets assume I'm not near any unsecured WiFi hotspot. To utilize the expensive brick I just bought to the max, I would have to get online. Well... T-Mobile Internet is $20 a month for abysmally slow Internet. Also, why would I connect using a PocketPC when my cellphone connects to the Internet just as fast and just as well?
4. Lack of Apps. Lets face it, PocketPC's lack Apps. I put everything I need on my laptop. I owned a PocketPC before, it died, I didn't need a new one. But lack of apps really hounded it.
My views on improving the PocketPC.
1. Bigger hard-drive. Between my 80 Gig Laptop, my 73.4 + 2x250 HD's on my laptop, and my 60Gig iPod, the PocketPC suffers from suitable space.
2. Lack of Apps. With not enough users, developers are loathe to code for it.
3. Price. Clocking in at the price of my iPod and considering how little I would never considering dropping the cash.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
PDAs might be cool toys, they do a lot that a PC can do, and you can carry it in your pocket. Pretty cool eh? But when it comes down to it, what does the device actually do? Hard to define; it can do calendars, it can do media playback, it can do telephony, it can do internet-related tasks. But on the overall, it's a very obscure device.
With the iPod, it's pretty clear what it does. It plays music. Now, it does do other things; it can watch movies, it can view pictures, it can broadcast music on an FM frequency, it can offload pictures from your digital camera, it can record class notes, it can keep your address book, notes, song lyrics. But these things are bonuses; the iPod's intention is to be the best damned music player on the market, and it nails that motive.
Now, don't think I hate PDAs; I love palm, I own a Treo 600 and a Palm m130 personally, but I almost never use them anymore. I have found that I'm distracted by a device that does too much, and isn't particularly good at anything that it's supposed to do. When I'm writing notes, I find a pencil and a piece of paper faster. When I'm trying to make a call, the Treo is ackward to hold and often lacks reception compared to my Nokia. And when I'm trying to browse forums, I find the screen's resolution prohibitive and just go and find a dumb terminal somewhere.
Give the PDA something to do, and you'll see people who need it to do that purpose, buy it. Instead of bundling everything and the kitchen sink, give it a very simple task, and expand upon the device in a way that's non-destructive to the device's original intent.
Jack of all trades.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPod is a focused device that does its original intent quite well. PDAs never did any of their information tasks very well, and considering a mini-laptop was far more useful and almost as portable, PDAs beyond address books (which a watch or phone does better now) never justified their 300-500 dollar price point.
I worked at a startup that chased enterprise apps on PDAs in the early 00s.
Developer tools sucked/expensive/closed, and the APIs changed constantly. MS does this junk on the desktop all the time with technologies, as in OLE->COM->DCOM->whatever, but can hide backwards compatibility in the OS bloat, but PDAs don't have room for backwards bloat. So no vibrant utilities or third-party apps really flourished. Palm wasn't much better, either.
I mean, try making an enterprise app for all the diffrent flavors of Palm+PocketPC. Jesus, it's like writing a 3D driving game for the NES, SNES, and Playstation2 all at once. Too expensive, and not enough money to be made.
Heck, processor architectures and fundamental OS capabilities (single-thread vs preemptive multitasking) changed constantly.
Battery life was always terrible, and if you ran out of battery, POOF! goes your installed apps and data (on the iPaq at least).
Finally, when I had to pay $150 for a damn PCMCIA sleeve for an iPaq that cost only $250, man, that is just WRONG. Any interesting thing you could do with it, from early WiFi or heck even wired networking went out the window with that.
So basically, the PDA market fragmented into dozens of minimarkets, where nothing could flourish. This was okay in the nascent PC market back in 1980 and you could release a computer with just BASIC interpreter and an extremely rudimentary OS, but people have far different expectations of applications (actual user interfaces, connectivity to internet, etc).
Poor marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
My phone also has a full keyboard, something I felt was a necessity for taking quick notes and because I'm a huge text message flirt. I'm wondering why this phone (the 3300) had such a small impact on the market when it's so feature rich? My guess would be the lack of any advertising done on its part. I do a lot of research before making any serious purchase, but I'm guessing the majority of America just buys whatever they see on tv most often, or perhaps most recently. Back when the 3300 came out those chintzy camera phones were all the rage and were getting all the tv airtime on commercials.
Maybe you should just consider yourself trendy and go around telling everybody you see with a video ipod "I could do that two years ago!"
Re:dont need (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if someone were to build a Linux image for your iPaq that strips it down to a simple music and video player, AND builds a website or desktop app( JAVA maybe ) to easily load the files.... Then again, it won't look like an iPod so it ain't got THAT going for it.
LoB
In one word... (Score:2, Insightful)
Can any palm-top computer reach the ease of use of an ipod, or any other portable media player? I have a Palm Tungsten T5, and it surely is more difficult to use, even when I'm just running the Real music player.
It doesn't help that ipods mostly are measured in gigabytes, not megabytes.
It's marketing, and software (Score:5, Insightful)
That's something lacking on most PDA's. Palm OS was great, has become patchzilla with about a billion things bolted on that old OS, and the new version is still vaporware. Microsoft on the other hand, released a complex, ugly looking OS that makes that tiny screen feel way to overwhelming.
As far as quality goes... well think about it. The Treo isn't bad, but has it's downsides, those cheap Dell PDA's are just that, cheap.
For there to be a winner, someone has to do what Apple did. Combine killer features, and quality with ease of use.
Palm had that formula for a while, but dropped the ball a few years ago. Sony picked up the hardware side with the Clie, which I still carry around. As far as the software goes... it never came back.
I'm still waiting for my new Apple PDA.
iPods are Hip, PDAs are for Dorques (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
My phone is a pda, has games, a camera, can browse the web. None of which I want, need nor use.
In contrast it often hangs (Windows Mobile so no surprise) and I have to take the battery out. When trying to answer calls it sometimes declares there was an error answering the call!?! And sometimes it simply doesnt ring/vibrate when someone calls me.
Why can't I buy *just a phone*? The original Motorola V (not the current bloated monster) and the Nokia 2110 were pretty much the perfect mobile phones: it's all been downhill since then.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take a straight up pocket PC, you can:
-Make phone calls
-Listen to music
-Schedule appointments
-Send e-mail
-Watch movies
But how many of those tasks is it really exceptional at? It's great for keeping track of a calendar and corporations are the biggest buyer of PDA's for that reason. They set up a centralized meeting system and then hand out PDA's to everybody.
It's not ideal for phone calls. I have a treo which is about as good of a compromise as you can get it and it's still a bit bulky for the average person. It'll fit in a pocket but it bulges quite a bit. You can listen to music but then you have storage space issues and the interfaces aren't nearly as good as what's on an ipod. You can send a small e-mail with ease but you need a laptop for real productivity. Movies... well, if you like watching movies on a 2 inch screen, more power to you and your optometrist.
The niche that a PDA is trying to fill is deceptively difficult. Basically give people a computer that they can carry in their pocket all the time. There's practical limitations to how small you can make the display and keyboard before it becomes unusuable. The treo is the best compromise I've seen and by most phone standards it's huge.
Doing One Thing Well Counts (Score:3, Insightful)
You might as well be asking why people buy screwdrivers and pliers instead of a single Leathermen.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd drop my RAZR's camera in a second if it'd mean a smaller and lighter phone, but only because the camera on it sucks so badly I end up carrying around my little Canon S505 most everywhere. When they put 3+MP cameras with decent AF in phones, I won't do that anymore, and we'll be one step closer to convergence.
Likewise, when they give me a 20+gig PDA with the size and style of an iPod, with a large screen, the horsepower to play movies, and that lasts 8+ hours on a single charge, I'll be all over it.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy /= PDA, but = iPod (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPod I carry around in my bag is about as simple to use as the cassete tape-playing Walkman I had in High school, in spite of the fact that it has far more abilties than that Walkman ever had. That lowers the barriers to ownership right there.
Then toss in the "cool factor" that comes with each iPod, and contrast that to the "nerd factor" that comes with every PDA, and it is soon clear why there are a few billion more iPods than PDAs out there.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is that simple
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Laptops (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a *bingo*.
Part of the appeal of the IPods is that they do what they do *well*. Interface, and sound quality. Now I'm not sure how they made it so that every kid under the age of 30 *has* to have one...that's another story.
Handheld computers just don't manage that simple job. They are sub-par computers with sub-par games and sub-par web browsing and some do a sub-par job of displaying video and playing songs. Yummy, just what I want...
I haven't replaced my old Samsung SCH3500 phone because few phones available today do a better job doing the things I *want* a phone for...reception, battery life, sound quality. I'd replace the phone every 6 months if they came up with phones that were better at being a *phone*.
In several respects, that's one of the reasons things are the way they are. Apple has always understood what the customer wanted (well, mostly anyway). It's just too bad they can't do it at a better price, or they'd be a frightening corporation...
Batteries, Batteries, Batteies (Score:3, Insightful)
When I want a portable media player I grab my Gameboy (DS or micro)with a Play Yan which has an insane battery life (5hrs plus w/ video) and great compression (4-5hrs on a 1 GB flash) and is well nigh indestructable. Beats the hell out of the iPod and beats my PSP on battery life. I even hear you can play video games on it.
Finally PDAs get no love. Every time a PDA topic comes up, everybody on slashdot becomes a luddite insisting that a 3x5 index card and a pencil outperforms a PDA (try GPS mapping with that guys !). On the other hand Apple generates slavish devotion, even with very mediocre products.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't seem all that hard to do but it's impossible for a company like Dell or HP to position itself as a fashion company. Nobody walks around proudly with a Dell laptop or Axim because the brand is about cheap and mass produced.
Also I think apple managed to place the ipod outside of the perceived complexity of computer appliances. It isn't simple because you do need a computer, internet savvy, etc to get the thing loaded with songs. Loading songs onto an axim is not much more complex. If I had my mom do either one she'd be vexed either way.
It's also got a lot to do with leadership and vision, It's almost as if Jobs is a magician that can control how people see things and influences them strongly.
4 years ago I got a powerbook g4 (400mhz) with osx on it and after some initial trouble with the original osx it's stil one of my favourite computers - without being able to pinpoint the why of it, it just rocks. It's like driving around in an old saab, just a very weird piece of marketing trickery, mass delusion or just plain quality...
Why... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Because they are Cool and you can show off... This fades FAST... Fads are not really a good business model.
2) Because you have a high-pressure or high-travel related job. In other words, you NEED all those tiny portable productivity features to stay employed. For this case, a PDA is more of shackle than a gadget. After a while, most people would love to be able to shred the PDA and go back to a normal job. So in this case, you really are not going to buy PDAs for your kids are you?
IPods on the other hand are ONLY bought because people wish to enjoy life with them. You can use at work, at home, wherever. They are pointed to a TOTALLY different and much much wider market than PDAs.
When I see someone with a PDA I have to wonder what kind of reason they would have to HAVE to use that tiny device for business.... Does that PDA simplify their life or does it introduce far too much complexity and expecatations or superiors?
When I see someone with an MP3 player, I see someone that has found a way to mix work with fun. Its a pretty good compromise.
Which person do you really want to be?
GSG
Re:PDAs haven't failed... (Score:1, Insightful)
You're talking like an Amiga guy, saying that something can't be a failure if it works better than anything else. Think like a market analyst: it's a failure if everyone hasn't heard of it. (I don't know anyone who owns an ipod, but I also don't know anyone who doesn't know what an ipod is.) It's a failure if the manufacturer's stock price doesn't keep going up.
Palm is a business, not a product. And as a business, it's as pathetic as Commodore in 1992.
Re:Its the interface (Score:3, Insightful)
Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
In terms of battery life, currently the best Palm MP3 player would be a Tungsten T2.5 (T2 with a Powerizer 1400MAh battery shoehorned in), which will give you 12 hours with screen brightness at minimum, but you have to perform serious surgery to get the battery in there (I've done it to a Tungsten T and it's not for the squeamish).
Re:Storage capacity (Score:5, Insightful)
True in most cases. However, PDA manufacturers are starting to get the clue. It may be a little too late to capture much of the market, but just a few months ago, Palm [palm.com] introduced the LifeDrive [palm.com] which comes from the factory with a 4 GB hard drive. That is starting to be a decent amount of storage. In fact, it's sort of what a lot of manufacturers have realized is the sweet spot for a music device. (Unlike myself, lots of users apparently don't want to try to fit their whole music collection on their music player.)
Now, here's the problem: the LifeDrive is priced at $499. That's basically double what you'd pay for the 4GB iPod nano model. Granted, the LifeDrive does a lot more, but the question is whether consumers need or want those things.
The big problem here is probably just that PDA companies (at least Palm) aren't big enough players to make a profit on a cheap device. Apple can sell iPods for virtually no profit as a way of getting the iTunes Music Store off the ground, but a smaller company like Palm can't do that. Unless they can radically increase sales volume, they can't make a PDA with 4GB for much less than $499 and still make a profit. So, that makes the PDA a lot less competitive with a dedicated music player than it could be.
Also, keep in mind that there are reasons why PDAs are more expensive to make. They have to have more RAM, faster processors, and (most importantly) a bigger screen than something like an iPod has. The screen on the Palm LifeDrive is 320x480 pixels and 16-bit color. Any music player's screen isn't anywhere close to that, and it doesn't need to be for a dedicated music player device. Even the new video iPod only has a 320x240 screen, which is half the resolution. Just like in laptops, a bigger screen will really cost you.
People dont want mobile video. (Score:5, Insightful)
People who are looking at the video iPod as a validation of the demand for mobile video are mistaken.
99% of the people who wind up owning a video iPod are only ever going to use it to listen to music.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh? You still can. Or at least, you still can here in Australia. Very cheaply, too - I can pick up a pre-paid phone compatible with my current network for $79 Au, which has a monochrome screen and a speaker phone. There's probably cheaper available too, but I haven't looked into it much since my current phone, which is nearly four years old now, still works well. That's of course another option - you don't actually need to buy a new phone, you know - the old ones still work
But regardless, there's still a market for simple phones here, and I think one of the reasons for that is the wide-scale adoption of mobiles - they're not a tech-savy only market.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
it was a mistake (but a somewhat understandable one) how mobile phone makers used to target the first phones with organizer functionality at the businessman, he will always use the real thing. but in the mainstream market they do a great job at filling the gap between not having an organizer system at all and carrying around a second device, complete with all the hassle of keeping batteries charged, setting quiet mode during meeting etc. in the end it's all software running on some microcontroller anyway, technically it does not make much difference wether you stick gsm on a pda or slowly enable the phones to do the pda's job.
wait, there's exactly one difference (or two, considering the "cellular network provider pays for the phone" issue mentioned elsewhere):
pda are completely associated only with work by everyone exept the most die-hard geek while phones are also seen as a way to stay in touch with friends and family etc, so ironically the _p_da end up being perceived as much less personal than a phone.
people (those not on
ps: now one could speculate about how many of those "i want a phone that phones and nothing more" are people who are called more frequently by their boss/customers than by friends/family
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, iPods are sold to everyone. Anyone can pick up an iPod, figure out its interface in a number of minutes (if it takes that long), and be well on their way to using the device. With a PDA, you pick it up, and you start playing with the applications. "Okay, these apps are great, but I don't see anything that I can't live without, or that would replace my current system."
So while I'm glad your iPaq is good for you (and it's funny; all 3 people who've responded to me have had iPaqs), I'm willing to bet if you handed it over to your mother she'd smile, and it'd be relegated to a desk drawer to live out the rest of its life.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply put, PDA's lack the battery life and storage capabilities of the ipod.
This relates to all portable devices with the exception of the ipod. Manufacturers keep adding more and more powerhungry and ill devised features to PDA' and Phones like video playback and camera support but always fail in two aspects:
The initial quality of the feature developed is horrible
They forget to upgrade the systems which these features need to be avaliable, which means phone and PDA hardware.
The problem is space, no more no less, all this media, includeing thousands of songs, takes space, and consumers are not happy that they have to buy seperate memory for their device which is inferior to the built in memory of the ipod 20 fold.
Take one of my family member for example, who recently bought a $400 camera, but in the process noticed that an increaseing amount of digital cameras do not include out of the box memory. Where was the marketing team on that decision. Surely they think if the dont include memory, consumers will be inclined to buy seperate memory, but what they forget is that consumers have the choice of the one with or without memory. The choice is clear.
So to make it clear: PDA's fail because they have the features (poorly developed) but not the infrastructure.
Give me a PocketPC PDA, with an IBM or Toshiba 20 gig microdrive, with a battery that not only promises but actually has an 8 hour+ basttery life in media playback, with the same price as the ipod and i would litteraly trash my ipod and buy it right now.
But why are things the way that are?
I suspect a features race between PDA's phones and media playback devices has left PDA's mortally wounded. I suspect marketing kept pushing for more features, not better features, and never gave one ounce of their time to the engenieers crying out in horror at the strain being put on backward technology, only to realise their jobs redundancy and a lack of demand from a detached marketing department for better hardware.
Of course it may be a subject of the limits of todays technology, but again, not enough work is being put on the desks of hardware developers to make better storage and battery devices. Instead all the work is landing on the desks of software developers who lie awake at night, and pull out their hair, knowing full well they cannot possibly write a fully functional feature set with such hardware constraints.
Consumers arnt stupid, esspecially when the average teenager has limited funds, and has to make every cent count. Consumers know the PDA only has 32 meg out of the box, and the similar priced ipod has 60,000 meg.
Give me a 20 gig+, 8 hour+ battery (music playback), and fully developed programs (that means everything from a better UI to more effeciency) on a PDA for the same price as an ipod.
Another great example is phones, where half asses features like camera's and operating system features (video, music) are more focused on than actually making a better fucking phone. I say work on the technology until its perfected, then implement these powerhungry features once the phone itself has been perfected.
Capacity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Though the biggest reason for failure is that most people simply don't need a PDA.
More than half the folks I know that have a PDA only have it as a status symbol. They don't need it, and barely use it. Most of the time they pull it out and start fiddling with it, they are showing off that they have one.
How many IT people are really on the go so damn much that they have to have a PDA? I sit in meetings and most of the people there have their PDA out, and are poking and proding at it once in a while. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that they are bouncing back and forth between menus, trying to look like they are important.
I could see some flunky of a famous person that keeps appointments and the like needing one. I can't see most IT folks needing one.
And quite frankly, when I walk away from my desk, whether it is to go eat lunch, take a dump, or simply to get some fresh air, I don't want work following me.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:1, Insightful)
the people are sheep
amazing how apple has become the p.t. barnum of the 21st century.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what people said about Palm. And I agree (or used to). Palm's core appeal was always as a storage device and people have always clamored for more memory on them. Palm's mistake is that they did add a 20GB HD and MP3 syncing at the right moment. They assumed that people would prefer realtime apps like telephone being shoehorned into that focused, nonrealtime environment of offline reference (contacts, reference documents, etc.).
So Palm, and Rio, and PocketPC missed the 'big-music-archive' boat. (BTW, I own a Rio Karma and love it. But that product was late. I also own a Psion Series 5, which was early.) Those three all kept a Flash RAM focus for too long.
Symbian OTOH is another animal: It's reason for being is telephone and lightweight internet, and the company even ditched the old Epoc32 moniker to distance it from the handheld PC image. The OS invites you to do nothing that would require an HD or suck the life out of a tiny battery.
Looking back, if any OS could manage it, Palm should have taken iPod's market. In fact they could have licensed the core OS to Apple and noone would be any wiser until Apple started merging standard PalmOS features, one-by-one, in successive models where it made sense.
Assuming they didn't frustrate too many geeks, that could have worked brilliantly.
The teenage daughter test (Score:5, Insightful)
She tried to use a PDA, with guidance, and still lost interest almost immediately. She said it was like trying to use a PC with ten foot chopsticks.
Apple == Ease of use. Zero learning curve to start. Like a toaster.
Note that this does not exclude a learning curve and more sophistication _after_ entry. Entry must be immediate and rewarding.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
The early '90s called. They want their yuppie group think back.
Wake up there princess, you've been asleep for a looong time. Everybody has mobile phones now.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is similar to why Google more or less wiped out Yahoo in searching. At the time, Yahoo was seen as the searching site that couldn't been beaten. Although we suffered their banners and other stuff. Google came and did nothing but searching, searching and searching, with a home page of only a few kilobytes. And even with textual advertising of only a few bytes. In short, the features were limited, but they did them well !!!
So, I'm truly convinced that when there is a company (history tells that this will be a new starter) that develops a cellphone with a voice quality and battery life that doesn't let me say from the start "shall I call you back on a landline", they will have a gold-mine. Sidenote: when you think currt cellphone sound quality is 'good enough', think for a second why everybody is shouting into their cell phones so loud that they anoy everybody around them.
It's all about KISS !!!
Another factor.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Two things happened:
1) the market crashed, everyone gave up on the idea that if they sacrificed their life to their job, and melded the disparate goals in their life to their corporate goals, they would get rich. to that end, everyone wanted to have their personal and corporate life in a sexy little device they could access at home, work and starbucks.
2) the data just isn't centralizable anymore. between corporate databases, ASPs, etc., synchronizing is almost impossible. you want your contacts? nobody gets excited about contacts anymore.
iPods are for lifestyle and play. Work isn't as much a lifestyle thing anymore. And good riddance.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
eg. I picked up a Motorola V3 (from the supermarket of all places) for £180. I'm on a minimal PAYG tariff nowadays (I keep the sim and just transfer it around phones), and typically pay £10/mo in phone calls (£120 for a round figure).
To get that 'free' on the network would have meant paying £30/month for a year... £360, with no upgrade possible for 12 months an no cancellation possible for the same period.
Multiply that profit by a couple of million and the carriers really aren't losing money at all.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The ipod is a good mp3 player, but it isn't a *great* mp3 player... it's just well marketed. No I don't mean the adverts, I mean things like making the term 'ipod' generic as if there were no other mp3 players around, and managing to make the things fashionable amongst teenagers.
The ipod video will sell millions... doing exactly what other video player has been doing for years (often cheaper too). Precisely because it's well marketed.
Hell, Windows Vista will make new headlines on its release (paid for by microsoft, no doubt) and will so well marketed that everyone will believe they need it even if their current OS is working fine.
You don't need adverts for that. Well placed 'news' stories, rumours... people are smart enough to filter out the crap when it's an 'advert', so marketing people use more underhand techniques. (ever heard someone on slashdot saying OSX is 'intuitive' and 'easy'? No OS is 'easy' by defintion (certainly not OSX which is more than a little counterintuitive in places).. it's a little bit of underhand marketing that seems to have taken off in the slashdot geek crowd, even if it never reached the masses).
Re:Intended use, capturing imagination (Score:3, Insightful)
A PDA (even an old one, like my IPaq) isn't designed to do anything - it has exactly six buttons with no implicit function on any of them, and a large touch-sensitive region that has a near-infinite set of potential purposes. As a result, my PDA is exactly designed to play music or video - What you suggest is that Winamp (etc) are not suited for playback... when in fact, that style of UI is what made computer based music / video popular in the first place. Can an IPod compete with my IPaq for codecs? Not even close. How about the player UI? My IPaq will bury it in every case (unless you physically drop the unit and break it), because Winamp doesn't suck - nor do any of it's PPC-based clones. It's interesting to note that even today, the best music or video playback device still cannot compete with my Ipaq, which is pushing 5 years old, in terms of usabiity, flexability, expandability, and features... since it has everything you've got on a full PC. Find me a player that competes with Winamp - you cannot. Plus, you can do more than just listen or watch - you can play solitare, check mail, write junk and compile it with GCC, blah blah blah, WHILE you listen. The only advantage the new units have is durability, due to the nature of the typical PDA display. However...
>> What you can do is irrelevant to 99% of the population (who are not geeks). It's what you can do easily that's important.
I agree here. If the market convinces people that something is hard, they'll believe it. IPod sells because the aquisition of music is marketed as being trivial. Obviously, aquisition / ripping of MP3s is likewise trivial... but that fact isn't marketed, so people shy away from it. The iMac was perhaps the only real attempt at selling on this point (click,rip,burn) - and obviously Apple discovered that it was *still* perceived as tedious and technical no matter how well they automated it.
>> If what it's designed for captures my imagination, and it's presented so I feel I know how to use it, it's sold.
Key point / editorial - and I don't disagree with you - but it's sad that something needs a concrete design in order to inspire imagination, as opposed to a mildly abstracted tool. Palm was probably a small culprit in this as far as PDAs are concerned - they were the big dog on the market, and those stupid tap-regions at the base of the screen were hard-coded to exact functions. When the PPC hit the market, Palm had such a legacy market presence that people (myself included, initially) expected that to still be the case. I find that when I tell people that the buttons have no explicit meaning, they totally fail to grasp it. THAT is probably why Palm originally dedicated those tap-regions to specific functions, and THAT is probably why the PDA is such a failure - people are so dumbed down that they have no freakin Vision.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I got them all.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The video packrat wants the best video he can possibly get, not his entire collection on a 1.5 inch screen.
The video packrat is just going to buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVDs.
It's different with music, because it's pretty much the same quality, whether it's coming from your $2,000.00 home PC, or from your $200.00 iPod.
Well, let's see... (Score:2, Insightful)
Keeping a mobile Calendar
Keeping a contact list
They are OK at:
doubling as a calculator
Sending email (if they have networking of some sort and a thumb board)
reading ebooks (if you have a high resolution, decent-sized screen)
They suck at:
Web-surfing
Word processing
Spread sheet use
Games (except solitare)
picture taking
picture manupulation
video shooting
video manipulation
storage
speed (Palms are decent here, but not good)
playing music
note taking
one handed UI navigation
What are they marketed as? A device that does all the things in the bottom list.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen a few people say this, and I really don't understand it. Could someone explain? As I see it, the new iPod has increased battery life, it's a bit thinner and has a little larger display. Beyond that, it's the exact same device it's always been and functions the exact same way it always has -- except that it'll play some video now.
I personally think the video iPod is a brilliant strategic move. They've kept the device essentially the same, not upsetting a winning formula. They still made marginal improvements in the core music player in terms of battery life and size. But they've put video capability out there to test the waters and see if the legal video download market turns out like the legal music download market has. If downloading Lost and Desperate Housewives turns out to be a winner, you can bet that other content providers will come running.
So what am I missing? Why is the video iPod a "bad move"? It looks to me like they've managed to pilot a totally new service while continuing to give people the same device they already love.
I realize it would be so much cooler if iTunes 6 had the ability to rip video content and transfer it just like we do with audio, but I just don't think that's possible. Since most DVDs incorporate copy protection, I don't think it would fly under the DMCA. If Rick Boucher's legislation [house.gov] gets passed, we may see something like that. You should probably head over to the EFF Action Center [eff.org] and support it.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic point is right, but this seems revisionist; Yahoo was mainly a categorized set of links (like dmoz.org) with a halfassed search engine tacked on as an afterthought. Indeed, at the outset it didn't even have a search engine--and even after adding one, it was never really a search engine back then. Altavista was the "preferred" search engine at the time (having replaced Lycos when Lycos decided to go in the portal direction).
But yeah, Google came on the scene and did just searching, and did it better than Altavista and Lycos at a time when they had lost the search focus and were adding relatively crappy portal features instead of improving search.
Re:I think you nailed it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the appeal of the IPods is that they do what they do *well*. Interface, and sound quality.
Exactly. Most people don't feel comfortable around complicated stuff like PDAs, but they knew how to operate their radios, stereo equipment, car radio, walkman, discman etc... They don't have to "start an application" to play their music, they turn their *audio equipment* on. They have a simple interface: play, pause, stop, next, previous, fast forward, rewind and volume. That's all they really need, so they want it in easy accessible locations: in the form of buttons on the case of the device.
I have both a PDA and a small flash-based mp3 player. I could technically use both to play my music, yet I never bothered installing mp3 software on the PDA. The mp3 player has a battery life of 17 hours of continuous play; the PDA doesn't come near that "always on" time. I can operate my mp3 player without looking at it, even if it's in my pants pocket. If I'd use the PDA for that, I'd need to whip it out every time I wanted to skip a song, turn the volume up or down etc... because I'd have to look at the screen to manipulate the virtual buttons. I'm not sure the music would keep playing if I switched to another app, like say my calendar, to check my meetings for the day. The music would definitely skip if I'd use some app that would do some burst of number crunching, assuming the PDA is multitasking in the first place.
A PDA is like a swiss army knife, or a Leatherman multitool. Yeah, it's a cool gadget for those who can afford spending cash on such frivolous things, and sometimes it comes in handy to carry around all those tools in a small package instead of having to drag along a small briefcase of single-purpose tools. But when I want to skin a bear, I'll use a hunting knife and not my swiss army knife. And when I want to fix my computer, I'll use a screwdriver set and not a leatherman multitool. There's a thing to be said for the simplicity of an ergonomic screwdriver with the head in the exact centerline, as opposed to a multitool where it's so far off center it becomes a pain to use for any job longer than 3 screws worth.
Basically, a PDA is just a crappy idea for mobile entertainment. It doesn't have the cool image projected by the iPod, and it's confusing to boot. That's why it doesn't appeal to the blinking 12's. The geeks and audiophiles for whom these disadvantages don't matter, since they're used to having somewhat more complicated toys, reject it because they rather have a device that does one thing and does it well as opposed to one that tries to do everything, but excells in nothing.
Apple's gamble (Score:3, Insightful)
As I see it, the new iPod has increased battery life, it's a bit thinner and has a little larger display. Beyond that, it's the exact same device it's always been and functions the exact same way it always has -- except that it'll play some video now.
You're right, in theory. The iPod added video capability without increasing the price or changing the basic functionality of the ipod. Some things, of course are changed, small things like no transfer over FW (Apple has glitchy USB 2.0 support on some machines) and the lack of remote functionality on the iPod's specialized headphone connector (now, it's dock-only).
But the real proof is in the tasting of the pudding. What I mean by this is that if people perceive that the video experience of iPod is not very useful and it becomes a vestigial function, then people will irrationally perceive that the iPod has lower value than an earlier iPod that doesn't do video. Part of this will be due to the fact that people will be lured to the new iPod by the video functionality but will find out it's not what they hoped. In particular, people may reject the video on the iPod because there is no easy way for users to produce video content for the iPod. Sure, some people will buy a bunch of $2.00 shows, but that novelty will wear off fast.
However, if I'm wrong and people do buy TV shows and music video like they do hotcakes, then the video iPod will probably be very successful. But without massive video iTMS sales, the fact that the iPod does not allow users to easily create/acquire content outside of commercial distribution channels may scratch the pristine surface of the iPod's reputation.
My guess is that Apple is working on a version of iMovie that will practically beam video content into your new video iPod and so the video iPod will revolutionize video consumption just as the iPod (r)evolutionized music-listening.
End to end user experience (Score:3, Insightful)
They also are not religuous about the Web and browser and recognized what we all know: rich media is inherently a desktop experience and desktop clients can be far richer than web apps (Yes, AJAX is great, but...). So iTunes is your portal. It uses the web as a data source, may display some stuff in HTML, but it is a desktop client that is quick and simple and totally integrated with the device.
The other options all involve multiple parties using some kind of standard (even is a proprietary standard like MS). This means that different people do different things and the integraiton isn't as good, the pieces can not count on each other, etc.
It is all about the end ot end integraiton of the experience.
Security and corporate culture (Score:2, Insightful)