Be a better phone
John Gruber has stuck his neck out again at his Daring Fireball blog, this time with a post offering advice to Google and especially to Android device makers on how challenge successfully the iPhone.
The key point, he says: build a better phone.
You can read his whole post at Daring Fireball (and check out the links he provides to three seasoned iPhone developers who now are trying their hands with Android, and discovering that it comes up short). I’ve summarized what I think are Gruber’s essential points here….
His lengthy opening boils down to: none of today’s Android players are serious yet about exploiting the real opportunity — a high-end, high-status phone, the place where Apple is most vulnerable to a focused effort at smartphone innovation.
Once you get through a lengthy introduction, he gets to his specific recommendations:
– copy what Apple has done successfully.
But Gruber focuses on things you (and I) don’t think of first in terms of Apple’s success. For example, make one phone, with different models marked only by the amount of storage, and improve it once a year. Developers, users, and the media all can focus on just one device.
He doesn’t spend time on hardware details like screen size, gesture interface, Web browser and so on. He covers all those issues with two sentences: “The phone needs to be as good as the iPhone in every possible way, including hardware build quality. Web browsing needs to be iPhone quality, not ‘almost iPhone quality’.”
– don’t be too concerned about undercutting Apple’s prices in order to make a better-than-iPhone phone.
Users are willing to pay for a high-end “experience” including high style, so aim initially for the high-end of the market Gruber argues.
– outdo the iPhone on a specific set of carefully selected features, and “promote the hell out of them,” he writes.
Those features include: over the air synchronizing of calendar, contact, and email through Google services; stress that Android apps can run in background, and aren’t limited to one centrally-controlled App Store; beef up the battery, even if the phone becomes slightly thicker than iPhone and make the improved battery life a major selling point.
Gruber’s post is an intriguing one, for device makers. I like his insight about stealing a page from Apple’s playbook to make first an “exclusive” phone that captures hearts, minds and wallets.
He touches only briefly (because this isn’t his focus) on some of the issues of the wider Android “ecosystem” which comprises not just manufacturers building smartphones with an open source operating system, but developers and network operators. I think some of those issues bear on the ultimate success of Android, though the intense dissatisfaction of new iPhone 3GS users with AT&T’s network and service hasn’t stopped the millions of iPhone buyers.
A 2008 report by Philip Sugai argued that Android is Google’s attempt to recast the mobile phone market, setting an open source mobile phone platform at the center of the interrelationships between phone makers, platform vendors, software developers, and carriers. Sugai argues that in the U.S. and elsewhere today, the device maker plays the central role in the mobile value chain, having primary “ownership” of the subscriber. We can see that with the success of the iPhone, in spite of users’ discontent with the network operator.
Android promises to change that dynamic, Sugai wrote, by creating new incentives for genuinely cooperative relationships among the various players. A common open mobile platform can fuel mutually beneficial innovation by handset makers, developers and carriers, he says. Carriers can choose to play an essential role in enabling and incenting for subscribers, simplicity, transparency and service; for developers, clear application standards and requirments, technical support, payment mechanisms and revenue sharing; and for handset makers, R&D funding, marketing and sales.
From what I can see, most of the changes anticipated by Sugai still await the leadership and committment necessary to bring them about.
Gruber doesn’t mention Palm’s offering: the Palm Pre with its webOS, which I think has come close to meeting a number of his points on making a better-than-iPhone device. To me, Palm seems to be trying to create a hybrid model, combining at least some of the openness that’s charactertistic of Android, with the proprietary innovation and control that have served Apple so well. As I’ve written before, I think Palm is in the process of missing its chance to make the Palm Pre with its webOS as successful as it could be, mainly because it’s following the Apple model too closely in too many areas.
