This is a fairly wide-ranging overview of mobile Internet devices where I’ve taken my thoughts and my notes and formed them into a report. I’ve done it mainly for my own benefit because, I’m someone that has to write things down in black and white before I can develop a complete picture but I hope you get something out of it too! Feedback is more than welcome. Part 2 is also availble.
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A mobile phone is a small, efficient comm’s device that can be carried 24/7. Its comes in business form and consumer form. It can do a huge number of communications, productivity and entertainment tasks but its got limitations. For example the video and Internet experience is limited. The small size creates design problems with input and there’s just not enough processing power to run full productivity applications. A UMPC is a very small, often handheld, computer that addresses many of the limitations of the mobile phone and gives people a tidy way to be mobile with the full capability of a PC. Unlike the mobile phone it is only available in ‘pro’ form. Pro meaning ‘productivity’ in this case. If you’re a consumer, someone that values style, ease-of-use, size and price over do-it-all functionality, there isn’t a product for you yet but there soon will be and the device will be enabled by the mobile Internet.
The Internet application ‘feature.’
There are people around that understand how to build a device that appeals to consumers and it’s a recipe that few understand. I certainly don’t understand it completely but I do know that it includes elements style, focus, branding, pricing, timing and, somewhere near the bottom of the list, technical specifications. In addition to all that you need a marketable feature. The ‘marketable feature’ is an interesting concept when applied to the Internet because the Internet itself is just a facility. Its not marketable at all. Its the applications on it that are the features and there are hundreds of them.
It’s this special feature that gives the buyer the justification for a purchase. Its something that they can relate to in their heads and say ‘Yeah, I need facility xxx for feature yyy so i’ll buy product zzz.’ Eg. ‘Mp3 playback’ for ‘music’ = buy iPod. ‘video playback’ for ‘videos in the train’ = buy Archos 605.
Imagine if xxx, the facility, was ‘Internet connected browser.’ There would be hundreds of possible features. Facebook, ebay, Gmail, myspace, Flickr, Joomla etc etc. Then just put the word ‘mobile’ in front of each of your features, multiply that by a wide range of customer types and you have a rather large set of possible products. A mobile Internet device is what we’re talking about here.
Simple hardware, unique capabilities.
How do you make a mobile Internet device? Its easy. You take a smartphone and make the screen slightly larger, make sure it works quickly and…well, in a nutshell we take existing smartphone and ultra mobile PC technologies and adapt them, optimise them and combine them together to form a new device with focused capabilities. With all due respect to engineers, making the hardware is the simple part of making the ‘complete product.’
To understand the basic capabilities a bit more, take a look at the diagram of ‘capabilities’ below. It was created before the terms ‘UMPC’ and ‘MID’ were common and it holds true today. It shows almost perfectly the mobile Internet device capabilities.
If you look at the 2.5″ screen device, the mobile phone, you can see how much is possible. It really is an impressive list but where’s the Internet? The screen size is too small. There’s no keyboard and the processing power just isn’t enough to enable it. While the processing speed issue will be solved over time, the other two problems are physical. Eyes do not get better over time!
If you move over to the column for 4″, pocket-able, thumboard devices, that’s the MID category and fortunately, where the processing power was a little on the low side one and a half years ago, its now got to the point where the processor capability,efficiency and sizing from the 6″ screen section (the ultra mobile PC section) has improved such that we could support ‘normal browsing’ Given some limitations, even advanced document reading, editing and maybe interactive video features will even be possible on the 4″ device. So in this 4-5″ screen category you have a new product that gets over the two physical issues of the mobile phone and enables near desktop-style Internet capability. [*1]
From a technical angle there’s nothing much new there and although we could argue about x86 and RISC processors, benchmark scores and battery capacity until we’re blue in the face but there really is no fixed technical specification. The ‘complete product’ is far more important to consumers than a list of specs.
I’m not going to go into an explanation about the ‘complete product’ here because It’s too complex. Its all about end user buying confidence, brand comfort, peer approval, after-sales ecosystem and a whole lot more and I’ll leave it to marketing people to explain it. [If anyone has any good references about this topic, please let me know as i’d love to learn more about it.] What I do want to do though is look at the product from the other side of the fence. It sounds like a great idea for customers but what about the manufacturers? Is there anything in it for them?
In Part 2 I’ll be looking at mobile Internet devices from the manufacturers point of view and you’ll see that there’s a lot of reasons why a manufacturer might want to move into the mobile Internet device market.
[*1] This near-desktop style mobile Internet does not have to be the Full Internet Experience as I defined it here. Consumers can probably be persuaded that optimised browsers and Internet applications clients are a good enough reason to buy a mobile Internet device if the ‘feature’ need is strong enough.