“Change” may not be coming to Washington as fast as we expected a year ago. Yet at the grass roots level, in the technology realm, something is definitely happening, and its going to help the policy reform process. The same kind of democratizing, collaborative, open source/open content trend that has swept through nonprofit technology now is gathering momentum in local, state and even national government. That was my overall takeaway from taking part in the March 6 New England Gov 2.0 “Unconference” at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Even if you didn't attend, you can find a lot of notes and material here: http://gov20ne.pbworks.com/ or look for Twitter archives at #gov20ne.
About 250 of us gathered in Cambridge as part of a series of Gov 2.0 summits and informal conferences around the country initiated last year by O’Reilly (the publisher) and other partners. While I have followed these to some degree, this was my first outing. Read more about the national efforts here: http://www.gov2summit.com/. On the related blog, you can sign-up to be part of the nonprofit/public sector connection.
Feeling that my own work straddles the fence between nonprofit and public sectors, I wasn’t sure how I would feel or where I would fit in that day. Right at home: we had an energized mix of public officials, government technology policy staff, nonprofit policy advocates, community activists, software developers, and academic researchers and students. Judging by the conversations at this conference, those working in human services, policy advocacy and political activism need to pay close attention to what is happening here. The public and nonprofit sectors have a lot to learn from each other, they serve common goals, and progress around effective use of data and the web will be mutually reinforcing. “Data” was likely the biggest buzz word at the conference—open data, sharing data, collaborative data, mapping and visualizing data and so on. This being an unconference, it aimed to self-organized by interest and we started by everyone giving a three words introduction of their background and interest. (Mine way, “share data now.”) Looking at the wordle (word cloud) of those introductions, you can see that data and open information drew many to the conference. (Creative Commons credit to http://www.wordle.net/ for the "Gov 2.0 Camp New England ")
Federal, State and Local Government agencies sit on enormous repositories of data that traditionally gets collected as a matter of course for regulatory reasons. We have business, economic, environmental and other data that advocacy groups need to be more effective. It’s often there but hard to get one’s hands on.
We also have mounds of data extracted from nonprofit social services and educational organizations at tremendous cost of time and infrastructure. Busy staff collect data to satisfy public grants as much or more than private foundation grants. From my point of view, this data may start as your data, yet once it passes to the government, it becomes public data. It makes sense that this data—in aggregated, depersonalized, privacy-protected form—be available back as well for communities to learn from, make their own assessments and evaluations of success and effectiveness.
In the public sector, making public data public serves the general good. Elected officials can commission and use (or ignore, as they see fit) qualitative assessments for policy making. The Gov 2.0 trend represents a desire for transparency around that government policy research.
Meanwhile, social sector advocates and activists have learned a lot about mining data to assess trends, correlate results with demographic and other community factors, and press for results and changes. We are all collectors of data and measurers of outcomes. This experience outside the government is an accelerant that will drive change inside the government. Organizational staff and consultants may gripe about grant requirements, yet we are also increasingly using the experiences to improve our own strategies and organizational management.
Toward a policy of "Data Impact Statements"
What should we look for, expect and advocate for in these realms?
First, the public wants more, easier, fuller access to government data. Yet government agencies have old systems, have legitimate boundaries around confidentiality and privacy, and have tight budgets and overwhelmed staff these days with little room to build elaborate data reporting systems. How do we strike a balance?
Where government agencies collect data, and most do, we should expect increasing transparency about what will be collected, at what cost in agency staffing and in compliance time and cost for those required to submit the data, with what quality, with what expected use internal to the government agency, and with what return back to the public. A few years ago, when incoming Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick asked for testimony to his Transition Teams, I proposed the concept of a standard “Data Impact Statement.” Like an environmental impact statement, government agencies would need to file a statement in a standard, readable format on any new initiative that collected data—individual filings or anything else. The statement would list what was being collected; what privacy, confidentiality, or security concerns there were about it; a pre-emptive judgment of the likely quality of the data; and what provisions the agency planned to make to put the data in the public domain.
In the not so distant future, we should aim that reactive freedom of information lawsuits will fade in favor of proactive Data Impact Statements throughout government. By having Data Impact Statements, at least advocacy organizations and human services agencies would be able to review, comment on, and press for change on what was going to happen with data their communities would provide and what of use they would get back. Over time, we can move toward uniform expectations—and funding to back it up.
Second, we should press that the release of data follow emerging technical standards. Web sites with pages of information, even if searchable, are not the same as reusable, transferable data format. The data evolutionary trajectory goes from text on the web, to tabular data on web pages, to downloadable text or Excel, to XML and now to the emerging concept of RDFa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/. This year’s new Drupal release, for example, will embrace RDFa as a standard for web services and data exchange. I suspect that other modern data and community oriented software will as well.
Helping people ask, "How would this look on a map?"
Third, where the average person might reasonably ask, “how would this data look on a map,” public data should be presented with geographic information right there for use. The Gov 2.0 conference gave interesting attention to opening up data for spatial analysis, using geographical based information in crises such as Haiti and Chile, and innovative light-weight open source software like Ushahidi for social mobilization and response.
Fourth, even in the midst of glaring global policy issues from health care to the economy to the wars, we should give some attention to reinforcing national leadership coming in the tech sphere. The Obama administration has taken a strong stand on the democratizing of public data. The http://www.data.gov/ web site is both a growing repository of data anyone can use in the policy making process as well as a sounding board for developing technical and policy standards. It is a welcome initiative and I part of the framework that makes the Gov 2.0 conferences so timely.
Let data inform the educational policy debates
Fifth, if data is flooding in to government and beginning to steam out, we need keep a steady eye on privacy and confidentiality issues. Protect privacy yet don't let it derail opening things up.
A good example is in the realms of education policy. Policy advocates want to be able to do their own refactoring of data on mandatory testing, the record of charter schools, programs to reduce educational inequality, and other elements of No Child Left Behind and its local equivalents. Often this data usage gets lost or delayed because of how long it takes to resolve legal issues around protecting individual student and teacher performance data. In this day and age, we should be able to keep individual data confidential and make aggregated data public. We should also be able to let public school systems and community-based youth jobs and enrichment programs securely exchange individual level student data where both sides agree, have signed appropriate agreements, and have family sign-offs as well. This is probably the single most recurring technology related demand from staff I work with on youth and alternative education programs.
Mobile and Social Media And the Gov 2.0 Trend
Sixth, there is better access to existing data and there is creating new data. In particular, an additional important trend is the use Web 2.0 and social media technologies to inform, energize and empower the public. At the conference, probably the most frequently mentioned example of local tech initiative was the local transit authority’s initiative to put realtime tracking of buses and other transit in the hands of the public. Yes, others may have started on this long before Massachusetts. Yet it has been remarkable how quickly local developers rushed to create mobile apps and all kinds of technology ideas have surfaced around the transit data. At one level, having this information helps busy people know whether they can grab that extra cup of coffee and therefore promote local business at a time when the state really needs it. At another level, it will also help transit and environmental activists really focus in on questions about which areas of the city get what kind of service.
As we learned at the conference, many local communities are experimenting with mobile phone-based systems that enable people and organizations to report problems, oversee responses, and work collaborative to improve services.
All these trends and more will also aid business planning and development. For the moment, the main learning and drive in the Gov 2.0 trend is collaboration and sharing among nonprofit and public sector technologists and policy makers. If you aren’t yet following this trend, you need to.
The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:
Palm released the phone that they've been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it's new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as "The iPhone's baby brother".
And Nokia's E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn't a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it's ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.
Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm -- to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else's.
What's clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don't are huge. They are:
Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI's of the iPhone, Android and Palm's WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast -- their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.
Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser's based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo's hideous Blazer. Add Google's voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don't work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.
Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you're connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple's mail running close behind it. What's ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync -- the Blackberry's kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding -- and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.
Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn't, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you're not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone's built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.
People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that's a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it's quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it's open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.
I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to "get" mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can't get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What's even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple's OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google's OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two -- it is, after all, Linux.
So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don't. There's a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they're AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I'd hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don't know anyone with an iPhone who's unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).
Business Week often provides thoughtful news on technology though its prism of general management strategy. I read BW's April 20 annual survey of the 25 most innovative companies on the plane back from the NTC, and it got me thinking and counting. See the online version here.
Of the top 25, I counted 14 listed primarily or prominently because of one or another aspect of digital and electronic technology. Though Coca-Cola and McDonalds figure as big innovators in 2009 (!), in the top ten were Apple (1) , Google (2) , Microsoft (4), Nintendo (5), IBM (6), HP (7), RIM/Blackberry (13) and Nokia (9). That's pretty impressive in itself. And while Apple and Google kept their 1 and 2 from last year, the other five rose from last year's similar survey of senior managers worldwide. Tech rocks the world these days. (Surprisingly, Facebook was the only top 25 tech-oriented innovator from last year that dropped down and out of the top 25 this year.)
Then I categorized a bit. Of those 14 out of the 25, I counted five there highlighted this year primarily for innovations cell phone and mobile communications (Apple, RIM, Nokia, AT&T and Vodafone). Yup, this is a bit subjective, but I figured I needed to put everyone in one category, based on the article’s summary for that company. So, mobile tech accounted for one fifth of the most innovative companies in Business Week’s survey.
Back to my categories. For better or worse, four were listed for consumer electronics innovation--Nintendo, Sony, Samsung and Walt Disney (yes). Then, I counted three listed for global on-line services and integration—Google, IBM and Amazon.
Finally, only one each primarily there for traditional hardware and software innovation (HP and Microsoft). And even here, other coverage of Microsoft in the same issue of BW emphasizes it’s cloud computing services initiatives.
If you divided the 14 up just according to what their general line of business is, then you would likely have a more even distribution among hardware, software, consumer, mobile and some mix. But that doesn't reflect the trend of innovation.
I also looked at which companies gaining recognition had a significant commitment to Open Source, or as the NTC’s keynoter Eben Moglen would say, to a philosophy of sharing in technology innovation. For this, I figured to list Google, IBM, Nokia (it is in the process of open sourcing its Symbian phone software), and Vodafone.
A handful of spotlight features complemented the BW innovation survey, and Vodafone was one. Vodafone, whose mobile communications empire does not touch the US, was highlighted for tools it was providing mobile developers to encourage sharing and open innovation. That too seems a significant trend to me. Here is the vodafone spotlight.
Lessons, if any?
Mobile computing will continue to grow. It’s cool to see that that corresponds with a significant strand of initiative in nonprofit tech circles this past year as well.
Open standards, open innovation have become mainstream. You could contrast the articles comments about Vodafone versus Apple, where the focus rightfully centered on design and usability yet not so much collaborative innovation.
And last: take note of Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft all for grappling with the realm of interconnected commerce and services. The dwindling down of focus on traditional installed hardware and software says something about what drives innovation in technology. From the global corporate elite surveyed by BW down to even the smallest of nonprofit organizations, I would say this has a message for what lies ahead in technology planning.
Check out the article on line. I know my categories are subjective. What do you think? And when should we expect to see a top innovator coming from or focusing on the social sector?
Of course, it’s not all sweetness and light. Insanely perhaps, five of the remaining 11 companies are auto companies, or conglomerates highlighted for a new car.
Project ideas I like so far include some interesting integrations of mapping and text messaging, including this tool to anonymously report sexual harassment. Presenters and facilitators at the conference include Patrick Ball, who has worked for years in data and security issues around human rights, Suzanne Seggerman from Games for Change (see related posts here and here) and Yvette Alberdingk Thijm from Witness, one of my favorite human rights organizations, where I got my start in technology for advocacy. The conferences is happening May 4-5 in Berkeley, CA.
While procrastinating I came across an article about cell phone projectors coming down the pike. It links to a review by the NY Times of one these devices already being sold. It struck an inner geek chord, and I thought, "cool". Amazon shows them selling for $200-300, though the reviews leave a bit to be desired. Mobility is a beautiful thing.
In order to discuss this phone, it's important to separate the phone from the operating system. Android is open source, based on the Linux kernel with a JAVA software development approach. The G1 is an HTC mobile phone with Android installed on it. Android is designed to run on everything from the simplest flip phone to a mini-computer, so how well it works will often depend on the hardware platform choices.
That said, HTC made many good choices and a few flat-out poor choices. Since it's impossible to not compare this phone to the iPhone, then it's obvious that they could have provided a bigger screen or included a standard audio jack (the G1 comes with a mini-USB headset; otherwise, you need an adapter). The iPhone, of course, is thinner, but that design choice was facilitated by the lack of a hardware keyboard. No G1 owner is going to complain that it's modest increase in heft is due to the availability of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. That's one of the clear advantages over Apple's ubiquitious competition. Apple makes it's virtual keyboard somewhat acceptable by offerng auto-suggest and auto-correct as you type, features that Android currently lacks, but should have by early 2009 (per the Android roadmap). But I find - as do many of my friends - that a physical keyboard is a less error-prone device than the virtual one, particularly without a stylus. I have some nits about the Android keyboard -- the right side is slightly impeded by the stub of the phone, making it hard to type and "o" without also typing "p", but it's overall a very functional and responsive keyboard, and I do sometimes blog from my phone, so it was a critical consideration for me.
The hardware has some other limitations as well. It sports a 2MP camera; 3 or 4 would have been preferable. And they made an interesting choice on the memory, including 2GB on board, with expansion available on MicroSD cards up to 8GB. This has led to what seem like some of the major potential issues with the phone and OS, discussed below.
Overall, the design is deceptively unsexy. While the G1 isn't as sporty as the iPhone, it is highly functional. It's easy to hold; the curved "chin" actually supports talking on the phone in a way that my flat Treos and Wing never did; the Keyboard slides easily and quickly, making it's use less awkward when you need it in a hurry, and the decision to include a Blackberry-style trackball, which some have criticized as extraneous, was actually sharp - I find it useful to navigate text fields when editing, and as an alternate to finger-scrolling. My favorite Solitaire game uses a trackball press to deal more cards. It's actually handy and intuitive. Unlike other smartphones, I took immediately to the functionality of the buttons; they're well-designed. Also nice - one handed operation on this phone for basic tasks like making calls, checking email and voicemail is really easy.
A Versatile Desktop
Unlike the iPhone and Windows Mobile, a big emphasis has been put on customization. You can put shortcuts to just about anything on the desktop, and you can create folders there to better organize them. I keep shortcuts to the dialer, calendar and my twitter client there, along with shortcuts to the people I call most, and folders for apps, games and settings. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts to applications. This, again, makes the phone a pleasure to use - the things I want access to are always a few taps away, at most.
It's a Google Phone
The Android OS is young, but elegant. The primary thing to know, though, is that this is a Google phone. If you use GMail and Google Calendar as your primary email and calendaring applications, you'll love the push email and no-nonsense synchronization. The pull down menu for notifications, with visual cues in the bar, is awesome; the GMail client is so good that I often use it to label mesasages because that function is simpler than it is in the web client. But if your primary groupware is Exchange/Outlook, then you might want to stop reading here. As of this writing, there are a few applications that - under the right circumstances - can sync your Exchange and GMail contacts. There's no application that syncs with Outlook on your desktop. If you run on Windows, Google has a calendar sync. But your options for non-Google email are either POP or IMAP in the G1's "other" email application, which is pretty lame, or some scheme that forwards all of your Exchange mail to GMail (my choice, discussed here). Google search is well-integrated, too, with a widget on the phone's desktop, a dedicated search key on the keyboard, and a "when in doubt, search" default that pretty much starts a Google search whenever you start typing something in an app that doesn't expect input. For example, in the browser, you just type to go to a web site, no need for a URL bar; from the desktop, typing will search contacts for a match to call, but if one isn't found, it will switch to a Google search. And taht browser is excellent, much like teh iPhone's, but lacking the multi-touch gestures. All the same, it;s a pseudo-tabbed browser that renders all but Flash-based web sites as well as the desktop, and puts Palm, Microsoft and RIM's browser's to shame.
Multimedia
Multimedia support also pales in comparison to the iPhone, which is no surprise. there's a functional media player, and an app that, like iTunes, connects to the Amazon music store. there's no support for flash, and the only installed media player is the Youtube app, but you can download other media players. You can store music and movies on an SD card (a 1GB card comes with the phone, but, if you plan to use it for music, you'll want to purchase a 4, 6 or 8 GB card). All applications are downloaded to the internal drive, which means that there's a limit on how many apps you can install - most of the 2GB is in use by the OS. I'm hoping that OS fixes and updates -- which are delivered over the air - will address this, as it's a potentially serious limitation.
Maps and Apps
Another compelling thing Maps and GPS functionality. While it doesn't do voice directions, the mapping features are powerful and extensible. Street View features a compass, so you can see where you are going as you walk, and there are already a number of apps doing great integration with maps and multimedia, as you'd expect from a Google phone.
Since Android is so new, and the G1 is the only phone that we'll see in 2008, it will be a while before the third party market for applications grows up to something competitive with Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Apple. While I have almost everything I need to do the things I do on a phone (and I'm a power user), those apps are pretty rudimentary in their functionality, and there isn't a big variety to choose from. I have no worries that the market won't grow - it's already growing quickly. But another consideration is that Android is still for early adopters who are dying for the Google integration, or, like me, want an iPhone-class web browser, but require a keyboard.
Application Recommendations
I get all of my applications from the market, accessible via the phone. A lot of third-party markets are popping up, but they are either offering things that are on the Android Market or selling items (the Android Market only offers free software - this will change in January). I have yet tos ee something for sale that looked worth paying for, versus teh range of freely available apps.
Apps I'm using include Twitli, a Twitter client. TwiDroid seems to have better marketing, but Twitli seems faster and stabler, as of this writing, and presents tweets in a larger font, which my old eyes appreciate.
Anycut - this is a must have OS enhancer that broadens the number of things that you can make shortcuts to, including phone contacts, text messages, settings screens and more. Essential, as having contacts right on the screen is the fastest speed dial feature ever.
Compare Everywhere is an app that reads bar codes and then finds matching product prices online. How handy is that? But I think the ability to scan barcodes from the phone, with no add-on attachments, is pretty powerful, and something that the nonprofit industry could make use of (campaign tracking, asset amnagement, inventory).
Connectbot is an SSH client - I once reset a web server in order to get an online donation form working on Christmas Eve from 3000 miles away. Essential for a geek like me. :)
OI or AK Notepad - simple notepad apps. Ridiculously, there isn't one included with Andriod.
Password Safe - encrypted lockbox. Splashdata has one, too, but Password Safe is more flexible, as of this writing.
WPtoGo is a handy Wordpress Blog publishing app, for those brave enough to post from a phone without spellcheck (I'll only post to my personal blog with this - I have higher standards for Idealware readers!)
And the Solitaire game up on the Market is very nice.
Conclusion
Overall, I'm loving this phone and I wouldn't trade it for anything else on the market - even an iPhone, because I live and die by that keyboard. If it sounds good to you, I'm assuming that you use GMail; you actually write on your smartphone, or would if it had a good keyboard; and that you don't mind being a bit on the bleeding edge. Otherwise, keep your eye on Android - this is the first of what will be many smartphones, and it's all brand new. For the first iteration, it's already, at worst, the second best smartphone on the market. It can only get better.
As the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1, the first phone out running Google's Android Mobile Operating System (OS), I wanted to post a bit about the state of the Mobile OS market. I've been using a smartphone since about 1999, when I picked up a proprietary Sprint phone that could sync with my Outlook Contacts and Calendar. We've come a long way; we have a long way to go before the handheld devices in our pocket overcome the compromises and kludges that govern their functionality. My personal experience/expertise is with Palm Treos, Windows Mobile, and now Android; but I have enough exposure to Blackberries and the iPhone to speak reasonably about them. My focus is a bit broader than "which is the best phone?" I'm intrigued by which is the best handheld computing platform, and what does that mean to cash-strapped orgs who are wrestling with what and how they should be investing in them.
I wrote earlier on establishing Smartphone policies in your org. The short advice there was that the key Smartphone application is email, and you should restrict your users to phones that offer the easiest, most stable integration with your office email system. That's still true. But other considerations include, how compatible are these phones with other business applications, such as Salesforce or our donor database? How easy/difficult are they to use and support? How expensive are they? What proprietary, marketing concerns on the part of the vendors will impact our use of them?
The big players in the Smartphone OS field are, in somewhat random order:
Palm: PalmOS
Nokia: Symbian*
RIM: Blackberry OS
Microsoft: Windows Mobile
Apple: iPhone
Google: Android
Palm is the granddaddy of Mobile OSes, and it shows. The interface is functional and there are a lot of apps to support it, but there isn't much recent development for the platform. Palm has been working on a major, ground -up rewrite for about two years, code-named Nova, but it has yet to come to light, and there's a serious question now as to whether they've taken too long. Whatever they come up with would have to be pretty compelling to grab the attention of customers and developers in light of Apple and Google's offerings.
App Support: C (lots, but not much new; Treos do Activesync)
Ease of Use: C (functional, but not modern interface)
Cost: C (Not sure if there's much more than Palm Treo's available, $200-200 w/new contract)
Nokia's Symbian platform is notable for being powerful and open source. It's more popular outside of the US, I'm not sure if there are any Symbian smartphones offered directly from US carriers, which makes them pretty expensive. They do support Activesync, the Microsoft Exchange connector, and have a mature set of applications available.
App Support: B (Activesync, lots of apps, but missing some business apps, like Salesforce)
Ease of Use: B (Strong interface, great multimedia)
Cost: D (Over the roof in US, where contracts don't subsidize expense).
The Blackberry was the first OS to do push email, and it gained a lot of market and product loyalty as a result. But, to get there, they put up their own server that subscribes to your email system and then forwards the mail to your phone. This was great before Microsoft and Google gave us opportunities to set up direct connections to the servers. Now it's a kludge, offering more opportunities for things to break. They do, however, have a solid OS with strong business support - they are either on top or second to Microsoft (with Apple charging up behind them) in terms of number of business apps available for the platform. So they're not going anywhere, they're widely available, and a good choice if email isn't your primary smartphone application.
App Support: A- (lots of everything except Activesync)
Ease of Use: B (Solid OS that they keep improving)
Cost: B (Range of models at decent prices)
Windows Mobile has broad third party support and powerful administrative functions. It comes with Activesync, of course. There are tons of smartphones running it, more than any other OS. But the user interface, in this writer's opinion (which I know isn't all that pro-Microsoft, but I swear I'm objective), is miserable. With Windows Mobile (WinMo) 5, they made a move to emulate the Windows Desktop OS, with a Start Menu and Programs folder. This requires an excessive amount of work to navigate. If you use more than the eight apps (or less, depending on model/carrier), you have your work cut out for you to run that ninth app. And the notification system treats every event -- no matter how trivial -- as something you need to be interrupted for and acknowledge. It's hard to imagine how Microsoft is going to compete with this clunker, and you have to wonder how the millions they spend on UI research allowed them to go this route.
App Support: A (tons of apps out there)
Ease of Use: D (the most clunky mobile OS. Period.)
Cost: A (The variety of phones means you get a range of prices and hardware choices)
Apple's iPhone represents a leap in UI design that instantly placed it on top of the pack. Best smartphone ever, right out of the first box. Apple clearly read the research they commissioned, unlike Microsoft, and thought about how one would interact with a small, restricted device in ways that make it capable and expansive. The large, sensitive touch screen with multi-touch capabilities rocks. The web browser is almost as good as the one you use on your desktop (and this is important - web browsers on the four systems above are all very disappointing - only Apple and Google get this right). The iPhone really shines, of course, as a multimedia device. It's a full-fledged iPod and it plays videos as well as a handheld device could. As a business phone, it's adequate, not ideal. While it supports Activesync and has great email and voicemail clients, it lacks a physical keyboard and cut+paste -- features that all of their competitors provide (although the keyboard varies by phone model). So if you do a lot of writing on your phone (as I do), this is a weak point on the iPhone.
App Support: A (it's still pretty new, but development has been fast and furious)
Ease of Use: A- (Awesome, actually, except for text processing)
Cost: B (since they dropped it to $199).
Android is Google's volley into the market, and it stands in a class with Apple that is far above the rest of the pack. The user interface is remarkably functional and geared toward making all of the standard things simple to do, even with one hand. The desktop is highly customizable, allowing you to put as many of the things you use a touch away. This phone is in a class with the iPhone, but has made a few design choices that balance the two out. The iPhone makes better use of the touch screen, with multi-touch features that Google left out. But the iPhone is has far less customizable an interface. And, of course, the first Android phone has a full keyboard and (limited) cut and paste. It is, however, brand new, and I'll discuss the future below, but right now the third party app market is nascent. Today, this phone is best suited for early adopters.
App Support: C (it will be A in a year or so)
Ease of Use: A
Cost: A (G1's are selling for as low as $150w/new plan)
The big question, if you're investing in a platform, is where are these all going? Smartphone operating systems are more plentiful and competitive than the desktop variety, where Windows is still the big winner with Apple and the Unix/Linux variants pushing to get in. But the six systems listed above are all widely deployed. Palm and Nokia have the least penetration and press these days, but they're far from knocked out. Nokia could make a big push to get Symbian into the market and Palm's Nova could prove to be really compelling -- at one point, Palm was king of these devices. Today, the interesting battle is between the other four, Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google. Of these four, all but Android are commercial OSes; Android is fully open source. RIM and Apple are hardware/software manufacturers, building their own devices and not licensing their OSes to others. Windows Mobile and Android are available for any hardware manufacturer to deploy. This suggests two things about the future:
Proprietary hardware/software combos have a tenuous lead. RIM and Apple are at the top of the market right now. Clearly, being able to design your OS and hardware in tandem makes for smoother devices and more reliability. But this edge will wane as hardware standards develop (and they are developing). At that point, the variety of phones sporting Windows and Google might overwhelm the proprietary vendors. Apple is big now, but this strategy has always kept them in a niche in the PC market. They dominate in the MP3 player world, but they got that right and made a killing before anyone could catch up; that edge doesn't seem to be as strong in the mobile market.
Open Source development won't be tied to the manufacturer's profit margin. Android's status as open source is a wild card (Nokia is Open Source, too, so some of this applies). Apple and Microsoft have already alienated developers with some of their restrictive policies. If Android gets wide adoption, which seems likely (Sprint, Motorola, HTC and T-Mobile are all part of Google's Open Handset alliance, and both AT&T and Verizon are contemplating Android phones), the lack of restrictions on the platform and the Android market (Google's Android software store, integrated with the OS) could grab a significant percentage of the developer's market. I've been pleased to see how quickly apps have been appearing in the first few weeks of the G1's availability.
If I were Microsoft, I'd consider isolating the WinMo development team from the rest of the campus. Trying to leverage our familiarity with their desktop software has resulted in a really poor UI, but their email/groupware integration is excellent. They need to dramatically rethink what a smartphone is -- it does a lot of the same things that a computer does, but it isn't a laptop. Apple should be wondering whether their "develop your app and we'll decide whether you can distribute it when you're finished" approach can stand up to the Android threat. They need to review their restrictive policies. RIM has to fight for relevance - as customer loyalty, which they built up with their early email superiority fades, well, didn't you notice that Palm and RIM the only names in our list that don't have huge additional businesses to leverage? And we, the smartphone users, need to see whether supporting Android -- which has lived up to a lot of its promise, so far -- isn't a better horse for us to run on, because it's open and extendable without the oversight of any particular vendor.
* I have to own up that I'm least familiar with Symbian; a lot of my analysis is best guess in this case, based on what I do know.
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