Interesting panel discussion, between Orange, Qualcomm & Acer.
Orange & Acer are both of the belief that people are happy to have multiple mobile devices, albeit maybe not carrying them all, all of the time. Qualcomm is more emphatic about its own research showing consumers are happy to carry 2 devices, some of them 3, but very few 4.
Depends a little on the definition of "carry", however - pocket vs. bag, for example.
The Acer speaker made a good point about needing to tie them all together better "which device has the photo of my friend?". But he was very emphatic that there is no need for a "Swiss-Army" all-in-one.
Interestingly, the moderator (from the US) seemed surprised about this, citing US research which shows people tend to prefer a single phone/device. I suspect this once again reflects the impact of cheap handsets & non-contractual prepay SIMs that are used in the rest of the world - there is a much lower entry barrier to getting a second phone in Europe.
Report: Mobile Broadband Computing
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Annoying WiFi logins
OK, first off top marks to the organisers of the Open Mobile Summit for arranging free WiFi for delegates.
However, it's notable that we've all been given daily BT OpenZone scratch-cards, rather than just having a dedicated conference-room SSID or single conference login. There was an OpenZone speaker, so I guess this may have been negotiated outside the usual hotel/event channel.
However, while I'm glad to have WiFi, and OpenZone is generally far better than peers like Swisscom in terms of attitude & pricing, it's a bit of a pain to use.
The BT splash-screen takes about 10 seconds to appear in the browser. Then it asks for both a username & password, which is a bit silly given they're both printed on the same card (behind a scratch-off panel - overengineering or what?)
I then have to enter both a 9-digit ID and a 10-character alphanumeric keyword. And then re-enter it after each time I hibernate my PC during the breaks.
It's completely unnecessary hassle - especially given the unfriendliness of the password. I haven't dared try and hook up any phone-type WiFi devices. Honestly, it's £5 worth of WiFi, not a bank account, so why the goldplated "security".
If anyone cares - my username & password are 409650422 and uhbpAKj4R8 respectively....
However, it's notable that we've all been given daily BT OpenZone scratch-cards, rather than just having a dedicated conference-room SSID or single conference login. There was an OpenZone speaker, so I guess this may have been negotiated outside the usual hotel/event channel.
However, while I'm glad to have WiFi, and OpenZone is generally far better than peers like Swisscom in terms of attitude & pricing, it's a bit of a pain to use.
The BT splash-screen takes about 10 seconds to appear in the browser. Then it asks for both a username & password, which is a bit silly given they're both printed on the same card (behind a scratch-off panel - overengineering or what?)
I then have to enter both a 9-digit ID and a 10-character alphanumeric keyword. And then re-enter it after each time I hibernate my PC during the breaks.
It's completely unnecessary hassle - especially given the unfriendliness of the password. I haven't dared try and hook up any phone-type WiFi devices. Honestly, it's £5 worth of WiFi, not a bank account, so why the goldplated "security".
If anyone cares - my username & password are 409650422 and uhbpAKj4R8 respectively....
Misleading mobile Internet & smartphone statistics
I am constantly amazed by the groupthink in parts of the mobile industry, and the shameless and unquestioning way that careless, woolly figures get rolled out, time and again.
"There are 4.5 billion mobile subscribers"
"The next billion Internet users will be on mobile"
"160m smartphones are sold annually"
"LTE will deliver 100Mbit/s speeds"
These all make great soundbites, but they don't bear close scrutiny. Of course, much of this debate revolves around definitions and semantics, but the point here is to drill behind the figures to understand *how they are derived* and *what they actually mean for the mobile business*
Instead, the industry has a very bad habit of using the best "marketing" numbers to make itself look successful and important, even if the reality is rather different. That's sort-of fine from a PR point of view, but unfortunately many insiders believe the headlines and use them as a basis for business planning.
Two examples have caught my eye today, both quite closely linked.
Firstly, my regular "sparring partner" Tomi Ahonen has a serious rant at Microsoft about its claims that smartphones are still in their infancy, and that PCs are still dominating the computing industry. Yes, you can argue that if you add together all the Apple, Symbian, Linux, RIM and Windows devices, you get a larger number than Ballmer quoted in his speech. However, that obscures two important caveats:
The other example is related. Two presenters at the conference this morning cited headline analyst figures along the lines of "1.2 billion users of mobile Internet by 2012", typically comparing it with today's roughly 1.3 billion fixed internet users and 400m-odd broadband lines.
Leaving aside the obvious point that there is no "mobile Internet", these figures really don't convey the whole truth. They lump in everything from PCs with 3G/WiMAX right through to GPRS featurephones on which someone accidentally hits the browser icon to go to the operator's homepage.
Most developers (certainly in developed markets) now have a view of a mobile Internet user as a BlackBerry or iPhone user with regular, daily access to email and the web, plus widgets and maybe an appstore. As mentioned above, that population at the moment is probably less than 50m people (ie the 40m plus another 10m of EDGE/3.0G Internet users).
I also see a lot of assumptions that everyone with a 3G-enabled PC will be an active user - not realistic, as only a % will actually pay for connectivity services. Many also forget how few prepay users (still!) get access to mobile data, especially at a reasonable price. 1.2 billion is approximately the number of global individual users with postpaid contracts today.
At the end of 2012, my own Mobile Broadband Computing report from a couple of months ago estimated active users of non-phone devices as:
- 170m for PCs (embedded or dongle)
- 20m with MIDs
Note that these are "users" not "subscribers". Most will not have traditional "subscriptions" but will use connectivity through various adhoc or bundled business models.
I haven't done any formal forecasts for smartphone usage, but my (very approximate) take would be, again for end-2012 [3.5 years from now]
- maybe 250-300m regular active users of flatrate data + highend phones equivalent to today's iPhone. Most will be contract monthly customers.
- maybe 200m more occasional users (maybe on-portal or widget) mobile web users with an OK-ish browser. Mix of contract and prepay.
- a fairly long tail of WAP users doing occasional access - mostly in emerging markets, but hobbled by continued poor availability of mobile data services to 2G prepay users. These are interesting from a statistical point of view (especially if you're trying to make a point), but are not really Internet users in the way that their counterparts with PCs or in cybercafes view the world.
[Sidenote on this mythical next 1 billion Internet users being on mobile: I recently drove 4000km through India, through big cities & small villages & rural towns. Advertising for mobile was absolutely everywhere. But <1% was for mobile data - and most of that was for SMS cricket results or similar. I saw ads for dongles in Varanasi and Mumbai, posters for Blackberries in Mumbai as well, WAP portals in a couple of other towns - and precisely zero people who were obviously using the web on a mobile device. I've been unable to get to the bottom of the 10's of millions of "mobile Internet" users cited by some national authorities, but I suspect the definitions are as loose as possible]
Put another way, I'd expect the population of high-end mobile Internet users to be about 500m by end-2012, split about 40:60 between PCs and smartphones.
Let's get rid of some of the noisy hype, and focus on real, actionable numbers. It's starting to get embarassing to see overblown figures repeated continually - it suggests insecurity or ignorance, like sticking your fingers in your ears.
"There are 4.5 billion mobile subscribers"
"The next billion Internet users will be on mobile"
"160m smartphones are sold annually"
"LTE will deliver 100Mbit/s speeds"
These all make great soundbites, but they don't bear close scrutiny. Of course, much of this debate revolves around definitions and semantics, but the point here is to drill behind the figures to understand *how they are derived* and *what they actually mean for the mobile business*
Instead, the industry has a very bad habit of using the best "marketing" numbers to make itself look successful and important, even if the reality is rather different. That's sort-of fine from a PR point of view, but unfortunately many insiders believe the headlines and use them as a basis for business planning.
Two examples have caught my eye today, both quite closely linked.
Firstly, my regular "sparring partner" Tomi Ahonen has a serious rant at Microsoft about its claims that smartphones are still in their infancy, and that PCs are still dominating the computing industry. Yes, you can argue that if you add together all the Apple, Symbian, Linux, RIM and Windows devices, you get a larger number than Ballmer quoted in his speech. However, that obscures two important caveats:
- Many "smartphones" are locked to additional applications, especially in Japan. Comparing them to a user-controlled smartphone is disengenuous. Many bank ATM machines, or retail PoS terminals have ordinary Intel/Windows boxes in their innards... but most observers would not call them PCs.
- Most "smartphones", especially older Nokia Series 60 devices, are not bought or used for their "smartness". Apart from Apple iPhones, very few are sold with "mandatory" flatrate or other "decent" data plans. I saw lots of "remaindered" Nokia N-series phones during my recent trip to India - a market without 3G networks.
- As I estimated the other day, the total number of 3.5G smartphones with good dataplans is almost exactly the same as the number of 3.5G-connected PCs.
- Despite Tomi's rant at Microsoft, it's instructive to note that the growth curve on netbook shipments (15-20m in 2009, after first introduction in 2007) far exceeds that of the early years of smartphones. I think there is a reasonable probability that operators switch their subsidy and emphasis to netbooks or dongles and away from (some) smartphones
- Smartphones are *expensive*. The Nokia N97 I have in front of me, costs 2x the price of the Samsung NC10 I'm writing this post on. Guess which gives me a better Internet experience. And which has a better battery life.
The other example is related. Two presenters at the conference this morning cited headline analyst figures along the lines of "1.2 billion users of mobile Internet by 2012", typically comparing it with today's roughly 1.3 billion fixed internet users and 400m-odd broadband lines.
Leaving aside the obvious point that there is no "mobile Internet", these figures really don't convey the whole truth. They lump in everything from PCs with 3G/WiMAX right through to GPRS featurephones on which someone accidentally hits the browser icon to go to the operator's homepage.
Most developers (certainly in developed markets) now have a view of a mobile Internet user as a BlackBerry or iPhone user with regular, daily access to email and the web, plus widgets and maybe an appstore. As mentioned above, that population at the moment is probably less than 50m people (ie the 40m plus another 10m of EDGE/3.0G Internet users).
I also see a lot of assumptions that everyone with a 3G-enabled PC will be an active user - not realistic, as only a % will actually pay for connectivity services. Many also forget how few prepay users (still!) get access to mobile data, especially at a reasonable price. 1.2 billion is approximately the number of global individual users with postpaid contracts today.
At the end of 2012, my own Mobile Broadband Computing report from a couple of months ago estimated active users of non-phone devices as:
- 170m for PCs (embedded or dongle)
- 20m with MIDs
Note that these are "users" not "subscribers". Most will not have traditional "subscriptions" but will use connectivity through various adhoc or bundled business models.
I haven't done any formal forecasts for smartphone usage, but my (very approximate) take would be, again for end-2012 [3.5 years from now]
- maybe 250-300m regular active users of flatrate data + highend phones equivalent to today's iPhone. Most will be contract monthly customers.
- maybe 200m more occasional users (maybe on-portal or widget) mobile web users with an OK-ish browser. Mix of contract and prepay.
- a fairly long tail of WAP users doing occasional access - mostly in emerging markets, but hobbled by continued poor availability of mobile data services to 2G prepay users. These are interesting from a statistical point of view (especially if you're trying to make a point), but are not really Internet users in the way that their counterparts with PCs or in cybercafes view the world.
[Sidenote on this mythical next 1 billion Internet users being on mobile: I recently drove 4000km through India, through big cities & small villages & rural towns. Advertising for mobile was absolutely everywhere. But <1% was for mobile data - and most of that was for SMS cricket results or similar. I saw ads for dongles in Varanasi and Mumbai, posters for Blackberries in Mumbai as well, WAP portals in a couple of other towns - and precisely zero people who were obviously using the web on a mobile device. I've been unable to get to the bottom of the 10's of millions of "mobile Internet" users cited by some national authorities, but I suspect the definitions are as loose as possible]
Put another way, I'd expect the population of high-end mobile Internet users to be about 500m by end-2012, split about 40:60 between PCs and smartphones.
Let's get rid of some of the noisy hype, and focus on real, actionable numbers. It's starting to get embarassing to see overblown figures repeated continually - it suggests insecurity or ignorance, like sticking your fingers in your ears.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Is the mobile phone really the hub of social connections?
I'm at the Open Mobile Summit, just listening to T-Mobile's head of products talking about their view of the Mobile Internet.
He mentioned that Facebook would kill for the amount of data & web of communications generated by a typical mobile phone's address book. Basically it was another pitch about network-resident address books (provided by operators, naturally).
He also made a comment about customers being "fed up with silo services".
He ducked my question from the floor about whether a T-Mobile address book would lock a customer to a "silo" access provider, or whether it would also be accessible from another mobile operator's network.
It got me thinking about this notion that the handset's "social graph" is a better map of personal communications and relationships than an online equivalent. And I stopped to think - I've probably met about 100 new friends and acquaintances in my social life since the beginning of 2009. I've added about 80 of these to Facebook, maybe 30 via email address.... but about 15 mobile numbers. I now have a significant number of friends I *only* communicate with via Facebook. I also have 3 mobile devices with different operator SIMs, multiple email accounts, fixed line, Skype etc.
The notion that any of my mobile operators has a handle on my social network and communications behaviour is completely false. And would I trust any of them not to try to lock me in to their access network if I uploaded my contacts?
Now to be fair, I'm in a particular demographic - urban, single, socially-active. Most of my communications are with friends, not family. And I recognise that trying to "churn" my social network from Facebook could be tricky.
But while I hope they don't read this, I'd be prepared to pay for Facebook now. It's proven its worth to me, and its accessible from any device, any operator and any network.
I think mobile operators (and handset vendors) are about to face closing window of opportunity for their goal of putting themselves at the centre of personal communications. Some may be able to shoehorn themselves into this role if they're fast. One thing is certain to me though: IMS won't be the right technical architecture if they do.
He mentioned that Facebook would kill for the amount of data & web of communications generated by a typical mobile phone's address book. Basically it was another pitch about network-resident address books (provided by operators, naturally).
He also made a comment about customers being "fed up with silo services".
He ducked my question from the floor about whether a T-Mobile address book would lock a customer to a "silo" access provider, or whether it would also be accessible from another mobile operator's network.
It got me thinking about this notion that the handset's "social graph" is a better map of personal communications and relationships than an online equivalent. And I stopped to think - I've probably met about 100 new friends and acquaintances in my social life since the beginning of 2009. I've added about 80 of these to Facebook, maybe 30 via email address.... but about 15 mobile numbers. I now have a significant number of friends I *only* communicate with via Facebook. I also have 3 mobile devices with different operator SIMs, multiple email accounts, fixed line, Skype etc.
The notion that any of my mobile operators has a handle on my social network and communications behaviour is completely false. And would I trust any of them not to try to lock me in to their access network if I uploaded my contacts?
Now to be fair, I'm in a particular demographic - urban, single, socially-active. Most of my communications are with friends, not family. And I recognise that trying to "churn" my social network from Facebook could be tricky.
But while I hope they don't read this, I'd be prepared to pay for Facebook now. It's proven its worth to me, and its accessible from any device, any operator and any network.
I think mobile operators (and handset vendors) are about to face closing window of opportunity for their goal of putting themselves at the centre of personal communications. Some may be able to shoehorn themselves into this role if they're fast. One thing is certain to me though: IMS won't be the right technical architecture if they do.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
What's the point in paying for QoS if you don't need it?
I regularly get vendors suggesting ways to monetise networks by providing higher guarantees of QoS, either offering users a "turbo button", or perhaps suggesting that an online video provider might want to pay extra for a partitioned part of a broadband pipe.
Sounds fair-enough in principle... but how would it actually work in practice?
I'm reminded of two roads that go through the centre of the UK - the main M6 Motorway, and a "sister" road called the M6 Toll which bypasses Birmingham. One charges for "quality of service" and the other is "best efforts". That's great - if you're a busy haulier delivering refrigerated goods, or perhaps a salesman trying to get to Liverpool in a hurry, you can avoid the endless roadworks & hordes of slow caravan-draggers on the main road.
But if you were driving at 3am... would you still pay extra to use it? Unsurprisingly, the overnight rates are cheaper. But if you had realtime traffic reports, and you knew that the free road was completely clear, why would you bother?
Something similar will happen with the various policy and QoS initiatives being discussed now. At certain times, best-effort will be perfectly good. At other time, it will be almost good enough. And at peak periods, it will be congested and pretty useless.
I think that there will need to be a good amount of intelligence in applications to know when it's necessary to pay the toll, or when the network is clear enough to use without goldplating the service.
Of course, it's possible that the operators might try to impose differential speed restrictions or place "speed humps" on the best-efforts route. But frankly, if everyone knows that these are simply money-gouging tactics, they'll get dealt with harshly by the highwaymen of competition (OK, I'll stop the overextended analogy there).
All of this is going to be difficult to apply to mobile anyway, as the gating factor in QoS is usually going to be the radio network. Having 99.9% QoS is worthless if it's only available 70% of the time.
Sounds fair-enough in principle... but how would it actually work in practice?
I'm reminded of two roads that go through the centre of the UK - the main M6 Motorway, and a "sister" road called the M6 Toll which bypasses Birmingham. One charges for "quality of service" and the other is "best efforts". That's great - if you're a busy haulier delivering refrigerated goods, or perhaps a salesman trying to get to Liverpool in a hurry, you can avoid the endless roadworks & hordes of slow caravan-draggers on the main road.
But if you were driving at 3am... would you still pay extra to use it? Unsurprisingly, the overnight rates are cheaper. But if you had realtime traffic reports, and you knew that the free road was completely clear, why would you bother?
Something similar will happen with the various policy and QoS initiatives being discussed now. At certain times, best-effort will be perfectly good. At other time, it will be almost good enough. And at peak periods, it will be congested and pretty useless.
I think that there will need to be a good amount of intelligence in applications to know when it's necessary to pay the toll, or when the network is clear enough to use without goldplating the service.
Of course, it's possible that the operators might try to impose differential speed restrictions or place "speed humps" on the best-efforts route. But frankly, if everyone knows that these are simply money-gouging tactics, they'll get dealt with harshly by the highwaymen of competition (OK, I'll stop the overextended analogy there).
All of this is going to be difficult to apply to mobile anyway, as the gating factor in QoS is usually going to be the radio network. Having 99.9% QoS is worthless if it's only available 70% of the time.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Apple iPhone 3G S - quick thoughts
Just had a quick glance at the new iPhone specs.
Interesting that it's just an incremental advance rather than a serious overhaul - I was expecting either a mini/nano version, or a souped-up one.
Things that are in it: MMS, cut & paste, 3MP camera, more battery life, compass, video, more memory, faster processor
Things that aren't in it: HSUPA, flash, 5 or 8MP camera, WVGA screen (800x480), multitasking (I think), slide-out QWERTY pad
My take is that it's probably enough for many existing owners of the 2G iPhone to upgrade (most of the 3G owners still have another 12 months contract to run anyway). Also looks like it's been priced to compete against some specific rivals (notably the Palm Pre) and extend market reach, rather than be the ultimate heavyweight ultra-spec superphone.
Probably makes a lot of commercial sense, as I suspect Apple would rather have 50 million normal midrange users, rather than 20 million ubergeeks. Given the economy, they probably made some pragmatic decisions about designing it down to a price, rather than going the Nokia route and putting in everything but the kitchen sink.
On the topic of which, I should be getting a shiny N97 to play with soon. I also need to change my "normal" voice/SMS phone (currently an S-E C902) as it seems to be getting progressively less reliable & crashing a lot. Assuming O2 keeps the Apple contract, I'm probably tempted by the iPhone S, assuming I'm not hammered too much for an early upgrade.
Interesting that it's just an incremental advance rather than a serious overhaul - I was expecting either a mini/nano version, or a souped-up one.
Things that are in it: MMS, cut & paste, 3MP camera, more battery life, compass, video, more memory, faster processor
Things that aren't in it: HSUPA, flash, 5 or 8MP camera, WVGA screen (800x480), multitasking (I think), slide-out QWERTY pad
My take is that it's probably enough for many existing owners of the 2G iPhone to upgrade (most of the 3G owners still have another 12 months contract to run anyway). Also looks like it's been priced to compete against some specific rivals (notably the Palm Pre) and extend market reach, rather than be the ultimate heavyweight ultra-spec superphone.
Probably makes a lot of commercial sense, as I suspect Apple would rather have 50 million normal midrange users, rather than 20 million ubergeeks. Given the economy, they probably made some pragmatic decisions about designing it down to a price, rather than going the Nokia route and putting in everything but the kitchen sink.
On the topic of which, I should be getting a shiny N97 to play with soon. I also need to change my "normal" voice/SMS phone (currently an S-E C902) as it seems to be getting progressively less reliable & crashing a lot. Assuming O2 keeps the Apple contract, I'm probably tempted by the iPhone S, assuming I'm not hammered too much for an early upgrade.
Forget lobbyists, this is how Net Neutrality gets enacted in law....
I've long held that the Internet will always find ways around any blocking/filtering mechanisms for certain types of application, especially in competitive markets.
What I didn't expect was that democracy can do the same as well.
This week's European Elections have thrown up an interesting anomaly - in Sweden, the Pirate Party, which advocates filesharing and new copyright regimes, has just won representation in the European Parliament.
How long before we get candidates standing for the VoIP Party.....
What I didn't expect was that democracy can do the same as well.
This week's European Elections have thrown up an interesting anomaly - in Sweden, the Pirate Party, which advocates filesharing and new copyright regimes, has just won representation in the European Parliament.
How long before we get candidates standing for the VoIP Party.....
T-Mobile highlights why customers should not trust operator-sold notebooks
T-Mobile can be a paradox from an analyst's viewpoint. At one level, it pushes hard on mobile Internet access, with its early provision of Web'n'Walk, and its significant pace in evolving its network to HSUPA and eventually LTE. It also has a sizeable WiFi hotspot presence, albeit as over-priced as many of its peers. It is probably the most evangelical of Europe's operators when it comes to selling embedded-3G notebooks, with 7 models from 6 vendors on its German arm's website (It's UK business is more dongle-centric).
Yet at an application level, it confuses. It has pretty much embraced the open-Internet worldview - when was the last time you heard anyone discuss on-portal T-Zones stuff? I've seen a demo of some sort of Facebook/Ovi cross-platform portal it is pitching, although it's not obvious that it will be accessible to non-T access customers.
And it has an absolute blind-spot when it comes to Skype. It blocks its use on the German iPhone, even over WiFi. If I'm reading it right, Skype will work on home WiFi or non-T-mobile hotspots, but the explanation that "the high level of traffic would hinder our network performance, and because if the Skype program didn’t work properly, customers would make us responsible for it" is an even more transparent fib than most of Gordon Brown's.
Initially I'd thought they'd teamed up with Apple for a German-specific version of the AppStore, which had different local approvals for apps, but it doesn't appear to be that bad, yet. But I have little doubt that any future T-Mo administered appstores would likely have some fairly draconian policies on which applications could be displayed.
Now, lets think back to the previous paragraph. How do you think that smartphone app-censorship might impact an operator's new image as being the PC retail store of choice?
Do you really think that consumers will want to buy PCs from a company that "has previous" in terms of such arbitrary policies? Maybe it might want to exercise similarly arbitrary decisions about what you can and can't install on your new computer? How do you know what software's been pre-loaded on it in the store? Can it be trusted not to interfere with the OS and BIOS? Hmm, why not play it safe and get one from XYZ Electronics down the road, then just get a dongle? At least you can trust those guys not to monkey around with the OS....
OK, I know that most corporate employees are not allowed to download .exe files, on pain of excommunication by their IT departments. But that's not your PC, it's the firm's.
At the moment, all the mobile operators I speak to are salivating over the prospect of selling netbooks with data plans. Even leaving aside the issue of payment plans and subsidies, I think they need to articulate very clearly what their future policies are on apps. The moment someone gets a pop-up saying "Sorry, you are not allowed to install that software" is the point at which the wheels fall off the whole operator-sold notebook phenomenon. Even Apple doesn't stop you installing "unapproved" apps on your iBook....
If T-Mo wants to avoid being labelled as "applicationist", it needs to start being more sensible about things like this. Its shortsightedness is also hastening the day that someone (Google?) just funnels everything through a VPN tunnel and away from the prying eyes of the packet inspection boxes. Or maybe Skype will just start doing realtime steganographic encoding of voice into images or other data streams....
Footnote: yes, I know T-Mo isn't the only operator with draconian policies of this type. However, it is the one that's pushing PC sales the hardest. And that's what doesn't fit about the blending of the two worlds of computing and mobile phones.
Yet at an application level, it confuses. It has pretty much embraced the open-Internet worldview - when was the last time you heard anyone discuss on-portal T-Zones stuff? I've seen a demo of some sort of Facebook/Ovi cross-platform portal it is pitching, although it's not obvious that it will be accessible to non-T access customers.
And it has an absolute blind-spot when it comes to Skype. It blocks its use on the German iPhone, even over WiFi. If I'm reading it right, Skype will work on home WiFi or non-T-mobile hotspots, but the explanation that "the high level of traffic would hinder our network performance, and because if the Skype program didn’t work properly, customers would make us responsible for it" is an even more transparent fib than most of Gordon Brown's.
Initially I'd thought they'd teamed up with Apple for a German-specific version of the AppStore, which had different local approvals for apps, but it doesn't appear to be that bad, yet. But I have little doubt that any future T-Mo administered appstores would likely have some fairly draconian policies on which applications could be displayed.
Now, lets think back to the previous paragraph. How do you think that smartphone app-censorship might impact an operator's new image as being the PC retail store of choice?
Do you really think that consumers will want to buy PCs from a company that "has previous" in terms of such arbitrary policies? Maybe it might want to exercise similarly arbitrary decisions about what you can and can't install on your new computer? How do you know what software's been pre-loaded on it in the store? Can it be trusted not to interfere with the OS and BIOS? Hmm, why not play it safe and get one from XYZ Electronics down the road, then just get a dongle? At least you can trust those guys not to monkey around with the OS....
OK, I know that most corporate employees are not allowed to download .exe files, on pain of excommunication by their IT departments. But that's not your PC, it's the firm's.
At the moment, all the mobile operators I speak to are salivating over the prospect of selling netbooks with data plans. Even leaving aside the issue of payment plans and subsidies, I think they need to articulate very clearly what their future policies are on apps. The moment someone gets a pop-up saying "Sorry, you are not allowed to install that software" is the point at which the wheels fall off the whole operator-sold notebook phenomenon. Even Apple doesn't stop you installing "unapproved" apps on your iBook....
If T-Mo wants to avoid being labelled as "applicationist", it needs to start being more sensible about things like this. Its shortsightedness is also hastening the day that someone (Google?) just funnels everything through a VPN tunnel and away from the prying eyes of the packet inspection boxes. Or maybe Skype will just start doing realtime steganographic encoding of voice into images or other data streams....
Footnote: yes, I know T-Mo isn't the only operator with draconian policies of this type. However, it is the one that's pushing PC sales the hardest. And that's what doesn't fit about the blending of the two worlds of computing and mobile phones.
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