In the past few years I’ve seen a whole load of social mobile apps, such as Sensor (was a bit involved in that one), and more recently fotochatter and 6th Sense.
I think most of them are clever and work as advertised. But, all seem to be based on a Symbian or Windows Mobile app for a smartphone and thus suffer from a crucial weakness – density of devices.
All of these apps (they are not services, yet) require that a person be nearby with the same app running. Therefore, there needs to be a high enough density of folks with the right phones in the right places with the right app.
Uh uh.
Having used various of these apps, I have felt very lonely, even in the mobile crazy halls at Nokia. There just isn’t any penetration of these smartphones to a significant degree to make these apps useful.
I’ve seen some ideas of how to get around this limitation, but all of them still expect someone to have a smartphone.
Here’s my proposal, forget the smartphone and deploy something that can be used with simple Java phones. Indeed, I’ve seen some cool stuff there, too, but nothing out in the wild, yet.
It’s so easy to make an app for a smartphone and say you’ve got a winner. But the reality is that there are about, oh, 600 million phones out there being sold this year that will not be smartphones (which themselves should amount to no more than 10% of the total market for new phones).
What say you?
Hey. Totally agree with you that penetration into as many of the devices is important. Our last company was Series 60 specific and it was a big lesson for us. That’s why we made fotochatter run in the most cross-platform friendly MIDP 1.0 way we could. Meaning, no fancy Java here. It just works. Hopefully everywhere. Just wanted to clarify that. Cheers. Armando.- co-founder of fotochatter.
Yup, know that feeling. Have the Sensor on my phone and feels as though it’s totally useless. Nobody here knows about it…let alone letting an unknown phone send any recommendation to the owner’s phone. *sigh*
Yes and no. Being Java doesn’t solve the problem density problem. People have to know about it, download it and run it and re-run it everytime they switch their phone off/on or run a second Java program (on many handsets). Unless the application is incredibly useful people just dont do it.
How many people do you know that use IM on phones (similar issues of download and install)? Inside the tech savy community (where PC IM is popular) the number is low, outside – non-existant.
There are few if any compelling add-in programs for phones. This suggests to me that these features need to be integrated into the handset in a way that the owner uses them almost without thinking. Yes this needs critical mass, but so did SMS.
Every 18-24 year old girl that I come across simply uses her phone with the same ease as her purse. This new generation is inherently techie and cool at the same time. So I think this is as much a generational issue as it is a techie/non-techie issue. Funny thing is for some reason we don’t have enough 30 something techies hanging out with 20 year old girls. 🙂 Seriously though. We just got some kids in a high school in Nicaragua using it. I call that penetration. More than useful I think its about the simple fun of connecting. My 2 cents. Armando.- co-founder. fotochatter
I started to write a comment and realize it was just getting too long! So I posted it on my own blog instead. =)
http://icppl.typepad.com/i_see_people/2005/07/comments_on_com.html
mike, co-founder of 6th Sense
Forget Java on mobile phones – it’s too crippled to do anything worthwhile
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