Form Factor
Wireless World, Singapore/Kuala Lumpur, January 2005 issue
The other day, Samsung enriched the mobile experience with a handphone with megapixel camera, two colour screens and a 1.5-gigabyte hard disk drive. The thing triples up as a phone/MP3 player/camera all-in-one. Nokia is trying to meet worldwide demand for its latest edition of the Communicator, the 9500. The Communicator is basically a phone that’s also a PDA with a qwerty keyboard. XDAs and iPAQs, touchscreen PDAs that double up as phones, abound. And camera phones with flash and telescopic zoomlenses are due to arrive any moment.
What does this tell us? One, everybody tries to stuff everything but the kitchen sink in one gadget. Actually, the kitchen sink is a serious option as well but then something else will have to go. And two, the definitive form that will wow us all into an immediate run on stores is still as elusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The first problem is a non-issue. It’ll solve itself. Moore’s Law, the rule that says computer chips double in capacity every year, has just ended an uninterrupted 40-year reign in the personal computing realm, but immediately found a new life in the wonderful world of mobile communications. Before you know it, TV, camera, computing and radio chips will fit on a piece of silicon that resembles a ten cents coin, both in size and in price.
The second problem, the Form Factor issue, is quite a bit thornier. It’s a problem on several levels. To begin with, it’s about physical shape. Long and narrow or fat and short? How big should the screen be? Keyboard or no keyboard? Clamshell or candy bar? It may sound a bit trivial but Nokia’s belated adoption of the clamshell shape shows that it can matter quite a bit.
But the next level is the most important and difficult of all: “What do I tell my consumers about the gadget I’m trying to sell them?” Is it a phone? Is it a camera? Is it a PDA? Or is it something completely new that’s not yet in the dictionary?
This is a serious issue. It explains why manufacturers keep investing gazillions in new ideas and services that hardly anybody uses. Want an example? MMS. Text messages were the big success that nobody saw coming. MMS was going to be the Next Big Thing, and soon colour screens and MMS capability flooded the market. But hardly anybody sent picture messages. No problem, let’s build in cameras, so they can take pictures and send them right away. It’s 2005 now, everybody has a camera phone, and the news is out: MMS usage is falling. Fewer camera phone owners send picture messages and those who still do, send fewer of them. The public has spoken.
What’s the lesson here? People hate complexity. A phone is for communication, clear and simple. So give people a phone and they’ll use it for voice and text. That doesn’t mean that you can’t sell them anything else: just don’t call it a phone.
It’s the message that counts. And in future it will count even more. In a few months time high-end phones will have 3-megapixel cameras, video and MP3 players. By year’s end they will have 5-megapixel cameras and 2GB of flash memory or hard drives for storing entertainment files. Performance and power consumption will be reduced by using dual core processors. Capabilities will keep growing.
But confusion will reign, and sales will drop in the long run, if we don’t get one thing right: to find the right functionality, and above all: the right message to describe it. The big designers of the 20th century already knew it: find the function, and form will follow. And KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The other day, Samsung enriched the mobile experience with a handphone with megapixel camera, two colour screens and a 1.5-gigabyte hard disk drive. The thing triples up as a phone/MP3 player/camera all-in-one. Nokia is trying to meet worldwide demand for its latest edition of the Communicator, the 9500. The Communicator is basically a phone that’s also a PDA with a qwerty keyboard. XDAs and iPAQs, touchscreen PDAs that double up as phones, abound. And camera phones with flash and telescopic zoomlenses are due to arrive any moment.
What does this tell us? One, everybody tries to stuff everything but the kitchen sink in one gadget. Actually, the kitchen sink is a serious option as well but then something else will have to go. And two, the definitive form that will wow us all into an immediate run on stores is still as elusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The first problem is a non-issue. It’ll solve itself. Moore’s Law, the rule that says computer chips double in capacity every year, has just ended an uninterrupted 40-year reign in the personal computing realm, but immediately found a new life in the wonderful world of mobile communications. Before you know it, TV, camera, computing and radio chips will fit on a piece of silicon that resembles a ten cents coin, both in size and in price.
The second problem, the Form Factor issue, is quite a bit thornier. It’s a problem on several levels. To begin with, it’s about physical shape. Long and narrow or fat and short? How big should the screen be? Keyboard or no keyboard? Clamshell or candy bar? It may sound a bit trivial but Nokia’s belated adoption of the clamshell shape shows that it can matter quite a bit.
But the next level is the most important and difficult of all: “What do I tell my consumers about the gadget I’m trying to sell them?” Is it a phone? Is it a camera? Is it a PDA? Or is it something completely new that’s not yet in the dictionary?
This is a serious issue. It explains why manufacturers keep investing gazillions in new ideas and services that hardly anybody uses. Want an example? MMS. Text messages were the big success that nobody saw coming. MMS was going to be the Next Big Thing, and soon colour screens and MMS capability flooded the market. But hardly anybody sent picture messages. No problem, let’s build in cameras, so they can take pictures and send them right away. It’s 2005 now, everybody has a camera phone, and the news is out: MMS usage is falling. Fewer camera phone owners send picture messages and those who still do, send fewer of them. The public has spoken.
What’s the lesson here? People hate complexity. A phone is for communication, clear and simple. So give people a phone and they’ll use it for voice and text. That doesn’t mean that you can’t sell them anything else: just don’t call it a phone.
It’s the message that counts. And in future it will count even more. In a few months time high-end phones will have 3-megapixel cameras, video and MP3 players. By year’s end they will have 5-megapixel cameras and 2GB of flash memory or hard drives for storing entertainment files. Performance and power consumption will be reduced by using dual core processors. Capabilities will keep growing.
But confusion will reign, and sales will drop in the long run, if we don’t get one thing right: to find the right functionality, and above all: the right message to describe it. The big designers of the 20th century already knew it: find the function, and form will follow. And KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
posted by Jos. at Saturday, January 01, 2005
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