I don’t like holding this phone, and I can’t overstate how much that informs the experience of using it. It makes an awful first impression, slippery and slimy and simply unpleasant in your hand. My white review unit is completely smooth and glossy, with a subtle checkered pattern that looks textured but is neither grippy nor textured anywhere on its body. Even the silver band around the sides, which is obviously supposed to look like metal, is plastic. Everyone I showed the GS4 to frowned and wrinkled their nose as if it smelled bad, before rubbing their fingers on the back of the phone and then handing it back to me — that’s the opposite of the standard reaction to HTC’s One, which everyone wants to ogle and hold. That’s going to be a huge problem for Samsung, because the GS4 and One are likely to be next to each other on store shelves, and at least on first impression there’s absolutely no contest between the two.

Even worse, it appears that Samsung has added so much complexity to the S4 that they had to include an “Easy Mode” so that normal people can use the phone. Look at this quote from Nick DiCarlo, VP of Portfolio Planning and Product Marketing at Samsung Telecommunications America:

With the S4 you will notice that we have done a ton of things to make things simpler. We hope that this could be a phone that you would recommend to your mom.

Pretty hypocritical from the company that lambasted mainstream iPhone users as the parents of the cool kids who want Samsung phones.

I guess my pick of the HTC One as the best new Android phone at Mobile World Congress is still looking pretty good.

Watch the trailer to learn more. Eckell launched his photobook through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo where you can purchase the book or individual images.

The photos look great. Perhaps Carnival Cruise should hire this guy to beautify their recent “adventures”.

Source: Chitika Insights, March 2013

And this is not a trend that Chitika expects to change in the medium term:

With the iPad maintaining its dominance within the tablet usage environment, it seems unlikely that any company will pose a challenge to its standing as the biggest driver of tablet traffic, particularly considering that the company is expected to release its latest tablet device within the coming months.

Tablets are increasingly being used as notebook replacements and often used to casually browse the web in the evenings while watching TV. As such, tablets are becoming the portal for many potential travelers during the discovery and research phases of their trip.

So as your developing your mobile web strategy, be sure to prioritize the iPad as the primary use case in your development and testing plans. This is even more important as Android tablets begin to migrate to new versions of Google’s Chrome browser which will use their new proprietary Blink browser engine, which I wrote about earlier this month.

Verizon is rapidly approaching an all-LTE network:

• ~82% of new smartphone activitations (5.9 million out of 7.2 million) were LTE
• 95% of it’s 3G network now has LTE coverage
• 54% of all network traffic is now over LTE
• CFO Fran Shammo said Verizon will be offering LTE-only devices (no 3G for voice) next year and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is coming right behind it. VoLTE is significant because that clears the way for simultaneos voice and data — currently Verizon’s only black-eye in comparison to AT&T

Apple is again the #1 smartphone, with a 55.5% share of all smartphones. Given that 2 years ago Apple’s market share at Verizon was ZERO, that’s pretty remarkable and is reflective of the pent up demand that Apple has seen at Sprint and T-Mobile as well. But what was really interesting was the mix of iPhones sold. Shammo said the LTE-capable iPhone 5 made up roughly half of Verizon’s 4 million iPhone activations.

That means the $99 (with activation) iPhone 4S and free iPhone 4 drew a significant number of sales on their own. I’m not sure whether this substantiates the need for a lower cost iPhone or disputes it. But i guess we’ll find out in a few months either way.

Spoiler Alert (well, not really): Southwest and JetBlue do quite well.

Click on the infographic for a larger image:

A strong desktop and mobile web presence is critical to travel suppliers, intermediaries and content providers, so understanding the implications of this recent news is critical.

Change in a Blink

The news that got most of the attention was Google’s decision to diverge from Webkit to introduce Blink as Chrome’s new rendering engine.

Many people – myself included – referred to Blink as a fork of WebKit. While this is accurate, “fork” is often a short-hand, pejorative term. But before we ascribe bad intentions to the move, let’s take a step back for some context.

Webkit, for sure, was the largest browser engine, but didn’t have a majority of desktop web usage.

Data Source: StatCounter

The numbers tell a very different story when you look at mobile browsing statistics (I used US numbers as a proxy for smartphone usage).  On mobile devices (which now outnumber desktop devices) WebKit has been all that’s mattered:

Data Source: StatCounter

But Webkit was never a homogeneous entity even though many tech writers referred to it as if it were.

Among the various flavors of Webkit-based browsers (about 40 according to Wikipedia), many used different JavaScript engines. So the idea of a pure WebKit browser was never a reality. As such, the forking of WebKit might not be as big of a deal as many fear.

Samsung/Mozilla partnership could have a bigger impact on the mobile industry

On the face of it, the other announcement seems less impactful, but is more intriguing.

Mozilla announced that it is partnering with Samsung to create a next-generation browser engine called Servo.

Two thoughts come to mind.

First, Samsung seems to be steadily pseudo-forking Android for its own purposes.

TouchWiz user-interface, S-apps that replace core Google services (e.g. messaging, translation, voice, navigation, app store), and the Knox platform seem to be creating a Samsung experience, almost to the point that it wouldn’t be recognizable as Android. In fact, if you look at Samsung’s advertising, it’s virtually free of any mention of Android. What’s missing is a browser, and developing one could be Samsung’s plan.

Could the browser be the last step before truly forking Android as Amazon has? And if that happened, could it be said that Google has lost control of the platform? That would have seismic effects on the industry.

Second, for Mozilla, this could be the next step in maturing the Firefox operating system (OS). More importantly, it could line up the #1 non-Apple smartphone brand in the world as a manufacturer.

Community projects aren’t always the Utopia we want them to be

Google is no doubt making this decision to further its own interests and perhaps the announcement about Blink will allow it to speed up the delivery of improvements to Chrome. According to Alex Russell, a Google Chrome engineer, productivity gains are the primary driving force behind the move. Nothing nefarious, just Google’s laser-like focus on execution and speed.

Or is it?

The truth is that when you have a lot of people contributing to a project you reach a point where priorities diverge and that really seems to be at the crux of Google’s decision to introduce Blink.

All you have to do is look at Chrome’s current advertising spot and it becomes clear:

Google wants to more tightly integrate your browsing experience across all devices. (Even though the ad doesn’t include TVs, TVs are definitely part of the company’s vision.) Having greater control of the core browsing engine is likely seen as a linchpin to deliver this vision.

Given the many different voices that are part of a community project, Google probably couldn’t get where it wanted to go without making a change.  Besides, if Google thinks it provides a competitive advantage, I can understand why they would choose not to share.

Further, the conspiracy theorist in me also sees this as a move done primarily because it directly hurts Apple, Google’s primary (only?) competitor in mobile.

Lee Matthews of Geek.com notes:

“For quite a while now, Google has held the number one spot on the WebKit code commit “leaderboard.”

Now that its engineers are working on Blink, that leaves WebKit with a greatly reduced number of active contributors”, which can pose quite a challenge for Apple to ensure that WebKit keeps up with Chrome from a technical perspective.

With Samsung joining forces with Mozilla on Servo, we don’t know how much future contributions WebKit will get from them either – Samsung has no love lost for Apple either.

And while Google gave good reasons for pulling out of WebKit, primarily pointing to Chromium’s use of a multi-process architecture, it didn’t have to happen that way, according to an Apple developer who is part of the WebKit team:

“…the main reason we built a new multiprocess architecture is that Chromium’s multiprocess support was never contributed to the WebKit project. It has always lived in the separate Chromium tree, making it pretty hard to use for non-Chrome purposes.

Before we wrote a single line of what would become WebKit2 we directly asked the Google folks if they would be willing to contribute their multiprocess support back to WebKit, so that we could build on it. They said no…

If Google had upstreamed their multiprocess support, we almost surely would have built on it. And history might have turned out differently.”

Modestly higher workloads for Web and mobile developers

In many ways the amount of work that development teams need to expend won’t change very much. Servo replaces Gekko for all intents and purposes, so that’s a wash.

You can say that Blink becomes the 4th engine, essentially taking the place of Presto (previously used by the Opera browser), but given the low market share for Opera, I would wager that many organizations didn’t develop or test for it specifically.

And even though Blink is a fork of WebKit, will it really be that different? Will it really require that much incremental effort for developers? Xavier Facon, CTO of Crisp Media (a leading mobile advertising platform provider) doesn’t think so:

It won’t make life easier or harder. These two engines [Blink and WebKit] will stay more similar to each other than compared to Servo and others.

I can’t imagine it will cause much fragmentation. All WebKit implementations already have different JavaScript engines. A different rendering engine increases the potential differences, but I think the WebKit teams and Blink teams won’t work outside the specs much anyway.

In fact, the approach of using flags in Blink, and carefully remove Webkit prefixes, allows new experimental features to be rolled out in fully backwards compatible approach.

Bastien Cojan, Technical Director for Ness’ Imano mobile development team, notes that web developers will have to go back to testing Chrome and Safari separately, though he says that many firms were doing that anyway as the differences between the two WebKit–based platforms were already significant enough to merit it.

Better security, stability and performance

All code gets worse over time. It’s not that the code itself degrades, but the layers and layers that are added increases code complexity, introduces bugs and expands vulnerabilities.  So the streamlining of the codebase that will result from Blink (Google says they will remove 4.5 million lines of code and 7,000 files) and the removal of the Google-dependent code in Webkit should enhance both products.

Veracode, a leading application security platform vendor, agrees noting on its blog that there have been 210 reported security holes in Webkit since it launched in 2007, with 207 of those discovered in the last three years, including some moderately serious security holes.

Given that Android accounts for 79% of all malware on smartphones, one can see why Google was keen to close up some of these holes.

This will be good for the industry

It’s generally a good thing when everybody works together. Life becomes more consistent, orderly. Standards, even if they are de facto, help the productivity of developers everywhere.

But significant change such as Blink and Servo can spur innovation and really move an industry forward.

With Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft all with significant skin in the game, they will have to really up their efforts. The consumer will be the beneficiary in the form of better products and experiences.

Crisp Media’s Facon says:

“I am pretty certain, all considered, it is a positive. There are various mobile OS and browser projects scheduled by Samsung, Intel, Google, Apple, Opera, etc… that we don’t know about.

Some of those projects are made complicated for developers when there is code share going on between all these competitors.

For Google to take this step was brave, considering they probably expected some backlash, but it solved business problems for both Apple and Google that allow them to move faster on projects we will end up caring about once we know them.”

Cojan agrees:

“These new web engines seem to be developed with ‘mobile in mind’, which should speed up the current mobile development and have a better handle of device specificities as it will be directly developed by the device manufacturers (Google + Samsung).

In theory, this should make the developer’s life easier (think Apple owning both hardware and software) and reduce the need for handling high number of different cases for different devices.

These four words gave fuel to the imagination of countless man, women and children. It did not only inspire Trekkies in search of beautiful green or blue women that Priceline pitchman William Shatner regularly “met” in his role of Captain Kirk, but perhaps it also inspired Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic). Space travel still captures our imagination today, most recently in Axe’s new astronaut-themed campaign for its Axe Apollo-branded products.

Science fiction aside, low-earth orbit (LEO) travel will be transformative for long-haul travel. The space shuttle or International Space Station travels at 17,500 mph and orbits the earth in just over 90 minutes. A trip from New York to Tokyo, including takoff and landing would take about 90 minutes instead of 14 hours. New York to Sydney about 2 hours instead of 22.

A small world gets smaller.

Today you can get to go to space if you have a spare $20M lying around. Like air travel, LEO flights will be the province of the super-rich for a time before it becomes economically feasible for the rest of us. It’s all very exciting and I only hope that I wasn’t born too late to try it.

The Obama administration decision to leave the commercialization of low-earth orbit to private industry and even by-pass the Moon seems a wise one. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse-Tyson says: “We have been there, done that”. So the next mission is to Mars. We have recently landed the Curiosity Rover and gotten numerous images and data. The next step is to send people. But Mars isn’t a trivial pursuit. Such a trip is frought with dangers and it is far. Much further than people really can comprehend.

David Poliwoda created an amazing webpage-cum-infographic that gives you a great idea of exactly how far it really is. Definitely worth checking out.

Software actually played a dominant role in Samsung’s booth. The main focus was Knox (as in Fort), Samsung’s answer to enterprise security and be business friendly. I completely understand the need to make business feel that Samsung phones won’t be a security hold given the extent of malware attacks on the Android ecosystem. But the manner in which they approached this surprised me. Knox essentially creates a schizophrenic environment on your mobile phone – one personality for work and one for your personal life.

Source: Samsung.com

Certain documents, applications and other data are locked-down within the Work persona, ostensibly by your friendly neighborhood IT department. Then with a click of a button you are transported into your personal space where the color schemes, themes and apps are all completely different. Oh joy. You can’t even see your business calendar in the Personal zone. So helpful when you are trying to make an appointment for your child’s Parent-Teacher conference.

Personally I would NEVER be able to operate like this. On my phone I go between business and personal items all the time. The cognitive dissonance in switching between the two personas and forced interruption would be maddening. What’s funny is that this is exactly the same concept that was pilloried when Blackberry debuted it last month during the launch of BB10. I wonder whether Samsung will be given any grief at all.

And while elements of Knox is based on AirWatch’s technology, it’s not anywhere near as elegant a solution.

Further it completely flies in the face of some of Samsung’s most recent ads where a guy, mocking a Blackberry user, says he can work on his spreadsheet, while watching a basketball game (see clip below). Perhaps he just happens to have a sports-crazed IT department.

In trying to position Samsung as business-friendly, they also launched their Samsung Enterprise Application Partner program. They had several companies showing Knox-certified apps in the Samsung booth, including SAP and Dropbox. But at least in talking with a representative from Dropbox, the Dropbox for Teams app isn’t specific to Android or Knox. The same functionality is available on iOS.

Will Knox be a Fork in the Road?

What I wonder is whether Knox as a security layer will evolve into some sort of fork of Android. It’s unclear if a Knox-certified app will run unaltered on a Motorola, HTC or LG Android phone.  I’m sure that there are marketing advantages to being a part of the SEAP program though. But if it requires maintaining a separate code-base I don’t see how it gets much traction. If it doesn’t, why bother?

What’s your thoughts? Am I being too harsh? Am I missing something?

As I noted in my previous post, MWC was decidedly Android-centric and that manifests itself here.

And the Winner Is…

…the HTC One. There was a lot to be impressed with. The hardware was really solid and the all-aluminum design is quite pleasing to the eye. But what really caught my eye was the next generation HTC Sense.

My last phone (I recently switched to an iPhone 5) was the HTC Thunderbolt. Aside from a nice widget or two I grew to hate Sense. It seemed to bog down the phone every now and again and was one of the many issues (damn you Verizon!) that contributed to the lack up OS upgrades. Worst of all, there was very little value added by Sense. It was just overhead.

But the new Sense UI is headlined by a new feature called Blink which creates a live, Flipboard –like experience to keep up with what’s going on in your streams (social, news, etc.). Kind of like Windows Phone live tiles.  Here’s a short video of a demo by one of the HTC employees in the booth:

The other neat feature is the photo/video software called Zoe. Essentially the phone shoots video and stills at 20fps at the same time. Giving you the ability to pull out individual clips from live action and enhance them if you like. There’s also some pretty good editing software built in that allows you to create ‘short films’ with the video and stills using some pre-set filters and music. Given how smartphones are replacing digital cameras, this should have some appeal in the market.

Motorola Impresses

That is not something I would have expected myself to say. Ever since the StarTAC and perhaps the original RAZR feature-phone, Motorola’s phones have been “meh” and their advertising mind-numbing. But the two new RAZR phones look really sharp.

Build quality seems excellent and the use of Kevlar on the back makes the phones light while not feeling cheap (I’m looking at you Samsung and ZTE). But what really set them apart for me was the almost edge-to-edge screens. This allows Motorola to fit larger screens in a much smaller footprint than other equivalent phones. The 4.3” RAZR HD was only marginally wider than my iPhone 5, but still small enough to use comfortably with one-handed operation.

The larger 4.7” RAZR MAXX HD still fit well in the hand though not really conducive to one-handed operation. But much smaller than similarly sized screen phones.

Making the phones even better is a move far away from ill-designed MotoBlur overlay skin. The Google influence is clear with an almost stock Android build, save for a few, more cleanly executed, add-ons and controls.

If you’re in the market, Motorola is definitely worth your consideration.

Samsung Snoozes

The world’s #1 mobile phone maker certainly had a large booth, but not much to show for it. They had a few new phones and a new 8” tablet plus a couple of cameras (one of which is powered by Android), but all in all, their presence was really underwhelming.

I did like the new Samsung Youth that sports a 3.3” screen and fits in your palm kind of like a Palm Pre.

ZTE isn’t quite ready for prime time

Unless you are looking for booth babes and then they stole the show. A dozen leggy women in short Grecian-style dresses adorned the booth, none of which (shockingly) knew a thing about the phones. It felt more like mid-90s COMDEX or a car show. I didn’t think serious companies did that anymore. Though ZTE was sadly not the only culprit at the show.

As pretty as the girls were the phones did not hold up their end of the bargain. Perhaps that’s why they felt they needed the girls. The gigantic, almost comical 5.7” flagship Grand Memo (though Huawei wins the absurdly large phone prize at a preposterous 6.1”) felt cheap. And 4 of the first 5 models that I picked up – the phones, not the girls – did not work at all.

Well that’s all I got. Thanks for reading.