Whatever you may hear, this isn't Nokia's first touch screen device or even its first touch screen mobile phone. But unlike the 7710 this will be a mass market platform with real developer support. And Nokia will need it, as many existing Series 60 applications will require developer effort in order to work on the 5800.

The 5800's device aesthetics fit its price point. This phone isn't going to turn heads -- unless the extremely loud speakers catch people's attention -- although it's not ugly either. The deep curved shape fits nicely into the hand and its narrowness makes the 5800 very comfortable to hold and likely explains the leaked 'tube' codename. There are sensible button options along the sides to act as shortcuts for the media bar, dim the screen, adjust volume, go to home, or the classic Nokia green and red buttons to control the phone. While Nokia has forsaken its anti-touchscreen religion it has avoided the fallacy of adopting a new anti-button at all costs mantra, Apple-style.

In countries where both are available, the 5800 will be the flagship Comes with Music (CWM) device. This offers unlimited music downloads, both over the air, and onto a PC, for purchasers of a 5800 that is sold with a CWM bundle. Interestingly, while the 5800 will ship in 2008, the CWM bundle version won’t arrive until 2009.

The software is clearly existing Nokia Series 60 with light enhancement for touch screen use. It works surprisingly well but the appearance is unexciting and lacks wows. Example: it's possible to switch photos by dragging a finger across the screen -- iPhone-style -- but there are no eye candy transitions, one photo just vanishes to be replaced by another in its entirety.

The 5800 should do well. Nokia are smart not to go head to head with the iPhone with this handset. At the lower price, it’s a compelling phone. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is a phone Nokia could have built several years ago.

Also, the premium N Series ranges’ positioning feels orphaned: The 5800 delivers a better browsing experience, a better music experience, and has a larger screen for video playback compared with any current N Series handset. I wonder if Nokia has imminent plans for a revolutionary touch screen N Series mobile phone? Perhaps a new high end phone based on Nokia’s Maemo Linux OS which was recently announced to have had mobile telephony support added?

In other words, the more successful a phone is with its design, the more people want to use their phones various features, and so the more strain is placed on the battery and a phone's daily life expectancy falls.

Related research reports:
Mobile Devices - Meeting the Service Needs of Upgraders, published on August 16, 2008.
Mobile Music Phones, published on January 12, 2005.

Music Playback Competes with Many New Media Features for Battery Power

This has created enough of a stir with their rivals to prompt a referral to the competition regulator. However, now the regulator rules they may continue.

Received wisdom: Only the altnets, the competitive operators, will market these kinds of offers. Naked DSL benefits over the top VoIP players.

My take: If a competitor is successful, most European incumbents are nimble enough to respond by adjusting product strategy to maintain their market position. There is no reason for an operator not to have a home broadband + mobile offer like this as a part of their overall product portfolio.

Plus, if the mobile pricing is sufficiently cheap, and includes enough bundled minutes, then a consumer will see no need to add a home VoIP service to their naked DSL service.

Latest is that the ASA has decided that Apple's iPhone should not be advertised as offering access to all the Internet.

Interesting points:

• There's an implicit assumption here that the Internet = the web. It doesn't. Think about Skype, instant messaging, email applications, iTunes downloads, peer to peer apps, etc. etc.


• Irony is that the iPhone does offer a much greater amount of the Internet and access to more different web sites than any other mobile phone.


• Double irony is that following the same ASA logic, the Mac could not be advertised as offering all the Internet either due to the number of sites that still require Internet Explorer. There is no Mac OS version of IE6 or version 7.


• For similar reasons, and just because they don't run Windows and Internet Explorer, many of the new tiny cheap netbook-class laptops running Linux can't access some websites or some parts of those sites. Will the ASA intervene here too?


• Many of the key sites that require Flash or Java plug-ins do work on the iPhone through specific iPhone applications, or special iPhone websites. Examples: BBC iPlayer; Youtube; Last FM; iTunes shop; Truphone; Palringo; AIM; Remote Desktop; Mocha VNC etc. etc.

My take - the spirit of Apple's advertising was correct.

The best current mobile applications and devices understand this, and download what content/messages they can as soon as they can. SMS works this way: messages are delivered direct to the handset. Blackberry push email's main benefit is that when a user opens their email, there is no wait while messages download.

This to my mind is the greatest advantage of building a mobile application, rather than a mobile website. Good applications work anywhere, anytime, whatever the network situation, and can use local storage and sync to deliver faster responsiveness than a website.

But Apple has made a strategic decision with the iPhone to target always-on behaviours.

The iPhone's entire design assumes that there is always a fast network connection present, for both the built-in Apple applications, and the bulk of those from the new app store.

Some examples:

• Google Maps (built-in) does not store any map data locally, even if the user has browsed that map before. Effect: the user has to wait for the map to download each time they open Maps, the speed depends on the vagaries of the mobile network. Despite the new GPS chip which works anywhere, the maps application is only usable if there's a data network. So, its usefulness in very rural areas is limited. Alternative approach: Nokia Maps automatically caches map data locally, speeding its responsiveness, saving the operator from unnecessary data transit, and avoiding data costs for the user if roaming abroad.
• Apple's iPhone email only automatically downloads the in box, not other folders, so there's a delay each time a user opens any other folder, and it doesn't work when there's no signal. How long the delay is depends on how many messages and the speed of the data network. With a 2G data connection and 20-30 messages I find it takes at least a minute or two. Similarly, there's no user setting to control how much of a message is downloaded, so routinely users experience partially downloaded messages, even if the iPhone has many Gb free space.
• Apple's new Exchange email support does not allow messages to be moved or deleted if there's no connection. Weirdly, Apple's IMAP support allows it. The experience when I tried to use Exchange email on the tube, above ground where there is patchy coverage, reminded me of the user access control alerts from Vista: the iPhone kept popping up warning messages.
• Sending SMS messages only works when there's a network present, and the iPhone does not auto-retry sending in the background until there's coverage. Effect: I write a message on London's tube where there's no signal and I have to remember to click send when I surface. I've seen the same poor behaviour on Windows Mobile 6. Alternative approach - my Nokia 7110 from 1999, write an SMS, try and send it, fails, but the text stays in the outbox and the phone auto-retries in the background. The SMS gets sent as soon as it's possible.

• Apple Weather app downloads weather each time the app is opened and has no local cache. Effect, doesn't work on London's tube. Slow to launch. No different in experience for the user compared with accessing a bookmark of a mobile website that has been saved to the iPhone home screen.
• Evernote (a great third party application) stores all notes on its servers with no local cache or sync, unlike the PC and Mac versions of Evernote that sync notes between Evernote's cloud and the local computer. Alternative approach - Windows Mobile syncs notes from Outlook to the handheld with a full copy of each note in both places.

• The newspaper applications for iPhone are little more than skinned websites, but which take longer to load than the iPhone's Safari web browser, and still only work with a live mobile data connection. Mobile News, Bloomberg, SFNetNews applications all require a connection to read stories, just like accessing a mobile website in Safari, yet take longer to launch and have a less standard UI as they are all distributed as separate applications. Alternative approach - antique Palm application Avanto Go, enables users to download content to their PDA for offline viewing. More recent Windows Mobile and Symbian versions offer over the air download. Local storage improves the speed to jumping between pages, so people read more, and see more adverts. The New York Times app for iPhone also appears to do this, but it needs a better UI to display when it has finished downloading stories.

If there's no data connection the current iPhone UI repeatedly nags the user to remind them to switch off flight mode (if the user has set it to on), or that there is no data connection if the mobile is "on" but has poor reception. This reminds me of the worst of Vista's user access control pop-ups (which can at least be switched off).

Bottom line - Apple needs to improve the iPhone's ability to operate where there is a slow connection, or when there is no mobile data network present. They need to add automatic local caches to their standard applications, and offer the user a few more settings to manage data roaming, beyond the current blunt on/off. Apple also need to make it easier for third party apps to store and cache data locally as well.

+ Examples of coverage issues:

In-building, 3G signals often don't reach or are weak. In rural areas, mobile networks routinely only offer gprs and sometimes there is no reception at all. Airplanes don't allow cellular radio use. Public transport often lacks good coverage: cellular masts tend to have been positioned along main roads, not along train lines, plus cuttings and tunnels break up the signal. London's tube has no underground mobile coverage whatsoever. If a 3g cell becomes very busy, speeds slow, and the geographical area that 3g covers actually shrinks. Etc. etc.

If a user is moving in a train or a car, there is no guarantee that a good mobile data signal, or any signal, will continue to exist as the user roams between cells and locations. They may start an activity in good coverage and then lose it.

Why build a mobile website? What's the best way of targetting the mobile Internet audience? This is an area we've debated extensively at Jupiter over the last year.

• Should the mobile web be separate from [PC] web sites?
• Should companies build mobile applications/widgets or should they build mobile websites, or both?
• What determines what tactics organisations should follow? Type of content or service, geography, or whether they seek a mass audience or a carefully chosen niche target segment?

The w3 alludes to this, but the main web standards body doesn't face the "why the web on mobile" issue head on.

Here's my take on why marketers need to ensure their organisations build mobile websites, in addition to whatever applications they develop:

• Websites enable marketers and publishers to target the broadest share of the mobile audience. Every modern handset has some form of browser, every modern smartphone has a web browser. Building one application will limit its the audience to one of the many different operating systems in use (iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile Pro, WM Standard, Symbian S60, Symbian UIQ, Google Android, Java, etc.).
• Building websites is relatively cheap. Existing web staff, web tools, expertise, and equipment can be deployed. Often a few site designs will deliver content to all smartphones. To reach such a wide audience an organisation would have to build multiple versions of the application, most likely from the ground up, similar to writing software for the Mac and Windows. Building those applications requires many completely separate full software development projects. Maintainenance costs are also much higher again due to the multiplicity of handset platforms.
• Leverages normal PC website traffic which can be easily diverted to a mobile version. iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile users are already visiting PC websites but finding an uneven experience. This is a ready source of traffic that organisations should embrace.
• Are more compatible with email newsletter links. If a publisher or marketer is maintaining user engagement through email newsletters with links to full articles, a mobile website ensures that these links are successfully delivered when a user clicks on them on their Blackberry or other phone. Linking from an email message to content within a specific phone application is hard to do, and to my knowledge impossible to do in a standards, universally-compatible with all handsets way.
• Provides universally-compatible landing pages for mobile advertising campaigns, which can then link to the rest of an advertisers' mobile website. If a mobile advertiser wishes to solicit requests for follow-up information, they have two options: trigger a SMS-based interaction (as Blyk favour), or link to a mobile website. SMS is a completely universally compatible tool but is purely text-based. Mobile websites enable a richer experience suitable for branding.
• Enables marketers to get to market fast, test the water, learn, and then re-plan and build the case for a bigger budget. Mobile websites are quick to develop, as well as being cheap.

The "One Web" position is contained in the W3's just published guidelines for building mobile web sites, Mobile Web Best Practices. It's a good read and is full of common sense tips all collected into one neat place. While it's aimed at actual website builders as it's lucidly written most of the mandates are easy for marketers and strategists to understand, and should be appled to normal websites too to maximise usability. A few examples:

• Keep website addresses short.
• Do not use pop-ups / unders.
• Limit [page] content to what the user has requested [only].
• Avoid free text entry where possible.
• Provide pre-selected default values where possible.

To what kind of potential customers will this appeal the most? Those with big homes, who will tend to have higher than average incomes and/or wealth. Nice.

KPN's download speeds are good (30-60Mbps). Prices are not that high given that this is an initial launch aimed at testing the market, early adopters, and teasing a response from the savvy Dutch cable companies. The top package tier looks be have little differentiation to justify the higher price. Pricing is significantly above the benchmark set by France's Free (Euro30) which is a very good thing for the business models of all Dutch operators.

Upload speeds are low (3-6Mbps) and look to have been chosen to be just one tenth of the marketed download speed. They are especially poor if compared with other fibre broadband services around Europe.

As KPN's main competitors are cable co's, KPN are under less pressure on upload due to the weakness of cable's HFC (hybrid fibre coax) technology to deliver high upload speeds. Ideally, KPN should use the much higher upload speeds of which FTTH is capable to create clear differentiation from cable broadband packages, even those based on DOCSIS3.

The major competitor operators that have their own existing DSL networks -- Sky, O2, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali -- will have to make decisions soon about whether to invest in fibre themselves.

A key part of that business case is the degree to which consumers are interested in next gen fibre broadband speeds. Today, JupiterResearch has published a new report with data on this precise subject:

Demand for Fiber Speeds
- Segmenting Targets for Next-Gen Internet

Other related reports on fibre:

The Fiber Future
- How FTTx Speeds Compare with WiMAX, 3G, DSL, and Cable

The Fiber Alphabet
- FTTx Broadband Technology and Its Effect on Net Neutrality

Clients - please ask us for more insight, we have other reports in preparation on this topic and have significant amounts of unpublished data which we are delighted to discuss on an enquiry call.

Key points:

- Availability to 10 million homes by 2012. This is fast.
- Mix of fibre to the home (FTTH) for new builds with peak 100Mbps speeds, and FTTC/VDSL2 for existing homes (peak speed of 40Mbps). Exact split between the technologies has not been announced.
- Dependent on regulatory response from Ofcom.
- BT will offer its fibre on a wholesale basis to other operators and ISPs.
- High definition TV cited as one of the key drivers.
- "Demand led" rollout indicates BT plans to revive the success of the community-led broadband campaigns of the DSL roll out to prioritise locations that receive fibre first.

Initial thoughts, ahead of the analyst briefing in five minutes time:

This is a game changer for the UK broadband market. The larger ISPs that have unbundled local loop networks (O2, Sky, Carphone Warehouse, Be, Tiscali) suddenly face the prospect of their copper DSL services becoming obsolete in just a few years. The small niche ISPs that have struggled to remain in business in the face of higher speeds and thin margins offered by the LLU players, now have a lifeline with BT's proposal to wholesale fibre.

However, there will be devils in the detail. 1.5 billion pounds is a suspiciously small sum to reach 10 million homes if BT were to achieve a high proportion of consumer uptake in the areas passed by fibre. I suspect the higher wholesale prices that BT plans for fibre, compared with DSL, will slow the uptake of fibre and so help BT save capex. Also, this announcement appears to be led by BT Wholesale, its uncertain how Ofcom will react given the division of the copper telephone line network into semi-independent Openreach. Ofcom may also choose to intervene to protect the copper/LLU investments of other operators, which could raise BT's costs and slow their roll out (for example by continuing to insist that new build developments receive copper as well as fibre). It's going to be extremely interesting to see if the LLU players choose to invest in fibre themselves.

More to follow.

The iPhone 3G's main goal is to grow Apple's share of the global mobile phone market by attracting new buyers.

For an existing iPhone owner the only reason to buy the 3G model is the new 3G hardware and GPS satnav, as the version 2 software is available for free to existing iPhone owners.

For a potential new buyer, or an existing owner, the v2 software is a really really big deal: it adds Exchange sync, the application store and lots of little improvements. As my colleague Michael Gartenberg has been saying all week this is as much about software as hardware. Exchange support and the app store will open up the appeal of the iPhone to a much wider audience.

Then there's the hardware. 3G offers a pile of benefits beyond the mere headline download speed. 3G enables a phone to receive or make a phone call while email or another application is connecting to the Internet in the background. HSPA offers better latency, which combines with that faster headline speed, to improve the web browsing experience. Anyone that has used ISDN (slow speed, great low latency, good browsing experience) or EDGE (OK'ish speed, terrible latency, poor browsing experience) or analogue modems (poor speed, poor latency) will understand what this means. 3G networks also routinely deliver better voice quality, and enable handsets to sidestep saturated 2G networks in busy city locations.

In countries where 3G coverage is good, like most of Europe, the 3G network will also have less of an adverse impact on iPhone battery life than the US reviewers found. From what I hear, AT&T 3G coverage is very poor indeed, even in urban areas. In situations where a 3G signal is weak, the handset has to work harder... result: the handset needs charging more often.

The GPS location finding should also work better in cities that lack the tower block canyons of New York, or Chicago. In European cities the handset will be more likely to see satellites and experience less signal echos. Again, this means the GPS should work better outide the US.

Then there is pricing. In many European countries iPhone 3G pricing is significantly below the original model. For example, in the UK, the iPhone 3G is available for free on a number of tariffs. The 8Gb iPhone 3G is now just 100ukp on the lowest tariff, compared with 269ukp previously. Unlike AT&T in the US, O2 has kept the monthly pricing the same, or better, than before.

This combination of 3G, lower handset price, the application store, and Exchange sync should dramatically increase uptake of the iPhone in Europe.

The 3G iPhone launch is Apple's big play to kick start iPhone uptake outside the US. That's a key reason for Apple's ambitious simultaneous multi-country launch. Looking at the offering on paper -- I've not used the 3G model yet -- Apple have a good chance of succeeding and hitting their end of year sales target.

Stop the hype with Mobile Wimax

Jupiter is conducting its annual TV Executive Survey for the European Digital Home Service.

If you work for a broadcaster, a cable/satellite/IPTV TV operator, a rights owner, or a TV production company, and have a few minutes to spare, your answers will help us collect interesting data on the state the of the TV industry. You can take the survey by clicking here.

We will use this data in combination with our existing proprietary consumer survey data on consumer attitudes and behaviours for new reports this summer.

To thank you for your participation, we'll send you a free copy of the aggregated survey results.

Please also note that:
- Individual responses are strictly confidential.
- Responses are only used in an aggregate and anonymous form.

If you have any questions about this survey at all, or would like to be interviewed by Jupiter for this research, please contact me: ifogg /at/ jupiterresearch /dot/ com and I'll either help or forward your email on to my colleague Laurence Meyer who is leading on this piece of research.

Thanks! We're looking forward to hearing from you.

Unlimited broadband = 12 minutes - My take in April on the detail of this traffic management scheme.

As I've said before, it is in the broadband industry's interests to be clearer and less ambiguous on the way they market broadband and broadband speeds.

Otherwise if the market is opaque and confusing, no ISP will be able to charge a premium for faster, quality, broadband as no consumer will be able to tell which service is better. Result: all ISPs will suffer declining revenues as consumers opt for the cheapest services.

I've been mulling over some new UK and European consumer data on attitudes to speed which makes for extremely scary reading for ISPs (clients please ask). It will be published in a forthcoming report.

In the meantime, have a browse of some of my earlier analysis of broadband marketing, the ASA and VirginMedia. As you will see, I'm not even slightly surprised about this ASA ruling!

VirginMedia is far from alone in stretching the truth, but this is the first major ruling that has gone against them. Most of the previous ASA rulings have focused on VM's competitors.

VirginMedia's traffic management, which is what the current ASA ruling that VM lost is about.

VirginMedia and a previous ASA ruling which VM won.

What Ofcom is doing from an industry perspective, as like me, Ofcom realise it's in everyone's interest to sort this out.

Note - I'm writing this ahead of the news conference, so more details may emerge soon. Also, I'm sipping coffee out of a Symbian mug I was given ten years ago as a thank you for helping out with the Symbian corporate launch. With those caveats out of the way...

This step is a major change in business model to revive flagging adoption of Symbian OS (at least outside of Nokia). For years, Symbian's goal was wide uptake of its OS and the establishment of a de facto standard for smartphones. This common OS would enable application developers and others to innovate and drive adoption of mobile data. This strategy has clearly failed, and without a new initiative Symbian would have been consigned to be one player among many in the mobile market, with new entrants like Apple's iPhone and Google Android picking up share.

Whether this bold move will turn adoption of Symbian around remains to be seen. Even if it does, the new Symbian foundation may struggle to keep sufficient central coordination to deliver a single platform for third party developers. Without such a platform, application development will continue to be hindered by the (unnecessary) costs of supporting multiple platform variations.

If it fails, and Symbian OS remains one of many mobile OSes in the market, then similarly application developers will have to make difficut choices: Should they develop for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Google Android, RIM, Openmoko?? etc. etc.

Ironically, in such a balkanised mobile OS market, the easiest applications to develop across multiple devices will be those that integrate least with each OS and device. Or, many Internet companies will focus their efforts on their on mobile websites as the simplest and cheapest way of reaching the whole mobile population.

For Apple, Symbian and Google Android represent similar challenges to DOS/Windows. Both Apple's competitors are actively courting multiple device makers and encouraging licensing. But the mobile market is not the PC market. The devices need to be tightly optimised. Apparently small UI irritations quickly become major issues for users, when those quirks get in the way of making a phone call or sending a message while walking down the street.

This time, delivering the best experience may win, and Apple is well ahead in creating that uniformly elegant mobile experience.