Consumer devices are here to stay. Apple’s iPhone changed all that. Apple would argue that its iPhone wasn’t just a consumer device and was aimed at business too, but it was marketed as a…
Part of the management summary of a document I’ve just finished about iPad in the Enterprise
Consumer devices are here to stay. Apple’s iPhone changed all that. Apple would argue that its iPhone wasn’t just a consumer device and was aimed at business too, but it was marketed as a smartphone with great Internet, media and gaming capabilities.
Apple’s iPad only served to make matters worse for corporate IT. This device, firmly cemented as a media slate, was also large enough to provide the kind of capability to do actual work on. Emails were readable; could be replied to and even composed in a sensible fashion without having the tiny screen of a BlackBerry or iPhone. Corporate Executives rejoiced and many of them became enamoured.
It is predicted that consumer devices will continue to disrupt traditional corporate IT infrastructure and business processes. The most significant impact will be focused on Information Security and network connectivity. Increasingly the ‘Internet is the network’ and consumer devices err on the side of using the Internet natively and without the necessary checks and balances that are needed by corporates. On a very positive side, though, consumer devices and their inherent ease of use and design aesthetic could help corporate IT reconnect with its business counterparts. It will be important for corporate IT to understand why the business wants to use these consumer focused devices – from the perspective of the business. An additional effect will be that enterprise software vendors and hardware manufacturers will continue down a road of applying consumer device design principles to their offerings aimed at corporates.
There are challenges ahead for corporate IT. Some of the management and security issues associated with consumer devices are being addressed by Mobile Device Management vendors. But the breadth of scope of such solutions is limited and few are looking towards the ‘non-mobile device’ areas that are covered by Apple TV, Skype TV’s etc. which are likely to occupy the next batch of consumer products that will creep into corporates. Time for a rethink of corporate IT’s approach.
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The Windows Phone 7 Fable
Steve Ballmer announced Coin Golf for Windows Phone 7 at CES 2011. This game will apparently let you earn Fable 3 gold on your Windows Phone and let you transfer it into the main game on your Xbox 360. Great. Gold is the least of my problems on Fable 3. I have mountains of the stuff.
But Fable 3 gold is not what this thought is about. It did, however, make me think a bit about Fable 3 and it’s gameplay experience. Since the first Fable, Lionhead Studios have had a very simple but incredibly effective way of movement, battling and interacting with in game characters. It’s so good that I thought “Why doesn’t Microsoft use more of these methods in other places - other games and even the UI of software?” I noticed in Ballmer’s CES keynote that the Kinect UI for Xbox has inherited aspects of this Fable UI. Namely “gesture and hold”.
When interacting with elements in the Fable game the “A” button symbol appears on screen to denote that you can interact with an item or person. You press A to perform the interaction. But it’s not just a single button press, you have to hold the button down until a timer circles the on screen “A” icon. What a lovely, simple way to interact with something. You don’t accidently interact because a single press is not enough, you need to hold the button for a moment.
Various blog posts and annoucements about Windows Phone 7 have lauded the ‘tap and hold’ feature of the UI. But in the one place I think it’s drastically needed - it doesn’t exist. This place is one of the things that is absolutely paramount to a phone - especially a mobile phone and especially one with a predominantly touch screen experience…. answering an incoming call.
I lost incoming calls because of the silly way you have to answer a call on Windows Phone 7. When the phone rings you have to slide the lock screen up and then press a button. It sounds simple, but believe me it’s awkward and sometimes difficult to achieve with one hand in time to answer some calls. The swipe up and then tap button action is just not ‘modern’, not simple enough and doesn’t make use of UI that Microsoft has within it’s portfolio. Microsoft Game Studios own Lionhead right? Well why not use the “A” button interaction from Fable to provide the method of answering or rejecting incoming calls. Just have an ‘answer button’ on the screen (rather than the lock screen to swipe up) and use the tap and hold method to answer the call. Simples.
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Microsoft will release a big WP7 update in January - this is what I think needs to be in it
The Windows Phone 7 OS is slick. Microsoft have done a pretty good job of distilling the key things that many of us do down and presenting them on the home screen tiles. So you get an at a glance screen that means you can look at the number of unread messages, unread emails, missed calls etc. But crucially what your next appointment is and not just the notification that it’s going to happen within the period that a reminder has been set. Windows Mobile 6.5 always had a pretty good home screen - a dashboard on your day. Windows Phone 7 has taken certain aspects of that and has kept them on the home screen. The four tiles at the top of the home screen - I’m told - will always be the same on all devices. So the phone tile, the People tile, the messages tile and the email tile with always be the four at the top. You can still move them if you wish, but coupled with the calendar tile (a double width tile) they comprise what most people will need for business and personal needs. Simply put the people tile is your contacts list, your phone numbers, your Facebook friends, your Windows Live contacts and any other contacts you might have from other services all in one place. Having Facebook integration without necessarily having to have a Facebook app is a nice feature to have. Of the apps that come out of the box on Windows Phone 7 I’d have to single out the email app. Filtering your mailbox is as simple as swiping left and right. Default filters are unread and important emails (as defined in Outlook if you’re using MS Exchange for email). This does make it pretty quick to skin through unread mails and emails marked as priority. The calendar app is not so good. It has a good standard view, but the month view is almost unusable - the text is just too small. It serves only as letting you know you’ve got ‘some kind of meeting’ on a particular day - not much more than that. My only beef with the email app is that the names of people who have sent you email, if particularly long, get cropped by the UI and you can’t actually see the whole name until you open the email. Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is very responsive. Pages load quickly and pretty much all sites I’ve visited render correctly. The thing that bugs me about IE on WP7 comes when you enter landscape mode. The URL box disappears and you can only get it back by tilting the phone back to portrait. I don’t get it. Most of the browsing I’ve done on device since the invention of accelerometer driven screen orientation has been in landscape. This is the case on iPhone and iPad. So why is Windows Phone 7 different? I don’t know. But, for me, it’s the single biggest feature missing. None of the other apps really stand out. The Xbox Live integration is neat. I need to get some cross-over game titles with their Xbox brethren to really get much out of that though. Having another device that I can earn Gamerscore on is cool, but I want a Fallout New Vegas mini-game that contributes gambling cash to my character in my Xbox 360 game. I was looking forward to the Fable III game that would reward you for cash in the full Fable III game, but it never materialised. Pants. So far I’ve only played Monopoly on WP7. It’s actually not that bad (it’s by EA so I’ll never afford them a positive review because I despise the company with a passion for the abomination that is the FIFA series) and I suppose I’d need to compare it to the iPhone version. BUt I’m not buying more than one copy of Monopoly. The camera app is ok too. It has a nice feature whereby when you’ve taken a photo it slides to the left of the screen and the current shot appears in on the screen viewfinder. This creates the illusion of having a ‘live’ photograph waiting to be captured along side the pictures you’ve taken. It doesn’t add anything to the experience for creating better photographs but it’s a neat way of presenting your film roll. So what is there not to like? Unfortunately, as of the current version of Windows Phone 7, quite a bit. And it’s critical stuff as far as I’m concerned. The phone’s use of it’s data connection is simply not as slick as other devices I’ve used. By this I mean the amount of ‘dead time’ you get while an application talks to the network, gets it’s data and then presents it back to you. Much the same way that Windows has had issues with waking up from a period of not being used and then struggling to connect to data without an enormous pause, Windows Phone 7 suffers from the dreaded ‘thinking’ bug that plagues many Microsoft products. The classic example of this is Facebook. When using the Facebook app (the full app not the native integration) should you leave the device while the app is running and it goes into a sleep state it’ll take a good while to wake the app back up. Upon hitting the Windows key (or the power button on the HTC and LG) you’re presented with a ‘white screen of nothingness’ for a good few seconds while the device yawns, stretches then thinks “ahh.. I need to get some data and refresh don’t I?” This isn’t something that’s limited to the Facebook app. Many of the apps I’ve downloaded suffer from this. The Xbox app suffers from this. But the email app doesn’t seem to suffer from this. Infact the email app is super responsive. So why can’t they all work like that? Which brings me on to what I’d want to see in January’s update. Here goes: 1. All devices need the ability to be woken from sleep state by pressing the central Windows key.
2. Something needs to be done about performance of applications when the device is woken up.
3. Internet Explorer needs the URL box to be accessible when in landscape mode.
4. Cut and paste. Yes I miss it in emails
5. Being able to edit the text in a forwarded email.
6. The onscreen keyboard, when in landscape, should fill the available width on the screen.
7. ‘Cropped’ text, namely long sender’s name in the email app, needs to be viewable by scrolling the name left and right.
8. Better Bluetooth support. I’ve tried to use a Bluetooth keyboard once with the phone but it failed.
9. errr… other things. I’m not impressed with the Zune app. As far as apps go I’m waiting for Skype, WhatsApp Messenger, a proper Microsoft Windows Live Messenger app, a decent series of news apps like BBC and Sky News, and some better games. :-) Not much to ask for is it?
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