Not exactly current news, but perhaps this might cheer someone up who's having a bad day: digging through AAS's archives reveals a series of predictions made in July 2002 by a venture capitalist giving a speech at a mobile developers conference. You can read some of these gems below, and I think you'll agree it's pretty amazing how "on the money" his forecasts have been...
Read on in the full article.
This is why no one in the mobile world should ever confidently predict anything more than a few months in advance... 😉
It's also interesting to reflect that many of the things people discuss now as the future of mobile phones simply didn't exist in 2002, so it would have been impossible to allow for their effect in five or eight years time.
He wasn't far off the mark with 3G. I would wager that most 3G phone owners only use a smattering more data than they did when they were using GPRS.
The 3G 'killer app' of videocalls is dead in the water and I don't see many people downloading music / video OTA.
Reading those, I'd have violently disagreed with him, even in 2002! 8-)
If you restrict the results to just the US - he wasn't far off for 2007. Nokia nowhere, 3G rollout had really only just got going there. Until the iPhone app store, apps on phones generally were also almost non-existent, and BREW had a very large presence in the US (still does).
Extrapolating from the US to the rest of the world in mobile is a huge mistake that has been repeated many times since though.
From all of the mobile fortune tellers I've seen over the last 5-10 years, Tomi Ahonen has been the most consistently correct - it'll be interesting to see if that continues...
(P.S. No, I'm not Tomi).
If you restrict the results to just the US - he wasn't far off for 2007.Extrapolating from the US to the rest of the world in mobile is a huge mistake that has been repeated many times since though.
Yes, that sums up my feelings too. He refers to the US market and the global market as if they were the same thing, which is what makes many of his predictions seem so silly.
In the real world, what's popular in the US mobile world (PDAs, CDMA, BREW etc) tends not to be popular elsewhere, it's quite a separate market. There's also not much leadership in the US mobile market, American mobile trends tend to stay in America and never really spread anywhere else. Even the iPhone hasn't done that well outside its US base so far, but of course any long term predictions are dangerous... 😉
But stuff like saying cameraphones will flop, that's a pure mistake, they've been a big hit everywhere since they became available. Music on phones is also something that's popular both in the US and elsewhere.
He wasn't far off the mark with 3G. I would wager that most 3G phone owners only use a smattering more data than they did when they were using GPRS
3G took way longer than anyone expected to become widespread, there was indeed a lot of disappointment at the time as it didn't seem to offer ANY advantages on the handsets of 2002 (they only had WAP browsers and tiny screens).
But 3G is definitely here to stay now. Things like web browsing and downloading music are fairly common, and totally unexpected things like 3G modems for mini-laptops are also becoming quite popular. Even low-end phones are starting to get 3G, so it's getting to the point where it's replacing 2G as a baseline.
The 3G 'killer app' of videocalls is dead in the water
It's quite amusing that he criticised 3G yet he predicted video calls would be huge...
Mobile phones will have mandatory detachable bluetooth headsets while making a call in the future due to health and safety issues.
Excuse me, but what is BREW?
BREW is a platform for developing mobile applications which is mainly used in the US. More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREW
Wow, shocking, you have to spend 400 dollars just to get an app signed and the networks can reject it if they don't like it. I'm very VERY glad this didn't catch on.
The fact people have to ask what it is goes quite a way to showing how wrong the original prediction was. 😊
Wow, shocking, you have to spend 400 dollars just to get an app signed and the networks can reject it if they don't like it.
Replace 'network' with 'nokia', and you've just summed up Symbian Signed!
well, getting a prediction from someone who works with BREW is unfair, of course it'll be unreasonable. lol
Replace 'network' with 'nokia', and you've just summed up Symbian Signed!
Which apps has Symbian ever rejected?
AFAIK they only reject malware, there are no quality considerations at all.
well, getting a prediction from someone who works with BREW is unfair, of course it'll be unreasonable. lol
Maybe, but you've got to admit the cameraphone and music phone predictions are pretty funny... 😊
Tzer2 wrote:Which apps has Symbian ever rejected?
Ya know, you symbian fanboys do crack me up. It's like you never interface with the developer community, and you never hear the cries of anguish coming from that community.
There are *tons* of rejected applications, most for pretty silly reasons. But for a start:
Unfortunately, I can't paste a link. But if you google for "UNI-10 Scalable UI failure", it's the first link.
I don't personally know the developer on this, but it was an application billed as using your phone's camera. The Symbian people tested it on a older symbian phone, WITHOUT a camera, and it obviously failed.
So now, this developer is out his testing fee. If he wants to resubmit, it's another 400. Another infusion of cash for Nokia to blow on Ovi, no doubt.
Ya know, you symbian fanboys do crack me up. It's like you never interface with the developer community, and you never hear the cries of anguish coming from that community.
(sigh)
I've written plenty of articles criticising Nokia's attitude to the state of Symbian app development, for example most recently:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Nokia_need_to_fix_Download.php
...and so have the other writers on this site.
There are *tons* of rejected applications, most for pretty silly reasons. But for a start:
Can you name five apps that were rejected for reasons other than security or stability?
Unfortunately, I can't paste a link. But if you google for "UNI-10 Scalable UI failure", it's the first link.
I've looked at the link you mean (on Forum Nokia) and it's just a discussion about restricting applications that require wi-fi to phones that have wi-fi. I don't see that's got anything to do with quality control of the app's actual functionality. If you read the entire thread it's more to do with a particular testing house applying rules rather weirdly in a particular case:
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum//forum/thread/134591/
It sounds like a heck of a lot of bureaucracy to wade through, and it might well be having a bad effect on app development, and maybe there are people making decisions who don't know what they're doing, but that's not what we were originally talking about. The original point was about platform owners vetoing apps for non-technical reasons.
If you look at what someone like Apple is doing they're openly vetoing certain apps permanently for pure commercial reasons. While researching the article I did about Podcasting I came across a discussion where someone wanted to write a podcasting app for the iPhone and Apple vetoed it because they said it overlapped with iTunes.
Symbian has never done anything like that to my knowledge. I have never heard of Symbian rejecting an app because it didn't suit their commercial needs.
AAS's archives reveals a series of predictions made in July 2002 by a venture capitalist giving a speech at a mobile developers conference.
He could have made the prediction to influence the direction of technology. Alas, the mobile user dictated the direction of mobile. Who ever thought text would go head-to-head with the voice service later on? To top it off, convenience and multi-tasking seems to be the current motto of mobile users regardless if the screen is too small, you can zoom it in jpeg later. :tongue:
Tzer2 wrote:(sigh)I've written plenty of articles criticising Nokia's attitude to the state of Symbian app development, for example most recently:
I've looked at the link you mean (on Forum Nokia) and it's just a discussion about restricting applications that require wi-fi to phones that have wi-fi. I don't see that's got anything to do with quality control of the app's actual functionality. If you read the entire thread it's more to do with a particular testing house applying rules rather weirdly in a particular case:
Well, having a sucky Download! application is one thing. Having incredibly stupid and restrictive testing and signing procedures is an entirely different thing.
Why is it on the developers to pick a testing house? Why is one testing house applying rules differently than another? Won't that lead to inconsistent standards as to what passes testing, and is signable, as opposed to what fails? Isn't that what Symbian signed is supposed to avoid?
And far from being one case, if you look through the Forum Nokia threads, you'll find tons of developers who have had their application fail for one reason or another, and in most cases, it's far from clear why the application failed.
Perhaps this is why the S60 market is relatively small, and the Apple market has exploded. The platform Apple provides is far from ideal, but their developer support is absolutely top notch. Like that guy Ballmer once said, something about developers, developers, developers.