Smartphones, 4G, IP, and IMS – Part II: Why is this G like no previous G

Making a phone call is an activity that seems almost as natural as walking, or drinking, but it has a history. About 120 years ago the layout of the phone terminal, with transducers for speaking and listening, was a settled matter of design. In another 20 years the matter of dialing phone numbers was settled as automatic electromechanical telephone exchanges were introduced. A phone call is a blend of humans making accommodations to machines and machines being designed for humans, and much of the early outcome of that blending persists today.

If you look at the software in any mobile phone, the key thing that makes it a phone is the call-state management. This is what keeps track of the state of phone calls (and, in 2.5G and 3G, data connections, too). It enables the user interface of the phone to display the correct state visually and play the right call progress tones (the ones that originate in the handset) at the right time. It also hooks into power management to light the LCD backlight at the right times, the switch that detects if a flip phone is closed, the keyboard lock, and performs other operations that create the user experience of a telephone.

The design of all mobile call state management is based on having one bearer channel to a circuit switch, plus SMS and data. The first implementations of mobile call state management had minimalist requirements: Display the on-hook dialed phone number on a numeric display, play call progress tones the user would find familiar from the landline user experience, and enable control over a small set of switch-based functions like call-waiting, where the call on the single radio channel to the phone is switched to a second call. It is familiar enough to be accepted by customers and accommodating enough to the way the network works to be efficiently deployed.

There are some differences between CDMA, GSM, iDEN, etc. but they are close enough to share a lot of the implementation. 2G, 2.5G, and 3G differ in the richness of the circuit switched signaling (but not so much that users are aware of it), and in whether and how much data you have. GSM and UMTS/WCDMA data and HSPA differ from CDMA data in detail, but, again, there's not much user awareness of the differences. Color LCD displays on phones make text messaging nicer, but the impact on the mobile phone call user experience has been limited to presenting a contact list and call log.

4G is the first fundamental break from the roughly 25 year old model of cellular mobile telephony. In 4G, the radio is part of a network interface on an IP network, like a WiFi radio. There are no bearer channels dedicated to voice calls. You either do IP telephony using SIP, in the IMS case, or you simulate circuit switched telephony on top of IP in the VoLGA case. There is no practical limit to the number of voice calls and other kinds of communication sessions a 4G device can juggle. Packets traversing the carrier's network carrying voice to other endpoints are no different from packets flowing between the endpoint and a third party or private gateway/switch with a telephone network interface. Identity, communications services, media (how voice or video is encoded), etc., all become decoupled from the network.

So we are entering a product development phase where the winners will be, in part, determined by how well they can make compelling new communications features and capabilities based on this change without confusing the end-user. What it means to be a phone is now infinitely malleable.

Surely, at the bottom of this a phone call has the same limitations as a face to face conversation plus the further limitations of not being actually face to face. No, even this can be called into question. The ability to redefine the phone call experience is comprehensive and the potential is limitless. And the potential ranges from the obvious – what the user sees on a screen – down to the subtlest microsecond-level manipulation of the human voice.

But will this potential be realized? That is more in doubt than that the potential exists. So far, the modern general purpose pocket-sized telecomputer surfs the Web and plays games. It will take the realization that new communications products can be created, and sold, to motivate reconsideration of how phones enable communication.

Smartphones, 4G, IP, and IMS – Part I: Toward a Fully Mobile Enterprise Communications System

I have not been blogging much lately, and I plan to change that. I am going to do that by writing a series of shorter blog entries.

There are four big forces for change in the mobile market now:

1. Smartphones have broken out of the PIM-oriented business niche
2. 4G networks, WiMAX and LTE, are coming to market
3. IP voice has taken over enterprise telephony
4. The ideas of IMS, if not implementations of IMS, are permeating new communications products

My next several blog entries will look at the interplay between these forces and the opportunities they open up: 4G, with or without full implementations of IMS, mixing IP communication with mobile communication, the way business communication systems are, finally, co-evolving with mobile communication, etc.

The reason I will be focusing on the interaction between these forces is that this is where new opportunities are created, and new entry portals into existing markets with entrenched vendors open up.

For example, most people think of VoIP phones in two distinct ways: VoIP applications for smartphones, which are mainly used for international toll-bypass, and VoIP desk phones for businesses.

What's the problem here? In each case, these products have reached some natural limitations: Mobile VoIP as toll bypass has hit an upper bound on value – it's not much more valuable than a calling card. And VoIP business phones are becoming the second phone – the place where you get cold calls, the thing you leave on do-not-disturb, the back-up.

Can we find a way out of these limitations in the four forces that are driving change? Let's see how each affects a possible solution:

1. The new smartphones and smartphone software platforms enable richer and more integrated mobile VoIP solutions than the crude Java ME (J2ME) applications for mobile VoIP. You can transform the handset into a mobile enterprise phone, and directly replace desk phones.
2. 4G networks enable enterprise communication to become an over-the-top (OTT) service. There is no longer any difference between being on-premises and off-premises.
3. Now that you can extend IP communication to users on the go, there is no longer a need for crude “two stage dialing” to “log in” to a PBX while you are on the go. It's an all-IP world.
4. An IP-PBX being used like an OTT telephone service is IMS-like in many of the features it delivers, but does not depend on IMS in the mobile network.

This is one kind of innovation made possible by the combination of these Four Forces. In future posts, I will explore more basic innovations, and the details of some of these innovations.

Organizing the Pantheon of Multimedia Communication

Recently I heard Garrison Keillor quote Joseph Campbell, in one of his essays on writing: “A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.”

It doesn't help that the rules are rational and sanitary. No stoning. No beheading. Bacon is not a problem. Just cold opprobrium that is made even colder by the certainty that You Did Something Wrong.

Fixing this is the central task of user interface designers.

Clearly, then, it isn't good enough to enshrine the olde thunderbolt-slinger in a fancy temple < cough >smartphone< /cough >. That won't make him any easier to deal with. We have to reform the rules. More, we have to reform the language the rules are written in and the definitions of the nouns.

That is what initiatives like MMTel and RCS require, but, so far, are not getting from user interface designers. Your 2.5G phone is a simple minor deity with simple rules. Everyone understands the propitiations and few are therefore intimidated. But the pantheon is getting crowded with both the bureaucratic jinns of IMS, and the anarchic dryads of the Internet.

Messaging is now multimedia messaging. Email and IM bring two other rites of messaging. IM presence and social network updates make it a group event, along with your push-to-talk circle of initiates. And plain old voice conversations can travel over the righteous roads of the synchronous digital hierarchy or the twisted but beguiling paths of the Internet.

Putting all this in separate little shrines, with separate sets of rules and liturgies is bound to put us at risk of hellfire and damnation, and the use of Strong Language. Consequently, the people are divided into the zealous, who are undeterred by complexity and proudly wear their scourges in a belt pouch, and the agnostic, who are driven to indifference.

The successful interface to IMS-based capabilities will solve this problem. It will put all the media for communication under a single set of simple rules and inside of one interface – not a set of applications, but one unified application for communication, just as using the 2.5G voice network requires just one user interface.

The problem is one of levels of abstraction. How can you take protocols as divergent as SIP, XMPP, a few dozen proprietary IM systems, some with VoIP and/or voice chat, push-to-talk, video calls, email, social network update feeds, and circuit switched telephony and give the user one set of tools, one set of contact information, one history, one set of shortcuts, and one consistent set of verbs and nouns for manipulating these capabilities?

The radio interface layer, and user interface on top of it, that turns your key presses into phone calls in one direction, and state-changes reported from the radio baseband into indications of call progress in the other direction is not enough. But how do you keep it just as simple for the user?

The notion of a conversation has to evolve to encompass the new media of communication. Key objects: people, conversations, connections, addresses, services, identities, status, and presence have to be made simple enough for humans to manipulate through the same 12 keys and handful of other buttons, and their visual manifestations have to fit on screens small enough to keep discreetly in one's pocket.

And this is the hard part: We have to create a new world of communications objects that spans media, networks, and protocols, and we have to make the human customer instantly fluent in the language of these objects. This layer, consisting of many new protocols, access to many new services, and quite a few fundamentally new capabilities has to be inserted between the keypad and the radio without the user noticing that the amount of software in the system has gone from bottle-rocket to space shuttle in one step.

The zealous don't care: They are happy to stuff a computer into a belt-pouch. Multimedia communication is easy if the user is comfortable with multiple applications. But, to give multimedia communication mass appeal, the masses must be appealed to: The result, for them, must be that their phones do more, but don't ask more from them.

Yo mama is a PDA

What is a smartphone?

Frequently, the question comes up “What is a smartphone?” Usually, this question is mixed up with other questions like “What makes a good phone UI?” and “Why don't all phones use a smartphone OS like Windows Mobile?”

The confusion comes from the fact there are “good” or “nice” UIs that can be classified as smartphones, like iPhone, and clumsier UIs that are clearly in the smartphone category, but that are hung up on a design legacy that prevents them being competitive with products like iPhone. Are they all smartphones? Do we need more categories? What about the Linux-based 3G phones in Japan? What about Android?

The PDA design legacy

The idea that handheld devices need an operating system emerged long before mobile handsets became the dominant handheld device. It emerged before one could expect all devices to include a wireless network. It emerged before Web browsing and Web applications became central to handheld device use cases. It emerged before we had a choice between a circuit switched voice network and packet switched data networks. It emerged before the disaggregation of communications services and network access.

Handheld device operating systems originated with PDAs. There are several problems that arise from this design legacy: PDAs started out as non-network-connected “sideloading” sync-oriented devices for carrying your contact list and schedule around with you. Was that even a good idea to begin with? Evidence is, no: The worldwide market for PDAs is less than one tenth of one percent of the mobile handset market. But, like some string of selfish DNA with a will to survive, PDA operating systems began to infect mobile phones.

An awkward relationship

This was never a satisfactory combination: PDA phones were heavy, expensive and sucked batteries. Some PDA users were happy with the ability to keep a large contact list and a synchronized schedule with them, but folding up Microsoft Outlook and putting it in your pocket is not a goal for most people.

The smartphone has had a long, slow growth trend in the market. Only three smartphone OS suppliers remain, one of which is on life-support, one of which can afford products that don't turn a profit for many years, and one which has as their almost-sole customer the largest handset maker in the business

The new need for a better phone OS

We are now long-separated from PDA use cases as key drivers of handheld device UI design. Multimedia, the Web, and a diverse combination of IP and mobile communication on multiple networks, using multiple services now drives the requirements for handset user interfaces. This is why old school smartphone OSs are facing new competition: It was easier for Google to make Android than it would have been to turn Palm OS, or Symbian and UIQ, into a platform that meets Google's requirements for a mobile device OS.

The new requirements:

• An OS that is non-exclusive, cheap to license, and adaptable on my schedule, not the OS vendor's.
• An OS that brings the Web front and center in the user experience. The “mobile Web” is a crock. Everyone wants the real Web.
• An OS that is undemanding of the user: Direct manipulation, touch connected to action, no multi-step operations, no “dialog boxes” - communication is not like filling out forms. In other words, it can't be harder to use than a non-smartphone, and it can't be less intuitive than a media player's UI.
• An OS that accommodates new forms of communication while retaining the simplicity of the mobile phone. Access to all of our modes of communication, all of our networks, and all of our services are converging into one device. The next phone UI should not make this a burden on the user, but a benefit to the user.
• An OS that makes presence central to the user experience. The “start page” of your phone should tell you about your contacts' availability.
• An OS that makes non-verbal communication a first-class citizen in the user experience. All forms of messaging should be treated uniformly, and a single interface should organize all messages.

None of these top requirements existed when PDAs were designed. Your to-do-list is not the most important thing for your mobile device to display. Your calendar is important, but it isn't central to communications tasks.

It is also worth noting that no mobile device meets all these requirements, especially not the communications-oriented requirements. The PDA heritage is being discarded, but what will take it's place? This is, as yet, unclear.

The new wave of smart device operating systems

Symbian (plus UIQ or S60), Palm, and Windows Mobile are the old-timers of mobile device operating systems, and the reason they are under attack from a new wave is that they cannot shake off their PDA heritage. Nokia is making the best of it by putting Symbian on some very capable hardware. But if you want to know why Nokia's amazing phones are not challenging the iPod, Symbian and S60 are the prime suspects. You simply can't build a user experience that is competitive with iPod using a platform born from a PDA (Yo mama!).

So what do we call the new arrivals? Android, the newest arrival, puts the question into focus. Android does away with most of the clutter of the PDA-style interface in favor of a friendly application “dock.” Sure, you could build a busy, multi-tab, form-filling-centric application in Android, but that's not what Google has done. Android's map application is full-screen, clutter-free, and all about direct manipulation. So is Android a “smartphone?”

I, for one, welcome our new Android overlords

I would venture to say that Android's creators hope it isn't thought of by end-users as a smartphone OS, even though it is targeted to the same big-screen hardware platforms as Windows Mobile. Android is for everyone who wants to surf and search on the go, not type-A email addicts who need to check their to-do list every time they glance at their phone. If you have the goal of building a better communications tool for everyone, don't look in a businessman's hip-pouch. You won't find it there any more than you would find inspiration for any consumer mass-market product there.

iPhone: Analyzing the Industry Reaction

Toss a pebble into a pond and watch the ripples. In the case of the iPhone, it's more like a grenade was tossed into the pond full of typical telecom industry punditry. All species of industry assumptions are now floating on their sides, stunned, on the surface of the pond. Let's fillet some and see what's inside:

Don't say it's the new iPod
The principal mistake made in analyzing the iPhone is the being phone-centric. In fact, the iPhone is the new iPod. It is the video iPod. It is the new iPod user interface. It is the WiFi iPod. It is the first of many new iPods, some of which won't be mobile phones. If you had been thinking “How many people really want a $600 phone from Apple?” think again: Apple didn't sell 500,000 to perhaps 700,000 phones in the first weekend. They sold that many high-end iPods, too. This is the factor missing from most projections that will enable Apple to safely make their numbers for the iPhone.

Telecom industry people will have to learn to look at the iPhone as an iPod first. They don't look at the Nokia N95 as a video camera. Nor do they look at a Blackberry as a PDA. This is something entirely new, and it will affect the way future iPhones are formulated.

3G has value
Some regret has been expressed over iPhone not having 3G. The real reason for the tut-tutting about no 3G in the iPhone is that the telecom industry was hoping iPhone would be 3G's killer app. The reality is the mobile data network is a backstop to WiFi until speeds are up and pricing is down. It is possible the gap will never be closed. 3G has limited value and significant down-side in higher hardware cost and lower battery life.

Some iPhone customers, mostly pundits that don't see their phone bill, have griped about lack of 3G. But more than balancing that out has been buzz about how to use an iPhone with a cheap prepaid account, or no mobile account at all.

Where is 3G in Apple's priority list? It's below taking the iPhone down-market, so raising costs by adding 3G, except at the top of the model range, is not likely to be part of the plan.

Carrier-driven product management works
iPhone was defined within Apple, with the goal in mind of transferring Apple's success in media players to the mobile phone market. It wasn't designed for the existing network. It wasn't designed for a carrier's ARPU strategy. It wasn't designed to provide a delivery vehicle for a new section of the walled garden. iPhone was subject to none of the industry influences that go into “normal” phones. And yet the iPhone is a huge boon to AT&T, with half of iPhone customers switching to AT&T. Will other carriers, especially second tier carriers that don't have the resources to do more than follow the lead of first tier carriers' mobile commerce and data strategies, add more products that are not defined by their internal product management initiatives? Probably not! But they should consider that the more they tighten their grip, the more churned customers slip through their fingers.

It competes against smartphones
Name a smartphone product that could sell 700,000 units at launch. How many of Apple's 700,000 first-weekend customers compared iPhone against a smartphone? Still, many futile efforts will now be launched to turn smartphones into iKlones. Now you know how to spot the next set of industry train wrecks. Ironically, Nokia, which has the best chance of actually making a competitor to iPhone is probably trapped by the fact the S60 UI is the best among smartphone UIs, when abandoning the smartphone UI is the only way to really compete with iPhone.

The rumors of a Microsoft “Zune Phone” would be credible and welcomed, if only Zune hadn't flopped badly enough to damage anything called a Zune Phone. A Zune Phone would break from the smartphone mold and it would actually be a good idea to make one. Or, for that matter, to put MSN Messenger into a Zune, with a Zune-ish UI. Anyone willing to put away the PDA heritage in the museum where it belongs has a good chance of success.

All bow before mobile unit volume
One reason why mobile telephony is so fascinating is the amazing volume of phones being sold. A billion per year and growing, and not all developed-world markets are saturated. This makes phones, and the components that go into phones – the systems-on-a-chip, or SoCs – the most important computing devices today.

Because of the volume of mobile phones being sold, it was assumed that when mobile phones started to incorporate music players it would spell the end of standalone music players. What follows from this prediction is that iPhone is a defensive product – a shift to the winning mobile platform and away from a standalone iPod.

But, while everyone else still must bow before mobile unit volume, Apple now sells enough iPods that mobile unit volume cannot overwhelm the iPod. Apple isn't making an iPhone as a defensive measure. In fact, Apple has flipped this around to where Apple is selling phones because they are part of a new-generation iPod.

The game will really be on when iChat is added to the mix. Then Apple will be adding new modes of communication and new communications applications to their phone products.