Today, Research in Motion, Motorola and Nokia held a joint press conference acknowledging they too suffer antenna attenuation when consumers grip their phones tightly in certain ways. Following in Apple’s footsteps, they will be offering cases for users of all affected models.

Immediately following the announcement, Nokia’s stock traded down to just $0.01 as investors realized how many goddamm crappy featurephones Nokia pumps out each year. Nokia’s liability is set to be a staggering 1 quadrillion Euros (1.29 quadrillion USD). Jonsen Svensen Svensvensen, Nokia’s CFO, said “The free cases will have a serious and negative impact on our business as the average cost of a case is approximately $4, which is 50% greater than our average gross margin per phone. We’d also like to take this opportunity to announce Symbian 3^3*sqrt(11) — our best and most consumer friendly OS ever.”

Motorola, on the other hand, said they expect the financial impact of the free case offer to be approximately $4,328. Motorola said they plan to send a mass email to their Droid user base offering either a free case with a $30 retail value or tickets to see LaVar Burton live and in person. According to Motorola’s marketing research team, the $4,328 liability accounts for the uptake of up to ten cases and is actually conservative as “there is perfect and undeniable overlap in the Venn diagram for Android and LeVar Burton fanboys.”

News from Waterloo, Canada was similarly optimistic. RIM’s co-CEO, Jim Balsillie said, “While we sell tens of millions of Blackberry smartphones each year, the vast majority of those are placed in the belt clips of investment bankers and consultants who aren’t even allowed to place phone calls on them. Truth be told, we could remove the antenna and no one would f*cking notice. In fact, I think I just saved us four points of gross margin.”

[Ed. But seriously folks, why aren't Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia users rioting in the streets, asking for their free cases? And why are those customers willing to accept the blatant lies from management that their phones are immune from antenna attenuation? I guess it's because nobody really gives a crap. Apple was wrong in belittling the issue at first but eventually fessed up and made some amends. Now it's time for the rest of the industry to at least admit they have a problem too rather than acting like little school children.]

Are you wondering why iPad apps, especially news reading apps like Flipboard, Wired and WSJ, keep getting so much praise and media attention? Well let’s do a head-to-head comparison of The Wall Street Journal iPad Edition and Online Edition (WSJ.com). Why do you think users prefer the WSJ iPad app?

WSJ iPad Edition (click to enlarge)

WSJ.com Landing Page (click to enlarge)

When put in these terms the choice should seem obvious. It actually is. Most websites overwhelm their customers with far too much information and far too many choices. If I simply want to read the morning paper (the primary WSJ use case), the iPad app is better-suited to doing that, even independent of the specialized iPad hardware. Consider how many words, links and pictures there are on the WSJ.com Online Edition. If you studiously read every word and studied every picture, how long would that take you? Of course users don’t read every word, they scan, but you are forcing your users to do far more work to find the information they do care about.

I also believe despite its “lack of features” the iPad Edition is just about as functional as the Online Edition. Most of what most users are looking for most of the time can be found in the iPad app. That’s who you should design for, your majority. Design for the majority of a specific target customer with a minority of features. My rule of thumb is the Pareto Principle: 20% of your features deliver 80% of your product’s utility. Do not design for the corner cases, especially at the outer layer of the onion (ie the first part of your product customers interact with). WSJ.com was designed by committee and designed by feature creep. It was designed by “Hey why don’t we throw in XYZ feature!” I am not opposed to WSJ.com containing all the features they have, but they certainly shouldn’t all be on the landing page. In reality, though, it can be difficult for a company to force discipline and simplify. I’ve seen it before in the real world. Why? Because somewhere in The Wall Street Journal‘s offices a coversation such as this would take place:

Product Marketing: Our data says that many users find our website confusing and overwhelming. They prefer the simplified iPad edition. Let’s start simplifying. Why don’t we move the Personalized Stock Quotes off the landing page?

Web Manager: Oh, no we can’t ditch the Personalized Stock Quotes. They get a good number of clicks. Do you want to lose all those clicks?

The problem with this conversation is that it takes a fixed pie, zero sum approach to product design. This is not how the world works. Removing a feature doesn’t mean you “lose.” This viewpoint doesn’t even begin to account for all the clicks lost / never had due to a confusing and overwhelming website. In fact, a simplified site could enlarge the pie and drive more total clicks to the things you really care about.

I am telling many of the startups I advise to conceptually “design for the iPad, not for the web.” It’s too easy to create an overly chromed-out website from the get-go. The iPad is a great design tool in that it forces trade-offs. (Unbeknownst to most people, trade-offs are actually the critical factor that drives the greatest innovation and the best products. It is the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard that makes it great, even though that makes it harder to type on.) Apple understands trade-offs. Products that try to be everything to everyone usually fail. They fail because they don’t have a target customer in mind and thus have to keep adding on extra features to accommodate every possible user and use case. In the end you, you wind up with Windows Vista.

So why are iPad apps such as Flipboard and WSJ getting so much attention? It’s because they are easy to use. They make reading the news what it should be, fun, as opposed to work, which is what WSJ.com feels like. They look nothing like most of the crap we put up with in HTML. Some of this can be attributed to the natural product value advantages of the iOS SDK over HTML (as I’ve previously written about) and some of this can be attributed to the great design decisions and trade-offs the iPad is fostering.

I stand uncorrected: branding and advertising matter in mobile. TechCrunch speaking to a luddite:

I asked him, “why the iPhone?” His answer? The commercial.

Per my earlier post, it appears that babies do trump useless HDMI ports after all. Android and Droid are royally screwing up their marketing.

Did you guys hear? OMFG! The new Droid X has an HDMI output! H-D-M-I OUT-PUT!!!!!!! Magic cakes!!!!!!! Isn’t that a useful feature!

Oh, hey there Grandma! I know you’ve been jonesing for HDMI output on your phone because you totally know what that means and spent the $80 a normal retailer charges for an HDMI cable. And what’s that? You even bought the hard to find mini-HDMI adapter? Radical! Oh and I bet it’s easy, like falling off a log, to set up. Ohh nooeess!!! It’s notttttt?!

This is what using HDMI on an Android phone is actually like according to the tech savy, professional gadget blogging CNET:

After spending some time encoding various file formats and sizes, we found that MP4 movie files performed the most consistently. Also, files rendered closer to the Evo’s native 800×480 resolution worked best as larger videos stuttered and would not play properly on-screen.

Well, don’t worry about that Grandma! It’s a good thing we bought you all that file conversion software and that new Alienware gaming rig to convert your huge video collection to MP4 in your codec of choice. But wait! What’s that Grandma? You were actually hoping to show photos of your kids over HDMI? Well F*CK, apparently Android phones CAN’T do that. They can only use the HDMI output for the bundled video player and/or YouTube, so no luck. But don’t worry Grandma! You can still brag to all your friends that your phone rocks because it’s like totally open!!! Yay!!! And don’t be scared of that creepy robot eye either Grandma!

BUT OH WAIT. What’s this? The iPhone 4 has BABY-DMI Output! Oh SNAP! That phone just made a goddam baby! It’s miracle! Hallelujah!

And that dude is downloading the baby on his iPhone! Double snap!

No, I was wrong. That phone didn’t make that baby. That baby made that phone call. You can call MUTHAF*CK!N BABIES OVER VIDEOCHAT on the iPhone 4. And it’s so easy babies can make video calls.

Now’s that what I call a useful feature Grandma. So which would you rather have Grandma, the Droid X or the iPhone 4? Your call.

[Ed. Apologies for the uncharacteristically foul language in this post. The script demanded it.]

Droid is betting on features with a rational appeal. Apple is going for the heart, laddering up to an emotional appeal.

Image from iPhone 4 FaceTime web video

Droid billboard

Image from iPhone 4 FaceTime web video

Two recent reviews of the HTC EVO discuss the product’s battery life. Brad Feld, one of the brightest VCs in the country, writes:

I can only find one thing to complain about – the battery life.  It’s still running Android 2.1 so I expect there will be plenty of battery tune up in Android 2.2, but out of the box the battery only lasts about six hours…Ok – that’s literally the only thing I don’t like.

Michael Arrington, a man who needs no introduction to my readers, writes:

Well, I’m an Android Fanboy, and I’m telling you not to buy this device. The battery life is abysmal…but this device routinely runs out of power while sitting on standby overnight next to my bed. You aren’t just charging this once a day. Or twice a day. You need to be thinking about your next power fix just about any time you are using it.

I think these two reviews miss something fundamental. Perhaps having worked for a hardware startup has helped me see this. Building hardware that runs software is all about trade-offs. With smartphones there are three primary trade-offs: cost, size and battery life.

While cost is a real trade-off, the upper limit to the BOM on these devices is well known to each manufacturer so this variable doesn’t change much from device to device or between generations. Size is a trade-off too, but like cost, it’s fairly constrained: the new device can’t be any thicker than the previous generation. That means the primary trade-off across all smartphones comes in battery life. Let me state this another way: producing a great phone that gets six hours of battery life, is like me saying “I love my pet tiger, but he eats babies.” That’s just not an acceptable trade-off. Eating babies makes tigers fundamentally bad pets. Unusable battery life makes a smartphone a fundamentally bad smartphone.

Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone. I think Android fanboys totally miss this point. Now, you might not realize this as an end user because the iPhone’s battery life is “OK.” That’s because Apple is making an explicit decision to trade some battery life and purposefully make it “good enough” for benefits such as a super dense and bright display, background threads, push notifications, video recording, gyroscopes and a laundry list of other features. If they could make a phone with a 10-day battery and all those other features at current size and cost, they would, but that’s not possible. They do this because they know it’s those other features that sell new phones, but battery life is the fundamental currency that runs the smartphone economy.* Apple is able to maintain this balance without dipping into unacceptable territory for the majority of users.

Let’s be clear that squeezing an extra hour or two of battery life out of a phone is no small task. You must make multiple trade-offs for every hour.

Since Apple is developing iOS for a very limited number of devices running extremely similar hardware, they can tweak every bit of code to optimize for battery life. Since Android is designed to run on heterogeneous hardware, these sorts of bit-level and device-specific optimizations are impossible. As smartphone hardware continues to become more complex, this dynamic suggests that iOS’s battery life advantage over Android on average will grow over time.** What you saw at the WWDC Keynote was Apple following a Reagan-esque Cold War Arms Race approach to defeating Android. Every new iPhone hardware feature is analogous to Apple trying to outspend Google in battery life. Google will feel compelled to start mandating front and rear facing cameras, gyroscopes, etc. to stay competitive, but all this will take an even greater toll on Android battery life. Android handset manufacturers will be forced to either make their batteries larger and thus their phones thicker or raise their cost and hope the carrier subsidies will go up too…or the HTC EVO 2 will get a stellar four hours of battery life.

*I’d wager that Apple is probably striking the right balance with battery life. How do we know this? If the iPhone 4 had been announced and it was the same, except 25% thicker than the iPhone 3GS, but had an extra 25% or even 50% battery life on top of what it will have, the reactions would have been universally negative. You know this is true. Don’t lie to yourself bro.

**I say on average because there will be variance within the Android ecosystem. Some Android phones will be better designed than others, but on average I predict, holding battery sizes between iOS and Android equal, Android will become less and less efficient per watt-hour of battery than iOS. Of course, one way for this prediction to fail, is for Apple to squeeze in more battery draining features than Android because Apple has more battery life to spare.

PS- Have I mentioned in the past ten minutes how much the HDMI out on the HTC EVO pisses me off as a product manager? Features without benefits are meant to appeal to a very specific target. That target is somewhere in the basement searching for their red Swingline stapler at this very moment.

Two parts of Steve’s WWDC Keynote yesterday stuck out in my mind:

1) iMove for iPhone: Embodies Why I Prefer iOS Over Android
When you look at iMovie for iOS you are not seeing a standalone app, but rather the embodiment of Apple’s vision of crafting the entire user experience all at once. Apple didn’t just throw a bunch of cool sounding hardware specs on a device like an Android device (ahem…HMDI out on HTC EVO?). Apple not only provided the better cameras and flash, but also the whole package by making iMovie for iPhone available–and it’s not just available it’s available at launch. That’s not to be underestimated because if it wasn’t delivered at launch or consumers were supposed to wait for a third party editor (and I would argue HD video has much less utility without cutting & editing), it would be a half-finished feature. I bet that when Android eventually copies Apple they’ll fully deliver on the hardware and the APIs but not the software, eg they’ll deliver a half-baked feature. Third party editors will eventually be available on Android but they’ll lack the integration and polish of iMovie for iPhone.

2) FaceTime
FaceTime is like a diamond mounted at that end of a 12 gauge shotgun. The video conferencing is just a shiny object distracting everyone, especially AT&T, from the real story. What is FaceTime with the video turned off? It’s an easier to use Skype that’s better integrated with your contacts in Address Book–and, oh yeah, it’s open. Eventually you’ll be calling iPads, computers, Android phones and everything else. So when the wi-fi restrictions are lifted, I hardly see a reason to ever place a call outside of FaceTime (except landlines? for now…). True, getting to that point would require some features and changes, but I think this is potentially where Apple is headed. There’s a good reason Apple didn’t put iChat on the iPhone. iChat’s user experience blows. Buddy lists? Needing people to be online? Come on. A phone should work like a goddam phone. Dial a number and brrring-brrring, beotch! That’s it. That’s how FaceTime works, but not Skype, not iChat. FaceTime might be the final straw that forces AT&T to realize they are an ISP, a packet jockey, and not a phone company. We’ve all been dreaming about video calling for so long that we were distracted from the real message: it’s not video conferencing, it’s IP calling. Video is a feature.

PS- So I guess Android 2.3/2.4 “Stay Puft” is going to require MEMS gryoscopes, 326+ pixels/sq inch displays,a forward facing camera, a rear facing camera, an LED flash and two mics? Seems like their laundry list of must-have features is going to get longer by the day if they are to avoid serious fragmentation (which I think they have thus far). I am not saying iOS is for everyone, just like OS X isn’t for everyone, but for my personal life I prefer things that “just work” even if I sacrifice some flexibility. It’s a trade off I make knowingly and willingly. (I used to go for customizable and complex 1994-2004, but then it just became too complex.) I can sum it up in saying: I want my iMovie for iPhone on day one.

Oh the irony. Apple's emerging PR threat comes from a command-obeying robot. (See Apple's famed 1984 ad.)

When you’re number one, everyone is a hater. As Chris Dixon recently tweeted, “Let me get this straight: some guy speculates he could hack the iPad hence major business mag reports it’s insecure??” Indeed, when you’re el numero uno (officially as of 5/27), the media and your competitors are on the hunt for the slightest whiff of anything negative to slam you with, even if it’s it untrue or doesn’t make any sense.

The memes of Apple as “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary” are potentially the most damaging to the brand. These gibes have been around for a while but it is Android has truly brought them to the public’s attention. I cite two arguments for these being the most damaging: 1) Apple’s historical brand equity is built upon the concepts of “creative” “freedom” and “individual”—the very antithesis of “restrictive.” (See Apple’s famed Super Bowl ad, “1984”.) 2) Apple’s modern resurgence is based upon Apple’s brand defeating the reality and perception of Apple as “incompatible.” Consumers only bought Apple products en masse once they believed and experienced true cross-platform compatibility, embodied in the iPod, iTunes and Intel Macs (see Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy’s case on Apple and the iPod).

So given this particular reality, what is Apple to do? How can Apple defeat the memes of “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary”?

1) The New “Open” App Store Takes a Lesson from Amazon

Much of Apple’s brand’s greatest ire stems from Apple’s 100% control over the App Store. However, as Steve Jobs has directly argued, control is necessary to keep the App Store within brand and grant “freedom from programs that steal your private data” “freedom from programs that trash your battery” and “freedom from porn”. So how can Apple reconcile this tension? I believe the solution is by offering a first-party App Store as it is today (analogous to products “sold by Amazon.com”), but also offering a gate out of Disney World to third-party affiliate merchants (think Amazon Merchants) whose veracity can be approved by Cupertino and also continuously rated by customers (think Amazon Merchant star ratings). These Merchants would of course be limited in number and scope, but ultimately the effect would be that the App Store is no longer perceived to be directly under SJ’s thumb. This could be structured in such a way to create distance between Apple’s brand and the Merchant’s experience and goods. It’s all in the execution.

In conjunction, the other half of the equation would be that Apple would need to develop more clear guidelines for the app approval process (as John Gruber has previously argued).

2) Requiring Flash to Reach Goals, not Saintdom

Steve, I fully concur with you on every point you raise in your “Thoughts on Flash,” but the issue from a PR perspective is that it comes off as a crusade against all things Adobe since you pose problems that seem to have no solutions. Instead of indentifying the issues in such a way that they appear intractable, you should have simply set out specific and explicit hurdles that Flash must clear before being allowed on iPhone OS (even if you don’t believe some of them could ever be accomplished). For instance, “Cannot drain battery more than Quicktime and H.264. Must be fully touch compliant as approved by Apple’s HI team—we can help you on this. Must be open source.” I believe this would have been much better received. And yes, I did throw that last one in there—my point is that by publicly issuing a challenge for Adobe to open source you could have won major PR points rather than reinforcing the perception of Apple as closed by “shutting Adobe out” which I believe “Thoughts on Flash” is widely perceived to have done.

3) From MobileMe to OpenMe

If you really want to deflate the (Android) zombies out there who think Apple is “closed” and “restrictive,” open and free MobileMe. As my buddy Sachin has argued, start off by making MobileMe $0. Next, give people a whole bunch of free cloud space (5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 100GB?) and see what they do with it. Let them be creative. Allow music and media streaming. Cache iTunes purchases in the cloud. Open up an API. Go wild. Surprise us all and blow our minds. You know, think different.

Simultaneous to the Palm merger announcement, HP took the opportunity to announce the new collaborative Palm Pre Plus Inkjet Printer, Scanner, Fax & Copier.

"I'm sorry, I'll have to call you back. I'm almost out of ink." © Tom Loverro

Ed: I just couldn’t resist.

Dear HTML,
I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

Yours Truly,
-Tom

I don’t want to read NYTimes.com on my Macbook Pro anymore. I would much rather read the NYTimes Editor’s Choice iPad app. The same goes for the WSJ. iPad apps are generally so far superior to their HTML counterparts it’s hard not to notice. iPad versions of newspapers look like the awesome mockups we were promised thirty years ago, while today’s web versions of newspapers still look a lot like what was actually available thirty years ago (see this awesome KRON news clip from 1981).

Is the solution to bring apps to the desktop? I don’t think so. I propose that the solution is to evolve the tools we use to create the web closer to the tools we use to create apps.

The web’s infrastructure needs to remain as open as possible. Yes, HTML5 will help, but no, it won’t go far enough in making the web as easy to make beautiful (for instance, providing the library of the sorts of standard interface elements that iPhone OS SDK does). I want HTML to make it as easy as the iPhone OS SDK to layout content with incredible production value without resorting to Flash (or any other closed or 3rd party plugin) or forcing every web designer to reinvent the wheel.

HTML can learn a lot from the iPad and the iPhone OS SDK. Will it? I don’t know, but if the web/HTML is to remain competitive and as open as it has historically has been, I think it needs to incorporate some of the lessons from folks like Apple in a way consistent with its core beliefs. If it can, the web might even become more open. Otherwise, consumers will seek to consume content where it is most appealing and producers/publishers will go there as well (and probably earn superior CPMs given the better production value and branding opportunities) and that may not be on the web, but in an app and I think that would be ashamed.