O2 ignores existing iPhone users with the all new iPhone

Apple just announced their newest iPhone - the iPhone 3G S and is due to launch on June 19th.

The S stands for Speed supposedly, which feels more Microsoft then Apple in style. No that isn’t a complement. It also seems a bit light on new features if you already have an iPhone as you can download the updated 3.0 software using the latest version of iTunes on June 17th (more instructions here).

If you do that you’ll miss out on a longer battery life, a 3MP camera, hands free voice contol and the ability to record video. The battery life is the same as the previous version when using 3G but is approximately a third longer using WiFi, listening to audio or watching video.

Existing O2 iPhone users are out of luck this time though. Whereas previously there was an option for existing iPhone users to upgrade to the new version by extending the length of their contract to O2, this time the only path to get the new iPhone is to pay out the remainder of your contract.

Most of the comments on Twitter when searching for O2 and iPhone are complaining about this state of affairs.

My take: most people will not pay and Apple could stand to take a hit. If Twitter is anything to go by, O2 is taking a bit of a hit to its brand as well. It is certainly not winning any plaudits

One thing is certain though, when those who bought the iPhone 3G when it launched come to the end of their contract (about 6 months from now) the mobile industry could be a different beast altogether in the UK. There is no Palm Pre today and the Google phone (G1) has been slated for its hardware (though not its software). In the next 6 months though, the Palm Pre should be available in the UK (on either  O2(!) or Vodafone) and there are supposed to be a large number of new Google phones (18+!) hitting the market by the end of the year.

Interesting times in the mobile phone market..

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Twitter’s current strategy seems to be to woo celebrities to the network and in turn that will drag the mainstream along with it. The problem with this is that whilst reality tv is very popular reading the text of celebrities is not always that interesting. Hello magazine etc do a good job of just showing the interesting bits and can monitor Twitter for them. How many times will the mainstream come back to see if anything interesting has happened. Not enough if the numbers leaving Twitter are anything to go by.

There is one thing that will attract people back – I gave it away in the title – events. I do not mean just the business conferences that have been popular on Twitter with the tech and marketing crowd. I mean the concerts and clubs. There’s enough focus and length of time that people will stay interested in monitoring it via their phones and they’re likely to meet people who are into the same things as they are building up a followerbase.

The end result is that a person reaches a critical mass of followers quicker and even if that fails to happen after one event they are likely to come back for the second.. and third etc etc.

Of course Facebook is still in a strong position due to its size if it can move quickly enough.

A possible problem for Facebook that everyone in the tech world complains about is the lack of asymmetric friendships. On Facebook, you can only see someone’s newsfeed if they friend you back. On Twitter you can choose to follow someone and not have them follow you back. However, the privacy in Facebook is a strong feature for them over time – there are some stuff you just do not want the whole world to see. Facebook’s fan pages may well do the job and allow you to see all the other fans and the celebs and then listen/interact with them.

However, whilst there is greater usage of Facebook’s mobile apps than Twitter right now, the Twitter apps are more obviously able to handle event specific message streams than Facebook using its search functionality. Facebook would need to change its mobile apps at least to accomodate easy access to fan pages.

Finally, neither Twitter nor Facebook have realtime updates on mobiles which would be a boon for this type of usage. But one step at a time

(Image courtesy: Osei)

for the ultra geeks amongst you – this guy made his iphone walk!

I love the iPhone – grudgingly of course as it is an Apple product – it really has moved the mobile phone forward and everyone else has been left scrambling to catch up. Both Microsoft and Nokia are seriously struggling. But there are still major gaps.

One of the toughest things for Apple, is that it is trying to target two very different markets: business and consumer. It has had the consumer aspect tied up with its interface, music and phone capabilities (though it needs a better camera). On the business side, the simple support for Microsoft Exchange has helped it to quickly penetrate the business user. The number of iPhones in our office has rocketed and is now the most popular phone in the office – beating Microsoft phones.

But there is a downside – it syncs Email/Calendar/Contacts but does not sync Tasks and Notes (unlike mobile phones which use Windows Mobile).

There are some 3rd party solutions out there:

KeyTasks – Good interface but it does not seem to sync properly and there is no category support.

TaskData – It does not have a great interface and again no category support.

Surprisingly there is no Exchange Notes sync app that I am aware of. There is however a great app out there that provides this funcitonality (without the Exchange Sync). It is called Evernote. It allows you to type out notes, record voice clips, capture photos and even has some basic to do functionality. The only thing it really needs is Exchange sync support – and possibly the ability to record video clips but I guess we are waiting for Apple to support that first.

I wrote over on afullerview the other day about how, a year ago, it was still much easier to just pick up the Yellow Pages and find local services.. despite the feeling that the paper version was very much an out of date medium.

Today I am in need of someone local to figure out what is wrong with my dishwasher.

Here are some real world results (searching for dishwasher repair london or if possible dishwasher repair my postcode. Lets take a look at how it went and see whether it was any better than last year.

Google:

• For the London search, it did a pretty good job – displayed a separate box of local results as well as some London-wide companies.
• For the postcode search, weirdly it displayed furniture shops first but lower down it listed a bunch of possible repair businesses nearby – but mostly for boilers.. changing the search slightly (”dishwasher repairs placed in speech marks”) restricted the results to 2 but nothing nearby.
• Using Google Maps provided the same localised results from the post code search.

Yahoo:

• For the London search, Yahoo also did a pretty good job – some possibilities though not a local enough search to provide anything nearby
• For the post code search – nothing
• Yahoo Maps – I could not get it to find anything.

Live.com:

• For the London search, it found some London/nationwide companies but nothing truly local, and not as relevant as Google’s or Yahoo’s.
• For the postcode seach it found nothing.
• Using Live Maps, with the postcode it found one possibility the other side of Essex (that’s quite far outside London!)

Yell.com

• Looks like a quick win. It found a whole bunch of suppliers. On closer look though, they are all the same company (they all link to the same website!). What happened to all the suppliers that are listed in the Yellow Pages (paper version)?

Conclusion
Well the major search engines are starting to catch up with the dedicated local search engines. Yell.com is theoretically still one of the best places to start but it failed miserably here. I expected Google to do better, but with most of the info entered into its local search results being a manual process done by the businesses themselves we are really waiting for the local businesses to catchup. Yahoo and Live was a complete waste of time.

Yell has the advantage of its age old paper version which contains a huge number of businesses but it really doesnt feel like they are taking advantage of it online.

In the long term though, Google was able to recognise that the search results I required needed local businesses in the results and not just companies with websites. Once they get more information about these businesses into their servers, more and more people will surely just search from Google?

With the addition of mobile search, location is also going to become an important factor. Guess who is the default provider on my iPhone.. yup Google. I did a quick search and unsurprisingly it gave me the same results as the desktop version. It is not perfect by any means though.

There is still a long way to go to get local search right.

By the way, I eventually found someone using Google website search, as I cannot find my copy of Yellow Pages – I think I recycled it .