What’s disappointing about these figures is that some of the advertisers not only should be supporting mobile, but some of them should probably be taking a mobile first strategy, especially those dealing medical and private issues, such as bladderproblems.co.uk or and londonwomensclinic.com as our usage data shows that visitors are more likely to be using a mobile than an office PC or shared family computer.

At Steely Eye, we want to get your existing sites and content onto mobile and all the other new web channels including tablets and web TV. We do it without transcoding or screen scraping solutions, and we do it right, making sure that we:

• Keep existing content/catalogue management workflows
• Keep your URL hierarchy and the benefit of your existing SEO
• Give you complete freedom of design without recourse to cookie-cutter templates
• Integrate with your existing analytics and ads
• and build a future proof platform for extending beyond mobile

If you’d like to know more about Steely Eye’s strategy, design and development services or our mobilisation platform please email info@steelyeye.net or call us on +44 207 494 4871

If you’re looking for inspiration to refresh your mobile strategy then visit the Mobile Recharge Hub to meet experts from digital media agency Steely Eye, official MWLive Mobile Partner and creator of the MWLive mobile site. What’s more, you can recharge your mobile at the same time.

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Sometimes it seems as if every man and his dog have an app now. What once was the latest must have technology showcase for brands big and small, is now simply another tick box in the digital marketing strategy checklist.

Consumers have seen every game, gimmick and geegaw in app form designed to make jaws drop and mouths chatter, and what was once shiny and new is now quickly dismissed as yet another cheap cash in. It is no longer enough to make your app react to every tilt, swivel and shake, and standing out among the crowded app stores is becoming increasingly difficult.

Here at Steely Towers, our customers are demanding ever more advanced features, but with so much competition, there are now proportionally more app developers than there is demand for their services, we find ourselves asking; “are we witnessing the beginning of the end for app development in what is already a saturated market”? After all, while agencies such as ours can offer the edge when it comes to creating the apps that will not only get high downloads and monetization (through increased sales or app sales) but also get people talking about your company, in tough economic times cash is king and it is hard to compete against the overseas cheap labour market or even two guys above a garage who’ve done one app in college. Clearly the market is becoming commoditised as developers are forced to compete on price rather that quality and reliability.

Mobile apps are no longer shiny and new, and themselves facing increasing competition from pure web solutions and new channels that use similar technological infrastructure but offer different ways of engaging. The last 18 months has seen the introduction of HTML5 and web app capabilities (the hybrid app). This introduction may be set to change the app world completely as it is not realistic in the long term to have an app for every store you visit, every product you own and every website you bookmark. Perhaps the most notable web app to come onto the market in just the last few days is the new BBC news mobile site.

Our Steely Eyes are always looking to the future, and so we have to be honest with ourselves and say that app development is now just another tool in the toolbox, but not the ‘be and end all’ by any means. Instead, we’ll continue to concentrate on where we can add the most value, helping our customers’ roadmap the next 2-3 years in digital, not the next 2-3 months.

Only one thing can be certain, while the excitement and interest surrounding apps gets pushed to the side, there is no denying that the future of mobile remains strong. It’s important to react quickly in changing markets and to recognise the need to burn old ships and move forward. As doors close to app development, they open to mobile web and Steely Eye will remain at the forefront of this emerging technology.

Indeed it’s just three and half years since Apple launched the app store era, releasing just 500 apps on 10th July 2008. Since then 500,000 apps have been approved by Apple and there have been over 10 billion downloads from the app store.

Back in the early days, the quality of apps were very hit and miss, the apps that did well were the ones that showed users a new and different way to use mobile. iPint was one of those apps and grew in popularity based on its notable features including its novel use of the accelerator and a realistic pint pouring simulation. iPint hit several million downloads and topped the download chart but perhaps its greatest achievement was letting marketing leaders know that there was a brave new world, a third screen to utilise in the marketing mix. Sure, mobile was personal and always in customers’ pockets but it could also inspire watercooler moments for brands.

But in the fast moving 21st century it does not take long for consumers to become jaded and cynical about what was only recently shiny and new. With so many apps, sites and other media competing for attention, it was time for Carling brewer Molson Coors, to refresh and update iPint.

Steely Eye worked as a technical consultant to BMB on Carling iPint version 2 which went live as an update at the end of February. The app designed by BMB and developed in partnership with Steely Eye and vouchering experts i-Movo helped Carling bring iPint up to date.

Rewarding the user for continued engagement, iPint’s major new feature is the vouchers, offering discounts redeemable at any UK corner shop with a PayPoint sign. The new update also includes a store locator map and a new UI incorporating Carling’s dynamic new branding, updated for Retina display.

And the results? Well it’s early days but iPint version 2 has already had over 250,000 downloads in the three weeks since going live, a fantastic result especially as it is only available in the UK.

A report this week positioned iPint as 19th on the iPhone Top 25 All-Time Free UK Apps – hopefully with the new features iPint will be able to maintain its position as the top branded app in history!

Drop us a line at hello@steelyeye.net to see how we can help you update your app or mobile website.

The difference between tablets and PCs is one of content consumption versus content creation. For those in management roles, spending their time making decisions, having a tool optimised for content consumption actually makes a lot more sense, because their role requires them to read internal reports and about external trends in their industry. The more effectively they can stay on top of the information, the more effective their decision making. In addition, the mobility afforded by use of a tablet allows them to be more mobile, spending more time getting out onto the ‘shopfloor’, talking to staff and customers face to face and better understanding their business.

Steve Jobs’ biography does allude to the inspiration for the iPad 2 being to shift it towards content creation – hence the presence of iWork, GarageBand and a camera. But creating business reports, charts and diagrams definitely benefits from a mouse and keyboard.

WHO USES TABLETS AT WORK?

• The PC is optimised for content creation
• A tablet on the other hand is optimised for content consumption
• Mid to high level managers therefore are increasingly using tablets to consume reports and data and then make decisions
• Tablets portability also makes them more suitable for field operations
• Airports and Factories use them
• Educational establishments use them for teaching

ARE TABLETS REPLACING THE PC IN THE HOME?

• Early evidence suggests that consumers are more likely to respond to a television ad on the tablet or phone in their hand
• It is easy to imagine users watching TV while tablet surfing on the sofa
• One of the peaks for tablet traffic is in the hour before bedtime

DO I NEED TO SUPPORT ANYTHING OTHER THAN IPAD?

• iPad dominates the market, with a 83% market share of new sales in the USA in Q4 2011
• The Kindle Fire is next at 13% and the Samsung Galaxy Tab at 4%
• The PlayBook reportedly does well in Canada
• Despite this, Android tablets are expected to catch up with iPad eventually
• With no legacy to support, all popular tablets support standards like HTML5/CSS3
• The web app vs native app argument is easily in favour of web apps for tablets

This a guest post by Tim Ocock who first worked at Symbian when the consortium was created in the summer of 1998. Returning in 2001, he worked in a dual commercial/technical role that necessitated almost unrestricted access to both the ‘shopfloor’ engineering teams and upper tiers of Symbian’s management. He left in 2004 to found Symsource, one of the few dev houses specialising in Symbian still in business today. He is currently Technology Director at Steely Eye Digital Media, a full service digital agency in London’s Soho, leading the webification of mobile and appification of desktop web.

Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.

To this day Symbian benefits from better battery life and lower hardware requirements than its competitors with similar features. Symbian is, arguably, the best phone Operating System there has ever been, and the original standard bearer for the smartphone concept.

But it’s no longer competing to be the best phone OS, or the best smartphone OS, it’s competing to be the best OS for internet phones. When Apple launches a new product, it might look like something you’ve seen before. But they define totally new categories, it just takes a while for everyone else to realise. Call it a superphone or an internet phone, the only platform that actually comes close to offering the same experience as iPhone, is Android. Internet phones include better web browsing, better multimedia, and apps of all shapes and sizes (and by implication ease for developers to make those apps), as well as a better UI to make all that content accessible, even at the expense of traditional phone features. They are something different from smartphones.

Symbian has never been an OS for internet phones. The Symbian definition of a smartphone was a phone with PDA functions. The browser was always a second class citizen, a third party component – Opera by default in the early days, but freely replaced with a licensee’s preferred option. Perhaps where Symbian started slipping in quality was the need, caused by the appearance of iPhone, to compete in the internet phone space too, a space Symbian thought it was in and thought it was winning without realising iPhone was something all together different. With neither enough time nor talent to make a competitive internet phone, that was enough of a distraction to let even those things that Symbian did well, slip too.

And things do take a long time when it comes to Symbian. Long before it was made open source, the platform had a well earned reputation for being hard to program. With its origins in Psion’s EPOC PDA Operating System, its peculiar form of C++ predated the ANSI standards of 1998, and in any case STL, ANSI exceptions and other features of the language in their semi-official forms were not conducive to writing lean software for battery powered PDAs. In their place, constructs such as the notorious Descriptor (like a string, but less useful) and the egregious chore of managing the memory cleanup stack, causes of both much frustration for newcomers to the platform, and Symbian’s code verbosity.

Yet the difficulty of writing good Symbian code was hugely beneficial to Symbian as a business in the early days. For many years, 80% of Symbian’s revenues were earned through consulting for licensees. Most telephony platforms today are off the shelf and Linux supports them all (because who else is going to write your Linux drivers for you if you don’t do it yourself?). Symbian’s licensees on the other hand each had their own proprietary telephony chipsets that needed to be integrated and their own customisations to the platform in mind. There was simply no incentive to provide an out of the box distribution, not until Android came along, enabling former Symbian licensees such as Motorola and SonyEricsson to put together new phones in mere weeks not years. Despite talk of Symbian enabling differentiation, the reality was licensees’ budgets were squandered on hardware porting and making the core platform fit for purpose. Both operators and OEMs alike kidded themselves that they wanted a platform they could differentiate on. In reality, Android and now Windows Phone 7 proved that to be mere lip service, that they really needed someone who knew software to do it for them.

It’s tempting to conclude then that Symbian simply chose to focus on short term consulting revenue (or had no choice to avoid going cap in hand to licensees more often), leaving engineering to deliver a half finished product. The appointment at that time of the consulting division’s accountant to head that department supports this argument. In theory changes made by the consulting teams were supposed to be folded back into the platform so it would become closer to a finished product over time. This almost never happened. Symbian attempted several times in later years, as telephony hardware became less bespoke, to address the problem, setting up teams specifically to create fully integrated distributions on various reference platforms, but usually done half-heartedly, outside core engineering and without enough resources. The leadership did not have the will to make it work.

But the consulting business was if anything just a nice side effect. The real root of the development problem with Symbian was that the APIs and tools roadmap were driven by the needs of kernel engineers and system integrators. It was not unusual to hear it spoken by senior staff that there would never be a market for after-market apps and games so why support third party developers? “Easy API” projects, to make phonecalls or send messages in less than 20 lines of code, were started and never finished. The Psion OPL language was briefly resurrected as it’s BASIC like syntax had led to a thriving third party apps ecosystem on the original Series 5. A suggestion to extend Java beyond the usability constraints and limited API of J2ME was shot down without a second thought. Each died quickly. Symbian’s engineering department forbidden to put resources on activities not authorised by product management. In turn, unlike at Palm, or Android today, there was no product manager representing the needs of third party developers.

More recently, the addition of standard C and C++ support, as well as the web runtime and even Python did at least get a dedicated ‘runtimes’ product manager. But even then, these were second class citizens on the platform, incomplete, poorly supported with tools, examples and documentation and most significantly not consistently available across all current devices. Contrast that with Android where Linux drives the core phone technology, everything else, including the application suite, is developed for the Java runtime. iPhone too uses FreeBSD at its lowest level but apps, including Apple’s, use the Cocoa developer-friendly APIs. Palm’s WebOS uses Linux for the phone and their browser based runtime for everything else.

Qt finally addresses this need but nearly 3 years after acquisition it is still unfinished. For Nokia now, the whole application suite for Symbian and for Meego needs to be migrated to Qt as quickly as possible because this will drive the discovery of new API requirements and improvements to the tools. Nokia has hundreds of developers working on Ovi Maps, successfully commoditising the SatNav market in a short space of time. But Ovi Maps is done. Those developers should be flat out on building out the whole application stack in Qt. It’s time that Qt was no longer a thin portability layer but a rich and powerful API for application development in its own right.

As for the user interface, work at Symbian for any length of time and you would have heard that “Symbian doesn’t do UIs”. So it’s no wonder every pundit has some witty comment to make about the current UI. But it wasn’t always that way. The Psion Series 5 won design awards and many remember the P900 fondly, while the UIs of Japanese Symbian devices made European phones look positively prehistoric until the iPhone came along.

By 2001, Symbian had recruited a world class design team, including experts from Apple, Psion, Ericsson and many other talented mobile UX designers. Symbian planned to build out 3 Device Family Reference Designs – Pearl for candybar smartphones, Quartz for touch screen PDA phones, and Crystal for keyboard equipped communicators. Technologies such as universal messaging (AKA visual voicemail), voice search, location sharing, augmented reality and context sensitive widgets were running in that lab years before other platforms popularised them.

Yet having assembled this team, Symbian was suddenly forced by its owners to abandon the notion of providing DFRDs at all and adopt the “Symbian doesn’t do UIs” policy. Nokia already controlled Crystal anyway. The embryonic Pearl was abandoned (it did not, as many suppose, evolve into S60). Quartz was spun off formally as UIQ. The UI design team were mostly laid off. Internally, Symbian used the old Series 5 UI for testing with Nokia later merging this together with Crystal to make the aborted S90 touch screen variant.

Of course, with the line between S60 and Symbian so blurred, as far as the user is concerned the user experience is a Symbian attribute and again the difficulty of development can take some of the blame. S60 in particular was written in a hurry by developers new to Symbian for the Nokia 7650 and its UI API, Averell, did not adhere to the elegant design design followed by Quartz and Crystal. In the interests of backwards compatibility, bad design decisions were never fixed preventing developers from having the time to iterate and refine their UI designs or even just to concentrate on the value adding features of their apps instead of fighting the platform.

So, a UI twisted into knots resulting from bad management and technical decisions made years ago and at the root of it all a stubborn refusal to meet the needs of developers because Symbian’s idiosyncracy created customer lock-in and generated short term revenues, and to its credit, also an OS that didn’t need 1GHz processors and 512MB of RAM.

But how does Nokia fit into all this? They were often said to be pulling the strings behind the scenes. When they finally bought Symbian it was because the threshold at which it was cheaper to buy it outright rather than continue to pay license fees had been met. The open sourcing of Symbian, it could be speculated, simply made it more palatable for the other licensee-shareholders and for regulators who had so carefully considered the creation of Symbian by, at the time, some of the world’s most competitive companies. It might have made sense then since many open source companies make money through customisation and support for Symbian’s consulting division to be part of the Foundation, to take the platform in new directions – set top boxes, in-car computers. But Nokia didn’t allow the Foundation to employ any developers itself and the consulting division spent their last months cross-training onto Android.

It wasn’t Nokia’s larger share of the original Symbian that gave them so much influence either. It was their spending power. Nokia outspent the other licensees all together by something like 4 to 1 in terms of license fees for volumes sold and in terms of consulting. Of course, it wasn’t Nokia’s fault their competitors weren’t building successful devices. But it influenced the behaviour and decisions made within Symbian all the time. It was after all a business and looking after your biggest customer is good business sense.

Symbian was supposed to be an equally balanced organisation. Licensees generally played by the rules, more afraid of antitrust and losing their place in the value chain to Microsoft. Except for one. Nokia were in a 5 way game of Chess that the other players didn’t know they were supposed to be playing.

Nokia blocked inclusion of a standard camera API in the Symbian product roadmap claiming it would be years before anyone built a cameraphone, weeks before the launch of the 7650, the first GSM cameraphone. They insisted on Symbian’s adoption of Nokia controlled components, the TCP/IP networking stack, the WiFi, Location services, SIP stack for VoIP calling, and probably the worst example of this sort of tactical interference occurred with Symbian’s move to support CDMA ‘out of the box’. With CDMA technology a defacto monopoly for Qualcomm, the obvious solution would be to build the reference software stack on Qualcomm hardware. But when your biggest customer was in the middle of suing and being sued by them, it’s not so easy. Symbian went to great lengths to build in support for CDMA, even setting up a secret team in North America but with their hands tied they had to use Nokia CDMA hardware for whom the only customer was Nokia. Nokia, in turn, proceeded to cancel several CDMA devices late in the development cycle during their frequent retreats from North America.

Symbian’s unique position caught between so many competitors made it difficult to appoint experienced leaders who had not already worked for one of the shareholders who could get people working for a common goal. As Symbian grew, the visionary creators of the platform were sidelined as ‘grown-up’ industry veterans were brought in to supervise the rapid expansion of the organisation. Thus did Symbian become an organisation in which anyone could say no but no one but Nokia could say yes.

So to the future. Despite comments from their management lately committing to the open source Symbian Foundation, Nokia already maintain their own internal Symbian codeline, occasionally releasing changes to the public mainline. With no other licensees (the Japanese also forked years ago), there is no reason to keep the Foundation going. New CEO Tim Holbrow is a great guy known to everyone who ever worked at Symbian, not one of whom would have a bad word to say about him, but there’s only ever one reason you put the finance guy in charge, while a skeleton crew is all that would be required to distribute the recently won EU funding to ecosystem suppliers.

Other licensees will never return to the platform unless a huge effort is made to provide a totally off the shelf, ready to run build of the platform supporting all popular hardware platforms. It’s almost certainly too late for that now.

Qt, however, is the right strategy for the application suite and for third party developers, it just needs to be finished and soon! It needs to be core to the Nokia software operation not a fringe activity.

Analysts are starting to understand that Symbian is a platform only for phones not for internet phones. Nokia needs to continue to educate the market to remove the risk of perception becoming fact. If they do not, they remain a company with tremendous assets but depressed market cap based almost purely on perception, and therefore a prime takeover target.

The problem for Symbian itself is that Nokia already has another phone OS, the increasingly creaky NOS/S40. The indirect costs of maintaining two ‘low end’ platforms easily outweigh a couple of dollars on the BOM for the ever so slightly lower hardware requirements of S40 and that difference is only going to get slimmer. Nokia needs to ditch S40 now even though that seems like short term suicide when it’s propping up the market share. But 38% market share is not worth having if that’s the 38% of the market who buy phones which only have a 1% profit margin.

The lesson for Meego, and other pretenders to the crown is, perhaps to look after your developers with useful APIs and powerful tools both inside and outside of your organisation. Find the right balance between efficiency and ease of development. Look after all of your developers and your developers will look after you.

Tim would like to thank @dw2 for giving him his big break into the industry.

Enter Siri. Or Evi. Or Jeannie. The incredible intelligent agents that understand natural language and do their very best to understand what you need and fetch it for you in near realtime. You communicate with them by speaking or typing in your question, and they respond likewise.

These agents put a personality, an intelligence, into your phone. And your phone is your best friend! It goes with you everywhere. It knows all about you – where you’ve been, who you talk to, what you read, what music you like and what your highscore is at Angry Birds. You miss it when it’s gone, and it’s the first thing you look at in the morning.

So why can’t we call or message our mobile phone best friend the same way we can our other friends, family and colleagues? Why can’t I make it a favourite contact? Why can’t I add it to my BBM group? And when I switch to my tablet, or Facebook chat, why can’t I ask the same agent, with the same knowledge about me, the same questions and get the same answers? Siri, y u no know who I am?

Sure, the iPhone 4S makes asking Siri questions a breeze, with the lift to your ear detection. But I might be on the bus. In my office. Self conscious about speaking to a computer (especially when repeating oneself for the still not quite perfect voice recognition).

Here at Steely Eye, we think the next step for AI personal assistants, will be when they are constrained not to one phone, but to all the channels you use, with their insight into your particular needs moving with you, from your phone, to your tablet, to your desktop, to your TV. Even your clock radio.

How long before you can add Siri to your iMessages, your Google Talk, your Skype contacts? We say, watch this space…

Here at Steely Eye we read voraciously all of the news and opinion to be found on the series of tubes that make up the interwebs, and we strive to make our Twitter feed @SteelyEye the most authoritative around for news relating to mobile media and other emerging new platforms.

But we appreciate that in this fast moving industry, Twitter updates come thick and fast, and it can be difficult keeping up if your schedule is anything like as busy as ours. That’s why we created the “Steely Eye on Mobile & Multichannel” weekly digest over at Paper.li

Each week Paper.li creates a newspaper personalised around the news we’ve tweeted and make it accessible on the web or for offline reading through their mobile web app or iPhone and iPad apps. The weekly digest of all news syndicated through our Twitter feed replaces the weekly roundups previously appearing here on this very blog.

Get the Steely Eye on Mobile & Multichannel magazine now at Paper.li

How do we know this? There are multiple reasons. The first, is the failure of 3DTV. After getting everyone to upgrade to flat screen HDTVs in the past 5 years, the TV industry needed something to sustain this huge growth spurt and it turns out, 3DTV wasn’t it. Remember when we used to change TV sets every 8 years or so? Now the industry wants us to change every 2 years, and needs to keep innovating to persuade us to do so, but are throttled by broadcast standards that take years to agree. Remember, the Japanese have had 1080i TV since 1994 (based on a standard defined in… 1979).

The second, is that in the UK and in other countries, Video On Demand (VOD) and TV catchup services like iPlayer and Hulu are increasingly becoming people’s preferred way of watching TV, not to mention YouTube, Vimeo et al. This will explode in the UK later this year when YouView launches, which will consist both of apps for existing apps TV platforms, and initially, a set top box cheaply available to turn any existing TV into a web-enabled TV. Much like the FreeView boxes we had to use in the UK when DVB-T broadcasts were rolled out. Of course, eventually all TVs sold in the UK will have YouView built in.

The third reason is simply the greater flexibility offered by having a connected PC. The PC is no longer the centre of our digital worlds. People’s content is in the cloud, and technologies that are widely supported now, such as DLNA/UPnP, make it possible to stream content from any storage device to any screen anywhere in the home. And while a computer is optimised for content creation and a phone is optimised for being with you at all times, a TV is optimised for content consumption, especially, video content. Already apps for Netflix and Lovefilm are available on all major TV app and set top box platforms.

Each TV manufacturer is looking for apps and experiences that will differentiate them from the competition. Surely Samsung will seek to integrate their TV and mobile phone experiences, and we’ll bet our grandmothers that the next range of Bravia TVs from Sony will have a PlayStation Certified download store offering PS1 and PS2 and PSP games without the need for a separate console, built-in.

At the same time, the proliferation of competing platforms, Samsung Smart TV (using Adobe AIR and Flash), Google TV (based on Android), YouView (in turn based on Adobe AIR and Flash), and others from Panasonic, LG and Sony, leads to a similar situation that we’ve had in mobile in the past that really constrained the growth potential. Different, competing apps platforms, and web browsers with different support for standards, different bugs and different performance characteristics.

Looking at the situation through Steely Eyes, one might guess that a newcomer like Apple will see an opportunity to shake things up. But in the meantime, the challenge, and corresponding solution is very similar to that faced when bringing legacy content and services such as ecommerce to mobile phones.

It’s where we come in. At Steely Eye, we build future proof multichannel web solutions that leverage your legacy sites, unlocking access to growing market channels including mobile web, mobile apps, tablets and web TV, without changing your authoring and catalogue management workflows and without resetting the clock on your hard earned SEO.

Stay tuned for more on web TV phenomenon from Steely Eye Digital Media, coming soon.