Sample page from Designing Mobile Interfaces

We're all the way to QC1, which means Quality Check, as I get it. I think there's a QC2 in a couple more weeks. It's tedious work, but also thrilling to see it not in Word, or on the web, but actually in a book format. Enjoy: And don't forget to pre-order before it comes out in November. Now 560 pages, but Amazon shows much less than that. I suspect you will not be able to get it for $30 when it comes out.

21% of the Phones I See Are iPhones

For some time now I've been hearing "everyone I see has an iPhone" from all sorts of folks in the mobile industry. I presume it's some sort of self select error from fanbois. And sadly, it seems almost everyone in the mobile industry is an overbearing fan of the iPhone. To the point that they are constantly surprised by baseline features of pretty much any other phone when I pull one out of my box of phones. And they spend all their time with one iPhone people, marry other iPhone people, and seem to think it's a really simple world. A month ago, an example of those comments that annoyed me was:

"If you watch the phones people display in public, you really see only two in large numbers: iPhone and BlackBerry."

I am sure that can be parsed to be technically true, but I hear a lot of comments along these lines. And with a popular developer mentality of making products for yourself, then your friends, and users who matter will come as they may, I am saddened by this. I have even heard non-technical (not mobile designers or developers, I mean) folks being given crap by their non-technical friends (same definition) for having an "old scool" phone, when it does perfectly good internet, email, etc. It's just not the latest favorite smartphone.
So, I was looking around one day exactly a month ago, and realized I am looking at all sorts of phones in people's hands. So, it's that simple. I started recording them. Every handset I even sorta could identify, I recorded. The methodology I used was:

• It has to be already visible. No asking everyone in the room to pull out their phones. This gives the observed weighting that everyone seems interested in. There's some "that's what they use" thing that implies everyone else's phones are unimportant. I have actually had conversations where people dismissed sales numbers.
• I discounted my family, and all work friends. And their immediate families.
• If it's clearly a phone, it gets recorded. This makes for some vague labels on some of them. I can recognize a half dozen handsets at 100 paces. Others are "flip phone" at all but contact range. So, you'll see some oddly vague data. But this is to avoid my own bias on recognizing phones I have or use or read about all the time.
• I started to record cameras, music players, etc. It got out of hand. Just let it be known that convergence is not as far as I would have thought. A LOT of people carry other devices, and almost everyone who wants to take photos brings dedicated cameras to events they know are gonna happen. Very, very little cameraphone use at school concerts. A few Kindles observed also, but no other readers, no iPads.
• No demographics. Partly, to make it easy. I was typing these into my phone while doing other things. Partly because I don't have the capability to bother everyone to fill out a survey. I would worry about my own bias therefore, so didn't gather any.
• Yes, it's local. Kansas City and nearby areas. If you think we're all rubes, blow me. Go ahead and design for your friends in the bay area, and stop reading now.
• This is only 72 total devices. Take that as you will.

Some other observations I made, but which were not as well recorded: Every type of phone was seen being approximately equally used for everything. SMS, email, games, video playback, internet searches. On iPhone, Android, Blackberry and every stupid little message phone. More study of this would be nice, but it's even harder to tell what people are doing. This is based on when I could tell. Oh, and fairly few people talking. Less than 10% of the observed phones were seen because someone was talking on them. I didn't record it, but more like under 5%. Very few. Mobiles are typing and looking devices now. All the data I used is available for you to mock and laugh at. Or, I guess, add to. If anyone likes this, go ahead and continue the experiment. Vector versions of the charts above can be downloaded as well. I think most of this is clear, but one definition is sort of mine alone. The Message Phone the stupendously common QWERTY device, usually with a slide-out keyboard, and some controls (usually a full 10-key pad) when closed. Sure, other devices and even many smartphones share these features, but for here, I am calling it only featurephones. Note that these are not counting as touch, since it's impossible to tell that at a glance, but some huge percentage of them are indeed touch devices as well. They often are pretty neat, with nice keyboards, good haptic feedback, perfectly good screens, multi-day battery life, etc. Note that iPhone and Android are neck and neck. And message phones slightly outsell those. Hmm... Oh, and check out that last one. Other devices outsells all others. Sure, it's a mishmash, but don't say any one thing is dominant when it's easy to make charts like this. Anyway, as far as validity, I always say that crappy, cheaply-done research that broadly backs serious, heavy research is trustworthy. Nothing here is totally surprising and much hews exactly to known sales or use ratios, so I do tend to believe it. So, what's this all mean? Simple. There are a LOT of devices out there, and people use them. Look at the data and see what is really going on. More importantly, look at real data and make sure you look at your own users, and your analytics the right way. But what if 96% of your traffic is coming from iPhone? Well, I'd be suspicious of the analytics first of all. Seriously, I've seen this way more than once. If you sell anything but iPhone apps and get that sort of traffic, then first be suspicious and make sure you are getting the right information.

Some more about the N75

I find all sorts of interesting stuff when I try to use my gear in unusual ways. This weekend I was running around in the woods trying to not get shot by 40 marines (okay, everyone just had blanks). Radios kept failing, so I spent a lot of time trying to use my phone as a cheater comm. Ran into a few annoyances: I wanted to keep the phone with me for 3 days straight with no chance to charge it. Ideally, I'd simply power off, but since AT&T finds it necessary to have max-volume "3G" meteors fly around at power on, I can't really do that. And... no "airplane mode" that I can find. So, I just silenced it and it died after 2 days. Lots of network failures. Really poor signal, but I could mostly make voice calls, and the signalling channel (to get MWI) worked even with NO indicated signal. Unlike every other phone on the planet, I could not send a text message to save my life, though. It seems like it was insisting on some special 3G data network, so failed even when voice was barely there. After the time in the woods, I had to ride in a car a few hours to get back home. Lots of email reading and responding, but I realized this weekend how much of my emailing is not just my random thoughts, but links to useful information. There is no clipboard on the N75 in general, or in any of the browsers I have. So, I had to leave a bunch of stuff unread until I could get home. And, to add another item, just now when I was looking around in my phone for interesting artifacts of these experiences to take a screenshot of, it locked up. I explored this a bit, and it seems to be a UI failure; when a call came in it went back to the normal mode and worked. But the dead app (Messaging) was still locked, and there's no way to force quit it (without a battery-off power cycle). No software can be 100% flawless, so I hope smartphones provide ways around this better than they are now.

My Life Changing Device

I've been hearing people talking about the iPhone in excessively glowing terms for quite long enough now. I've even heard people in the cube next to me talk about how its world-changing, or life-changing. Remains to be seen, but I doubt it. For starters, yes I have played with one. Its a good PDA (needs software and a non-terrible network). By a long shot the best mobile browser ever. And its got some other neat interface stuff, seems well designed and built as all Apple products are now and the input is as good as can be expected (I wear gloves in the winter... not a lover of finger-only inputs). Anyway, its simply not gonna be anything like a life-changing device for me at least. Why is simple, I never had PDA, smartphone, even iPod. I used a spiral-bound datebook for 2 years in high school, but never really got into it. What I love is the laptop form factor. For the past few years of rejecting smartphones I have justified it as my need (or love) of graphics, cause that's what I do for a living. But maybe there's something else. I've always preferred this form factor. By my second year of college, I was using this pseudo laptop like thing for notes, schedules, etc. That died, and there was a gap, but for the last ten years or so I have carried a laptop with me practically everywhere. I can remotely look up pretty much any file, record my grandfather's WW2 reminisces, download listen to my entire music library, watch movies, output photos to TV, plug in an aircard and do internety things while on road trips, blog, or really whatever. Carrying around a computer all the time exposes them to damage, though. I coddle, but sometimes I break things when I fall or they get run over by a car. So the life changing device to me? A ruggedized laptop. Why? Its a real appliance. Like everything else (non-electronic) I carry around, or used to, its only marginally concerned with abuse. It gets scratched when I drag it across the street, but it still works fine. I don't even have a case. It's just got a sling for when I need to carry it more than across the room. Oh, and its a touchscreen. Yes, I've tried tablets. Too fragile, and just weird. Too much effort to be tablets if you know what I mean. Someday a ruggedized laptop might come out that's just perfect, though. This isn't the final state, I hate windows so its not my primary, and its too heavy, and its only got a 6x8 screen. What I hope for is not just that I can keep buying old, used ruggedized laptops, but that every electronic device (or at least most) are built to last. And in this, the iPhone may be a harbinger of something good. Apple's been slow on making their laptops really solid (though they are trending correctly lately) but the iPod series is almost the definition of rugged. People carry those around a lot, and they stand up to a lot more abuse than most phones or other devices I know. The wife's iPod (I don't have one, but I am exposed to them) is a 2G model, and runs like the day it came out of the box. I hope this degree of longevitity and ruggedness is where electronics are trending.