From Streetcars To Spaceships

The iPhone needs a better virtual keyboard. Now.

I'm so very close to buying an iPhone but one thing is holding me back. I can't work on a device where the keyboard obscures over half of the screen. I need a device I can write with. Articles like this. Web pages. Pocket guides. Things that involve hundreds or even thousands of words and that I can do just fine on a small screen if I can bloody well see what I'm writing.

Do you mind if you can only read one line of text on your computer when you write? Of course you do. And whatever Koolaid-soaked idiocy may currently be circulating, it's stupid to have things that way on an iPhone. The happy, bouncy, anticipating virtual keyboard app that the iPhone includes is very cute, but it's terrible for real use. And, in fact, tests have now shown that people typing on the iPhone are reliably slower and more error prone than users of other handheld devices. iPhones can be used with a stylus; it's time that somebody did a keyboard app that is optimized for one.

So if you're a programmer and want your chance to get a popular app out on the iPhone, write a nice, practical virtual keyboard app. One that is only fifteen or twenty pixels high, one that plays well with other apps, adjusts well to shifting from landscape to portrait, and chooses readability over cuteness. And price it at five or six bucks. Don't make it free. The people who will want such an app will be the ones like me who value our time and productivity and won't mind paying a few bucks. I guarantee that as long as the conditions above are met and it's stable to boot, you'll make some real money. Leave extra features for the second release. We'll be perfectly willing to buy a new version with math symbols and multiple typefaces and the ability to do skins, but don't delay your product to do this. Get your app to market as soon as you possibly can.

Mark my words, the person who does what I say will get money and market position and respect and thousands of others will be sitting around spouting crap about "I coulda bin a contendah" because they waited too long so they could add dozens of frills to show how clever they are.

Don't be clever. Be smart. Write the app. Test the app. Sell the app. I and many other people will thank you.

Why wasn't there an EEE PC in 1998?

There has been, understandably, a lot of hooplah about the recent release of ultra low cost, low power, sublaptops like the OLPC device and the EEE PC, not to mention the various copycats. And I agree that they will utterly change the balance of power. How computers are used, by whom, and when will all change as will the dynamics of how they are made, specc'ed, sold, and modified. The sheer fact that we now have whole new terms for these, from "netbooks" to "UMPC"s says quite a bit.

That's all jim dandy and I'm delighted.

But, as I wrote in January of 2004, I think that it's also important to ask why we haven't had these devices for the last ten years. We had wonderful low cost, low power, subnotebooks back in the nineties, customers loved them, they had huge brand and device loyalty, the companies had paid down their capital costs, and the product lines were profitable, to say the least.

And one by one, every last one of them was shut down, with the parent companies universally withdrawing into vertical markets or switching to hamhanded attempts to make a super Palm, under the "logic" that all customers want a device that is as small as possible. The only subnotebooks they made by 1999 cost at least a thousand dollars (usually quite a lot more), were rarely ruggedized, and were specced under the logic that if it isn't just like a desktop, it's useless.

They all drank the Koolaid. And got blackmailed into it by Microsoft. Can you say "origami"? I knew that you could.

And they blew a billion dollar market while fighting over scraps and snarling at RIM.

So, now that these devices have reemerged with a roar, I say again what I said in 2004. What happened to these devices is a very good test of the doctrine that "the market" will somehow magically satisfy all customers.

The great myth of the "efficient marketplace" doesn't look terribly credible once you get a close look at what happened here.

This was NOT rational behavior and I think that studying what went wrong in this market segment will eventually be recognized as a key step to understanding the dynamics of modern corporate capitalism.

HP, Sharp, LG, and half a dozen other companies all did the wrong thing. I think that we could learn a great deal from determining and documenting why.