The Second Pocket gold rush
Thursday 18th May, 2006I have a friend who's into gadgets. I mean,
even more than I am.
He's got just about every plam device that exists, and holds the dubious honor of having used ALL palm devices OS, Palm, WinCE, Symbian and Linux. We constantly tease him about the fact he carries enough battery power in his pocket to propel him to the Moon !
The Jargon Dictionary has a name for this - it's called the "Batman factor", with a reference to those fantastic devices the Gotham hero carried on his toolbelt: word has no self-respecting geek would ever leave the house (I mean, his mother's basement) with a Batman Factor lower than 3.
But here is another way to look at this. What about the vast majority of people who are NOT geek, will NEVER be geeks, have NO DESIRE of being geeks? What is their Batman Factor?
Well, I believe that for the world at large, BF = 1 (your cellphone) and increasing that value is no easy task. But let's assume for a moment that we have some sound research proving that consumers are actually willing to carry two items with themselves; after all, we've got two pockets in our trousers, right?
[Gosh, I just realized how male-chauvinistic this statement is, but on the other hand, girls don't really fancy gadgets that much anyway, and whatever they carry in that department gets sunk in their purse (an infernal device whose BF approaches infinity); alla in all, a male rolemodel is probably a good proxy for the market: boys and their toys.]
So if a target of BF = 2 is realistic, I don't think there is anyone who would doubt that one such slot is firmly occupied by the cellphone, whose main use is, well, to make telephone calls. The question is therefore what could occupy the other slot?
The rush for the second pocket
The assumption here is that any device which can win the second pocket will by definition be with the consumer AT ALL TIMES, enabling untold riches connected to the continuous use of such device, much like the cellphone enabled to people to make calls while moving, a functionality that no number of payphones could ever match. The killer app.
So what are the candidates ? in no special order, here's is my list:
As we all know, there are countless attempts to come up with the magic mix of functionality that everybody will want, but the reality is that all such concoctions tend to be perceived as subpar solutions hacked together: yes, I can have a camera with my phone, but it is almost invariably a very bad camera. Or I can play MP3 files on my PDA, but it will have nowhere the slickness of an iPod.
Let's therefore look at each functionality to find what the winning feature is (if any) so that we can then try to bake our own ideal device assembling sets of compatible and mutually reinforcing functionalities.
Still camera
A point-and-shoot still camera is made up of three things: a lens, storage, a video. Experience has proven that people do like to take pictures on the road, but don't really care about "sending" opting instead for some form of "sharing": so pics are viewed, are printed and they are uploaded to Flick'r or Riya, but that is largely done through a computer, which means you need a reasonable video and storage worthy of the name. With sensors starting today at 5 MPixels, anything below a few gigs of storage is looking for trouble, and a screen below 3" is really useless. No clear leader, no clear brand fidelity by consumer.
MP3 player
This market is almost synonymous with Apple's iPod, but when you strip away the coolness of the design, an MP3 player is really nothing but lotsa storage. Most users don't even bother with commands, see the iPod Shuffle success. The Apple iPod is the runaway leader, here.
Video/Picture player
While I may enjoy carrying my digital pictures collection with me (don't we carry a pic of our kids in our wallets?) I still think nobody wants to watch "Desperate Housewifes" while walking down Main Street. This functionality however was stealthily introduced by Apple as simply a bonus on their latest iPods, and it has now gained some sort of traction, also thanks to the clever maneuvering with content producers.
Key elements here are large storage, lots of battery power and a good screen.
If there was a market there could be a leader, but really the Apple iPod is a lone contender in a roster that perhaps includes one other vendor (Archos) but with nowhere the design refinement of the current (and especially the next generation) iPod.
Camcorder
These used to be TV-crew sized behemoths nobody on their right mind would ever think of lugging around. Not anymore. Vendors are increasingly putting out smaller and smaller devices and we are nearing the point where physical supports (cassettes, DVDs) will be abandoned in favor of solid state memory. This will further blur the distinction between still and movie cameras: this camcorder is smaller than most still cameras, yet it shoots High Definition digital movies in MPEG-4 format; when you think that practically all still cameras are also capable of shooting video, I suspect the convergence between those two items is inevitable: same lens, same sensor, same storage, same screen for viewing pictures or movies. You could argue that vendors such as Sony or Canon command a leading share, but none of them is really ahead of the pack.
PDA
Personal Digital Assistants are perhaps the oldest gadget of the pack; although their invention made companies such as Palm very successful, it is now clear that their popularity has peaked. Their penetration will never be anywhere remotely close to the cellphone, and hybrids (smartphones) have been hampered by the contrasting design goals of small size (cell) and a large, readable screen. The two key elements of a PDA (excluding its software, of course) are a keyboard and a screen, both of which need size to be really comfortable. Leaders? If they were still relevant, one might mention Psion or Palm, but...
Web browser
Well, OK, this is not really a device, but more a functionality that can be attached to any or all of the above devices, provided it has a reasonably sized keyboard and screen as well as some form of connectivity.
The ideal device
All in all, a camera-equipped iPod, with its large screen and storage seems a good bet, covering 5 out of 6 functionalities. Not so sure about the rumored-about iPod phone does not make that much sense to me: why should the front runner for the Second Pocket centent itself to be the runner up for the First one ? The irony of this analysis is that truly there is no reason an MP3 player cannot be embedded in a phone: it doesn't need screen, nor keyboard, and the headphones are the same you use for handsfree use, so if the iPod on steroids wins the race for the Second Pocket, its original functionality, the one which created the myth, may actually migrate somewhere else.
He's got just about every plam device that exists, and holds the dubious honor of having used ALL palm devices OS, Palm, WinCE, Symbian and Linux. We constantly tease him about the fact he carries enough battery power in his pocket to propel him to the Moon !
The Jargon Dictionary has a name for this - it's called the "Batman factor", with a reference to those fantastic devices the Gotham hero carried on his toolbelt: word has no self-respecting geek would ever leave the house (I mean, his mother's basement) with a Batman Factor lower than 3.
But here is another way to look at this. What about the vast majority of people who are NOT geek, will NEVER be geeks, have NO DESIRE of being geeks? What is their Batman Factor?
Well, I believe that for the world at large, BF = 1 (your cellphone) and increasing that value is no easy task. But let's assume for a moment that we have some sound research proving that consumers are actually willing to carry two items with themselves; after all, we've got two pockets in our trousers, right?
[Gosh, I just realized how male-chauvinistic this statement is, but on the other hand, girls don't really fancy gadgets that much anyway, and whatever they carry in that department gets sunk in their purse (an infernal device whose BF approaches infinity); alla in all, a male rolemodel is probably a good proxy for the market: boys and their toys.]
So if a target of BF = 2 is realistic, I don't think there is anyone who would doubt that one such slot is firmly occupied by the cellphone, whose main use is, well, to make telephone calls. The question is therefore what could occupy the other slot?
The rush for the second pocket
The assumption here is that any device which can win the second pocket will by definition be with the consumer AT ALL TIMES, enabling untold riches connected to the continuous use of such device, much like the cellphone enabled to people to make calls while moving, a functionality that no number of payphones could ever match. The killer app.
So what are the candidates ? in no special order, here's is my list:
- still camera
- MP3 player
- video/picture player
- camcorder
- PDA
- web browser
As we all know, there are countless attempts to come up with the magic mix of functionality that everybody will want, but the reality is that all such concoctions tend to be perceived as subpar solutions hacked together: yes, I can have a camera with my phone, but it is almost invariably a very bad camera. Or I can play MP3 files on my PDA, but it will have nowhere the slickness of an iPod.
Let's therefore look at each functionality to find what the winning feature is (if any) so that we can then try to bake our own ideal device assembling sets of compatible and mutually reinforcing functionalities.
Still camera
A point-and-shoot still camera is made up of three things: a lens, storage, a video. Experience has proven that people do like to take pictures on the road, but don't really care about "sending" opting instead for some form of "sharing": so pics are viewed, are printed and they are uploaded to Flick'r or Riya, but that is largely done through a computer, which means you need a reasonable video and storage worthy of the name. With sensors starting today at 5 MPixels, anything below a few gigs of storage is looking for trouble, and a screen below 3" is really useless. No clear leader, no clear brand fidelity by consumer.
MP3 player
This market is almost synonymous with Apple's iPod, but when you strip away the coolness of the design, an MP3 player is really nothing but lotsa storage. Most users don't even bother with commands, see the iPod Shuffle success. The Apple iPod is the runaway leader, here.
Video/Picture player
While I may enjoy carrying my digital pictures collection with me (don't we carry a pic of our kids in our wallets?) I still think nobody wants to watch "Desperate Housewifes" while walking down Main Street. This functionality however was stealthily introduced by Apple as simply a bonus on their latest iPods, and it has now gained some sort of traction, also thanks to the clever maneuvering with content producers.
Key elements here are large storage, lots of battery power and a good screen.
If there was a market there could be a leader, but really the Apple iPod is a lone contender in a roster that perhaps includes one other vendor (Archos) but with nowhere the design refinement of the current (and especially the next generation) iPod.
Camcorder
These used to be TV-crew sized behemoths nobody on their right mind would ever think of lugging around. Not anymore. Vendors are increasingly putting out smaller and smaller devices and we are nearing the point where physical supports (cassettes, DVDs) will be abandoned in favor of solid state memory. This will further blur the distinction between still and movie cameras: this camcorder is smaller than most still cameras, yet it shoots High Definition digital movies in MPEG-4 format; when you think that practically all still cameras are also capable of shooting video, I suspect the convergence between those two items is inevitable: same lens, same sensor, same storage, same screen for viewing pictures or movies. You could argue that vendors such as Sony or Canon command a leading share, but none of them is really ahead of the pack.
PDA
Personal Digital Assistants are perhaps the oldest gadget of the pack; although their invention made companies such as Palm very successful, it is now clear that their popularity has peaked. Their penetration will never be anywhere remotely close to the cellphone, and hybrids (smartphones) have been hampered by the contrasting design goals of small size (cell) and a large, readable screen. The two key elements of a PDA (excluding its software, of course) are a keyboard and a screen, both of which need size to be really comfortable. Leaders? If they were still relevant, one might mention Psion or Palm, but...
Web browser
Well, OK, this is not really a device, but more a functionality that can be attached to any or all of the above devices, provided it has a reasonably sized keyboard and screen as well as some form of connectivity.
The ideal device
All in all, a camera-equipped iPod, with its large screen and storage seems a good bet, covering 5 out of 6 functionalities. Not so sure about the rumored-about iPod phone does not make that much sense to me: why should the front runner for the Second Pocket centent itself to be the runner up for the First one ? The irony of this analysis is that truly there is no reason an MP3 player cannot be embedded in a phone: it doesn't need screen, nor keyboard, and the headphones are the same you use for handsfree use, so if the iPod on steroids wins the race for the Second Pocket, its original functionality, the one which created the myth, may actually migrate somewhere else.
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