6 things you should know about smartphones

Friction Makes Fire

Episode transcript

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AA: Hello, you’re listening to Friction Makes Fire, a podcast all about innovation and technology with me, Alex Allen.

GW: And me, Graham Walker.

AA: So this is the very first of our explainer podcasts, which is where take a topic or a technology and then run through a list of questions to try and demystify some of the things which might have been puzzling you.

GW: Exactly, and I’m an outsider to the world of technology, so most of these questions are questions I genuinely want to know the answers to, so I’m quite pleased.

AA: You’re kind of playing the role of the 'every man', aren’t you Graham? It almost doesn’t matter what you do or where you come from – you’re just someone who is asking questions for the people.

GW: My name’s not actually Graham, it’s John Everyman.

AA: Some might call you the Farage of the technology world.

GW: Thanks.

AA: I’m sure that’s how you’d like to be known. So what are discussing in this episode?

GW: We’re discussing what I want to know about smartphones. What works, what’s good, what’s stupid nonsense, and what are the shiny bits that make you want to buy it when actually it’s pointless innovation.

AA: Excellent, and I will read from my list of notes in a spontaneous way, which will make it look like I’ve just knocked this stuff out.

GW: Absolutely, and the canned laughter is the genuine live audience.

AA: Very good, so let’s get started, question one. What have you got?

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(1 min 31 secs): Is the edge screen technology you see on phones like the Galaxy Edge a pointless, novel idea or is it genuinely good innovation?

AA: So there are actually legitimate reasons why Samsung have introduced this feature. One of them is that if you’re in a meeting and want to place the phone upside down on the desk so you don’t get distracted, you can assigned colours to certain people that you know so that if they call you during the meeting it will flash in their colour, and you check whether someone important is calling you without being distracted discretely.

And it also has a data strip along the side, which will show you key information like missed calls, time, battery life, and so on. Samsung are trying to use the edge to show you information in a discrete way so you can be aware of it without having to pick up your phone in the middle of an event and make it very obvious you’re ignoring everyone to respond.

That said, Samsung does have previous when it comes to incorporating various bits and bobs that they’ve innovated just for the sake of it. Ultimately the proof of the pudding is in who’s buying it and using it, and actually it was their best selling phone last year. Although the Galaxy Note 7 did explode in a few people’s hands, which probably had an impact!

GW: Yes, always a poor sales pitch. OK, fair enough. So it sounds like it might genuinely be a good idea. It sounds like it might be good for business people particularly?

AA: Where eventually you assume we’ll get to are phones with flexible displays where you can literally fold them in half, and maybe have a screen the size of a TV that folds in to a tablet and the folds in to a smartphone. This is the very start of that. We’re at the very beginning of that. Over time you will see more displays that can change their shape and size, and that kind of thing. We’re nowhere near productionising those kind of products yet.

GW: Productioning! Is that one of your tech words? It’s a word inside tech world, it’s not a word outside tech world.

AA: I like to think it’s a word from anyone who makes anything.

GW: Fair enough!

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(3 mins 48 secs): What’s the difference between HTML and Flash, and which is better?

AA: Flash is created by Adobe, who create lots of other things. It was born in the desktop PC era, and it was mostly used for games, playing video, adverts and that kind of thing. Since the launch of the iPad, Apple decided they weren’t going to use Flash. Apple has a tendency to force shifts like this, they’re a big beast and can get away with leaving holes in websites on their devices and telling users they’ve got to work around it.

And the reason they wanted to do that is because HTML 5 can do a lot of the things that Flash used to. HTML is the language that all websites are fundamentally written in. With HTML 5 you can do things like create animations, play video and create games – and it’s got a lot of advantages over Flash. It’s more efficient, you don’t need to install a special plug in from Adobe to make it work, it uses less battery, and it works responsively - so if you’re using it on a tablet and then you move to a phone the content adjusts to fit the new screen size.

So Apple said we’re not going to support Flash anymore, and Steve Jobs wrote a long note about it and explained why. Now Android doesn’t support flash either, really. You can’t download Flash anymore from the Google Play store. You can still go on to the Adobe site and download old versions of it, but what we’re seeing now is that most providers are now redesigning their content for HTML 5 instead.

GW: So Flash is becoming obsolete?

AA: Yeah, and it was a big deal when it was first prevented from being used on various platforms, but now people are mostly over it. Another factor is that Adobe have lots of other products including Illustrator and Photoshop on the Mac, so they don’t want to annoy Apple too much because they have common customers and a shared interest in working together. Flash is just a technology that’s now had it’s day and been replaced with something better, which happens.

GW: Betamax has gone!

AA: Yeah, although the difference is that Flash was used on lots of sites for a long time very effectively and served a need well enough. The other thing is that lots of games that people used to play on websites that used Flash are now in the App Store, which Apple loves because they control all that media and take a commission from all the paid content that's sold.

GW: I’m sad that had such a logical and reasonable answer. I had this vision of Steve Jobs throwing his toys out of the pram about it.

AA: It did happen that way at the time, and there was quite a lot of debate about whether it would actually stunt sales of the iPadand whether people would buy a device that didn’t use Flash, but it ended up being the right decision. It also never ended up working effectively on Android either, and in the end the decision was really made for them because Adobe just couldn’t get it working efficiently.

The problem with building on mobile is that there’s a lot more restriction. Devices aren’t as powerful and they’re using mobile data to run things – so you have to prioritise technology which is efficient and not as resource hungry.

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(8 mins 11 secs): What is the point of NFC and Apple Pay in the UK? Are mobile payments the future?

AA: NFC has actually been around for a while. This is a topic where Android users will say hang on, this isn’t an Apple thing, Android has been using NFC for a long time. But this is a good example of how it isn’t so much about the technology, but about getting people on board. You have to get all the outlets and store sign up, and all the card manufacturers to let users put their cards on Apple Pay and now Android Pay as well.

So far it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. I was looking through some of the stats, and as of last year Apple Pay had an adoption rate of around 24%. So around a quarter of all iOS users have tried Apple Pay at least once.

GW: Globally?

AA: Yeah, and that’s up from about 9% in November 2014 when it first came out. But one of the reason that that’s true is that Apple Pay is only available on the iPhone 6 and up, and obviously over time more and more people have upgraded so there are just a lot more devices out there that it will work with and it’s much more widely available now.

That said in March of 2015, in a survey asking users how often they used Apple Pay 48% said they used it at every opportunity but a year later that figure had dropped to 21%. So it does feel in some ways like a novelty that has worn off, although you might also say that the early adopters were probably more likely to be bigger advocates of the technology while the back end who are getting it now are less engaged, and less bought in to it.

GW: Yeah, I suppose if you want to be on the cutting edge you feel like you have to use these things to keep up with the Jones’, but if you don’t it probably doesn’t feel as important.

AA: Yeah, I would be surprised if eventually these mobile payments don’t win out, because the idea of having a wallet in your pocket with cards and paper money in this day and age is ridiculous, really. And obviously if you didn’t have that wallet, then doing it on the phone with one device is the logical evolution. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it becomes more ubiquitous in the future than it is today.

Obviously in our market where contactless is so widely used, it’s actually more trouble to pay for something on the phone than it is to use the card – compared to the US where signing receipts with signatures and using cash is a lot more common and NFC is more of a leap.

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(12 mins 21 secs): Is Android better than iOS or vice versa?

AA: So, first of all, if you’re not a tech person, this is a question that people argue about relentlessly on internet forms. Relentlessly. It’s insane, really. There are people out there that who I’m quite confident would go to war about this.

GW: It’s the new religion!

AA: iOS generally wins on the content. So there are slightly more apps available on Android; I think that Google’s Play Store has around 2.7m apps and Apple’s App Store has 2.2m. But what’s interesting is that far more people are willing to pay for apps on iOS than on Android, and the App Store makes around 75% more revenue.

What that tends to mean is that the best apps come out first on iOS, and then later on Android, or not at all on Android. So really, if you think about your phone is a big black rectangle that does cool stuff, there’s more cool stuff for it to do on iOS. Typically that’s why people tend to gravitate towards it, because the App Store is just killer. Apple have been been doing it for a long time, they attract the best app developers, and customers are willing to pay for them so the quality threshold is higher.

GW: It always feels like it’s a really clean experience.

AA: Yeah, and that’s really Apple’s thing – iOS is a lot more locked down. Some people describe it as Apple being closed versus Android being open, which comes with advantages and disadvantages. So for example, until recently Apple had set of apps like Stocks and Weather that you weren’t allowed to delete from the phone. If you wanted to change the app you write emails with from the one they make, you couldn’t.

GW: But they’ve started to let you now?

AA: Yeah, they do more of that now then they used to. And on Apple devices you have to install apps via the App Store, whereas on Android if you really want to install apps from outside the Play Store universe then you can.

Apple is trying to give users a tailored, guided, ‘it just works experience’, while Android wants to be more of an adventure where users can do what they want. The question is really whether you want your operating system to be an adventure, or whether you want it to be guaranteed to work the majority of the time.

GW: That’s interesting because I think I would want it to just work all of the time, not because I’m lazy but because I don’t have the time to try and understand all the different routes that available to do different things I need to do.

AA: Yeah. So Android is about choice. You can re-skin your phone, add widgets and make it look and feel the way you like. You can choose from hundreds of different Android handsets, whereas there are just a few iPhones.

The big problem they have is fragmentation. So for example, just 18.7% of Android users are using the most recent version, compared to 77% of iOS users. And actually the most popular version of Android is still Kit Kat, which was launched in 2013. The reason that one is still so popular, is because it’s often the version that’s used on budget phones or cheap contracts. The problem is that your phone manufacturer decides when you get pushed a new version of the software.

GW: A bit like Microsoft do with new versions of Windows, like Windows XP, Windows 10, and so on?

AA: Yeah, a bit. But if you buy a phone from, say, LG and they decide they they’re not going to bother pushing you a new version of the software because it’s not worth it, then you don’t ever get one.

This is where it gets a little confusing. So, Android is open source. Google make Android, they release the code, you can have the code for free, and you can make it look however you like. And a lot of manufacturers, like Samsung, will cover it in their own skin. They want to make it look like their own operating system. So theirs is called Touchwiz, and although it’s still Android it doesn’t look like Android – it looks like its own thing. So if they want to release a new version of Android to your phone, they also have to reskin the new version as well to make it look like Touchwiz too.

GW: Which probably takes a lot of time and effort?

AA: Yeah, and obviously in that time a new phone might have come out and they might be focusing on that instead. So what this means is that you might end up having the same version forever, and you might never get an upgrade.

This is why you end up with this situation where there are lots and lots of different versions of Android out there being used. Lots of different phones, lots of different sizes – and if you’re an app developer trying to build an app for this, it’s a nightmare to build for everything. Maybe some of them are powerful enough to run your app, but some aren’t. Maybe it doesn’t fit all the different screen sizes it needs to. Maybe it won’t be supported properly by the operating system. So that’s why it’s much easier to build for iOS, which is what usually happens.

GW: Because there are just a few phones and a few versions of the OS, and that’s all you need to worry about.

AA: Right. So Apple's attitude is very much ‘we’re going to tell you what you want, and we’re going to make sure you get what we tell you you’re going to get – but at least it’s going to be consistent and you’re going to be happier in the long term.’

GW: That sounds like a big gamble, because if they’re telling people what they want and they get it wrong that could create a big problem and lose market share?

AA: Oh, sure – and Apple’s ‘it just works’ thing hasn’t been a constant success by any means. They made a huge mess of Apple Maps the first time that came out, when they were trying to wean themselves off of their dependency on Google Maps.

All sorts of issues with cars ending up in the middle of fields and on the wrong side of fences next to the place they wanted to be. What big tech companies tend to find is that they're reliant on other technology providers to provide them with things that they can't operate without, and the longer this goes on the more entrenched they become and the harder it is to get out of it.

GW: OK! That was good, that was a good answer.

AA: I guarantee you there will still be people out there are will say that this guy knows nothing. Absolutely nothing.

GW: Reddit will be alive!

AA: I want them to know I feel their operating system pain and I did my best!

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(19 mins 17 secs): Is wireless charging really a good idea or is it just a novelty? From what I understand, you have to put the phone on a mat on next to the cable anyway, so what’s the point?

AA: It’s weird. This is the iPhone’s 10 year anniversary, and in that whole time the one thing that hasn’t improved at all is battery life. Batteries are still pretty much the same today as they were then when the iPhone first came out.

Testing has proven over time that customers would much rather have a nice thin phone rather than a thicker one with more battery. Apple could quite easily make their phone twice as thick and fill that whole space with battery but they choose not to because it just isn't what people want.

So logic dictates that if you’re not going to make the battery bigger, then the alternative is to make it recharge quicker. So a company called Store Dot, which is an Israeli start up, showed Wired in 2015 a battery that could be fully recharged within 30 seconds, which is quite revolutionary.

That could cause problems of its own, because lithium batteries have a finite lifecycle of times you can charge them, and each time you recharge its capacity reduces slightly – which is why at the end of a 24-month contract phones are usually dead on the knees.

But if you remember smartphones in the early 00s when they had low grade cameras on the back of them, people were asking what the point was. There was no internet on mobile yet, and sharing content wasn’t mainstream - but over time it became a big deal.

GW: But that paradigm shift happened, and now it would be stupid to have a phone without a camera.

AA: Exactly. And there’s a start up called Ossia that's developing plates that can be fitted in to walls that will actually charge devices wirelessly when you’re nearby. So imagine that rather than putting your phone on a matt for it to recharge, it just recharged when you’re in the house, which is much more interesting – and this is the kind of thing we’ll get to eventually. Phones will just automatically recharge, you won’t even know it’s happening and re-charging won’t be a thing people talk about anymore. You’ll just have to change batteries more frequently and swamp them in and out.

GW: But they could compensate for that by making batteries cheaper and easier to replace?

AA: Sure. So right now it’s all a bit of a novelty, and not particularly practical but over time it will become, I imagine, much more widespread.

GW: So this is just the first step in the right direction?

AA: Possibly. Unless someone has a really big breakthrough in battery technology itself because building this plates in to infrastructure isn’t going to be cheap or quick to implement. If someone could just create a battery that lasted five years on a single charge that would be much better, although at the same time you wonder whether smartphone manufacturers would want that because all of sudden their customers might not want to upgrade as often.

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(22 mins 34 secs): How much does screen size and customisation of devices matter? Phones used to be getting smaller and smaller, and now the trend is that they’re bigger and bigger.

AA: I was having a look at this, and I found that by the end of 2014 Samsung were making 56 different phone models.

GW: One less than Heinz!

AA: Exactly! And they cater for all sorts of different groups. They cater for early adopters, and latecomers, and photographers, and people who want to write with styluses, and people who want to listen to music, and people who like curved screens.

GW: If you want to do it, you can do it.

AA: Yeah, they want to create a phone for every eventuality. And for ages Apple basically said this is our phone, you can have it in any colour you want as long as it’s black. It comes in one size, and you’re all just going to get used to it and deal it.

Because of the fragmentation issues we talked about before, they just want to make it really easy. One phone, one size, everyone just uses the same thing. But what’s really interesting – and I’m sure if this is a Steve Jobs not being around thing – is that they now make a lot of devices that I couldn’t imagine them making in the past.

They make an iPad Pro now that comes with a stylus, which is for professionals who want to draw and sketch. They make the iPhone Plus, they make the normal iPhone, they make the iPad Mini, and so on. And it’s been forced on them in part, I think, because consumers have said that they like this customisation. We like having a device that suits us specifically.

GW: In America that’s certainly a big thing, choice. One hundred ketchup brands down the aisle. Not to go back to Heinz again.

AA: It’s interesting that when smartphones first came out the design was made to be used with one hand. Four inch screens; if you actually look at the first iPhone now it’s tiny. Absolutely miniscule. And even the iPhone 6 feels quite small – so people clearly prefer big phones. And I think the reason for that is we’re using smartphones far less as phones than we ever used to.

GW: If you took away the phone aspect of it, people probably wouldn’t care so much now.

AA: And it’s become most people’s main computer. It’s an internet browser, mostly – and for that you want a nice big screen. YouTube videos – again, you want a nice big screen. So I think that the use cases for needing a big screen have become far more prevalent than those to make it smaller and sleeker to act effectively as a phone.

So ultimately it’s been a case of Apple telling users what they want, and users telling them they're wrong and they really want big phones, even if on the outside they seem quite impractical. They’re hard to store and put in pockets, but all devices are compromises. They all have to compromise on size, weight or power to focus on one purpose in particular – and it feels like most users are happy to put up with phones being slightly awkward but capable rather than sleeker and slimmer that can do less.

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(26 mins 23 secs): Is voice response really the future of phones and how we interact with technology?

AA: Well if you look at user experience, it hasn’t really changed much in lots of ways since the very first computers. If you imagine a registration form on a website, you still have to interact with it in the same way on a phone that you always used to on a desktop. It’s just lots of fields and you input your information and submit it. It’s not very intuitive, and actually quite complicated in places too.

Nobody has ever come up with a better way of doing that – and voice could change things. It could be much easier to dictate things like that rather than input using a tiny keyboard with your thumbs – so that’s why I think it’s quite interesting. It also feels very natural, we’ve always used spoken language to communicate and interact.

There will obviously be situations where it’s not the right input method. You can imagine being on the quiet carriage of a train or asking Alexa for your medical diagnosis – so I think there’ll always be a need for screens to some extent.

But one thing that’s really come through from Google Glass and now this, is that users don’t like input methods that make them look stupid. They don’t want to wear glasses and look odd or out of place. The same goes for talking to a machine – it’s pretty rare that you see someone talking to Siri or Alexa out in the wild. Even if it’s something simple like setting an alarm, people just don’t do it.

And that’s why I think Alexa has an early edge in this space, because if anything is going to change this behaviour then its probably being in the home. It’s a more intimidate setting and you’re less self conscious - I could see myself using Alexa to turn lights on and change TV stations. Whereas if I’m out and trying to set up meetings that's a harder stretch – I’m convinced it’s a behavioural issue rather than a technology issue.

GW: it's really cheap, too - £49.

AA: Definitely. One thing I think Alexa has done a really good job of is getting Alexa in to lots of people’s homes at a really low price point. It’s now going on to the Fire stick, which you can plug in to the TV, and also on to a phone for the first time – it’s being bunded on the Huwaei Mate 9. It’s going to be available in cars soon as well.

What will be interesting is to see whether all these voice assistant ecosystems will play nicely with each other. Obviously Amazon has quite a nice advantage, it controls the shop where you can buy a lot of things that will be compatible with Alexa – presumably it could start building some items of its own if it wanted to.

GW: Light bulbs, smart kettles, that kind of thing.

AA: But what happens in a situation like this is that all the big players will try. Apple will try, Amazon will try, Google will try, and there will be a winner of the category. And for the next 5 – 10 years we’ll be talking about them as the winner of this new generation.

GW: Like Blu Ray and HD DVD or Video and Betamax. I guess at the moment because Siri doesn’t always understand you properly it can feel quite awkward, but if it was more intuitive and smarter I might use it more.

AA: You get to a point with any technology where it doesn’t feel like technology anymore. If you look at what a smartphone can do now compared to even ten years ago – it’s ridiculous. Just think about satellite navigation for a second, it’s insane but completely taken for granted now!

GW: Isaac Asimov once said that any technology that is suitably advanced is indistinguishable from magic, which I think is a great quote.

AA: Yeah, so eventually the idea of speaking to an assistant will probably feel quite normal, and it will be advanced enough that it will be hard to distinguish from a real person. But the challenge of being an early adopter is that you have to live through the pain that improves the product enough so that it becomes useful for everyone else.

Think back the first iPhones running on Edge networks that weren’t really fast enough to do the things people wanted to do use them for. If you buy an iPhone today or an Android flagship device then you get a really great experience because of the work that went in to learning and improving it all that time.

So for a while, voice assistants will feel really strange, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the future there’s an advanced version of Google Glass in the future that’s a contact lens capable of adding a layer of augmented reality over the top of your vision that also incorporates voice assistant functionality too. But if that does come, don’t expect it to feel new and exciting – because it will probably just feel very normal. That’s just how technology usually is.

GW: OK, that sounds a good place to wrap up – and I’ve also come to the end of my list of questions.

AA: That is a good time to end then!

(ENDS)

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