N97 Conclusions: Simon Cowell style

Based on feedback that the N97 post was too long here is my Simon Cowell style review of the performance of the N97 so far.

Is it a great phone? yes.

Does it have all the input methods a user could ask for? yes

Is this a great phone for media caputure? yes

Is this a phone priced / aimed at the majority of students? no

Is having a keyboard more important than a large set of applications? no

Are Nokia moving in the right direction? yes

Is it easier for Nokia to add an App Store equivalent to the iPhone, than it is for Apple to add a keyboard? no

Is the iPhone still the best example of a platform to deliver educational applications and content on? yes

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05.Dec.08 devices, mobile phones, off-topic Comment (1)

iPhone Apps – the story so far

iPod Touch 2G

iPod Touch 2G

Another week – another enthusiatic iPhone story from Al!

This is just a round up of some stories and stats that have been around this week about the App Store going over the 10,000 application threshold.

Before the App Store stories here is a quick note that Apple now own the second most popular smartphone operating system. They have now captured 16.6% of the smartphone market globally – ahead of Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Also note this does not include the iPod Touch – not a phone – but it must be the biggest selling PDA in the world now.

OK App Store news:

148apps.com have put together a page with the icons for all 10,000 apps and have some statistics breaking down the details of the applications on the right. You can see a breakdown of apps by date submitted, price or category. Category shows that there are now 770 apps marked as education in the App Store which by my calculation is 7.7%. This should probably be watered down a little as many of the language applications have the same application many times each with different vocabulary sets e.g. French, German, Russian etc.

Let’s call it 7% of the whole set of applications for the sake of argument. I have no real data about how PC software breaks down in terms of categories – but I think this number must be about right as a proportion of a software market place.

For those wanting more stats you can visit Oreilly Radar for a breakdown of prices that indicates in the US App Store the average price of a top 100 application was now $2.60.

Finally MobileCrunch lists out the top apps in various categories broken down by paid and non-paid. There is not much to be learnt from this – apart from how healthy the market place is and how diverse some of the entries in the Top ten apps are.

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03.Dec.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones Comments (0)

The Nokia N97 and education?

Nokia N97 in use

Nokia yesterday unveiled the N97 their latest smartphone which is being dubbed (not by Nokia) as their iPhone Killer.

[UPDATE: Post now available in the much simpler Simon Cowell style of delivery]

The talk of an iPhone killer is premature and Nokia know this – they have a long way to go yet to catch up with Apple – and a lot of it is not about creating the right device. Nokia have no App Store, lack a single platform and have a brand that is more about utility and reliability than it about innovation, cool and media as Apple’s is. The price for an unbundled device will be €550 which means it is aimed at high end users and not even being put to compete with the iPhone.

I have yet to get my hands on a N97 – so my thoughts are based solely on the images I have seen on the Nokia website, engadget and from the always enthusiastic Robert Scoble.

The device could be thought of as a N810
phone, but it’s O/S is S60 not Maemo and this makes a difference in
terms of how this device will be useful. In terms of the physical
device it seems to be slightly smaller than a N810 and similar in width
and height to an iPhone – but almost half as deep again.

As you would expect from Nokia the camera is 5 Megapixels and can do
DVD quality video, which is a great improvement over the iPhone.

There are three very striking things about the device:

  • Slide out QWERTY Keyboard
  • Touch screen
  • Simple button design – as I understand it when the keyboard is not shown – there is really only one button and the touch screen (sound familiar?)

Reports say that the touch screen interface is good – but not as reactive as the iPhone screen. The reason for this is the technology used for the touch screen. Nokia use a ‘resistive’ touch screen to support pen based input (important for inputting Chinese and Japanese characters) which is something the iPhone apparently doesn’t do well. More importantly the S60 user interface has been greatly improved – but I am not sure yet if it still matches the simplicity of the iPhone. A user interface is ‘only’ software and can be improved upon. There is a problem with the ‘only’ software issue though – are software updates as easy for the N97 as they are for iPhone users?

The obvious differentiator between the devices though is the keyboard – and as I have often argued this is key for educational purposes. Nokia seem to have chosen to keep things simple with the keyboard – it looks easier to use than the N810 which is even better. The N97 continues to show that Nokia devices are great at capturing input (pictures, videos and typing). Improvements to S60 may make using Nokia phones simpler and easier, but the iPhone platform is simple and better for consuming media – from music and video through to applications.

At the moment I still think the iPhone / iPod Touch are the better platform for education even though this device is starting to show Nokia is moving in the right direction. Educational applications will probably always make up about 10% of all applications available for a platform. Until Nokia boasts as many applications as the App Store there will never be as much educational content for a Nokia phone. The number of applications in the App Store (10,000 last week) is an indication of how successful Apple have been in lowering the costs of development for 3rd parties, by providing a single (non-fragmented) platform, handling distribution and billing and guaranteeing the 70% revenue share. Nokia need to address these problems if they want to have a large set of applications and as a result of that educational content.

I think that Nokia need to do the following if they want to generate as successful application platform as Apple:

  • Provide a single platform for application developers to work with phone and non-phone devices (Maemo would fit the bill well and there are indications Nokia think this also).
  • Provide a simple integrated application delivery mechanism – just like they have done on the N810 with Maemo – the Over the Air updates are really simple
  • Provide a simple developer payment mechanism like Apple’s 70%
  • Find a brand that means something to consumers that shows Nokia is a media company  (N97 ! come on what does that mean to a consumer?)
  • Make sure this device always ‘Comes with Internet’ and consumers understand this is an internet and application phone

The N97 shows that Nokia have moved in the right direction and have been able to change themselves and rise to the threat from Apple (which is more than can be said of RIM and Microsoft). This also shows what a competitive market does for innovation in mobile technology which can only be good.

For mobile phones in education – it is still clear that if you want to use the phones in people’s pockets you need to have a cross platform solution (such as uHavePassed) and for anything complex you can only aim at a small percentage of phones. The iPhone platform will have 40 million users by the end of the year and is very attractive as a single device. The N97 will not impact on the position of the iPhone – but it shows that a future device from Nokia way well do just that.

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03.Dec.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones, tools Comments (17)

School that hands out iPods wins award…

According to an article in the Independent a school in Glasgow has won an award for an initiative that results in children winning iPods.

On seeing the headline I thought this would be an education related story but the iPod prizes are used as an incentive for the students to eat more healthily.

The overall story is one that we already know – iPods are extremely attractive to students.

I am left with the thought – wouldn’t it be great if they were being used not just to encourage healthy eating but to encourage and increase engagement in education.

I’m preaching to the converted here though!

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03.Dec.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning Comments (0)

Ollie Bray – iPhone / iPod Touch education use cases

Ollie Bray has a series of continuing posts about ways the iPod Touch / iPhone can be used in education – well worth reading and subscribing too:

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/iphoneipod_touch/

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03.Dec.08 devices, education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones, tools Comments (0)

iPod Touch to be marketed as a gaming device

iPod Touch 2G

iPod Touch 2G

It seems that the latest adverts from Apple will market the iPod Touch as a gaming device – which in turn could get it into more pockets.

The latest iPod Touch advert from Apple was launched yesterday during Steve Jobs Keynote at the Let’s Rock event.

The Tag line for the iPod Touch now is “The Funnest iPod Ever” (not the funniest as I first read it!). The guided tour headlines games with music and movies as the reasons why you want an iPod Touch.

From a comercial point of view this is a problem mostly for Sony with the PSP (Howard Stringer Sony CEO was in the front row of the Key note apparently) – a more bulky gaming device that can play movies without the storage or touch. Nintendo will still compete on price and have all the great titles at the moment – but they must also be worried about the new iPod.

Why is this great for education? Well this increases the market place for iPod Touch (and to a lesser extent the iPhone) to gamers – they are a very picky bunch but if the iPod Touch titles become cool games then it could become a must have device – increasing it’s credibility. Anything that increases the street credibility of the iPod Touch helps create more software for it and also makes it more acceptable.

If Apple could only solve the problem of input – a clip-on keyboard that was also a screen protector as an accessory would be fantastic – or a bluetooth keyboard – or a full screen landscape keyboard for note taking.

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10.Sep.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones Comment (1)

Review: Ubiquity – a grand project from firefox (for educators and students too)

I started seeing the buzz about Ubiquity last week after the anouncement my slice of the twitterverse seemed to be making comments about it – so I finally got around to installing it. It is an amazingly ambitious idea, but here is a quick review of the potential of Ubiquity for desktop and mobile learners – and a projection for the future.

The Idea

The idea behind Ubiquity is that natural language can be used to get the browser to do some tasks in a browser that are beyond a few normal keystrokes. For example you can select an address with your mouse and then press Ctrl-Space and then type map this and a map will be displayed – click on the map and you can then send this map as an email.

Ubiquity is a platform that allows people to write and share new commands (scripts or macros we would have previously thought of them).

The final idea is that all of these commands can be linked together – so that a user can input some quite complex instructions. An example given on the documentation site is “book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary and add it to my calendar.”.

Lets be clear this is very ambitious stuff.

The Potential for Education

How does this relate to education? Well the open nature of the commands means that commands for anything can be written.

When proficiently used it is possible to quickly pull data together from multiple sources which can be quickly combined. In some ways this can be thought of as cut and paste for the web.

It can also make data come to mean much more – highlight a word then Ctrl-Space define this and the definition is there on the page. Highlight a piece of text and then Ctrl-Space email this to xxx and an email will be drafted which can then be added to with other sources.

One very powerful feature is that you can edit a page with a couple of commands – for example select some text and say delete it is no longer in the page, select some text and say bold it can become bold. You can also say edit-page and the page becomes editable and you can type where you want, delete what you want and insert as you want. This means that students can edit any page on the web (BBC NEWS, Downing Street etc) although the edits only exist in the browser these can be printed off – so a custom BBC News page can easily be created and screen grabbed or printed.

There are already commands to grab something and quickly twitter it – there is no reason why text on a page could not be grabbed and sent to a mobile device for later reading.

The Problems to overcome

In all the analysis it should be remembered that this is just version 0.1 and clearly shows the power of the idea with some very simple commands.

However looking at people who are trying to write new scripts and combine them together it seems that there are still a lot of fundamentals to get working. For example – the email command supports Google Mail only and then only the vanilla version. Customising support to include Google Apps has proved to be quite hard and this has highlighted that something like email relies on the application knowing quite a lot about the user.

Then there is the problem of the natural language – as a programmer I am comfortable that I have to use exactly the required command – but to appeal to a wider audience there is going to have to be some flexibility.

The “Elephant in the Room” here is security – this is a very powerful scripting capability that is installed in firefox – an untrusted script will have the ability to do all sorts of nasty things to your data (files, bank account etc). To go back to the original vision of a sentance that should be supported :

“book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary and add it to my calendar.”

This is going to need at least access to my payment details and my address book – it will take a great amount of convincing me to give Ubiqutity this information.

For the moment I’ll be sticking with Dopplr and Skyscanner.net to solve this problem.

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05.Sep.08 education, off-topic Comments (0)

More on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Education

If Apple hit their sale goals (and there is every indication they will) there will be another 10 million iPhones in circulation by the end of 2008. This will bring the total number worldwide to close to 14 million iPhones.

I can’t find detailed figures on the iPod Touch – but I have found references saying that the touch is now outselling the iPod Classic, and others saying that Apple is downgrading sales figures for the iPod Touch this year. (If someone can contact me with better figures I’d be grateful!). For the sake of this article let’s assume there are already 6 million iPod Touch devices and that these numbers will continue to increase at a pace similar to the iPhone.

This means that by the end of this year there will be at least 20 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices in the hand of real people.

The really important question is who are these people? I would like to get an idea of the demographics of iPhone and iPod Touch users. It would seem to me that the iPod Touch is more likely to be a school or university student from 15-21 and the iPhone is more likely to be a professional 25-35 – but that is purely gut feeling. At this high level it is clear to see that educational software would be different for those two audiences and gives an indication about what types of sftware would be useful to them.

Can anyone help me get better figures for the iPod Touch sales? I know that it has none of the country constraints of the iPhone and is available world-wide. Also how can we get to better understand the demographic – has anyone seen any research in this area?

The lack of a good input mechanism make both of these devices of less use in education for classroom work, but the multi-media capabilities are great. The Touch could do with a microphone and camera though so that in can capture in addition to play multi-media (lets hope both of these get announced with GPS for the iPod Touch in September).

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18.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones, off-topic, tools, uHavePassed Comments (2)

Revision, Planning and Data capture

As we have become more experienced in what works and doesn’t work on mobile phone we have begun to focus our efforts in three specific areas when writing tools to support students – Revision, Planning and Data capture.

Why are we so focused only on these three areas? We believe that these are the areas where Handy Education (using convenient tools) is most useful and effective.

Revision / Practice

When revising the content of a course – most of your time is spent in one place with your text books (and other materials) around you – reviewing your notes and writing more concise notes. Of course not everyone revises in this way – but lets call this the most common approach. Is there a place for a mobile phone during these sessions? Maybe (I am sure the imaginative could crowbar in a way to include a phone in these sessions), but I think the phone comes into it’s own when away from these sessions.

We try to support students here by providing ways to do “micro-revision” to support these sessions – with Flashcards and quizzes to help practice recall of the ideas and concepts.

With process and technique based concepts like those of Mathematics the most effective way of learning the technique or process can be to repeat and practice it. There must be feedback to help the student understand where there are problems in the process, so the student learns to correct these problems.

We have been using mobile programs to help people work through mathematical problems, whilst providing immediate feedback with step by step instructions on how to correctly calculate the answers. These programs are less sophisticated than PC based equivalents – but the convenience of use means that they can be used many times to help build a students confidence in these problem areas.

Planning

Having convenient access to a list of outstanding work and upcoming deadlines is of great use to students (especially university students and adult learners who have to balance their studies with other parts of their life).

This data should be available to students in any way that they need to access it – via computer or phone or other device.

We are making sure this data is available in all these ways.

Data Capture

Capturing data about your workplace or  work situations is very useful in a number of vocational courses these learning diaries are used as new skills are aquired and practised at work. Being able to capture – audio notes, videos, pictures, text and structured data that can be used later by a student to review their progress and used in write-ups – is very convenient when using a mobile phone.

As we continue to develop our platform for students we are making sure all of these areas are covered.

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06.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, luzia research, mobile development, mobile phones, tools, uHavePassed Comments (0)

Handy education – not mobile learning

When I first got involved with mobile phones and education – my first impressions of the usefulness of having support on your mobile phone were completely wrong.

The first tool I wrote was a tool to help me learn German vocabulary – I had a list of 1000 words that I wanted to be able to remember and I already had made a pile of flashcards for the first 100 words that I carried in my pocket. I wanted to stop having to remember to take carry the flashcards with me – so putting them on my mobile phone made a lot of sense. I purchased a Windows mobile and in a couple of days wrote a program to help me track and manage these virtual flashcards.

My vision was that I would use these flashcards in the same places I was using the real flashcards – whilst waiting for people, on a train etc. The idea for me was simple – the phone program would make life easier by tracking which vocabulary I knew already and which I didn’t and if I my memory for it was getting progressively better. The program would also mean I would not have to remember to take the flashcards with me.

What really happened though was that I started flicking through the cards in many places, taking 2 minutes here whilst waiting for the kettle to boil at work – another 2 minutes whilst on hold on a phone call etc. I would flick though the cards whilst sitting in front of the telly, lying in bed and in many other unexpected situations.

What became clear to me was that having the program on the mobile phone – did not only help me study outside of the house and office – where it was more difficult before, but it removed barriers to studying in those normal places also. Before I had to go and get the flashcards – organise them in piles, and then work through them – once finished I would have to make sure they were put away carefully and then return them to their place of origin. Now I had ot reach into my pocket and press 2 buttons – state was restored from my previous session and off I went, when finished – press one button  – lock the phone and back in my pocket.

The realisation that my mobile program had reduced a barrier to me building my vocabulary, rather than just allow me a more convenient way to package a learning resource was key for me.

Indeed with uHavePassed we receive information back from our users about when they use the software (each time they synchronise with the server) – we can see what time they take tests and it turns out that very late in the evening is a very popular time. It is our assumption that our users are in bed at this time and taking practice tests. The motivation and effectiveness of studying before sleeping should be the subject of a separate debate, but I found this to be further evidence that programs on mobile phones do as much to encourage and support students in the house, school or place of work as they do outside of these places.

Whenever I talk to others about the tools we write for mobile phones – the picture they first create is of people on a bus or train etc. It takes some time to realise that mobile learning tools can be used anywhere (even infront of a computer) because they are designed for short interaction periods, focused only on specific tasks and give good continuity through start / resume functions.

For us the phrase mobile learning is a great way to first introduce the tools we create, but is highly inaccurate in detail – our tools can be used anywhere, but location is not key.

In German the word for mobile phone is Handy (just to prove that first program worked) and reflecting on the English meaning of this word, convenient, says to me it would be better if we thought of what we did as Handy Education – not mobile learning.

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04.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, languages, luzia research, m-learning, memory, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones, tools Comments (5)