• 3G Support
• More Countries
• Enterprise Support
• 3rd Party Application Support
• And…. GPS!

Following on from the post a few days ago that mentioned the iPhone (It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!) it is pretty clear these days that Apple is after the business user. They have provided integration with Exchange e-mail, so you can get your corporate e-mail on the run, and they are creating a very compelling application development environment, which includes a top notch simulator to test out apps.

There is a huge deal of promise in mobile devices to increase productivity, but not without challenges. Lots of different platforms and handset incompatibilities to overcome (see Mini-bar Meet Up – Some New Technologies). Either Apple or Blackberry, or both of them, are likely to crack this one in the next few years.

As I am in the process of choosing a new phone, this is all of great personal interest right now. Apple has been enabling location aware applications, and demonstrated connecting your position and your address book to enable you to locate nearby contacts. I also expect we’ll see more and more social applications coming to the iPhone (there are already a number of blogging apps). The Apple Appstore will enable easy distribution of applications and be in a huge number of countries. Apple also introduced the secure delivery of enterprise custom applications via their own intranets to authorised phones.

Will the Blackberry keep up? In terms of raw handset sales, the iPhone hasn’t flown off the shelves quite as fast as some expected. That good sized user base is key for good support and an a healthy application ecosystem, and there Blackberry has a lead – so far.

That said, Apple users are used to being in the minority from the desktop world (especially at the hight end, according to this report). There too, Apple has been making in roads into business. The Mac might be in the minority, but it seems to be the tool of choice for productivity addicts both at home and in the office – judging by the readers of this blog at least.

All worrying stuff for Microsoft, although given the Yahoo activity, they probably have bigger fish to fry, of the Google variety. They also have some tricks up their sleeve too, but that is for another day. Microsoft have the tablet PC format, which is proving itself in many business applications. The iPhone now have very good support for document reading, and makes good use of the touch screen, but I like having something in between my MacBook Pro 17 inch and the iPhone – the Samsung Q1 I’ve been using is just right. Bring back the Apple Newton (for those old enough to remember that).

Apple also introduced a cloud-based service – MobileMe – which syncs between different devices and enables synchronised e-mail for those of us that don’t have our own Microsoft Exchange servers. It works with PCs (outlook) as well as Macs. It also gives a slick web interface to all of the functionality, and integrates with iDisk as well. It might make for a nice disaster recovery mechanism for solo-workers or small/medium businesses. The usual cloud-based service caveats apply of course. It is $99 per year and there will be a free trial from release in July. Today I use Plaxo to provide this syncing for me, but I’m watching them carefully, post acquisition.

As a side note, it was also nice to see a UK technology company featured during the event (with their Band app, and yes there is even an actual band that use iPhones for their music). A Spanish company was featured too, so a bit of European flavour! Roll on July 11th, when all this should be in our hands…

Related Posts

• It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!
• Little Pixels in Communication – Are your pauses clear?
• Communicating With Yourself – More on the iPod and iPhone as a Universal GTD Capture Device

“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

From Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise (emphasis mine).

It really does explain much of the error in corporate IT these days. Web 2.0 consumer services know this, and the next generation of users coming into business expect this: It is all about the user experience. I have used and deployed some awful tools in the past. I will never do so again. They can near bankrupt productivity, be it an information tool for getting things done or an expenses or payroll system.

Let’s say you have 100 employees. If a tool saves a member of the IT department an hour a week, but costs each member of staff just 60 seconds a week, you have lost productivity – and wasted time and money. What if you have 1,000 employees? Think about it.

If you spend a hour downloading, setting up and learning to use a new task management or GTD tool and it saves you a minute a week, it is going to take over a year to get a payback on it. I’m being kind here and assuming the tool stays the same for a year. How many times have you changed your personal productivity system in the last year, or spent time fiddling with new software?

I’m not saying avoid new technology, quite the opposite. If businesses are going to be productive and effective, then they must innovate with the Information technology they use, but it should be from the perspective of delivering productivity not technology. I see a new generation of workers who will bring change, and an older generation who are demanding it. There will be no mercy for IT departments or businesses that get in the way. Technology is meant to improve productivity, not get in the way of it.

Related Posts

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• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• Never Loose Your Voice Again – It’s Your Future

A while ago I purchased two books: The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. Curiously these two little gems have remained at the bottom of my “to read” pile for a while. OK, they have sat there for a very very long while. I pick them up, groan, then put them straight back down. I have bad memories of grammar lessons from school. Just looking at the books brought those memories back vividly.

This week things changed. I got stuck on the M25 for several hours. Not for the first time this month, I might add. As I sat there, engine off, freezing cold, I fought to make some productive use of the time. My laptop wasn’t by my side, so after I had made all the phone calls I could, I scanned around the interior of my trusty transport to find something else to do. Apart from some old food wrappers, the only thing there was a copy of The Elements of Style. I started to read. Once I’d read all of the food wrappers, it was on to the book. I read, and I read, and I read. Unsurprisingly, for a book on writing, it is brilliantly written. It has helped me to better understand some of those funny symbols on my keyboard. You know, the ones that only take a few pixels.

A bit of punctuation can be a great productivity boost, turbo charging your communication skills. Modern communications mediums have some funny effects on punctuation. Punctuation is a critical tool for preserving meaning when communications moves from speech to text. It recreates the information that is built into our speech, but lost in the alphabet. Those little typographic symbols attempt to capture some of the information we embed into our speech. We convey lots of meaning by way of pauses, breaths and stops, not to mention intonation and all of the other non-verbal communication. Maybe this is why Seesmic is so popular and Unified Communications is about to take business by storm.

Recently, I had reason to do some discourse analysis. This involves in depth analysis of conversations, taking notated transcriptions, which have the pauses and intonation annotated back into the text. I won’t bore you with what one of these transcripts looks like, but safe to say that a single page of text becomes many, many pages once it is marked up. It is amazing how much we say using non-words.

Instant Messaging, SMS and Blackberries are leading us to produce text completely devoid of useful annotations. If you want to see how much trouble is caused by missing the occasional comma or full-stop, just read the back of Eats Shoots and Leaves. To paraphrase:

A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down and eats a sandwich. It then stands up, pulls out a gun and and fires it into the air. “Why?” says the waiter. The panda says “I’m a panda, look it up” and throws him a poorly punctuated wildlife book. The entry under panda reads “Eats, shoots and leaves.”

A bit of wrong punctuation can obscure the meaning. Some real-time communication technologies implicitly provides that information, like the pauses and line breaks in Instant Messaging. However, for many of these new mediums that isn’t the case. We write conversationally, but the tools don’t capture the subtleties of speech.

A whole team of people were frantically running around in an office I visited recently. They were trying to work out what one of the senior executives meant in an email he had sent from his Blackberry. Eats shoots and leaves, that’s what I say. To use tools productively, as technologists and users, we need to learn to write. Starting with punctuation.

Elements of style is a good clear book and easy read, Eats shoots and leaves is even more so. I highly recommend them. I’m still digesting both, and I hope that they will also improve my blog writing!

How’s your punctuation? Have you seen any comma driven technology accidents recently?

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