In Japan, cellphones have become too complex to use

Steve Jobs’ new iPhone, expected to be unveiled Monday, is headed to Japan by the end of the year. But the device’s famed ease of use may actually be a put off in Japan, where consumers want features, not simplicity.

 Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master.

“There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo.

Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”

Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all.

“Some people care about quality, but first and foremost it’s about the features,” says Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. He estimates that the average person only uses 5 to 10 percent of the functions available on their handsets.

Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.

Hayashi owns a Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a miniature but crisp 3-inch TV. In addition to 3G and GPS, the device has a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors that enable Wii-style games to be played sitting on the train.

“When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they’re amazed,” Hayashi says. “They think there’s no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that’s only because I’m setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features.”

In actuality, Hayashi says, the P905i is fatally flawed. The motion sensors are painfully slow, and the novelty of using them is quickly replaced with frustration. And while being able to watch TV anywhere is a spectacular idea, there’s no signal in the subways, and even above ground, the sound cuts out every few seconds.

“There’s nothing more annoying than choppy TV noises,” Hayashi says.

Aoki, who carries two phones, a Sony W44S and an iPhone for accessing the web, has only a vague idea of all the things the Sony cellphone is capable of doing. “Every once in a while, you find an incredible function via the complicated menu,” he says.

The manufacturers, who realize the absurdity of piling on features that don’t work well, are caught in a vicious cycle of materialistic consumers who always want the newest high-tech handsets, and carriers that have complete control over what products and services are provided to their customers.

“The most important thing for us is to provide our end users with a unique user experience through our products,” says Toshi Kawamura, a spokesman for Sony Ericsson Japan.

They’re also at the mercy of the all-powerful carriers, like NTT DoCoMo — the company that created the localized 3G network that makes Japanese handsets virtually obsolete in the rest of the world — who get to decide what applications and functions are compatible with their networks.

“The flashy little functions are cool, but they’re carrier-specific,” Hayashi says. “Once you take this out of Japan, it’s just a piece of metal.” Japanese companies only make 5 percent of global mobile phone sales, and all of those sales are domestic.

Neat-looking gadgets are also a core aspect of one’s identity. Daiji Hirata, chief financial officer of News2u Corporation and creator of Japan’s first wireless LAN, admits to changing handsets more often than is probably necessary.

“Cellphones are always part of any conversation,” he says. “People are always using them and holding them, even in the middle of a meal, so they might not think you’re hip if you’re carrying an old one.”

However, it’s unclear whether Japanese consumers will ditch their complicated cellphones for Apple’s easy-to-use iPhone, which will be sold in Japan by SoftBank by the end of the year.

A survey conducted by Japan Railways showed that just more than half of those polled were interested in buying the iPhone, but that less than one-fifth really knew what the iPhone was.

“It doesn’t have 3G, the camera is only 2 megapixels, and it lacks fun little features like mobile wallet functions and an LED flashlight,” Hayashi says. “It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it’s not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture.”

Are you ready for Windows 7?

“Hold the line!” That’s the new rallying cry for the core Windows development team. Add new features. Tweak existing ones. But whatever you do, don’t make Windows 7 any slower or fatter than Vista.

I have little doubt those are the marching orders for Windows 7, given the tight release timeframe of 18 to 24 months plus various reports of early Milestone builds. More ambitious changes would risk another — and potentially fatal — Longhorn-style delay. Windows 7 will be exactly what the internal Microsoft working title conveys: the seventh (actually fifth) generation of the Windows NT code base — the same code base that forms the basis of Windows XP and Vista today.

Shocking? Only if you’re one of the deluded Save XP die-hards who bought into the whole Windows 7 uber alles mystique. For these lost souls, the next Windows is more than just another version. It’s a true panacea, a conduit through which they can pour all of their anti-Vista angst. Don’t like UAC? Windows 7 will fix that. Frustrated by Vista’s sluggish performance? Windows 7 will run circles around it.

Reality check: Windows 7 will be a lot like Vista. In fact, it’ll be more like an extensive Service Pack (think Windows XP SP2 and/or the various NT Option Packs of yore) than a major new release. Big ideas and big new features are what got Microsoft into the whole “Longhorn reset” mess in the first place.

This is actually a good thing. Despite the criticisms leveled against it (including more than one heated diatribe by yours truly), Vista isn’t really flawed in any fundamental way. Yes, it’s slower than XP — but that was to be expected given its more complex code paths. Likewise, the “girth” issues were somewhat inevitable. Meanwhile, the hardware base is slowly catching up to where it needs to be to support a more complex Windows OS.

I’d even go so far as to say that, if Vista were launched today –- with the SP1 tweaks and improved device driver ecosystem in place -– it would fare a lot better than it did. But hindsight is 20/20. The future, in the form of Windows 7, is all about shipping an incremental follow-on to Vista that shores up the NT code base once and for all.

The good news is that this also makes speculating about the next version’s runtime behavior a lot easier. After all, if Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with some performance and usability tweaks, it means we can deduce a lot about the product’s system requirements and compatibility with the installed base by examining performance and usage data collected from systems running its immediate predecessors, Windows “5″ (also known as XP) and “6″ (also known as Vista).

Peering into the future with Windows Sentinel
Enter the Windows Sentinel project. With nearly 2,000 contributing systems, the exo.repository –- which is the heart of Windows Sentinel –- provides us with a representative sample of Windows-based systems running a mixture of versions (XP, 2003, 2008, Vista) and workloads (business productivity, analytics, home/personal).

Basically, we have our finger on the pulse of the Windows landscape. And by measuring that pulse, plus a few other metrics (and some educated guessing), we can tell a lot about how Windows 7 will be received when it ships.

For example, we can tell right now that roughly 29 percent of current systems will be able to run Windows 7, although not always with adequate performance.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of system disclosure data (CPU type/count/speed, memory size) as well as performance indices calculated from runtime data collected over a one-month period. Of the remaining systems, 60 percent have too little memory (less than 2GB) to reasonably host a Vista successor, while 29 percent don’t have the CPU horsepower (less than 2GHz).

We can further break down the “survivors” by analyzing their current workloads. A full 36 percent of them are already CPU bound, with 27 percent of them heavily overloaded. This is per the exo.repository’s Peak CPU Saturation Index, which is a compound index derived from 4 contributing factors: Processor Queue Length; Per-process Instant Delay (a custom CPU metric derived from the Processor Queue value); Per-Process Cumulative Delay (another custom metric); and Event Duration.

Interestingly, of the systems that are most heavily burdened, only 31 percent are running Vista (which is not really surprising since Vista makes up just 16 percent of the overall sample set). The rest are running a mixture of XP and Server 2003/XP-64-bit.

Needless to say, a heavily loaded (in terms of CPU saturation) XP box doesn’t bode well for Vista’s successor. Like Vista, Windows 7 will introduce a much higher CPU burden in the form of additional background services and their corresponding execution threads. Currently, this ratio runs approximately two to one in favor of Vista: A Vista-based PC must juggle roughly twice as many concurrent execution threads as an XP PC while running the identical office productivity workload.

Chances are good that Windows 7 will, at minimum, maintain the status quo in terms of resource requirements. This, in turn, means that customers who were hoping for some relief with Windows 7 will be sorely disappointed. It’s simply not realistic to expect Microsoft to produce a “leaner” OS and yet still add enough functionality to make it worth upgrading. At best, we might see a new version with a resource footprint similar to Windows Vista, which still places it out of reach of more than three-quarters of the systems in our sample set.

Bottom line: Less than 20 percent of the installed base is ready to migrate to Windows 7 today based on all of the factors detailed above. By far, the biggest (60 percent of the base) inhibitor is limited RAM: Like Vista, Windows 7 will have a voracious appetite for memory. Today, 2GB is the bare minimum for reasonable Vista performance. Expect 4GB to be the norm by the time Windows 7 ships. Likewise, the days of the single-core CPU are over. Dual cores are a must, while quad cores are rapidly transitioning from luxury to mainstream necessity.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it has time –- and Moore’s indefatigable Law –- on its side. Assuming Microsoft does indeed “hold the line” on code path expansion and keep Windows 7’s requirements within striking distance of Windows Vista, it can launch virtually anything and still have a winner. Just don’t expect to boot it on that old Pentium III box you stumbled across in your basement.

Apple’s games strategy looks beyond consoles and the iMac

It’s no secret that Apple Inc. has been on a hardware tear. In the last year alone, there has been a flurry of developments: The company branched into the mobile phone arena with the iPhone. It reinvented the mp3 player with the introduction of the iPod Touch. It worked its way into living rooms with an updated Apple TV.

But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.

Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.

This isn’t necessarily a new frontier. Fans of the Cupertino-based company may recall how a Steve Jobs-less Apple entered the console gaming fray in 1996 with the troubled Pippin. At best, the Pippin ended up being a costly lesson. At worst, it served as a stinging footnote to the company’s strained relationship with gamers.

Fast forward to the present — the company has enjoyed a string of hardware and software hits and has disrupted the music and mobile phone industries soon after entering them. Today’s Apple certainly has the means to release another console, but let’s face it — a rehashed Pippin would be a huge gamble, considering the established relationships and competition represented by Sony’s PlayStation3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii.

This doesn’t mean that Apple has abandoned ways to break into the gaming market with its desktop hardware. A beefed-up iMac offers an interesting possibility. Adding horsepower to the iMac line isn’t exactly new for Cupertino, but with an overclocked Intel CPU and an nVIDIA 8800M GTS under the hood, the new iMac could easily pass for a leading gaming rig — at least, if there were more developers creating games designed to run on it and OS X.

It seems much more likely that Jobs and Co. may be following a different path to gaming success — domination of the mobile gaming market.

A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy’s biggest tells. The filing extends Apple’s trademark in regards to:

“Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.”

Skeptics could easily dismiss this as Apple casting a wide net for future expansion, but a swift call to action seems more likely. Not only are executives well aware of the strong interest in gaming among Mac users (and vendors), but also new conditions exist for gaming to be pushed to the forefront in the Apple hardware and software ecosystem. The faltering company behind the Pippin now dominates several hardware segments, which makes a huge difference in launching a new (and potentially related) product. The problems that the Pippin faced – such as the development and marketing costs associated with an unproven device – would be negated by a gaming platform tied into Apple’s market-dominating and innovative mobile devices.

And here’s the really sneaky part – the iPod Touch and the iPhone are already fully capable of playing games. Apple highlighted this home-court advantage with the recent release of the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch. By doing so, Apple let a community of eager third-party developers tackle designing games like “Spore” as well as casual games for its devices that utilize innovative features such as the multitouch screen and motion-sensing accelerometer. Along with all of the development tools necessary for building applications, developers will have the ability to upload and sell their creations through the iPhone App store (naturally, Apple will take a cut).

Consumers are already ga-ga over Apple’s mobile devices to begin with, so whether they should be re-imagined as gaming gadgets is more of a marketing issue. But with the developer community in a tizzy to create the next great Apple-friendly game, it’s only a matter of time before Cupertino announces that it’s ready to connect the dots. Don’t be too surprised if it ends up being Steve’s “one more thing” at next year’s Macworld.

Microsoft runs its datacenters on ‘Autopilot’

With all eyes on what Microsoft is doing in the online-advertising space, it’s easy to give short shrift to the datacenter and back-end infrastructure that is powering not just adCenter, but all of Microsoft’s various Live services.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reminded Wall Street analysts earlier this week that the cloud infrastructure is key to how Microsoft goes forward with Software+Services (S+S). During his February 4 Strategic Update in New York, Ballmer told analysts:

“And a lot of the things that we have been investing in, in terms of cloud platform, which themselves have no direct business model but come to market as servers, as desktops, et cetera, it will require reasonably significant investments to start commercializing that cloud platform….
“What’s the future of Windows, what’s the future of corporate desktop value? Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud.”

There are lots of components beyond just the racks of Windows Server boxes that are keeping Microsoft’s online properties up and running. Some of the other pieces that have come across my radar screen (thanks to tips from various sources who requested anonymity):

* AutoPilot: The management system for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Live Search services. Word is Microsoft is extending AutoPilot to handle every Windows Live service, as well as some other members of its Live and Online families. AutoPilot performs tasks like network monitoring, power monitoring, performance monitoring, analysis, etc. It also will enable Microsoft to use commodity hardware in deploying its datacenter infrastructure.

* Bedrock: The core shared publishing platform for Live

* Shuttle: The feed-management system for Live. I’m not sure how this fits (or doesn’t) with Microsoft’s FeedSync, which is one of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet projects.

* Fuse: A SQL Server diagnostics/monitoring system

* Cloud DB: The project via which Microsoft is scaling out its back-end structured data store. Cloud DB will be the storage platform for many of the Windows Live services and applications. The team is working to make SQL Server more fault tolerant, scalable and highly available.

Microsoft officials have been playing up their desire to combine their datacenter assets with those from Yahoo in order to maximize network effects as one of the primary rationales for Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo takeover. As others have pointed out, Yahoo’s back-end infrastructure — which is as involved and complex as Microsoft’s, no doubt — is powered heavily by Linux and other open-source software.

Sounds like a daunting task to combine the two. Maybe Microsoft should just let Yahoo’s datacenters run Linux and use that as another way to study its competition…

Fans cheer as Apple’s iPhone finally hits Europe

Apple fans queued through the night in Germany and Britain to be among the first in Europe to buy an iPhone, the must-have gadget that is set to shake up the mobile industry.

Over 10,000 iPhones were sold by Friday afternoon in Germany, a T-Mobile spokeswoman said, after it went on sale at midnight in a Deutsche Telekom shop in Cologne.

“It was love at first sight,” said one 50-year-old man.

T-Mobile representatives handed out blankets and umbrellas as well as hot tea, coffee and pretzels for those waiting outside, before sales staff cheered loudly as the first customers entered the store.

In Britain, fans had to wait until 1800 GMT before the music-playing, Web-browsing phone went on sale at stores from Apple, mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse <CPW.L and mobile operator O2.

The queue outside central London’s main Apple store stretched around the corner and long lines also formed in the city’s financial area.

First in the queue, clutching a mug of steaming tea, was student Graham Gilbert, who arrived at 0830 GMT on Thursday and endured a wet and cold night on the street.

Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica’s O2 and Carphone have pinned high hopes on the iPhone after more than a million sold in the United States in a few months.

“It’s probably the most important phone this year in terms of the impact it will have on the mobile phone market but it’s going to be a long way from being a best seller,” CCS analyst Ben Wood told Reuters.

“But one of the things that Apple do very well is they spend a lot of time thinking about the consumer experience and we’re going to see their competitors taking more of that approach.”

Most analysts expect the device to be popular with a niche audience, in part due to its price tag, and those queuing on Friday in Germany and Britain were mostly young men.

Most European handsets are subsidised in return for long-term contracts but the iPhone costs 399 euros ($585) in Germany and customers must agree a two-year contract with T-Mobile for monthly fees between 49 and 89 euros.

In Britain the iPhone costs 269 pounds ($56 on top of an 18-month contract costing a minimum of 35 pounds per month.

“It’s a magnificent product and it’s very well marketed by Apple,” said Greenwich Consulting’s Fred Huet. “The real question will be how many they sell once the novelty wears off.”

The phone will go on sale in France at the end of the month.