9. Mobile TV and P2P video struggle again in 2006
10. Happy Slapping - more attacks and export potential
Unfortunately, Happy Slapping has really gone mainstream in the UK now, with more and more attacks reported. Just in the course of the last month, we had our first celebrity Happy Slap on c-list, Myleene Klass as well as the first murder convictions associated with the phenomenon.
Just in case you missed the Happy Slap thing (which must mean you don’t consume UK media), what sounds as if it might be a childish prank, is actually illegal assault. These attacks sometimes result in serious injury and murder, as we see above. The idea is that a group of kids/youths beat someone up, film it on their video phones and then circulate it among their mates, for a laugh.
Films are usually circulated by Bluetooth, so are impossible to prevent or track to their source, even if they are discovered by the authorities.
You can read my theories into the origin of these attacker here. I have actually seen some happy slapping attacks on video and they are genuinely violent and stomach-turning. It’s not comic violence in any form.
Sadly, my 10th Prediction is that we’ll see a lot more of these attacks, along with copycat Happy Slapping outside the UK - the US and Germany would be my best guess (assuming this hasn’t happened already).
This will be accompanied by idiots blaming mobile phones and not society for the problem, as well as clueless MPs calling for action.
Member of Parliament, Mr Adrian Bailey, for example has already called for mobiles to be jammed in school grounds. Do they let anyone into parliament these days? Doesn’t the man know:
1. Jamming phones will be about as effective as jamming all cuckoo clocks in schools, as this would neither disable the camera nor the Bluetooth functionality.
2. Some kids need their phones and mostly for perfectly legitimate and legal reasons - like phoning parliament to protest about the standards of MPs these days and how they seem terminally stupid in comparison to yesteryear.
3. Most Happy Slapping attacks take place away from school grounds anyway. It’s like banning automobiles from driving on railway lines as a way of reducing drunk driving related deaths.
7. MVNOs will gain in popularity, with new services announced and launching regularly. But the thinning of the herd will also begin, with at least one high-profile casualty before the end of the year.
8. RIM will take it on the chin, even if it comes out of its patent suit okay. Push e-mail will become a commodity offering from carriers, and rivals like Visto, Seven, Nokia and Good will make gains in the enterprise market, partly because of their support of all types of mobile devices.
Things are again looking good for Research In Motion in its patent fight with NTP — the latest update has the Patent Office saying it expects to throw out all of NTP’s relevant patents, and it’s moving quickly to beat the tight schedule the judge in the case has imposed. I’m not going to wade into the issue of the patents too deeply — there are people with far deeper knowledge on that topic than I — other than to say I think the right move is for the USPTO to revoke the patents, and I hope this and other high-profile cases will lead to a badly needed overhaul of the US patent system.
The court case, though, is the least of RIM’s concerns. Several rivals are waiting to pounce as the spectre of a Blackberry shutdown has lead plenty of potential (and existing) customers to explore other push e-mail options, giving companies like Good a significant, if somewhat artificial, marketing boost, increasing their foothold in the market. This exposure will help them in the long run, in addition to any customers they can grab in the short term.
But the real rivals for Blackberry are the carriers it depends on for sales on connectivity. They’re realizing that people like getting their e-mail, both business users, and to a lesser extent, general consumers. Push e-mail will quickly become a commodity, carriers offering the service either for free or very cheaply as a way to push data charges. They’ll do it on all the devices they sell, whether it’s through built-in messaging applications or J2ME e-mail clients. Most people, even business users, will find this a good enough solution, both in terms of cost, but also because they don’t have to switch to a bulky Blackberry device, they can use whatever handset they want — even their existing one. They might give up the Blackberry keyboard, but can get a Treo or other device that has one instead.
RIM has licensed Blackberry Connect to other device manufacturers, though devices that feature it are coming out in a trickle rather than a torrent. The crux is what RIM can add to the Blackberry service to make it better than a commoditized offering — and from where I’m standing, I see very little. The differentiation in delivering e-mail to a mobile device and processing responses is pretty invisible, and isn’t apparent at all when users have a smartphone that can handle attachments and do all the other things a Blackberry can, with the added bonus of supporting far more add-on applications than the Blackberry OS.
So, if RIM ends up prevailing in its patent fight, its stock will undoubtedly bounce and some observers will say it’s smooth sailing for the company. But, in reality, 2006 will be a tough year for the Blackberry.
How are we doing so far? Don’t forget to leave a comment.
5. Ringtones implosion accelerates, as one of the shortest boom and bust cycles becomes clear to all.
6. Gizmondo withdraws from handheld gaming sector.
Gizmondo must be one of the big failures of 2005 and I’m really, really (no, really!) puzzled as to what the hell’s going on there and why they seem to have access to so much money.
Firstly, they want to take on incredibly strong incumbents in the handheld sector, Nintendo’s GameBoy and Sony’s PSP. Not to mention N-Gage, that was patently struggling, despite the might and distribution strength of Nokia behind them. Why on earth would any company want to try this with limited resources?
Well, if the product was competitively priced, had a bunch of extra features and crucially, a range of great must-have, exclusive games, they may just stand a chance. But no, the games portfolio was shite and limited and it was more expensive than the entrenched incumbents.
And their distribution strategy in the US was laughably to hang out in a few malls.
Were their senior execs contrite and modest in their demands while overseeing this fiasco? Did they hold back their salaries for when they could demonstrate that this unpromising approach had worked? Not a bit of it! Salaries included several million dollars of cash and options and luxury $250,000 dollar cars.
Then we have loads of corporate shenanigans including buying companies owned by directors and paying off privately incurred legal bills. Admittedly, some of these actions were corrected, but why were they allowed to happen in the first place?
And did we mention “legal, accounting and consulting costs” in the first six months of 2005 of $75 million? And a net loss of $220 million in that period?
Pretty bad stuff - what next? Maybe some of the directors were a bunch of convicted white collar crooks that investors has entrusted their money to? Err, yes actually. On this discovery, they resigned.
Someone do the decent thing and put them out of their misery. No one can really believe that this mess can be saved. Can they?
So, Prediction 6 - Gizmondo must die.
3. 3G won’t kill Wi-Fi, WiMAX won’t kill 3G. There will be no killing of rival radio technologies.
4. Operators will still struggle to find the key selling points of 3G.
Mobile operators are still struggling to figure out what to say when customers ask why they should switch to 3G. Video calling failed miserably as a USP, and cheap voice and text remains the lure of choice for some operators’ 3G offerings. They think that music and video will do the trick — but they’re wrong, there, too (we’ll explain why in a couple later posts). What else have they got — mobile turkey shoots?
Operators will have some success getting people onto 3G networks through a sort of soft forced handset upgrade. While they won’t stop selling 2G handsets, the only cool ones available will be 3G ones. So if you want something new and something hot, at some point on many carriers, you’ll have to go 3G. That may be more successful, really, than trying to sell people on any sort of application they’ve currently got.
The underlying problem here is how carriers approach this sort of thing, and their insistence they be at the middle of everything. If they haven’t yet come up with something — a few things — to convince people that 3G can add some value to their life, they’re not going to without changing how they go about it. The concern is that they’ll be relegated to bit pipes, doing nothing but selling network access. There’s two sides to this: first, there are plenty of successful ISPs out there that make money. Second, if they’re smart, they can be more than just a bit pipe, if they’re smart.
Operators need to be additive — their role should be to add value, and if they’re successful, people will pay. They need to facilitate communication, entertainment and whatever else people want to do, and make it as easy and fulfilling as they can. Typically, they take the opposite approach, limiting what people can do. Want to moblog? Use their blog site, with their rules and their charges, and lose your content if you change operators. Want to watch TV? You can watch anything, as long as it’s something the operator sells you. Then, look at the flip side. Want to send something to your own blog? You’re on your own. Want to watch your own video? Have fun getting everything set up. The whole attitude is "it we don’t sell it, we don’t want you to do it."
If carriers are going to insist on taking an active role in everything people do on their phones, they’ve got to take an active interest in making sure that people can do whatever they want. A total reversal of their attitude is needed, changing from explicitly telling people what they can do to letting them do whatever they want to do. Embrace this mentality, and people will figure out on their own what the value of 3G is.
So this is supposed to be a prediction — well, that part’s simple enough. Carriers won’t figure this out in 2006. Expect more of the same old locked down networks and applications, and expect 3G to stutter because of it. This is one prediction I’d be happy to see not come true.
Welcome to MobHappy’s 2006 Predictions!
While Carlo and I are away, chilling out, we’ve written these for your entertainment. While they’re a bit of fun on one level, we also take them quite seriously and if previous years are a guideline, we’re not bad at them. If we score a point of every right one, 2005 saw us with 17/19 and 2004 with 6.5/8.
We’ve done a full 20 - two each week day - a one liner and a slightly more considered piece. Please comment and leave feedback, as that’s what makes blogging fun for everyone.
So let’s crack on.
1. Apple launches the iPhone (as opposed to co-operating with a Moto phone) as MP3 and phone convergence accelerates.
2. Mobile Marketing - The Market Thaw
Mobile Marketing has been going to be big next year since 2001, unless you’ve been reading my predictions. But every year it’s really failed to gain much traction and for every brand dipping its toes into the mobile marketing sea, you’ve had another running back up the beach to safer campaign territory.
2006, in my view, will start to be the sea change. 2006 won’t be the year it explodes, but we’ll certainly start to see more brands get involved and there’s a real danger of agencies making some money from it.
Why am I thinking along these lines?
I admit there’s a huge amount of gut feel here and listening to the market, but that shouldn’t be discounted, as anyone who’s ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink will appreciate.
However, this is supported by some important trends.
Firstly, we have demographics. It’s always been the case that marketing departments tend to be led by people in their late 30’s and 40’s. Senior agency people in charge of selling campaigns were around the same age. This meant that that 5 years ago, these people weren’t even using sms and needed to have it explained to them.
So despite all the evidence that their customers were big on sms and using their phones for other stuff, they didn’t really feel it and couldn’t relate to it. At the same time, the agencies were full of people who couldn’t think joined-up mobile, so poor little mobile marketing had no chance.
5 years on and we have a new generation of marketers in charge. They won’t exactly have grown up with a phone in their hands as the under 25’s have done, but they’ll certainly be heavy users of mobile and it’ll be in their psyche. This means that when mobile ideas are proposed, they’ll understand with both their brains and their hearts.
The final piece of the demographic jigsaw is customers themselves. Everyone uses sms these days, therefore it can no longer be accused of being niche. More importantly, it’s so bleeding obvious that for anyone under 30, their mobile is the most important possession. They’re simply obsessed and rarely spend even a minute without glancing at it, fondling it, checking it for messages. Only a congenitally stupid marketer can ignore this, especially when combined with the stats showing the rapid decline of old media in terms of consumption and influence.
Another trend is the mainstream agencies are finally noticing mobile and that they have to start changing quickly if they are to survive after the old 30 second ad is finally buried in the next couple of years. All the bright agencies are looking at the implications of this and are really starting to embrace change. I don’t think these guys are going to drive the market, but they do learn quickly once something has their attention.
That doesn’t mean we’re not going to see loads of doomed attempts to put banner ads on phones and run 30 second ads on them.
I also worry that there’s a dearth of creative people, who think up the campaigns, who understand the technology involved in mobile. While the customer shouldn’t be bothered with HOW things work, campaign originators do. So unless you understand what’s possible, you’ll never push the envelope in any meaningful way.
In fairness, the corollary applies. The techies who run the back end, aren’t capable of coming up wiith good campaigns, as they don’t understand marketing. So we need people who can operate across this void, naturally and instinctively.
Mobile marketing is a child of engagement marketing and is perfectly suited to that engagement process of creating dialogues with customers. This is the secret of success in mobile and brands considering getting involved must have dialogue at the heart of their campaigns.
2006 will see a lot more innovation in sms (much more than yet another “text and win”), forays into WAP and Java, experiments with sponsored content and some intelligent (and legal) innovation in location-based promotions. It’ll really start to explode in 2007/8 and brands need to start learning now before they start having to play catch-up.
Welcome to the final Carnival of the Mobilists of 2005, where we feature the very best online writing about mobile. To celebrate this special issue, we asked all our writers to send in their favourite piece from 2005 – and they haven’t disappointed. I challenge anyone to come up with a finer collection.
We also have some special guests dropping in, who I hope might turn into more regular contributors in 2006.
So let’s get started on our record catch.
Mobile Jones points us to a fascinating post about how language influences and limits how we think and the implications of this on mobile design. This is a wide ranging post, taking in everything from an Amazonian tribe who can’t count past two, to companies approaching mobile from a web perspective and getting it totally wrong. Microsoft sprung straight to my mind. Go read it.
Mobile Diva, Darla Mack, has been looking at the controversial area of mobile phone virii, pointing out that there’s no way you can get a virus without deliberately installing it. She also points to a great tutorial that demystifies the mobile virus and is definitely worth a read.
Actually, getting a mobile virus reminds me of the spoof email virus that went around a few years ago. It was called a Virus for Stupid People (or something like that) and told recipients that they had caught it and must now delete all their files on their hard drive.
Rudy De Waele sends us his first piece of personal experience writing – no, not what he did in his school holidays, but writing as an adult. He does a great job of outlining the issues of buying music and the limits imposed on him by a music industry that’s way out of touch with its customers and their needs.
Troy Norcross is well known as the man who hates spam. Back in October, he introduced the world to his concept of TRVR. In order to avoid being spam, messages must be – well read it, it’s important.
For those of you who missed the first Carnival, one of my favourite posts was Dorian Porter‚Äôs exploration of how we might use digital tools in the future. Dorrian suggests that we’ll have many devices and simply use the one that suits our purpose and need at the time, rather than have one device to rule them all. Go check out what the implications of this might be.
Emily at Textually chooses a post of hope for the future. The mobile phone already played a part in overthrowing an unpopular Government in the Philippines – can it go the whole hog and topple the totalitarian regime in North Korea? Find out how it might happen.
Mobile marketer, Helen Keegan, has a gripe at a recent Coke promotion – which quite obviously no one had bothered to pre-test. It’s amazing how a brand with so much mobile experience in the UK can get things this fundamentally wrong. I suspect someone tried to save budget by cutting corners, which is a bad idea when technology is involved. Read about the litany of errors.
Judy Breck is on a mission to get schools to use technology and mobile phones, especially, as part of the eduction process. It’s a tough mission, as most educators want to ban mobiles or at least restrict their use. Whereas if they saw them as learning tools, it would make their job of teaching the little darlings so much easier. Judy explores this further in this short, recent post.
I promised you some big names in this edition and the first one is one of the most experienced and best writers about technology around. On Malik writes his own eponymous blog and is also a senior writer for Business 2.0, simply the best business publication around, in my opinion. So I was very interested to see what Om would send in as his favourite post of the year.
Om doesn’t disappoint with a great feature on a new wifi system offering us all to become mini-broadband providers. The implications might be free wifi wherever we go ‚Äì or it might not. Read Om‚Äôs, along wqith a few other contributors’, thoughts here.
The Pondering Primate nominates his post that asks and answers one of the big questions of our time – How Microsoft can beat Google?. Interesting for all of us in tech, but Microsoft especially, whose world view is starting to look very jaded. The answer lies in a theme we both write a lot about – connecting the real, physical world with a digital equivalent.
Ajit Jaokar sends us his very latest post as his best of the year. He explores NFC (Near Field Communication) as the possible answer to opening up mPayments – surely the next billion dollar prize in mobile, for those that crack the market.
Daniel from the Mobile Enterprise Blog is also a great believer in the latest is best, but he’s based this on the response from his readers. It’s a great piece on the impact that the current RIM legal situation has on the mobile enterprise industry.
Stuart at Blethers chose his post as one that questions the whole precept of mobile TV – or certainly whether anyone will actually pay for the thing. Check out his post.
Wap Review has been considering Mobile Transcoding in-depth. If you’re going WTF? or nodding smugly, I suggest you head on over and read it, as whichever reaction you have, you’ll find it equally interesting as it lies at the heart of the mobile internet. And as we all know, the mobile is the real meaning of Web 2.0 – or should it be Mobile 2.0?
One of the leading voices for the mobile movement in the last 10 years or so is Howard Rheingold. Author of the outstanding Smart Mobs book and lead blogger for the website of the same name, he is surely more responsible than any other individual writer for waking up so many people as to how mobile is radically reshaping our very society on a daily basis.
So I’m delighted to include Howard’s post as the best from Smart Mobs this year.
But, wait. That’s not all. One of the saddest mobile events of 2005 was Nokia’s decision to close down The Feature. It had become the best destination on the web for informed discussion and debate on the mobile world and it’s sadly missed by many.
We certainly didn’t want to leave The Feature out of this celebration of the best writing. So I asked the ex-editor of The Feature, keeper of the archives and now my writing partner here at MobHappy, I’m delighted to say, to choose the best from 2005. And guess what? He selected the same article that had been chosen from Smart Mobs, by Howard.
So Howard gets the double whammy of being the best of Smart Mobs and the best of The Feature too – quite an accolade.
Read Howard‚Äôs “Mobile and Open: A Manifesto” in abbreviated form on Smart Mobs or the whole thing in The Feature Archives.
Incidentally, if your company wants to be seen as a thought leader and agenda setter in mobile technology, there’s lots to be recommended to take some of the best principles of The Feature and apply them in a new context. If this sounds interesting, let’s have a chat and let’s see if we can work something out and involve these great writers who are featured here today.
Anders from Abiro is a newbie to the Carnival, but a very established and high volume blogger, who is a valuable edition to any blogroll. Like all of us, he struggled to pick his best post out of the 500 he’s written in the last year, so he cheated! He picked his annual mobile round up as his post of the year and a great read it is too. A nice mix of the important and quirky, so go and check it out.
Mike Masnick is our final guest star in this festive edition. He’s a great writer and commentator on technology, not just in what he writes, but how much he manages to produce and which is consistently, unfailingly excellent. Many times I’ve had an idea for a post and Mike’s written it first and better than I could have done, damn him!
So it‚Äôs a great pleasure to include a post from TechDirt here. Mike writes about Location Based Services, a subject dear to my heart, with a pull-no-punches piece about the ridiculous way operators look at this area. On the one hand, operators try to sell services no one wants (video calling springs to mind) and on the other, reject services that could be true differentiators. Furthermore….actually, just go and read Mike‚Äôs piece.
Another newbie to the Carnival, but big cheese on the UK mobile scene is Mike Grenville’s 160 Characters. It’s an excellent source of news and info, as well as a good meat space networking scene if you’re in London. Mike’s generously chosen someone else’s writing for his best of the year and the topic is the controversial Adult sector. Julia Dimambro from Cherrysauce saw her first adult magazine when she was 13 and has been fascinated ever since. Her post explores why the controls on adult content in the UK, while they seem onerous to the industry, are actually one of the major growth drivers. Go have an ogle.
Finally, the host traditionally chooses a post of his own and I’ve gone with one I wrote back in May – The Death Knell of Privacy. While I’m a big fan of LBS and mobile tech, they do have their downsides and we need to be aware of these. Let’s pick the best for our new world and stop the worst from happening.
This is also a sentiment picked up in C Enrique Ortiz’s entry “Responsible Location-Based Software - Don’t Do Evil”, which is both a call to action and a practical guide to the developer community to use LBS responsibly. If you’re involved in this area, read it and take heed - you know if makes sense.
And since MobHappy is a joint blog, I’m going to break the rules and pick a post from Carlo too. Why DRM Will Kill Mobile Music was widely quoted around the web and rightly so. You won’t read a better summary of why the record industry should abandon DRM and focus on something it can win – like producing great music and working out how to make money doing it. As Sony have kindly demonstrated this year, DRM doesn’t work.
Thank you all the writers and readers for taking the time to contribute to this bumper edition. I’m going to wimp out of selecting my very favourite contribution this week – there’s just too many excellent pieces. But if you’re short of time and only can read 5, make sure you check out Howard, Mike, Debi, Om and Carlo. [I’ve been adding and replacing these names for 30 minutes now and have to just go with this list. But there’s another 10 or so I could have put in the top 5! Honestly, take time over the holidays to follow all the links – you won’t be disappointed.]
We’re taking a break at the Carnival and the next one will be at The Golden Swamp on 20th January 2006.
Happy Holidays!
Russell
And so, we come to the final few predictions I made, with my score running at 13 out of a maximum 14 points to date. How did I dio in the final stretch?
15. Adult services continue to quietly boom
Yes, this is continuing to boom as far as all the data I’ve seen, which I have to admit isn’t very much.
People often miss the point of mobile porn, pointing out tiny screen sizes as not being friendly to view images and video, for example. That’s like saying sms doesn’t work as it’s hard to input the text - if there a need for something, people will put up with poor experience and usability. Especially if that need is err…urgent.
What mobile can offer the adult services user is privacy, on two levels. Privacy from others viewing what you’ve been looking at (computers are often shared or tracked by IT departments), but also portable privacy - no one would think twice about popping into the loo with your mobile, whereas taking your laptop would raise a few eyebrows.
Points 1.
16. Cheaper calls, fixed price packages
I was wrong on this one, but I think it’ll happen this year - I was just a little ahead of the market. Watch out for an MVNO to start this inexorable trend.
What I said was that we’ll see an “all the voice and data you can eat for $50 a month” package? Or $25 or $100 maybe?”.
Still, no points for me on this one.
17. Java Portals
In the last two months of last year a load of brands announced that they too were launching their own Java portal and going direct to the market, cutting out the operators. This included no less than The Sun, MTV, GMTV (UK breakfast TV), Celador (Millionaire) and Endamol (Big Brother).
My prediction was that this would go strangely silent as they realised quite how difficult and therefore ridiculously expensive this would be. You see, despite Java purporting to be a common platform, it actually needs an awful lot of testing and tweaking to work on every handset.
The strange silence continues as I award myself a point, unless I’ve missed all the launches. I’m quite pleased with this one, as it went right against what everyone else was saying at the time.
18. WAP
I said it would continue to grow strongly. Latest stats say in the UK that it’s come up from 1.3 billion page impressions a month to 1.82 billion. But the MDA are a little lax at releasing the latest figures, so it’s probably significantly more.
Points: 1
19. Child Tracking Fails to Take Off
This sounds like it’s a parental dream - know where your little darling is whenever you feel the need.
Unfortunately, it’s flawed as a concept as you only know where the phone is, not the kid. Therefore, it’s next to useless in those cases when it would be most useful - when the child is abducted or when the little fella doesn’t want you to know that he’s off partying, not doing homework with a study buddy.
It’s certainly failed to get traction in the UK and I haven’t heard any success stories, so I’ll claim my point.
So there you have it, 17 from 19. Please feel free to comment or critique.
This is my second to last post for 2005, though Carlo and I will be posting virtually over the holiday period until our return on January 9th. This means that we’ll be posting our predictions for 2006 during that time.
My final post will be the Year End Carnival of the Mobilists - look out for it later, together with some special guest stars!
It’s roundup and prediction season, when everybody looks back on the past year and looks ahead to the new one. We’re no different of course, with Russell reviewing his predictions from last year, and our new ones to come very soon. I’m going to take a slightly different tack the next couple days, looking at the best and worst in mobile in 2005, starting with the worst. These are the products, services and ideas that went down like the proverbial fart in church this year, in no particular order:
- the Vodafone 702sMO and 702MO handsets: These were two 3G handsets Vodafone put on sale in Japan — about two years two late. When 2-megapixel cameras were common, if not the norm, Vodafone and Motorola start selling this wonder, with its stunning VGA camera, delivering 310,000 pixels of poorly lit, blurry wonder. The 702sMO gets special recognition: in a land where flip phones undoubtedly reign supreme, why the companies thought anybody would buy not just a crappy phone, but a crappy phone in a candybar form factor, is well beyond my mental abilities. Unsurprisingly, the phones flopped and were yanked.
- Let’s stay with Vodafone Japan, for its covers to make handsets look like lumps of cheese. Vodafone Japan’s really in trouble, and as one of its many misguided attempts to right the ship, it released a range of covers for a Toshiba handset that let users disguise them as tires, dinosaur eggs and… cheese. Surprise, surprise, the gimmick didn’t turn the operator around.
- NTP’s push email product that’s being hurt by RIM’s Blackberry system. Oh wait, that’s right, NTP’s never made a product to be hurt by RIM. So they deserve a bajillion dollars.
- Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO offering. Get “Unlimited Broadband Access for $59.99 a month.” * with a qualifying monthly voice plan as well. ** and a 2-year contract. *** and don’t think about doing anything other than web or e-mail. **** and we use a different dictionary than you, where “unlimited” doesn’t mean “not limited in terms of number, quantity or extent”, but rather “you can use as much as we think is okay”.
- Gizmondo. It would be a shame to single out the device alone, when the company’s executives deserve just as much, if not more scorn. High salaries, expensive cars, questionable relationships and ties to the criminal underworld — all in a year’s work in the handheld gaming business.
- Crazy Frog. Enough said.
-And last, but certainly not least, the Motorola ROKR. Since it’s nearly Christmas, I’m feeling slightly generous, so I won’t build on my extensive back catalog explaining how and why the ROKR sucks. Needless to say, it failed to come even close to living up to the ridiculous hype surrounding it. And there’s nobody to blame for that but Motorola. So, deservedly, the ROKR gets my STNKR of the year award.
Now it’s your turn — what were the biggest mobile failures of 2005?
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