The Google Nexus One handset has “bombed” after selling just 20,000 handsets in its first week.

Eh? Selling 20,000 devices in a week with no brick-and-mortar outlets (and therefore no chance to test the device before purchase), relatively minimal marketing, from a new seller using a pretty unique (for the US, anyway) sales model is a “bomb”? And, oh, yeah, this isn’t a hard, reported number, it’s an estimate based on the number of apps Nexus One users have downloaded.

If Google has indeed shifted 20,000 devices in a week, that sounds like a decent triumph to me, and bodes well for when google.com/phone is selling more than one device on one operator.

Motorola Inc., the largest U.S. mobile-phone maker, sued a former executive now working for Apple Inc., accusing him of disclosing its trade secrets to aid in the marketing of Apple’s iPhone.

Michael Fenger in March ended an almost six-year career at Motorola where he was a vice president for the company’s mobile- device business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is now Apple’s vice president for global iPhone sales, according to a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Chicago.

“He was privy to the pricing, margins, customer initiatives, allocation of resources, product development, multiyear product, business and talent planning and strategies being used by Motorola,” according to the complaint.

Seriously.

There you have it. This guy is, apparently, the reason Motorola is in the complete shit and the iPhone is doing well.

Of course, if this were the case, wouldn’t the iPhone have been called the IPHN?

Much like the MotoZINE ZN5′s lack of 3G data connectivity, this new 5 megapixel Kodak cameraphone will be limited to WiFi and EDGE for all its data needs. Even worse, there’s no auto-focus on that badass shooter… No autofocus on what could have been an incredible 5-megapixel cameraphone. No 3G on a device that’s supposed to compete with the latest and greatest from the world’s top handset manufacturers. Fairly bland exterior styling.

I’ve given up on expecting anything great from Motorola in the short term. After all, when your bosses (at least the ones that haven’t already fled) are openly shopping your company around, I imagine it’s pretty hard to keep motivated. But damn, 5 megapixels without autofocus, why even bother? Why try to make a high-end device if you’re going to pull up way short? What’s the point? And more to the point, how’s it going to help the company?

Part of what’s boosting that cost is the inclusion of an EV-DO radio. That makes it slightly less uncool than other e-book readers (though it’s hard to call anything as fugly as the Kindle cool at all), since it takes the PC out of the equation, allowing users to buy books directly from the device, as well as download blogs (albeit from a pre-selected list of options) and periodicals. While plenty of people will quibble about the choice of EV-DO instead of some flavor of WCDMA, that’s not especially important, since that change wouldn’t make the Kindle a success. But the inclusion of a mobile radio at all is noteworthy.

The EV-DO service comes without the need for a subscription, and is provided by Sprint, who’s been saying that a major use of its WiMAX network will be to provide connectivity to a wide array of consumer electronics. This is a significant paradigm change, because it removes the need for a PC, or phone, or other networking conduit from devices. While the phone itself will take over the functionality of many ancillary pieces of electronics (like MP3 players and cameras), the inclusion of mobile connectivity in standalone devices offers new realms of possibilities for enhancement.

To steal Russell’s lingo, the fight between the Convergionists and the Separatistas will rage on — but both converged and standalone products will continue to get better and better, particularly as standalones begin to integrate wide-area mobile connectivity.

Still, none of this will likely help the Kindle. Perhaps it’s a great product for the small number of people that will care about it, while the rest of us will decide that $400 would buy us plenty of old-school dead tree books. Or you could plunk down $460 for something like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (which also went on sale today, through Amazon no less), and use it for an e-book and blog reader, and everything else it does.

It’s an application that gets installed on your phone and automatically and undetectably sends a copy of all inbound and outbound sms to a third party, as well as the facility to list all calls made and received and location information. It’s also not detectable as a virus, so a virus scan won’t get rid of it. And if you do want to make sure that your phone is completely clean merely as a precaution, you have to re-install your mobile’s factory settings, thereby wiping any data that happens to be on there, including your address book.

It can also be installed via Bluetooth, which is really nasty. So next time you’re tempted to download one of those innocent looking marketing messages via Bluetooth, what you might be accepting is one of these things – I’ve pointed out this danger before.

The app costs $129 and the company claims that the software:

can be used to check a wayward spouse’s phone, see if your teenager is dealing drugs or has fallen in with the wrong crowd, …. see if employees are sharing secrets and keep track of members of a sales force…

The makers do helpfully point out that using their application might just be illegal in your country. Which is pretty big of them.

I wrote the other day that the downside of technology is that it brings to life the 24/7 surveillance and sousveillance envisaged in Orwell’s 1984. Make no mistake – this software in the hands of an extremist government will cost people their lives.

What a nice business to be in.

As well as being puzzled why his driver (he’s still got one, so no need to feel too sorry for Tone) now stops at red lights, he’s got his first mobile phone. And he’s having to learn how to use it, which must be as strange to him as it is to us to find out that he can’t use one.

His first experimentation with sms apparently led to a “who are you?” response.

Mrs Thatcher had a similar problem getting to grips with normal life. She had to be given lessons on how to use the phone, as her modus operandi as PM had been to pick it up and say “get me Mr Reagan” or whatever.

I’ll have more thoughts on it later, but my initial reaction: shiny. And that’s about it.

Update: Wow, not sure where to start. First, I don’t think you can think of this as a phone, really (nor does Michael Mace). It’s about the most kickass iPod yet, with some phone functionality added in, along with a web tablet. That’s both an asset, but also a potential hurdle. It’s an asset because it’s freed Apple from the phone-centric thinking that, at time, plagues other handset vendors. But it could be a big hurdle, because it looks like it’s tipped the balance too far away from “phone” and too much to “other stuff” for many people’s liking.

While the touchscreen’s cool and interface novel, I think it’s going to be way too complex for most people’s tastes (granted Jobs did say Apple just wants to take 1% of the handset market). Jobs decried things like the complexity of dialing phone numbers on current handsets — but is having to call up a virtual keypad, or tap your way through a contact app with your finger that significant an improvement?

The internet functionality looks pretty slick, as do the widgets. But my concern in this area is how open the device will be to third-party development. That struck me as odd, since Apple and Jobs usually go to great pains to play up to developers. Pretty much all he said along these lines was that the iPhone runs OSX — what what’s that mean, particularly for external applications? I’m also concerned that the iPhone won’t fit in to the existing ecosystem, and will be essentially closed off to mobile developers.

I’ve got a lot of questions about this device, and the Apple site doesn’t offer much guidance. I’m also very skeptical about the durability of the iPhone — it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that will take very well to the typical abuse many mobile phones receive on a regular basis, in particular being carried around in pockets (I’ve already got echoes of the first run of iPod Nanos in my mind).

All that aside, the mobile industry’s gotten a tremendous boost today. While most of the iPhone’s features aren’t nearly as revolutionary as Jobs seems to think, the iPhone’s going to get a ridiculous amount of press that will — if nothing else — inform people that all these things are possible on a mobile phone, though they may at first have the impression that they’re possible only on an iPhone. Mobile media has just gotten a huge boost; the mobile internet has just gotten a huge boost.

Of course, alongside that, Apple’s thrown down the gauntlet. As much as the iPod was already the bar for media playback functionality on mobile handsets, those comparisons will now shift to the iPhone: does it play music as well as the iPhone? Videos? Photos? (Of course, on the flip side, the iPhone’s going to get “writing SMS on this is nowhere as easy as my old Nokia”) That’s going to be a challenge for handset vendors, but it’s one that should benefit us users. There’s a big opportunity here for the industry as a whole: Apple’s opened the door, and I’m not convinced it’s going to be iPhones that go flying out, especially at $500 or $600 after subsidy and two-year contract.

I’m sure this is a trend that’s happening in the West too, though perhaps not quite so fast. What will companies give retiring employees instead? Gold mobiles don’t have quite the same cachet.

Interestingly though, while shipments of new watches are down by 1/3 over the last decade in Japan, sales value has actually increased by 8%. People are buying more expensive watches, which seems to mean that the function of the watch is changing from a time piece to a fashion statement.

When industries start collapsing, it can happen very quickly. Just observe how¬†fast the stand-alone MP3 market disappears as a mass market proposition. If it hasn’t peaked last year, 2006 is the start of a market implosion.

So it’s interesting to read about a new survey¬†that suggests that of the one in seven phones returned by users as faulty, 63% have nothing wrong with them whatsoever. Let’s not forget, these devices aren’t something that have been rushed out in someone’s lunch hour, but something that incredibly intelligent and dedicated teams have spent many hours and much money designing, creating and honing and (you’d hope) running exhaustive usability tests on them.

[Mind you, you'd have thought that would also apply to Ikea flat-pack furniture, but I'd be surprised if they even know what usability testing was. Sorry, personal gripe!]

But returning to the non-faulty phones, this is really an awful track record, costing the mobile industry about £4.5 billion a year globally, based on the cost of £35 to test, repair and refurbish a phone.

Actually, this doesn’t surprise me all that much. I remember being involved peripherally in a similar issue with Sony’s PlayStation when it was first launched. Many returns were simply not required and it was costing a fortune. So, we set¬†up a call centre, where the first few questions would determine if it was the machine or the user that was dodgy – a kind of drongo testing exercise. Then if we thought it was a genuine case, we’d turn up the next day with a new one. As well as being outstanding customer service, this was actually cheaper than the previous collect, repair and return, as we could collect the old one at the same time as delivering a refurbished one.

But the point is that PlayStations were far easier to use than today’s phones and the users were much more techically literate than the average phone user.

As far as the mobile industry is concerned, this depressing scenario simply has to be improved. The company that emerges with a better usability testing solution, as well as a logistics¬†concept more like I’ve described above, stands to make a great deal of money.

But, equally important is the education of the¬†users themselves. You can try to design your phone to be foolproof, but we always underestimate the ingenuity of fools¬†and they’ll find a way to misunderstand, no matter how brilliant your design.

Clearly, many approaches to education have been tried with technology – ranging from manuals, which few ever read, to product and feature “tours” which people promptly forget about, even if they see it in the first place. Most of us are much more interested in a Ready, Fire, Aim approach when it comes to using tech.

This isn’t an old problem though. I heard from a Microsoft insider that 70% of¬†Excel users¬†don’t know you can use it to add up columns and rows of figures. Yes, I was surprised by this too – but try it for yourself, it can Despite this huge issue of most users never utilising anything but a tiny fraction of the technology they have available, most vendors pay lip service to user education, believing that, for instance, training is the responsibility of training companies. And writing such bad product manuals that other independent companies could write and sell millions of manuals that simply did a much better job.

In this case, it’s not an opportunity cost (users not getting full value from purchases and therefore failing to appreciate them) but a ¬£4.5 billion direct cost a year, not counting customer disappointment, which surely calls for a new approach.

SNAP in, that¬†I wrote about after 3GSM, have at least part of the answer¬†and if you’re¬†an operator and not talking to them, I urge you to call them now and at least see what they’re up to. You’ll be left behind if you don’t do something like this, I promise you.

But, I’d also consider testing¬†the idea of free seminars about getting the most out of your mobile phone. I have a feeling that these would be surprisingly popular as most people seem to want to learn, they just don’t know where to start and the self-help method¬†evidently doesn’t work for 95% of the population.¬†I think Orange’s new initiative of¬†incentivising retail sales people to get their customers to use data is a great too, partly as it can be directly measured and partly as it turns an influential and under-utilised army of form-fillers into evangelists.

As a final plea to the industry in a week where we’ve covered two huge stories with usability at their core. The mobile user is not you. To¬†quote David Ogilvy, slightly out of context,¬†the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife. Or husband, or anyone else you know who doesn’t work in mobile and who thinks about their phones’ features as often as they think about how a vacuum cleaner actually works.

Handset manufacturers certainly need to lead this charge, but operators surely need to up their game too, with both sides starting by committing to a zero tolerance of phones that don’t work properly, out of the box.

But it doesn’t end there. This matter is a critical issue for the mobile industry and lies at the heart of the question of whether mobile data will really take off and become the cavalry charging over the hill to save¬†the army beleaugured by falling voice revenues and margins.

Maybe this could be a great role for the Mobile Data Association in the UK, at least, which always seems to me to have a huge potential role in the value chain, but lies there like some slumbering giant.

 [tags] usability, snap in, excel, Ogilvy, MDA, mobile data [/tags]

We’ve been predicting this for some time now, so it’s interesting to see this in the wild, as a working solution. It uses a highly accurate version of GPS, combined with a compass and is a collaborative effort of 4 Japanese companies and an American one.

Of course, many practical problems remain. How do you populate the data in the first place, so there’s something to tell the user when they click on the object? And how do you “police” the accuracy if the data – what’s to stop a restranteur, for instance, writing their own reviews?

I suggested that this would best be achieved by a Wikipedia-style user generated content and policing collaboration, but there may be other options to launch a geographically limited solution, as a mashup between local information services, restaurant guides and maps.

The article suggests that it’ll eventually be a paid-for model (the trial is free) and that some 200,000 customers will sign up within 12 months. This seems pretty unrealistic from where I’m sitting, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see how it fares.