Yes – in the sense that we will finally see the chord being cut on iOS device activation and operating system updates. Over The Air (OTA) updates will finally arrive, three years after the feature was available on Android. Well, at least they’re on the right track, making the 5th generation iPhone purchase experience more in line with the overall UX that Apple traditionally excels in. Wi-Fi sync of iTunes library content to iOS devices will certainly be helpful for people who are actually managing content with iTunes.

No – because the biggest announcement from WWDC was aimed at solving the wrong problem: synchronizing files between devices. I’m of course talking about the seemingly wonderful service that iCloud will provide to millions of Apple customers living in the content management hell brought to them by previous Apple innovations. When acquiring digital content from iTunes store is made so convenient, you can easily end up in possession of a lot more digital content than you had before. Now, to make sure you continue to purchase content from iTunes store, it’s only natural that the store keeper will feel the need to make managing this content easier. Enter Apple iCloud, priced at $25 per year, which promises to remove the burden of moving files back and forth between different storage locations. iCloud will match your iTunes library content and make it downloadable (notice: not streamable) to any device registered to your Apple ID. Hurrah, problem solved! Or is it?

Here’s the thing: we don’t need a better way to synchronize music files, we need a way to remove files altogether. I don’t want to own bits if I don’t have to. Ever since I signed up for a Spotify subscription, the real need for me to manage digital music files locally on my gadgets has in practice already been removed. That’s because Spotify is not a store like iTunes, it’s a service. Anyone familiar with the cloud computing concept will probably know the term SaaS, software as a service. What this means is that you no longer purchase a copy of the installation media or bits for a software application, rather you subscribe to a service that delivers the application to you (most often through a browser). Subscription based services for music delivery, such as Rdio and Spotify, have already brought the SaaS revolution into our PC’s, smartphones and iPods. Why purchase music as bits if you can get them as a service?

In the business IT lingo people are talking about public cloud, hybrid cloud and private cloud. Basically the first one is a “real” cloud service like Gmail or a private business application built on a publicly available cloud platform like Windows Azure. The last one is used when trying to operate with many of the principles of the cloud, while still remaining in possession of your own servers and application instances, perhaps located in an external data center. Hybrid… well, let’s not go there. A label that some people have cast on the private cloud option is “false cloud“. I think this also fits with what Apple has introduced to the world as their version of the cloud. It initially looks like a cloud service for music (“all your music available anywhere!”), but in reality it’s a cloud service for files (“…just the music you already had somewhere”). Blah.

iCloud will no doubt become a success. Knowing Apple’s track record in delivering excellent usability, it may well turn out to be a killer product for cloud adoption among consumers. I can imagine it becoming “Dropbox^2″ in its ability to solve day-to-day file synchronization problems, which is surely great news. What the iCloud will not do is make the iTunes paradigm relevant again, for those customers who’ve already left their bits behind. In my eyes, Apple has become a victim of its past success in selling both the hardware for media consumption as well as the content. Evolution over revolution is a safe bet to make when you’re riding on the top of the evolution wave. iCloud could have been Apple’s revolution, but now it looks like the revolution may take place elsewhere.

Why is it then that we’re still required to plug in a variety of USB cables into some of these devices? Not for charging it with electricity, but for loading it up with bits. If I’m able to consume much of the bits already through the wireless network connection that hooks me up with the great big data cloud of the Internet, then how can there be another category of bits that must still travel through the cable?

Let me illustrate the issue through two recent experiences I’ve had, one sponsored by Apple and the other by Nokia.

Case iPad 2 and iTunes

I recently decided it was finally time for me to give up on trying to steer clear from Apple products. The tablets are not just a new revision of the mini-PC/netbook boom from three years ago, I believe there’s much more to them. If the netbooks were about squeezing the familiar PC experience into a more portable form factor with a lower price tag, the tablets are aiming to bring us the smartphone experience of iOS and Android on a not-so-miniature device that gives better room for content presentation and user interface design. You could say it’s a case of less vs. more, which tends to trigger the primitive human reaction of “more is better”. I was so impressed with what my 4.3″ Android smartphone was capable of delivering compared to my previous 3.2″ gadget with the same OS + applications that I wanted to see what happens when you keep adding up more hardware goodness in a similar environment.

In an ideal world I would have preferred to purchase an Android tablet, as there are several reasons why I believe it will eventually become the leading platform for tablet computers and applications. However, the future is not here yet, as we’re pretty much lacking both the Android tablet computers and applications right now. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab with pre-Honeycomb/3.0 version of the Android OS are not true tablets in my opinion. Also the current Android applications designed for a typical 3.5″ smartphone screen probably wouldn’t deliver the “more” effect I’m after. There’s no way around it, iPad rules for the time being. With the recent launch of v2 it was also easier to justify why now is a convenient time to invest in new hardware.

I won’t bore you with a general iPad 2 review here, I’ll just state that it totally rocks your socks off. Now, the one thing that doesn’t rock one single chord is the fact that you need to plug the device into a PC/Mac equipped with iTunes just to turn it on. In a way I understand the need for the iPad activation as a part of the bigger picture that includes the App Store, credit card billing, DRM and all that jazz. A necessary evil if you are stepping into the light /dark side (depending on one’s point of view) of the Apple empire. However, there’s some big irony in the whole post-PC era gospel preached by Steve Jobs when the product that should lead us into this era starts its life with a navel cord attached to a PC.

It’s no secret that I hate the iTunes application and what it has become. If I only had to use it as an occasional maintenance dock for the iPad OS updates and user identity verification, I might be able to live with this handicap. Unfortunately that’s not quite the end of the story. After having hooked up my iPad into all the usual web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader etc. (which inspired this tweet), I wanted to see how this thing works on consuming some less dynamics content, meaning books. I have a Kindle 3 and love the experience when used in conjuction with Amazon’s book store account, but not all of my eBooks are Kindle optimized. Some things just work better in PDF and especially in color, so the beautiful iPad screen should really shine with this type of content.

What I would like to see for the iPad is a similar service as Amazon has, where you can email PDF’s to Amazon and they’ll optimize it for you and deliver the book into your Kindle, wirelessly through a WiFi connection. Ok, email may not be an elegant choice of technology, but the process flows very smoothly for the user. When I wanted to achieve the same end result for the iPad, I was initially completely lost on what I should do. I had downloaded the iBooks application from the App Store and it did have a Store button allowing for book purchases (but of course not for us Finns, as there’s nothing on sale in the local iTunes book store, except freely available books). How was I supposed to get my own content into the library?

I hooked up the iPad into its navel cord again and launched iTunes. Since you can’t just copy files on an iPad, like you would for any other USB-enabled device with internal memory, there had to be a way here to get the PDFs flowing into the iPad. I didn’t see any menu item related to books or PDFs, the only synchronizable content appeared to be the usual iTunes bits for music, video etc. Finally after rubbing my head for a while and clicking around the menus, I figured it out: I had to perform the “add files to a library” process on my PC’s iTunes instance. Selecting PDF’s brough up a new category called “books” in the library, which also then became available as a syncrhonizable category for the iPad when the device is plugged in with the cable. A few more clicks, then performing a synchronization operation for the very first time (since my music and photos are already online in Spotify or Picasa Web Albums) and eventually the content appeared inside the iBooks app.

Does this process make sense on a device that has both WiFi and 3G always-on internet connection (which often doesn’t work, by the way)? Like hell it does. The tablet computers are essentially big windows into the cloud of content that the web has to offer for us. They are not media players like the early iPods, where you transfer bits from your home media banks into a mobile device. That was the world ten years ago, why must the shadow of iPod and iTunes still haunt the iPad? At a bare minimum, the content synchronization should be something you can perform wirelessly instead through the USB port, but ultimately iTunes as we know it has to be removed from the process completely.

When we look at the competition ahead, Google doesn’t have any legacy comparable to iTunes, which is why the Android devices are much better prepared for the post-PC era with no strings (cables) attached. For the average tech consumer it may not feel like such a huge drag, and I’m sure Mac/iPod users don’t pay much attention to it at all. Nevertheless, the behaviour patterns everyone is learning from more recent services like Dropbox or Spotify will make Apple’s inconvenient truth gradually ever more visible to their customers.

Case Nokia C7, Symbian^3 and Ovi Suite

Speaking of Dropbox, after initial scepticism of the service’s alleged greatness, I’ve grown to love its beauty of simplicity and ubiquity. The service runs on my home PC, work PC, Android phone and iOS tablet, quietly taking care of small but important tasks such as making sure my KeePass database of usernames and passwords is always available wherever I go. The ability of Dropbox to deliver a dead simple way for masking the file transfer and synchronization complexity into a simple folder that’s available across devices makes it the perfect service for “normal” people who are not interested in the geeky side of technology and gadgets. It just works.

My dad recently bought a new mobile phone, a Nokia C7. I didn’t have the heart to try and convert him into an Android user, as the leap from traditional “dumbphones” built for phone calls, into a full-blown portable computer like the modern smartphones, might have been too long. If SMS is only just becoming a routine for you, it’s maybe best that your first smartphone resembles a mobile phone that’s familiar to you. That’s pretty much what Nokia offers. The C7 has a decent touch screen and a Symbian^3 OS with a few bits and pieces of what iOS, Android and WP7 (why not start including it in the list now) are made of, but at the end of the day an average user might easily mistake it for an S40 mobile. Sometimes this is not such a bad thing at all, we must keep this in mind.

The big screen and the capable camera make the C7 a nice gadget for shooting photos. Nokia has always been great at hardware and if I’d have to find a way to regularly get high quality photos captured with an Internet enabled device, I’d probably turn to Nokia’s product catalog, just due to their reputation on camera performance compared to the many lame efforts of Asian smartphone manufacturers. Based on this reputation, I had assumed that the process of taking photos and performing actions on them in Symbian^3 would at least be on par with Android. Surely many members of the product marketing team must have been faced with the situation of having to demonstrate the camera functionality of Nokia products, just to draw the attention away from anything related to browsing web content or other weak spots of Symbian. Well, from my experience with C7, I now think they’ve never bothered to proceed beyond snapping a photo with the device. You know, like, sharing it with some other device or application.

On an Android device, I can click on any picture to bring up the Share menu, which presents all the applications installed on the device that have the ability to integrate with the camera/gallery. Dropbox is my favorite method for moving pictures into an archive, but Facebook sharing and all other social applications are also very potential candidates for the next action I have in mind after taking a photo. If I install new apps, the menu gets appended with them. No need to spend any time wondering what to do, it all just works right in the context.

What are the options on a C7? Well, you can of course 1) send an MMS (do people still use those?), 2) attach it to an email or 3) send it via Bluetooth. All of these options probably would have felt useful five years ago, but as of today they all just scream legacy to me. Ok, perhaps the problem is just that the stock C7 doesn’t come with all the necessary apps, so lets go and login to Ovi Store. I’d imagine a search term like “photo sharing” would shed some light on the best way to proceed. No, nothing useful here. Since none of the top mobile app brands from the world of iOS and Android are available on the Symbian platform, even a geek like me finds himself having another one of those “iTunes moments” where the familiar logic of solving a problem doesn’t seem to work.

Sugarsync is the closest thing to Dropbox on Symbian, so let’s install that one. I get the PC application installed, even though the folder configuration is not nearly as intuitive as Dropbox. I manage to download the mobile app from Ovi Store and seemingly also connect the C7 to the same user account as the PC. The folder structure looks different from this angle, there’s some bizarre “briefcase” concept blocking my view etc. but it looks like this could in theory work for photo sharing. Except that when I start the process from capturing a new photo and wanting to move it to Sugarsync’s folder, I cannot figure out any sensible way to complete this task. The share menu is of course not updated as it would be on an Android. There is no easy navigation path between the photo gallery, the file system and the sharing application. Unless you want to work with memorizing and moving cryptic Pic123456.jpg files inside file explorer, there’s no solution. It just doesn’t work.

I refuse to give up and try another cloud based content syncrhonization application (forgot the name already). Usability is even worse on this one and I’m actually not even able to complete the pairing process of the PC and the phone, because I started by creating the user accoung in a different device than what the online registration wizard assumes. Well, I’m 100% sure that this is not a big loss. At the end of the day, I register a Gmail account for my father and just instruct him to email the photos from his brand new smartphone as attachments to his own address. I feel completely defeated for having to suggest such a lame process. My foolish cloud dreams have been shattered once again.

Of course there is a way to perform content transfer between the Nokia C7 and a PC. The answer is Ovi Suite. You need to install this Nokia’s equivalent of iTunes onto your computer, then plug in your shiny new mobile device with a USB navel ch… cable into your computer and perform a synchronization of the gallery items. To add insult to injury, the micro-USB cable supplied with C7 is about 10cm long. Sure, you could start playing with Bluetooth device paring and all that, but that’s another experience I want to spare my old man from. Also, unlike with Apple hardware, you’re actually allowed to mount the phone directly as a USB drive (well, I assume you are, didn’t try it with C7), but that is all still cable games.

Nokia even offers an advanced USB On-the-go feature, which lets you connect other devices or mass media directly on the Nokia phone which acts as the master device. Great, but what’s really your fetish with those cables? You’ve already given up on producing rubber boots, isn’t it time to give up the rubber cables next?

“Quit whining and plug it in!”

You may consider me a spoilt geek who has nothing better to do with his time and gadgets than to complain about what features they are lacking. Fine, maybe that’s also true, but here’s the underlying motivation why I write posts like this: when I observe how the world is changing slowly but surely towards a particular direction, it allows me to also spot those little pieces of the world that are standing still, i.e. getting left behind. Those little things represent potential disruptions to traditional businesses and business models, which to me are a very intriquing topic. As they say, shift happens.

Here’s how the world looks from my eyes today:

See? It’s all in the cloud already – today. The devices are connected to the cloud, the content is mostly in the cloud, also the people have arrived in there thanks to the social media breakthrough. What’s the one thing that doesn’t belong there? Yep, correctomundo, you guessed it right.

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.

Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

Months went by and along came Spotify. Instead of being free first, then going paid, there was always a solid freemium pricing model set up for the service. After listening to the ads on Spotify for a couple of weeks, I was more than happy to pay €10 per month for the no-ads, higher quality service. Lesson number 1: never ask the users to start paying for something that used to be free for them. Paying must give you more, not just more of the same.

Spotify does a fairly good job in the basic music player functionality, but otherwise the service is shallow. The recommendations and new additions provide a very rudimentary interface to explore the content of the Spotify database. This means that most of the time you will need to come up with the artist or track name you want to search for in some other context, then try your luck on possibly finding the right music on Spotify. You can’t collect a usable library of the albums you have listened to or want to in the future (which is what I use Tumblr for as a temporary solution). Furthermore, there’s no community aspect to the service whatsoever, which in the year 2009 cannot be considered just a nice-to-have feature anymore.

Re-enter Last.fm. I didn’t initially pay any attention to the Spotify settings menu, since there are not too many things to configure in the player anyway. Nevertheless, it turns out there’s been a native Last.fm scrobbling feature built into the Spotify client for almost a year already. So, just by entering the account information, my up-to-date playlists were back  in Last.fm. With the addition of this nice little Greasemonkey script, launching the Last.fm tracks right from Firefox is also a breeze. Even more apps/mashups can be found from here.

Last.fm’s CFO has stated that they don’t view Spotify as a rival but rather a collaborator. While that might sound like the typical corporate talk where everyone’s always a leading provider in their own little niche market as defined by themselves, there’s a lot more wisdom behind this particular statement. Lesson 2: Don’t reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels. (Ok, I ripped that from Jeff Atwood, but I’m just practicing what he’s preaching.) Sure it would be perfectly possible for Spotify to build their own community features into their client, but why would they bother? It’s all there already, just integrate the two services and let them both focus on their strengths (and come up with a fair revenue sharing model, which is easier said than done). I’ll be a happy user of them both.

Spotify, I love you because…

• You make it so incredibly simple to access music, even those albums that I have on my CD shelves
• If I want to do research on a new artist, your single UI is so much more convenient than browsing YouTube or downloading MP3′s
• Your €10/month offer for the premium service is so attractive
• You are seriously making me question why people need to own music in the first place

Spotify, I hate you because…

• You make me wonder why I should bother to continue digitalizing my CD’s, while I’m already halfway through the project
• You provide hardly any tools for discovering new artists within the application, so I still need to do that somewhere outside
• You don’t seem to offer much in return for the €10 premium service, since the free account is already so damn good
• I like to own CD’s and you’re making me look like a fool