Archive for the ‘Phones’ Category

Apple’s Slow and Careful Crisis Management Doesn’t Always Work

Slow and meticulous is how Apple generally approaches product design, and it’s also how it handles crisis management. The company doesn’t rush, so that it can get things right the first time.

But when it comes to responding to crises, being slow hasn’t always been the best idea for Apple.

Macworld editorial director Jason Snell published a peculiar but intriguing piece Friday, analyzing how Apple handles crisis management. He notes that the way Apple responds has a clear pattern: The company takes its time to react with care and with a lot of detail. This is illustrated by the past week’s iPhone location-collection controversy and last year’s “Antennagate” debacle.

This technique seems idiosyncratic to some crisis-management experts, who believe companies should respond much faster in the event of a crisis.

“We live in a world that’s measured in seconds,” said Michael Robinson, senior VP with Levick Strategic Communications, a firm that helps companies deal with public relations emergencies, in an interview with Computerworld. “Companies grow and go away in that time. If it takes a week, it might as well take a month.””

Apple isn’t the only big corporation that takes its sweet time to respond to concerns. Sony, too, took over a week to acknowledge and publicize a massive security breach that resulted in hackers potentially stealing personal information, including credit card data, from millions of PlayStation Network customer accounts.

Data researchers revealed April 20 that an unprotected file inside iOS devices stores location data, dating as far back as 10 months. The file stores information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points, leaving a digital trail of your general whereabouts.

Apple waited an entire week to publish its response to the location-data collection discussion in the form of a Q&A, explaining that the company had made some mistakes. And when asked why, Steve Jobs defended the company’s decision to wait:

“By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days,” Jobs told All Things Digital. “Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.”

During last year’s iPhone 4 antenna controversy, in which some customers reported that holding the iPhone in a very natural way caused signal loss, Jobs made a similar statement to explain Apple’s slow response.

“We heard about [reception problems] 22 days ago and have been working our butts off. It’s not like we’ve had our heads in the sand for three months,” he said during a press conference.

In both these scenarios, Apple’s slow and calculated response to crises seemed to address the issues effectively, although later than some critics would have liked.

Snell argues that in the case of Antennagate, Apple’s idiosyncratic crisis management didn’t seem to do Apple any harm, as shown by skyrocketing sales of the iPhone 4 despite the controversy. Therefore Apple will probably go unharmed with the location-data fiasco, too.

“I’m not convinced that Apple’s been given any reason to believe that its approach to crisis management is wrong,” Snell writes.

But it’s worth noting that in another major “crisis,” Apple’s slow-to-respond M.O. didn’t bode well.

How Apple Fumbled ‘MobileMess’

Think back to the debut of MobileMe, Apple’s $100-per-year online service for e-mails, calendars and contacts.

MobileMe was riddled with bugs and glitches when it launched in 2008. Then things got worse. There was an outage that left 1 percent of MobileMe customers (20,000 people) without e-mail for weeks. Some reported temporarily losing thousands of their e-mail messages due to the glitch.

Even if that was just a small portion of MobileMe customers, an e-mail outage is a serious problem, especially when it’s a paid service. You could miss important notes related to job offers, family members and friends.

During the MobileMe debacle, which critics dubbed “MobileMess,” Apple didn’t respond to queries from press. And for customers, it issued a vague statement acknowledging the problem, but gave no clear estimate of when the problem would be fixed.

It was the same slow and cautious crisis-management technique that we saw again this week, but with a different outcome.

Throughout the weeks of e-mail blackout, there weren’t regular updates assuring customers of what was happening, each step of the way. The only status update from Apple was, “We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service.”

But by the time the problem was fixed, it was too late. MobileMe’s brand was damaged forever. And the consensus among technology writers, and even Steve Jobs, was that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s standards.”

“It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation,” New York Times columnist David Pogue wrote on the “MobileMess” debacle in 2008:

This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The difference between MobileMe and the location controversy? In the case of MobileMe, customers affected by early bugs and the e-mail outage were the ones demanding answers. They didn’t get the attention they needed from Apple, and for many, MobileMe could no longer be trusted.

In the case of the location-collection controversy, it was mostly the media and some senators demanding transparency from Apple, not thousands of customers complaining, and so, Apple will probably continue selling millions of iPhones anyway.

Customers Deserve a Quicker Response

While Apple’s late response to the location controversy was indeed effective, I’m not convinced this was the best way to handle the situation. Customers, not just journalists, deserve to have an idea of what’s going on with their products sooner.

If its explanation is to be fully believed, Apple had to know that it was a mistake to store a year’s worth of geodata on iPhones the minute it took a look at the file. It could have defused the situation sooner by acknowledging that there was an error, while promising that it was working on a full explanation and a fix to come later.

Apple even had a prefabricated response waiting for it. When asked, Apple could have pointed journalists to a letter its general counsel penned almost one year ago disclosing the iPhone’s location-data methods to Congressman Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts). Most of what appeared in Apple’s Q&A this week was already buried inside that year-old legal letter.

Finally, the only reason the location issue ever came to light was that Apple’s security team simply didn’t respond to questions from the two data scientists who originally published a story on the issue: “We’ve contacted Apple’s Product Security team, but we haven’t heard back,” they wrote.

A slow and thorough response to a crisis can work for Apple, but with the location-tracking controversy, the issue could have been avoided altogether with a single response.

As it turned out, the location-tracking issue was not an immediate or huge concern. But in the future, Apple might not be so lucky if its mistakes prove to be more serious. The company should reevaluate its crisis-management technique before it gets into another MobileMess.

Unofficial Windows Phone 7 updater removed

Remember the Windows Phone 7 updater by Team ChevronWP7 that allowed you to update your WP7 phone regardless of what model it may be and the warning Microsoft issued about it possibly putting your phones into an unserviceable state? There were disputes over the whole issue, with some folks saying that they’ve received notifications to official updates even after updating their phone unofficially. Well it looks like it does’nt matter anymore. Regardless of whether it negatively affects your WP7 device or not, the ChevronWP7 updater has been pulled off the internet because Microsoft told the developer that the tool was “breaking phones.” So there might be a possibility that users who updated their phones with the unofficial updater could be stuck on NoDo forever. The developer is working on how to rectify the solution, but until then it looks like a system restore of the phone to its original state should do the trick, which not many users are willing to do for now. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next WP7 Update to arrive first. Read the blog post about the updater being removed.

Unofficial Windows Phone 7 updater removed, By Ubergizmo. Top Stories : Atrix Review, Motorola Xoom Review,

How Angry Birds Is Becoming the Next Super Mario

You can’t go a day without hearing someone mention Angry Birds.

Fans on Twitter share pictures of cakes they decorated with the Angry Birds characters. On YouTube, parents post videos of their kids playing Angry Birds in real life. Even talk show hosts like Conan O’Brien can’t resist cracking a joke about the game every night.

The game’s creator Rovio on Friday announced a new game, Angry Birds Rio, based on a movie made by Fox. (See teaser images below.)

The game is so ubiquitous it’s almost obnoxious. Some tech observers previously dubbed Angry Birds the new Pac-Man, but that wasn’t enough for the game’s makers.

“What we’re doing is we’re building out the Angry Birds world,” said Peter Vesterbacka, whose business card title reads “Mighty Eagle” of Rovio. “Pac-Man is only one game. Mario is a better benchmark.”

Angry Birds first appeared in Apple’s iPhone App Store in December 2009. Since then, the game has expanded to multiple devices, including the iPad, Android phones and the Sony PlayStation Portable, amassing over 75 million downloads to date, according to Rovio. The majority of sales comes from the App Store, where Angry Birds has consistently ranked a best seller.

Angry Birds accentuates the business opportunity unlocked by the iTunes App Store, Apple’s digital-distribution platform for selling third-party apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Launched in summer of 2008, the App Store’s friction-free business model proved to be a new digital frontier where software programmers big and small had an opportunity to make serious money, whereas before, hobbyist coders were no match to major game studios and their colossal marketing budgets.

In the App Store, some programmers have netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales with clever games, software utilities and DIY social marketing. Apple recently announced that iOS customers surpassed 10 billion app downloads.

But Angry Birds was not a small-team effort, nor was its success a lucky strike. Based in Finland, the Rovio game studio that makes Angry Birds has 40 employees and expects to expand to 100 by the end of this year.

Angry Birds was actually the studio’s 52nd published game, and its 16th originally created game, according to Mikael Hed, Rovio’s CEO. He said the game’s success was carefully engineered with physics-based gameplay that made it easy to learn, while creating depth for advanced players in later stages. Add to that very cute characters and sounds, and a polished design, and you have a big hit.

Report: T-Mobile to Offer Upgraded Samsung Vibrant 4G

Pictures of what look to be leaked press promotional materials of a new Samsung Android-based smartphone have been circulating the web this morning. If they’re the real deal, it could mean that last year’s Samsung Vibrant will soon have a 4G brother.

The mystery device highlighted in the leaked materials is aptly named the Samsung Vibrant 4G, according to pictures acquired by mobile blog TmoNews. From the looks of it, the hardware specs line up with the first-generation, 3G Vibrant (shown above): 1GHz processor, 4-inch super AMOLED screen, 16GB SD card storage (upgradable to 32GB), all the bells and whistles of the non-4G predecessor.

To keep it from being a complete rehash of last year’s model with 4G tacked on to the end, the new Vibrant does seem to have a few new upgrades. First, there’s the addition of a front-facing camera (pixel resolution not yet specified), a feature that seems to be about par for the course in the coming generation of smartphones we saw at CES last week. While it’s playing catch-up with the iPhone 4, we think it’ll soon be a standard for higher-end smartphones in the industry.

Another perk: The new Vibrant will supposedly run an upgraded version of Android, version 2.2 ‘Froyo,’ rather than the 2.1 ‘Eclair’ of last year’s model. (Though it’s still no version 2.3 ‘Gingerbread,’ the most recent release.)

What T-Mobile really seems to be hyping, according to TmoNews’ photos, is the phone’s claimed increase in speed. The Vibram 4G would run on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network, which T-Mobile spokesperson Erica Gordon says is capable of “theoretical peak download speeds of up to 21 Mbps.” Depending on the city you live in, what you’ll probably get is something closer to what independent test groups have found, somewhere in the area of 4 to 5.5 Mbps down and 1 to 2Mbps up.

T-Mobile offered no comment to specific questions about the rumored device, and Samsung followed suit.

If the phone does indeed exist, T-Mobile and Samsung are most likely betting it will do as well as its predecessors in the Galaxy S series of smartphones. We’ll continue to report on news of the Vibrant 4G as it breaks.

See Also:

• Samsung Vibrant Looks Like an iPhone, Has Battery Life to Match
• First Look: Samsung Vibrant Rips Off iPhone 3G Design
• Samung
• First Look
• T-Mobile, Garmin Announce New Android Phone

Photo: Samsung Vibrant (Stefan Armijo/Wired.com)

Google Instant Speeds Mobile Search — If You’ve Got the Bandwidth

Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.

Indeed. With fast hands and a full QWERTY keyboard, the time between typing “Google Instant” and “Google Ins” is minimal. On a non-PC keyboard like a phone, e-reader or remote control, it’s considerable.

To activate the beta, you need to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or iOS. Then go to google.com in your mobile browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box.

The only trouble with Google Instant on mobile devices is the net connection. Google Instant works by making server calls with each stroke. To even make it work in a mobile browser, google had to create a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation to dynamically update the page with new results.

On a good Wi-Fi network, that’s no big deal. On 3G, it’s not a major problem. On (gasp) EDGE, it can actually make search much, much slower.

“With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks,” Kanefsky writes. “Since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the ‘Turn on’ or ‘Turn off’ link.”

See Also:

• How Google Instant Could Reinvent Channel Flipping
• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Google Debuts 'Instant' Search (Updated)
• What's In A Search, If You Don't Hit the Search Button …
• Google Adds Gesture Search to Android Phones
• Google Beefs Up Voice Search, Mobile Sync

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