Handful of Nothing

As some people know, I work for INdT where we develop a couple of applications for
Maemo, and we are really fans of the platform and the whole linux mobile in general. So when I read about the contest it was clear I should make a internal competition with the members of the design team. Here is team.M first works, and of course I said it’s not good to be submitted :) This team is based in Manaus (in the amazon) and it’s composed by 3 really nice guys: Miguel, Abrãao and Glauber. Here is their first iteration on the brands:

This is their message about the candidate for entries (they need to be approved by me after some modifications etc):

“We would like to start this post saying that branding design is not
our main area of expertise or business. Knowing that, what we’ve done
was try to apply some graphic design principles to accomplish
something that may look rather simple but is in fact one of the most
complex things in the design field: Construct a visual identity. As
every design process should, we have started the job by doing some
research on the topic, our goal was to define “what means maemo.org to
its users, what values does it represent?”. After doing some internet
research, digging a lot in the forums and conducting a survey with a
bunch of developers, we ended up with the following characteristics,
aspects, keywords and etc for maemo.org:

People, Freedom, Mobility, Internet, Nokia ITT, Linux, Technology, Nokia, Internet, Challenging, Nerds, Fun, Share… and so on.

With these in mind, we gave a look at the alternatives that were
produced so far for contest and in some famous, and not so famous,
logos to avoid “copying”. I hope we did our homework well. After that
we gathered our design group over a rounded table and generated the
biggest number of alternatives we could, nothing was discarded, no
devil advocate was allowed. With a lot of paper in our hands we did a
old technique to let creativity flow: Every member of the group got
one alternative sheet from the pile and had a small time (15 min.) to
make some “improvements” over the alternatives he liked and then pass
the paper to the designer next to him. We keep doing that until all
the alternatives were reviewed.

With half of the process gone, we selected the best alternatives with
the help of some good willed developers and went to the computer. There
we still did some small changes over the main idea, defined the logos
final appearances(plain and fluffy) and illustrated some use cases for
them, like application over t-shirts and caps. That may be not the end
of the road, but we think that we are on the right way.

People Involved:
Abraão Affonso
Glaubert Oliveira
Miguel Peres
And a lot of nice developers
”

——-

Wow! that’s a huge headline :) Well after seeing / reading some big consultancy companies going back to the desk to work on their iPhone sales prediction, because they remembered that small detail that MOST OF THE WORLD is not the US… I will try to make a small comparison for people to understand with my other hobby : Guitars.

What guitars has to do with mobile phones or the iphone sales? Well… As I explained in the other post, iPhone cannot sell a lot in a lot of countries because of price. People then said “Are you dumb? it’s only 199 now, in some countries it’s even free!”. yeah yeah yeah, but is it free or 199 without contract? No! So how much it would cost? something around 500 US they say. But wait.. we are talking about imported products, and for that I give you the Guitar example:

This is my consumer dream nowadays : A Steve morse signature guitar:

It cost 1.4k USD. today’s exchange rate is at 1.6 BR$ for each dolar, so this would give us the final price of 2240 BR$. The same could be applied to the iphone, at 500 USD, going for only 800 BR$. Affordable :)

But then enter a common 3rd world / emergent country taxes crushing style customs! And your 1.4k dollars guitar has turned into this:

Yes. you saw it right, 8.300 Br$ (and this is cheaper than the official distributor recommends) so we are talking about 5243.12 USD :) Magic? No baby just taxes over taxes :) This is actually better than the ps3 case that I talked when it was launched, the ps3 at 599 got here for 8k also.

So, 5k Dolars :) you can by a round trip with hotel for the US, buy 2 guitars, come back, pay all the taxes, and sell one guitar and you will have the 5k back and 1 guitar. Magic.

Now, what about a 500 USD phone? Even with the 199 USD you can compare with other eletronics: the Wii costs 249 right? Here in Brazil it costs 1.599, or 1000 USD :) So the best price for the iPhone will be something at 500 USD WITH contract (I’m putting here that the carrier will make it free, but it will have to pay the taxes to import the phone) and the minimum salary is 2 times lower than this :)

I was looking the entries for the Maemo logo and I was really happy to see how many people have contributed already. But I also gave some laughs, because I could recognize at least 6 or 7 famous brands there :) Amazon, Palm, Engadget, etc and 2 guys being hanged by the neck! :) In the end I’m happy to see people giving their shot on the future maemo looks, and for sure we will contribute with some options :) after all we are the fuffly fuffly-ui-dudes :) Anyhow I think Maemo really needs this revamp, and I hope more people contribute to make this a great brand. My advice as a graphics professional? Be simple :) We are brazilians, but the European way of less is more is always great to start with :)

Carman, our fully open source project here at OpenBossa Labs, aims to give tablet users the chance of analyzing their Car’s OBDII protocol was on “hold” for a while with no new versions announced. The fact was that just like Canola, the whole INdT team was going over a lot of changes so the projects were hit by that.

Anyways we were not stopped, and Carman indeed received a lot of love, but it could have used a little bit more. The first thing was the obvious “closer” relationship with Canola. The new version is not integrated, but is indeed full EFL based and respects the same approach as Canola on GUI design. More important than the visual is the addition of several new features, one of my favorites is the Trip report. This little feature will enable you to record all your trips or telecommutes to analyze for example best route, with lower consumption, lower engine stress and give you the chance to compare 2 very similar routes (like I have 2 - 11km and 13km possibilities here, but one of them is really better even on consumption: 13km, just because the engine is less stressed the whole way)

Also we tried to give a real “renew” on the visual design, bringing a really outstanding, best-of-class graphics to Maemo, and I can guarantee, it’s going to be the most gorgeous application for Internet Tablet. If you do not believe me take a look in those images below : (these are the final Visual design being implemented) the goal is really to create a custom look, trying to give freedom for theme makers to adapt Carman for several Car models. This themes were crafted by Nando Sperb, a incredible designer working in carman Project.

In the future, we still want to connect Carman and Canola, have both as opensource and this is the first step.

Please, waste a little minute of your life to read this : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/heres-whats-going-to-happen-to-apples-rivals/ and then come back to the non-alienated world outside the US.

Fact: I am a huge apple fan. Fact: I do use the iPhone. Fact: I do use OsX. Fact: I know a lot of mobile phones. So let’s go:
Not using only the “Nokia sells more than apple in single day” argument, the point is: Apple has a head start on the single smaller niche of the market: the high end phones. Also: Even on that niche, there’s still people that think that they need physical keyboards or a working bluetooth (so their small laptop can go to the internet once they are in the country for example). Also there’s a bunch of people who like to add media in a little bit free way, like just inserting a usb cable and copying inside the card. Likewise there’s people who want a little bit better reception and a camera that takes better pictures(like the sony ericssons).

With that on the line, and after you expend a little more time reading the comments the conclusion is the following:

Apple will indeed have a great year. But has someone noticed that the same success level that Apple had in the US was not achieved in the other countries? That only countries that are more american-like (Status-driven etc) like Brazil, will be able to replicate it, when others (parts of Europe, India, most of china) will continue with their own choices of phones (mainly durability, pre-paid cheap phones, etc)? Does anyone reported that Symbian, even with all it’s flaw still selling a lot of phones and by no ways in the universe will be staring at apple without moving?

Please people! Get your grips on! It will be a nice competition, on the high end section, but as everything it is also subjected to a possibility of failure in several other market, and the whole early adopter community can also be dragged in the future to more open devices like the future android enabled ones. The market scenario will be a lot more complicated than the iPod was for apple. iPhone will never never hit 20% market share in the world. This would mean nobody uses anything besides iphone on the high end category, what we all know is just like to say that nobody is going to use anything but the ipod ever again.

There’s just no space in the world for another monopoly like MS windows. I don’t believe that after all this bla bla bla about long tail, people believes that one product, with just storage space variation will be the doom of it’s competition.

So finally the 3G iphone hit the shelves. Already a lot of people pissed off because there’s no front camera, or better bluetooth support or this or that. I barely read those topics. I went straight to the thing that catch my attention: the MobileME. While it looks just like a new clothing to .mac + mobile sync, it’s actually looking quite similar to OVI from Nokia. I maybe be wrong, but at least in some part (I think OVI will be a little bit bigger and cover a lot of field not covered - games, maps) but if you put together, application store + itunes store + mobileMe it’s almost like OVI. Now comes the thing: does it worth 99 dollars / year? Are you going to buy it? For us here in Brazil, 99 is just a little bit too much, but it makes more sense than paying 99 for .mac.

It’s going to be interesting now to see the fight going over the User experience field more than ever: Who’s going to provide this “technology-internet-savvy” user with the best experience? Nokia OVI or Iphone + MobileME?

Update: It was good to see that some of the design flaws I complained a lot were solved for this issue. The main one was in the industrial design : weak reception. this time apple’s placed a plastic cover on the back, this will for sure improve the signal strength. Also I complained a lot about the lack of mass item deletion. The new email also brings that. (I’m not saying that they saw any of this here) I’m just happy to see that even with all the things that were out, they still paying attention to a lot of details that, in the end, makes the difference.