the onda

In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.

I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").

Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:

The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it. —via Steve Litchfield

How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.

Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming content, most people would rather just sit back and consume. This is why YouTube won when many other more producer-friendly video sites floundered. It's why TV still commands the kind of audience that most "huge" online properties would kill for. And it's why, as a mass market product, I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone will spank the N95.

But there is something potentially different about this particular twist on consuming versus creating. For a long time now, I've been hot and bothered by the idea of the "unwitting blogger," or the regular user who, in the process of doing stuff, becomes a creator of content without really thinking about it. On the PC/Internet, the trick is most successfully implemented by the proper harvesting of either metadata or messaging data. Digg is today's king of metadata, and Facebook the king of messaging. Both sites turn their "consumers" into creators during the very process of consuming the services.

What I would argue in the case of the N95 is that a phone equipped with a really good camera, a GPS, and an open API could become rocket fuel for the explosion of unwitting bloggers. Geotagged automatic upload to Shozu is just the beginning (though a very powerful one), as is Jaiku's twist on presence. We've surely got more to come as developers begin to explore how we bring location, multimedia, mobility, presence, messaging, and the cloud together in new and creative ways.