Life of Hellen Keller. Simply amazing.      

Exciting Danger. I'm excited about Danger's hiptop. You can find news about hiptop at DangerInfo site or watch a great talk about Danger given by Andy Rubin. In short: hiptop is a wireless communicator i.e. it's a web-enabled phone/PDA mix. Few people have doubts that a market for wireless communicators is huge. In my opinion the first company that'll do it right will be a winner and it looks like Danger Inc. might be this company (in US market, at least; elsewhere i-mode is already a smashing success).

Let's review the current (US) market and see why no-one was successful so far.

First there were WAP phones. WAP failed because it was bad. There was nothing good about it:

• it was outrageously expensive
• had extremely limited features (tiny screens, terrible "keyboard", lack of interesting services)
• the protocol was a technological mistake
  • unnecessary duplication of existing standards
  • designed to the limitation of the GSM technology. Technology will improve, limitations will be gone but the protocol will still be bad.
• it was designed with a controlling mindset (there were licensing issues, carriers tried to have control over services by closing access to "unauthorized" services which basically killed innovation and hurt the platform in its early development).

The lessons from WAP fiasco are:

• openness is critical. Think Web. It took off in a large part because anyone with a PC could start a web site/web service. No need to get permissions. No need to pay technology license fees. Freely available tools for development. Web caught like a wild fire.
• platform needs to be free. Think Web again. WAP vendors were hoping for that when the platform gets hugely popular they'll get rich by licensing the technology. What happened instead is that they've poured lots of money into developing the protocol, marketing it, putting into phones and all this money is lost because people couldn't freely develop WAP services and phone vendors themselves didn't invent anything worthwhile
• the product must be good. Stock quotes on the phone is not enough.
• the price must be reasonable

After that we had Palm.NET: specialized service for wireless-enabled Palms. The platform was open: anyone could create a new service by writing and distributing so called PQAa. There were wireless-specific apps (and all existing Palm apps ran well). There were two problems:

• price. It was too expensive (both the device and monthly service fee)
• limited coverage

Lessons? It must be something cheap and it must be widely available to create a critical mass.

Then we had phone/PDA combinations, based mostly on Palm OS. The good part was that there is plenty of applications. The bad part is that none of this applications is designed to take advantage of being on-line. Also they were bulky and expensive. Handspring's Treo could have been the "phone/PDA combo done right". It had great reviews but disappointing sales. In my opinion it was hurt by the wireless infrustracture not being there yet. Such devices really need "always on" GPRS, GPS doesn't cut. GPRS wasn't widely deployed when Treo lunched and because of that it wasn't even GPRS-enabled (although GPRS capabilites were promised as an upgrade when the network becomes available). Ah, guess what, it's expensive (> $400).

Then we had phone communicators with Symbian OS. They have their own share of problems. Devices are expensive, most of them didn't ship in US yes, there aren't many applications for Symbian OS.

There's also Blackberry's RIM but it's mostly used as a wireless e-mail reader and didn't catch on as a general-purpose device.

So, can Danger break the spell? In my opinion yes. Here's why:

• the time is (almost) right. GPRS is finally being available in major areas.
• the price is (almost) right. Rumored $200 is only a half of what the closest competition costs, rumored $40 monthly service fee is also reasonable (assuming that it also includes regular minutes, as just an addition it would be hard to stomach)
• the device itself is very attractive. It really looks better than anything I've seen before.
• the features are attractive (web browsing/e-mail/IM/contact management etc. provided out of the box)
• the platform seems to be open (at least Danger's officials say it is)

There are other good signs: what Danger Inc. is saying so far shows that they understand the market. They seem to have a very experienced team (e.g. veterans from Apple). They seem to have a good approach (making money on selling phone carriers a platform not on device itself). They seem to understand that in order to take off this thing must be an open platform: third party developers must be able to write and distribute application for this device. Such openess contributed to Palm's early staggering success. They seem to understand that the platform must be designed to be evolved and improved (faster/different processor, bigger screen resolution etc.). Inflexibility in this regard and poorly design OS is now causing Palm a lot of problems when they try to upgrade the Palm OS platform. In other words: they seem to have both good ideas and a team that can execute on those ideas.

Given that the device has not launched yet we can only wait. The launch has already been pushed a few times and the latest rumors mention next month.