Given that the new iPhone 3G S is rated at up to 7.2Mbps, you'd think Telstra would be all over it as a potential show pony for Next G's purported high-speed performance. Yet the opposite seems to be true.
Another year, another iPhone. The usual enthusiasm definitely
ensued this week as Mac enthusiasts predicted, the media converged
and Apple delivered the latest updates to its
popular smartphone.
Given
that the new iPhone 3G S is rated at up to 7.2Mbps, you'd think
Telstra would be all over it as a potential show pony for Next G's
purported high-speed performance.
Australia's mobile carriers, predictably,
converged on the enthusiasm for the launch, launching
pre-registration sites and loudly trumpeting their readiness to put
the new iPhone 3G S into our hot little hands when it becomes locally available on 26 June.
Correction: Optus and Vodafone
have announced their plans for the 3G S, which even gets a mention
on Optus' main page. Telstra, on the other hand, seems to have
missed the announcement completely; its iPhone page remains unchanged and its home page
continues to trumpet the Next G compatible handsets it offers from
other makers. It is, in short, business as usual at Telstra.
I've previously taken Telstra to task for its antipathy towards
the iPhone, which has been an unmitigated success all over the
world by wrapping all the features you know and love in smartphones
(and, in the new iPhone 3.0 software, including
conspicuously-absent things like cut-and-paste and MMS) into a
gorgeous, easy-to-use interface that solves many of the problems
that made early smartphones such as the touch-and-go proposition. It is
not perfect, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say
the iPhone is setting the pace for mobile innovation.
Given that the new iPhone 3G S is rated at up to 7.2Mbps, you'd
think Telstra would be all over it as a potential show pony for
Next G's purported high-speed performance. Yet the iPhone seems to
have barely registered on the radar of Telstra, which as recently
as a few weeks ago was still playing its own hand in the user
interface stakes. That hand is the basis of TelstraOne, a new
branding and software development exercise in which Telstra has
partnered with Victorian start-up SurfKitchen to
take over the home screens of many of its mobile phones using the
company's SurfKit foundation.
The basic premise of TelstraOne — sorry, it's technically
called the TelstraOne Experience, perhaps in a nod to the
late Mr Hendrix? — is that each phone gets the same standard
Telstra icons — for Mobile Foxtel, email, Sensis properties such
as the Yellow and White Pages, and so on. The goal is to unite
Telstra's various online smartphone-compatible services under a
single banner that's easy to reach.
TelstraOne users can also mix
and match their own widgets for things like Facebook and Twitter
from a Telstra-maintained selection. It's kind of like the iPhone's
App Store, just without most of the apps. Your personal mobile home
page is stored on a central server, so if you switch from one
Telstra phone to another, your heavily customised mobile phone
environment goes with you.
Telstra's mobile executives were talking up the TelstraOne
concept at its launch a few weeks ago, and there is certainly some
appeal in the idea of simplifying user interfaces. They also like
TelstraOne because its various modules can be mixed and matched to
reflect the various customer personalities that have been
identified in Telstra's targeted marketing strategies.
The interface seemed like a way for Telstra to solve the issue I
pointed out at the iPhone 3G's local launch last year — that the
iPhone presented a major problem for Telstra because it didn't tie
in with Telstra's various content services. TelstraOne, of course,
does exactly this, and could easily spearhead the company's efforts
to develop One Interface To Rule Them All. Just consider Telstra's
plans to work with SurfKitchen to port it to other platforms other
than the Sony Ericsson W705 and Motorola MOTOSURF A3100 devices
demoed at the launch.
Which other platforms? "Symbian", a Telstra mobile bigwig
explained. "And, of course, Windows Mobile. And, to be honest, you
could roll it out on other devices: bigger-format PDAs, for
example, or anything you might look at."
Bigger-format PDAs? What is this, 2002? And wasn't the
MOTOSURF already running Windows Mobile?
"You're not mentioning the iPhone," I interjected, because he
was clearly working hard not to mention the iPhone. The response:
"We'd be happy to roll it out over the iPhone, but I think Mr Jobs
has probably decided he's already got the best thing in the world
so far."
What about developing a TelstraOne-like application that could
be delivered onto the iPhones of Telstra customers over the App
Store? Surely, I asked, it couldn't be that hard to get the big T
onto the home screens of the iPhones that Telstra sells, even if
Apple would never-not-in-a-billion-years let Telstra stamp its logo
on the physical phone itself?
"It's not something we've actually explored," he said, with an
expression that suggested he'd bitten into a clove hidden somewhere
deep in his entree. He quickly turned to someone else whose
question took the conversation to a more comfortable place.
Just in case you missed that: for all its billions and its
dominance of Australia's mobile market, Telstra has apparently not
even considered how it might deliver its content to iPhone
customers.
Which explains why there was no iPhone support for
Telstra's Beijing Olympics coverage. Or why Mobile Foxtel doesn't
work on the iPhone. Or why Telstra seems more than happy to let
Optus and Vodafone lap up the country's iPhone-using customers (and
their voracious appetites for mobile data). This is somewhat
surprising for a company that regularly touts the capabilities of
its core mobile network.
The iPhone wasn't the only seemingly verboten mobile platform;
Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS wasn't mentioned, nor was the
new Google Android, onto which there would seem to be no
philosophical obstacles, at least, against the introduction of a
new front-end to Telstra's emerging media empire.
Telstra's continued cold shoulder to the iPhone confirms that
the company is only interested in those mobile devices on which it
can own the interface completely.
Telstra's continued cold shoulder to the iPhone confirms that
the company is only interested in those mobile devices on which it
can own the interface completely. It's a strategy consistent with
Telstra's long history of branding and interface control, and may
well continue to pay off in the short term; after all, for all the
flash and glamour around the iPhone and its ilk, smartphones are
still a relatively niche product that only recently passed into
double-digit portion of the overall mobiles market (largely thanks
to increased awareness of the iPhone).
In the long term, however, does Telstra really believe this is
sustainable? Because with all due respect to Sony Ericsson (whose
slider-phone W705 I have enjoyed playing with) and Motorola (whose
A3100, not so much), conventional phones have really reached a
plateau of sorts; all the innovation these days is in the
smartphone space.
It seems hard to conceive of Telstra capitalising
upon its mobile market dominance without at least trying to extend
its content strategy onto the market-leading iPhone and BlackBerry.
Android-based phones would seem to be a particularly appealing
target, since Google has not tried to dominate the interface as
Apple does, and Telstra wants to. Telstra needs to get its head out
of the sand and figure out how to use the current enthusiasm over
smartphones to its advantage — so by the time the iPhone 4G debuts
next year, it doesn't look like it has been caught out
sleeping.
What do you think? Is it more important to have a
consistent, carrier-owned interface or to give customers access to
the latest-and-greatest features? Can Telstra ever reconcile its
mobile strategy with Apple's?
Also, on a more general level, this
is my 100th Full Duplex column since I took up the mantle in 2007;
it seems as good a time as any to request feedback, good and bad,
and requests for particular topics you'd like to hear more (or
less) about as I look towards the second century.