Ivailo Jordanov

Reading a post on GigaOM – The Recipe for a Successful Smartphone Is Getting Bland, which got me thinking about the subject for what I would really like in my future phone.

Firstly lets take a quick look at what excites me about the soon to be released iPhone 4. Besides the obvious longer battery life, background processes, application folders etc, there are a couple of things that I am quite looking forward to. The first one is the new screen. Ever seen some of the first Android devices started coming out with screens which were more then double the resolution of the iPhone, I have been wanting a better screen. I am also looking forward to the HD video recording. While I almost always have a digital camera in my bag, there is something special to be able to shoot a video and send it straight away. The spell checker!

All together there isn’t much that would make me switch from my iPhone to another device, EXCEPT – if someone released a good dual sim smartphone – a phone that would enable me to have two live numbers at the same time. I am not talking about those flimsy dual SIM telephones produced in China, I am dreaming of an HTC/Motorola/Blackberry like solid device.

As I travel quite a bit on business, I am most often in the UK, Bulgaria and Russia. I currently have different numbers for each country, though the Russian number is only used when I am there, my UK and Bulgarian numbers are always active, which requires me to carry two devices at all times (currently iPhone and Blackberry). Naturally as I use the data on the relevant phone depending on which country I am in, both of them have data plans.

If I was able to get such a smartphone running a solid OS, either the Blackberry, Android or even the Palm Web OS would do, I would most certainly switch from the iPhone and use it as my one and only telephone. The ideal device would let me choose which SIM card should the data be used on, while keeping both numbers active for calls and text messages.

If I was a smartphone manufacturer looking at the growth of the iPhone with some envy, I would strongly consider this as an option. I am sure, much the same as me, there is a significant number of others who have the same problem and would jump at the opportunity to drop the second phone.

A while back, Fried Willson had posted his thoughts on the content apps on the iPad (the apps launched by newspaper, magazine and other publishers), titled I Prefer Safari to Content Apps On The iPad, which largely echoes what I have been thinking about since demo videos of the content apps started popping up on the Internet.

Even though i don’t use an iPad yet, it seem to me that having a separate app for each publication is going backwards. While after watching some early video demonstrations of of the first apps, I was quite impressed and excited by the user experience, in practice it strikes me as a burden to have to go from app to app, especially considering that they all have different user interfaces.

I have been using rss readers and news aggregators for some time and it feels that content apps are quite the opposite of those. My rss reader enables me to quickly look at the headlines of the publications, which I follow, in chronological order and decide which articles to read, while aggregators like techmeme and digg enable me to see what’s talked about at the moment and surface content I may have otherwise missed. In addition there are links that people share with me via email, facebook and other social media. Previously I used to find interestig links on Twitter too, but it has now gone a little too noisy for me to sift through the stream.

So what happens now, someone sends me a link and it opens in the browser, I read the article and decide I want to read more from this magazine, so I close the browser and open the app? If I do not have the app, I purchase the app and then read more or is it that I continue reading from the website for free? Last but not least, what happens if I want to bookmark something to read later, does that bookmark go into the individual app?

If I am following around a 100 publications and blogs, that means that I would have a bunch of apps and still my RSS reader to follow the ones that do not have their own apps.

It seems to me that this “set up” will not last long term, but perhaps I am being a little fussy and none of this would in fact matter to the majority of people as they will just enjoy using the shiny new apps.