I left Nokia last week after six fun-filled years to pursue new challenges, and am currently exploring a range of these - will post updates when there's more to report. However, one of the advantages is that I can now (with a clear conscience) use non-Nokia phones. Now for a mobile guy, the choice of one's first (for a while) self-purchased and paid for primary mobile device is not a trivial issue - and after much to-ing and fro-ing, the shortlist was the iPhone or Google's Nexus One. Blackberry seemed too corporate and while I've heard good things about the new Palm OS, I wasn't convinced there'd be enough of an application base to try out the cool new augmented reality apps etc.

The uppers

I went for the Nexus One due to the novelty factor, a better camera with a decent flash, and tight integration with Google's services, without which I can hardly get out of bed. At first it didn't disappoint - when you set it up it's blazingly fast - just enter your Google username and password and the thing magically works and is synced with your emails and pictures. The value of the phone is now pretty much in the cloud - apart from the replacement cost and delay, losing this phone wouldn't bother me, as I know I can get my data from anywhere. The usability, speed and intuitiveness of the OS puts Symbian to shame - things work how you expect them to work, and I can't think of a prompt coming up when it shouldn't (such as Do You REALLY Want To Go Online, just after you've asked it to, or Packet Data Active beeping up on every call). Other plus points are the fit and finish - it's robust, sleek and smooth.

The downers

But, boy is it smooth. This is the biggest downside - the thing slips out of your hand. Ok, I've got bigger and maybe even sweatier hands than normal, but I've already dropped it three times as I move it from ear to hand and back. The iPhone fits better in the hand, and this starts to matter. Also the screen while great inside, is completely invisible in sunlight. My gripes aren't limited to the hardware though, lest Google feel they can relax. The messaging and call handling is clearly done by a newbie to mobile phones. I may be asking for trouble because I use Google Voice which makes things a bit complicated, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to find sent messages, or take a specific message and forward it on, or cut and paste. Call handling via Google Voice is also at times a farce - the call comes in from a number I know well (e.g. my wife's) and yet it still screens it, and forces me to find the screen (impossible in the sunlight as noted above), switch over to Dialpad, enter in 1 to accept then put it back to my ear, without dropping it. Many people have just hung off by the time I get that done. And for numbers in my contacts book, why does it even bother to ask me to approve - let them all dial direct, please Mr Google.

So while I think Google and HTC have done an excellent job in creating a mobile computing device, Nokia still makes a better phone. If they could just merge the form factor for the E72 with the Android OS, I'd be happy. As for iPhone, when the next version comes out with a >5MP camera and decent Flash, I'll have another hard decision to make.

Interesting little device I saw today (that am not affiliated with), which sits on the cusp of mobile, healthcare / wellness and data-as-a-consumer-service trend, and does it as a combined device+service, rather than just an app:  Fitbit. It has an inbuilt accelerometer to measure your steps, or your sleep patterns, and spits it out to a dedicated web service to track your progress.

The CPU, tech features and storage are no doubt fairly trivial - most smart phones wouldn't get out of bed for that (and a bunch already do similar things), but Fitbit are betting on simplicity. This removes many of the intimidating tech obstacles that put most people off ever trying to push their mobile limits  - downloading apps, navigating a UI and syncing with a computer /  web service.

Single use devices win on simplicity, but have a big downside: they make up for the lack of redundancy at the software level with wasted packaging. I hope they minimize this, making the charger compatible with other home electronics for example. More electronics enviro-waste is a big turn off for these gadgets.

Waste aside, these focused devices are here to stay. I don't see Nokia's decision to go for free navigation as necessarily being the end for TomTom and Garmin, or that the iPad will necessarily blitz Kindle. Single use devices (can) do one thing very well, rather than lots of things passably. If enough people care about that difference, both the focused device and the swiss army knives will continue to co-exist.

There are no shortage of predictions about what this year will bring for mobile, so at the risk of piling on a bolted bandwagon here are a few more. Not exhaustive by any means, more of a selection of some of my favorites.

1. Celebrities figure out how to monetize social media, even if social media doesn't.

If Kim Kardashian can get $10k for a single Twit, how much could someone with a broader following and even greater respect coin? Lots of outrage and fuss predicted (can you trust anyone?), but the market will reward credible endorsements, and affiliate technology will enable both transparency and revenue.

Location-based posts and pics/ videos submitted via mobile will be a big part of this, as the mundanities of daily life are manna from heaven to the celebrity obsessed.

2. Developers expand focus from the device to the hardware ecosystem

A big challenge until now has been making it easy and reliable for phones to make calls, send texts, browse the web and download apps. Thankfully this is more or less a solved problem, so I suspect part of the battle will shift to the hardware ecosystem. People will start to integrate mobility into their physical environment - TVs, thermometers, speed cameras and sensors will become part of the extended operating system. Creative developers for Apple are already straining at the leash; first flashlights, spirit levels and compasses, and now blowers and handwarmers take us beyond the digital to the physical environment.

Look for big growth in the m2m market and intriguing modular hardware initiatives like Nokia's NOTA, Aduino and BugLabs and a fun new concept out of Portland, Green Goose (thanks Rob!).

In addition, companies like Nokia and RIM/Blackberry who are overdue for an operating system upgrade could take this opportunity to leapfrog even even Palm's fabulously slick WebOS and ensure their next OS is integrated more tightly into the physical environment.

3. Mobile augmented reality as a new search interface

Continuing the theme of moving beyond the phone, here we'll see the the overlay of digital intelligence with the real world. Google Goggles is an important validation - and gives them the advantage of having an alternative search trigger (their location algorithms deliver the search term, rather than the keyboard). This is a new enabler for many services that can overlay digital with physical, and there are some intriguing proof of concepts popping up like mushrooms, subway finders, interior design and ski slopes.

Bruce Sterling's speech at Layar's launch provides a good summary of the state of play and potential here.

Video: Bruce Sterling's Keynote - At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

4. Health goes online and mobile at the same time

Healthcare eats up massive amounts of consumers' attention,' powerpoint ink and investment dollars (the second quarter of 09 saw more VC investment in healthcare than in IT). Professional-grade startups such as AmericanWell are quickly dismantling barriers to online health such as onerous insurance liability, online doctor-patient relationships and restrictions on cross-border medicine. At the same time Congress is on the verge of throwing another 30m uninsured Americans into the system who will need cheap yet effective treatment, and the shortage of primary care physicians is set to increase. I predict mobile as platform of choice here - more secure and personal than a computer and able to take, send and store pictures, sounds and videos of questionable body parts, and deliver location-based services that will help patients find services easier.

Every year for the past few years has been billed as the year that mobile will break through. As AdMob and Quattro proved late last year - 2009 was actually the year for mobile, but it came and went. Mobile is no longer another place, it is all around us, like the Internet now is. I think 2010 will be the year that mobile starts to integrate with the physical world to deliver genuine user benefits (such as saving lives) as well as more trivial ones (such as Kim K painting her nails). Either way, a busy time for innovation ahead.

Trying to save the consumer content industry (in particular newspapers and the record industry) by charging for digital content faces all sorts of problems. Distributing content today is trivial, so charging for it is like trying to eat soup with a fork - you won't end up with a satisfying meal. What’s needed is to change the product into something new. This could be as simple as a bundle with another product, or a more ambitious exercise to create new services. Either way, the right products – three dimensional ones, not flat digital ones - may make people happy to pay.

First, a confession. I'm a newspaper junkie. Have been ever since Matt got me hooked on the innovative-sounding Daily Telegraph. I then graduated to the pink pages and would consider this one of life's essential luxuries (not least, because it would act as a great sun hat if I was stuck on a desert island).

One of my first and least rewarding jobs was selling advertising door to door to small businesses for the since defunct Staffordshire and East Yorkshire Tattler (no URL available, surprisingly). I was 17 and not much of a salesman - I lasted about a week.  However, a more effective sales campaign by me probably would not have saved this magazine. The content was pictorial reports of garden parties and point-to-points, with some copy to support the advertisers of the day. Circulation a thousand, tops. Later in my journalistic “career” I worked as a cub reporter on the Leicester Mercury and before University did a work experience stint at the Economist, trailing the witty political editor Andrew Marr, sitting in on editorial meetings where Smart People discussed Big Topics. College and business school saw me dabble with a pen - for fun, not profit. I enjoyed hanging out with hacks, and liked being the master of my own product with no need for focus groups, and a release cycle of days, not years.

So, as a committed consumer, and occasional dabbler, I'd like to see newspapers and what they stand for survive. However, as a futurist in my early life at Nokia I've plotted enough trends to see where 30% declines in ad revenues lead. The Internet has pretty well solved the main problems newspapers are known for – disseminating information about what’s going on, and saying smart things about it. And they do this better on many levels. A Twitter page can show the collected insights of 15 different people I respect on a particular topic, not just one jaded Editorial writer. Or as Jason Jones points out on the Daily Show, they actually have news about today, not yesterday. The web has taken over the many of the easy jobs that newspapers had. As Clay Shirky points out, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.”

Search engines index online newspaper sites and use that to answer consumers’ problems. They deliver a boat load of value to the user, keep a bit for services rendered and may arguably deliver some to the content source itself. Unfortunately search engines deliver eyeballs, but the newspaper industry hasn’t figured out how to monetize them successfully. Google does not make people buy more newspapers – the publishers’ choice of business model is not their concern.  Rupert Murdoch recently lashed out at Google, complaining they are stealing their copyright. This strikes me rather like a horse complaining that it’s been led to water, but has not been forced to drink. Rather than figure out how to do something with the hordes of people search engines are delivering, industry veterans are running in the other direction. A variety of pay wall concepts are emerging (both micropayments and subscriptions) - many have been tried before, none have worked. In addition to Rupert Murdoch vowing to charge for content, Steven Brill’s Journalism Online has just signed up 500 newspapers for their subscription model and my very own FT has been encouraging others to put walls up.

While subscription models will work for a time with differentiated content that is difficult to share, removing great swathes of mass market content from the web is a reactionary move to hold onto a base of declining value. Google is not the enemy, they are simply better at playing the new digital game in which newspapers now find themselves competing for their life. Regardless of how it’s done (subscription, micropayments etc) creating pay walls won’t work for two main reasons. First, basic economics says price of a product will tend to its marginal cost – this is, in the case of digital information, zero. Consumer demand will route around these roadblocks and drive the price down. Second, the web is the new reality here, and it is based on the idea of stupid, simple links that do not have an authentication mechanism or a smart tollbooth built in. No single pay scheme will aggregate all “content”, which now ranges from high journalism to your buddies’ baby pictures. If it did, there’d be demand for someone to operate outside it.

Advertising and newspapers have existed for ever, but online ads have so far failed to move the needle in terms of revenues. Some suggest hyper-targeting the ads is the answer. There’s something here, but current ‘contextually relevant’ adverts that push their products based on keywords are not compelling - a knife company was recently horrified to see its products presented online next to a story about a stabbing. The other danger is if they work too well they’ll face consumer pushback. (“Honey, why is our online newspaper constantly showing us adverts for divorce lawyers?)”. Ads that are increasingly targeted on the reader’s every move will become as suffocating as being wrapped in Clingfilm (I had that done once in a Spa in France, and trust me, it’s suffocating).

Instead of trying in vain to charge for a product that prefers to be free or ever more vigorously push ads that people don’t want, content owners may be better off changing the product that they’re selling.

One way to do this is to make a bundle with other more robust business models. This is the logic for Nokia's Comes With Music – providing buyers of certain devices with unlimited song downloads to keep. This extracts some of the margin from the device sales to give to the content owners.

iTunes got there first, and has spent more time building additional value on top of content. They now sell a quarter of all songs in the US, but really it is not a digital music store. It is a seller of ‘instant gratification so you can play that song your girlfriend has just mentioned’ and of ‘the ability to take your music with you on your run to inspire a new personal best’, and more recently it is kicking the tires with smart recommender services that help you more easily navigate your collection. These experiences are what people pay for, not “content”.

This seems to point to a fruitful direction for content companies. Take a step back and ask what user problems are you being paid to solve. Think for a minute about a newspaper. Its value is not just in the printed words it carries, no, it is far more nuanced. It does the difficult job of filtering 10bn pages of the web into a manageable chunk (It is personalized). It is totally portable with a ‘screen size’ that can be changed instantly (It is contextually relevant). It is instant on. It conveys self expression – oh, you also read the WSJ? Good chap. It can be used as a note pad, a fly swat, a door stop, fish and chip wrapper or even, as mentioned above, a hat. (It can be combined with other products). These are implicit sources of value that I suspect have helped newspapers stay relevant, more so than the words on their pages, which if good enough, will be instantly distributed, regardless of the height of the pay wall.

Turning “dumb” products into three dimensional services could involve many things, but a place to start experimentation could be adding i) personalized and ii) contextually relevant information and services to the content, and iii) working with other companies to make your product work even better in conjunction with theirs.

This will involve many of the mostly-content companies transforming themselves into mostly-services companies. Certain commodity elements – dare I say it – even that Kabul reporter – will need to be outsourced to people who specialized in those areas. The challenge that many small newspaper companies will face is to build the infrastructure themselves. An individual subscription to the FT or WSJ is just about manageable, but a better model, especially for the small guys, may like the one proposed by a new startup called Kachingle. Here you start with a (Big) assumption that a large number of people will be willing to pay a small monthly amount, say $5 into a pot that is administered centrally. This cash pile is then shared out among participating content providers who have signed up to the system, and then doled out according to the actual traffic (which can be measured by cookies or manually clicking an icon on the site). So if the FT signed up for this, they would leave most of the content open to the web, but recognize when one of the participating members was visiting, and the system would register them a share of the cash. If readers consistantly read more FT than the Wisconsin Gazette then the FT will get more of the cash.

As my friend Jim Griffin, who is running a similar scheme for the record labels, points out, you need a fair way to split up the cash. The digital trails we leave around the web can be just that - as that is our attention. As long as we know we are benefitting the sites we visit, and can have some control about who gets our cash, this scheme has legs. All sorts of questions about whether such a scheme could ever reach critical mass, or whether this could be federated etc. But unlike the pay wall ideas above, it is based on having content available to the web for free, and providing additional services on top for people who pay. So a reader who does not pay sees the content, but when they are a payer, they see the content rendered in three dimensions – personalized, contextual and useful. The kinds of services that we’ll see are up to the imagination of the content companies, and we’re only now scratching the surface of what we could do with a new mountain of data. Whether its personalized alerts about stories of interest, delivery to your car of phone, offers from companies that you actually want or some angle of social networking (these people like the articles you read…). Who knows, we’re still early in the transformation, but we need to start coming up with ways to create positive, not negative, lockin.

The recently announced acquisition of German startup Cellity was completed today. Good news for Nokia as it takes us towards a goal we have had for a while - getting more out of the most important social network that you own (ie the contacts book on your phone) by connecting it with the new breed of social networks that are today better at leveraging the many faceted advantages of the web as a platform.

Welcome the @cellity team, and congrats to my colleague Ed (@simnett) and the team, who disproved that myth that nothing gets done in July.