Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Answer To Mobile's ROI Is A Shrug?

About half of marketers and agencies are not measuring mobile ROI, eMarketer said. A shrug of the shoulders is the answer to the question by the clients or senior management of how we're doing? My question for you – what will you do next after you are moved out?

Half of Pinterest’s users are outside the U.S., the company says.

58% of customer service teams view social media inquiries as their top challenge, Forbes reported.

44% of U.S. online shoppers start the buying process with Amazon, per BloomReach.

Nearly 8 out of every 9 minutes occurs within a user’s top five apps: comScore.

On Twitter, videos are retweeted 6x more than photos. Also, 90% of video views on Twitter are from mobile devices.

More than half of all Google searches now happen on mobile devices.

CEO John Chen said that BlackBerry may quit the handset business if it the company is not profitable in a year.

eMarketer says that approximately 2 billion people have smartphones today. Another 150-200 million will buy their first in each of the next 3 years.

Americans spend 2+ hours a day on smartphone apps: comScore.

A headline proclaimed that mobile is "marketers' magic bullet". We haven't gotten more sophisticated than that hype nonsense?

54% are willing to end a relationship with a brand if they are not reached with personalization, according to Razorfish’s Jeremy Lockhorn.

Several more from Jeremy:

-- 46% of consumers will purchase more if you personalize across channel

-- 83% of consumers expect you to know them across channels and devices

-- there is a 1% conversion rate for smartphones, a third of the PC rate

-- 55% of marketers are using cross-channel technology to create single view of customer

Microsoft says that Surface is now a $3.5 billion business. Still, NFL announcers mistake them for iPads.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Does It Pay For A Retailer To Offer Apple Pay?

It may not pay to carry Apple Pay. Twenty-eight retailers told Reuters that lack of access to data about customers and their buying habits is a key reason why they don’t accept Apple Pay. But an Apple rep told the news organization that it expects half of the top U.S. merchants to feature the service by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Kantar says that only 13% of U.S. iPhone 6 owners have used Apple Pay. What has held the other 87% back? Not enough locations, not enough consumer education, not enough benefit? Something else? I say that it’s all of the above.

Tweet of the week – from Rebecca Lieb ‏@lieblink: Smart jeans that tell you if you gained weight? My stupid jeans have done this for years.

Facebook Messenger now lets you send friends a map with your location.

True or false, fellow Apple Watch owners - if I left it at home, I'd make a special trip to retrieve it. I'm in the false camp.

Consumers are willing to trade personal info for value, per Forrester. 41% for cash rewards, 28% for loyal points, 15% for a better consumer experience.

Walmart announced new mobile programs that include a geofence feature that alerts associates to gather pre-ordered merchandise, saving time for the customer.

Periscope now offers a map view of active broadcasts.

Yahoo reportedly paid at least $20 million to stream October's Buffalo Bills – Jacksonville Jaguars game.

BlackBerry settled a legal dispute with Ryan Seacrest's Typo Products.

Expedia's Spanish-language mobile web site is part of an initiative to test and learn.

What irony: Gogo launched a "generous" customer loyalty program for airlines, not paying users who suffer with the service.

Seventy-four percent of people 55 and over in America used the mobile Internet in 2014, a 14% jump from 2013: comScore.

Fifty percent of people uninstall a poor app, IBM says.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Is A Five-Year "Smart" Clothing Sales Forecast Smart?

So-called “smart” clothing sales are forecast to top 10 million units in five years, a study from Tractica says.  That doesn’t sound like a hit to me. Ten million over a half-decade is a relative drop in the bucket. For perspective, analysts expect Apple to sell between 8 and 14 million Apple Watches in year one.

Americans spend more than 36% of mobile data traffic use on real-time entertainment and 22% on social networking, per CTIA.

Periscope best practices need to be established and followed so we don't keep being asked to stop what we're doing to watch someone walk down the street.

The supposed death of the tablet is overblown. eMarketer forecasts use in North America moving from 174 million this year in 2019. That shows growth, just not on the hockey stick trajectory that we were on over the last five years.

Swatch says that it’s developing smartwatch batteries that last six months. Time will tell if this matters.

30% of those on Tinder are married, says GlobalWebIndex. My wife and I denied knowing what it is.

Four in 10 digital newspaper readers are mobile-only, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Over one-third of marketers are selling or sharing customer data: Forrester. This topic is covered extensively in my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book that will be available in June.

Approximately, one third of Mother's Day gifts were to be purchased on a mobile device, Criteo predicted.

Consumers are 1.4 times likely to watch a video ad on their phone than any other channel: Google.

One more Google note - more searches are now conducted on mobile than desktop.

I saw a tweet that called BlackBerry an icon. Digging deeper, it was from a BlackBerry partner. That explains it.

A 98-year-old Melbourne woman conceived an app that gives players the task of listing a continuous string of interconnecting words until they have used every letter. Because of the backstory, Millie’s Game may be the most interesting in the app stores.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Facing 2015 Head On

Touch ID is so 2014. Among the advancements expected at next week’s CES 2015 are additional mobile applications that combine biometrics and selfies to enable authentication and access. Hoyos Labs unveiled one 12 months ago or about the last time we attempted to log into a site and remembered both our user name and password. A faceoff is ahead with more competition and innovation.

Smartphones and tablets accounted for more than a third of online sales on Christmas Day as well as 57% of all online traffic: IBM. Those are big jumps vs. previous years.

Also, iOS sales were 4X Android sales on Christmas. That is consistent with Thanksgiving and recent holiday seasons.

Amazon: sales made from its smartphone app doubled this year: nearly 60% of customers shopped on a mobile device. Cyber Monday remained its busiest mobile shopping day of the year, with customers ordering 18 toys per second.

35% had troubles holiday shopping on mobile devices (SOASTA) in what was called "early stages" for retailers.

Tweet of the week: from @ChrisPirillo: BREAKING NEWS: Santa can't be tracked for the rest of Christmas because he had to turn off his GPS to save battery.

From The Verge’s review of the BlackBerry Classic: "The only problem with the screen is that you can't fit a big enough line of coke on it."

Only 12% of ages 18-29 say television would be hard to give up, according to Pew.

While I was out shopping, zero attention was given to Apple Pay at Macy’s’ point of sale. No signage or discussion from clerk. That's no way to speed up adoption.

Meanwhile, Apple Pay launched at Walt Disney World on Christmas Eve. Disneyland comes on in in 2015.

It was great to hear from Apple that a package I sent was on a truck for delivery. Not so great was getting a 5 a.m. text about it. Common sense, no?

Headline: Consumer Interest In Apple Watch Has Been Steadily Declining Since September. Is that a surprise given that it’s not on sale?

I received several impersonal holiday email, including one from FreeConferenceCall.com. Touching.

70% of executives surveyed, more than in the previous four polls, agree that mobile technology use invades time between work and leisure, per CNBC’s Mobile Elite report. Six in 10 access business content via their mobile device over the weekend. 

In My New Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Should We Be Proud That There Are More Mobile Devices Than Toothbrushes?

Rather than trying to prove mobile’s popularity by saying that there are more wireless phones in the world than toothbrushes, why don’t we buy the world some toothbrushes? There are organizations that serve this mission, but we still have a need. Carriers, handset manufacturers, marketers, are you with me?

Led by “back to school shopping”, mobile commerce increased 47% in Q2 vs. a year ago, comScore said. And sales via tablet were up an eye-opening 75%. As comScore reported, some brick-and-mortar retailers prominently offered online-only “Back to School” deals on their sites to promote digital commerce.

One more to note as we near the holiday shopping season: mobile has become the primary medium for consumers to engage with retail brands online, with 70% of engagement from mobile devices.

OK, another one because the stats are so important – more than 34% of the top 10 retailers’ monthly unique visitors are mobile-only.

It has come to this for Blackberry - Wall Street cheered an $11 million loss in the second quarter.

More than one in eight Americans has deposited a check within the past year using a mobile app.

A third of all pictures taken by millennials are selfies, according to a report from Mitek Systems and polling firm Zogby Analytics.

From the same study: 36% of millennials have decided where to spend money or have switched companies based on a brand's mobile offerings.

As crazed as we are about mobile in the U.S., we take a back seat to Austria where market penetration in mobile is 130-140%, according to the IAB.

Multiple studies show that half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds. I would’ve guessed 5.

86% of time on mobile is spent on apps, ExactTarget said.

Tablet sales are estimated to increase 39% this year, Brainshark stated. Some think that it’s a dying category. I’m not one of them.

Fear of going without your phone is called nomophobia. As in no mobile. Going without a toothbrush is worse.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The "BlackBerry Find" Edition

Nothing says that there are differences in mobile phone usage better than a photo that shows a teenager in England stuck in a storm drain trying to retrieve her BlackBerry. In America, a teenager would head down there and find hundreds of the less-than-popular device. Actually, he or she would never make the effort.

Eighty-five percent of time Twitter users spend on Twitter happens on a mobile device, comScore says. Also, mobile Twitter usage in big cities primarily comes from iPhones, according to a separate report.

Within days, there were 12 million downloads of Microsoft Office on iOS devices. As industry analyst Chetan Sharma points out, it was the most success Microsoft has had with mobile.

Forty-one years ago this month, the first cell phone call was made. The first mobile phones cost $3,300 each and had a battery life of about 20 minutes.

An Apple touchscreen patent shows the company supposedly has figured out when we’re mad at our iPhone. But what if we are mad at something else?

Are you marketing to older folks? Pew is out with a new report – 59 percent of senior citizens use the Internet; 77 percent have cell phones; 47 percent have broadband at home.

One third of wearable device wearers are ditching them, a new stat from Endeavor Partners says.

By the end of the year, there will be more active mobile devices than the population -- 7.3 billion.

The majority of global mobile video viewing in Q4 2013 was content more than 30 minutes.

Do you think March Madness took mobile users away from their devices? Hardly. Over half of U.S. smartphone and tablet users were using mobile to stay current.

In Nigeria, over 500 facilities are using mobile to diagnose and treat tuberculosis.

SMB mobile website adoption in America is now 23 percent, Hibu says.

YouTube gets 50 percent of time spent on mobile entertainment apps.

I wonder if my wife will be OK if I opt in for Hooters offers via SMS in the name of research.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Of WhatsAppitis and More Pictures of Little Jimmy

Can tapping out mobile messages damage your health? A Granada doctor diagnosed sore wrists as WhatsAppitis. The treatment was "complete abstinence from using the phone to send messages," along with anti-inflammatory drugs.

Twitter now allows picture tagging, up to 4 photos per tweet. Did you see my kid in his hat. And with his sister?

50 percent of users say mobile is the first and last thing they touch when awake. There are punchlines galore. Just not going there.

By 2015, 43 percent of business tablet users will print from mobile devices, HP says. What’s taking so long?

Mobile advertising and search investments by marketers are forecast to increase an average 55 percent annually in 2014, according to Jack Myers.

Millennial Media ‏says that mobile rich media can increase click-through rates by as much as 350 percent over standard banners.

Nineteen percent of Google’s ad revenue came from mobile search ads in 2013 with eMarketer projecting that it will rise to 30 percent over the next three years.

Rankings are subjective by nature but Amazon is only No. 18 on Fast Company’s most innovative list?

My Fitbit Force is being returned due to recall. Actually, that’s great news since innovation is happening fast in the wearables category. Will get more for less.

BlackBerry beat quarterly expectations and made progress on its turnaround. Who expected that?

LinkedIn profiles with images are 11 times more likely to be viewed than those without. I would’ve guessed 50-1.

Headline asked if sales of high-end smartphones have peaked. You get more today for less. That’s not hard to understand.

Report: Sprint to launch HD Voice nationwide by July. Voice is the killer app? In 2014?

Instagram now has 200 million users, including 50 million in the last six months.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Swiping at NFC Hype

7-Eleven and Best Buy stopped Near-Field communications (NFC) initiatives, delivering a blow to those who have hyped the heck out of the concept for years.

The White House is testing Samsung and LG phones. BlackBerry may be thrown out of Washington like an under-producing congressman.

Twitter is experimenting showing how many people saw your tweets. My guess is we overestimate how much of our content is seen in such a noisy digital world.

Apple may improve your iPhone's battery life by understanding your habits. Personalization rocks in mobile.

PayPal is working with mobile location tracking firm Placed to connect mobile ads to in-store visits.

I’m betting that you’ve seen many recently recount their first Tweet. I feel like it’s akin to sharing my lunch from today. Neither my mom nor wife cares. And neither do you.

Now you can tip in Starbucks mobile app through an iOS update.

Tribune's Newsbeat app lets robots read you the news in the car. As opposed to the human robots who read the news from your local station.

People in the U.S. are now spending almost an hour more per day on mobile devices than watching traditional TV, according to a Millward Brown survey.

Nielsen says most people have heard of wearables, and that one in six use one. That seems very high to me although it surprised me that Pebble sold 400,000 smartwatches in 2013.

Facebook will grow its share of worldwide mobile internet ad dollars to more than one in five this year--behind only Google, eMarketer says.

Amazon will soon begin shipping a video-streaming device.

Apple's iPhone 5c, described by many as a failure, outsold Blackberry and Windows Phone last quarter.

The mobile health market will top $49 billion by 2020, SAP forecasts.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Mom, Baby and Phone Make Three

New moms spend more time on smartphones than other adults, an AOL survey says. Researchers found that new moms turned to their phones as a “lifeline”  - namely personal assistant to manage schedules, social hub, personal shopper, “informer” to get educated on a slew of new topics, and escape route to get away from the pressures of motherhood.

Wikipedia will start texting info to users in Kenya who don't have Internet access.

I haven't talked to one person who said “Great, BlackBerry BBM is on Android and iPhone”. Timing is everything.

Amazon fired away at Apple's new iPad with an ad that says the Kindle Fire HDX is "Lighter than Air".

With limited supply expected, positioning to get an iPad Air or Mini will be like going after Springsteen tickets.

It’s smart for Apple to call the new thin iPad Air. The Air laptop is beloved and considered by many – including me - as best out there.

I was asked if there is a reason for a business with 40 percent of its traffic coming from mobile to not have a mobile optimized site. None.

SMBs should look further than Foursquare ads for marketing - think permission-based databases.

By 2017, 83 percent of retailers expect to have in-store wireless and 56 percent envision having guest Wi-Fi, a new report claims.

Devices with voice recognition will top 1 billion units in 2013. I recently met someone in that space. Advancements are coming, including voice authentication like “fingerprinting”.

The U.S. healthcare industry reportedly will spend $539 million on mobile marketing by 2015.

Four years ago, less than 4 percent of emails were read on mobile. It’s now near 50 percent.

New York City, the country's largest metro area, has the lowest adoption rate of smartphones -- 48 percent. That’s a surprisingly low number.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Impact of Mobile On The NFL Edition

My friend Peter Knox has a four-screen NFL experience: Red Zone on the TV, Eagles on the iPad, fantasy tracking on the iPad Mini, video/chat on the iPhone. And some think that the Vince Lombardi era was the NFL’s heyday?

News that BlackBerry is pulling back from the consumer market was met by an “or vice versa’ comment by tech journalist Colin Gibbs. Exactly. Four years ago, BlackBerry had 51 percent of the North American smartphone market.

I was intrigued by a tweet on a "fully flushable toilet". I prefer one that flushes only 35 percent.

Tired of iOS7 and iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C comments? Judging by history, we're minutes from the rumor churn on iPhone 6. Maybe seconds.

Separate turns to desperate in iPhone auto-correct. I nearly gave someone a heart attack. WTF?

Several stories are out that seniors are now the growth opportunity for mobile. Yes, the technology generational divide is shrinking. 50-64 year olds spent more on tech than 18-29's over the last 12 months, according to Adobe.

End of television? Yeah, right. According to eMarketer, the TV ad spend grew 6.4 percent in Q2 2013 compared to 4.1 percent for digital display.

A mobile trend from Pew - Less "checking in"; more "here's what's near you". Yes, we’re talking about Foursquare, which now has Yelp aspirations.

Only 15-20 percent of Africans have bank accounts but 60-70 percent have mobile phones.

NPD says that over half of children in the U.S are now using smart devices.

The use of mobile news apps on smartphones and tablets has increased from 30 percent to 50 percent since 2012.

Forrester says the recipe for mobile marketing success includes big helpings of analysis. You think?

Mobile shopping is expected to take 16 percent share of holiday e-commerce says eMarketer.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The "Charge It" Edition

“Juice” with your coffee? DuPont has introduced Corian Powermat wireless charging countertops.

Mobile use during sex stats were interesting the first time. 8,674 surveys later and yeah, so?

BlackBerry's marketing aside, the market has spoken on the company's flagship Z10 - price dropped 75 percent to $49. The company’s CEO says that training issues and problems with getting buyers to "move from the pack" are the reasons for the sales woes. Also, a new report says that BlackBerry now accounts for just 2 percent of mobile traffic.

South Africa mobile stats nearly a year after I visited – 68 percent of email are sent/received on a cellphone; 3 times more text rather than email

One more - there are 4.6 times more households with a mobile device than a computer.

The New York Times is creating a digital long-form magazine. How will it do? Content wins pre-digital times and now.

eMarketer has slashed its 2013 U.S. mobile payments forecast in half. The day will come. Just not tomorrow or next year.

Univision's Hispanic audience avidly consumes content, ads on mobile. No surprise. Hispanics continue to over-index on mobile use and activities.

Another mobile made-up word - apportunity. Stop. Now.

For most outside of us geeks, having two mobile phones in a year is more hassle than a thrill. Agree?

More than 25 percent of organic search visits came from mobile devices in Q2.

How Not To Get Fired For Choosing The Wrong Mobile Strategy is the topic of my July 25 Market Motive webinar. You in?

Cripes. Just saw someone say 2013 is the Year of the smartwatch. It was the Year of mobile something like 9 straight years.

There are supposedly two ways to hit “print” on a mobile device. I can't even get my Macbook Pro to print wirelessly.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer: The Battle For Public Opinion Edition

With mobile and social, a brand can lose the battle for public opinion in two minutes rather than the two hours you read about in crisis management textbooks. Carnival Cruises is the latest case study proving this.

93 percent of time spent on social networking in United States is on Facebook. I read that a day after seeing a headline proclaiming the impending doom of Facebook.

Yet to drive revenue despite 125 million downloads, Bump has added mobile to PC sharing.

If your mobile stats are as old as your feature phone, you stand little chance to succeed.

Verizon now rates apps by how much data, battery life they consume. This is useful and should be duplicated.

Only 18 percent of iPad users check email more than 10 times a day, according to eMarketer. It’s secondary access for most.

Dish says it bought Blockbuster to open wireless stores. In my neighborhood, it is vacant. And that's common.

Headline: The iPad Business Is Collapsing. My reaction? And by 2014, more will walk around with nine toes on each foot.

50 percent of mobile users will be "addressable" this year: Forrester. Why aren't more brands creating opt-in programs?

Primary mobile users on Twitter are 63 percent more likely to click on links than those who mostly access via PC.

Also, those who access Twitter primarily on mobile are 86 percent more likely to be active on Twitter several times a day.

Headline: Is mobile video the new TV commercial. Me: no.

10,000 Home Depot employees are switching from BlackBerry to iPhone for productivity, improved customer service. This follows Lowe's’ playbook.

Does the word beta give Apple more forgiveness in Siri shortcomings? And how long can a beta phase last?

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer: The "Proof Is In The Tattoo" Edition

To woo younger consumers, T-Mobile will allow tattoos and piercing on employees at retail locations. The day we see an iPhone tattoo is the time we’ll know the coveted phone is a member of the T-Mobile family of devices.

87 percent of broadcast TV & 93 percent of cable TV viewing still occurs live, according to Nielsen. Why? In part, this is because you can’t time-shift social media. That factor is growing. Community works best in real time.

The $4 million Super Bowl TV ads will have mobile calls to action, right? How easy is this? Rather than come in for free breakfast, respond to the CTA and opt-in for more.

Mark Zuckerberg says a Facebook mobile phone would be the "wrong strategy", yet signals point to January 15 announcement of one?

Could this be the year of no “Year of” designations?

The iPotty was introduced to train a toddler to use the toilet via iPad education. The only surprise is it took this long to come to market.

An app to help you catch more fish? More important is one to have us eat more fish.

BlackBerry's browser has long been its weak link - now it "smokes" iOS and Windows 8 phones?

Groupon has expanded its Square-like mobile payments to Android. The company doesn't see profit on this. Rather, it’s an avenue to more core business.

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint will carry BlackBerry 10 phones. Of course, the question is how many users will do the same.

An app that can call 100 phone numbers at once? I never have --or will have -- that need.

25 percent of the U.S. population used a tablet at least monthly in 2012, a figure expected to rise to 34 percent this year: eMarketer.

I disagree with the headline "CES has sadly become a complete waste of time". Dealmaking with players all in one city is the reason to go.

What's Behind The New Porsche-Branded BlackBerry?

Mobile Marketer asked me for my thoughts on a Porsche-branded BlackBerry phone soon to be available in limited supplies.

Here's what I told the publication:

“Porsche drivers are among the most loyal automobile owners in the world. It makes sense that some brand enthusiasts would want their phones to be Porsche-branded, especially since it will sell in Porsche boutique stores.

“Mobile devices are personal. They ring how we want them to, are accessorized to our particular tastes and oftentimes make fashion statements.”

“The value of an association with a diminished brand like BlackBerry is questionable for Porsche Design. But the device will have limited distribution and visibility, so there is likely more upside than downside.”

The article is here http://www.luxurydaily.com/porsche-design-launches-new-blackberry-smartphone-...

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Dream Edition

A psychologist has created an iPhone app that can manipulate dreams. No, not those kind of dreams. More like the ones where you are walking in the woods. Yeah, I’ll pass, too.

New York City is transforming old phone booths into ‘smart screens’. Kids, they were places to make calls. Oh, you need the definition of a call?

Blackberry 7 is rated the most secure mobile operating system. RIM’s problem is that security is not even a small driver when consumers purchase.

Everyone wants in on the Instagram talk. Mitt Romney talked up Instagram and innovation less than a week after someone signed him up for the service.

Nokia cut its financial guidance due to "competitive industry dynamics”. Was competition unexpected?

Meanwhile, Nokia identified a Lumia 900 software glitch, then offered a fix and $100 credit. It is due to a memory issue. My question - will consumers remember at the point of purchase?

According to an analyst, Best Buy's mobile business brings one third of the profits but accounts for less than 10 percent of the overall square footage in retail stores.

Wireless device charging is coming to some Chryslers. Will they prevent all those coffee spills that come when we fiddle with plugs?

It isn't the size but cost that may doom Toshiba's 13-inch tablet. It is $650 at the low end. Consumers will buy this why?

AT&T has rethought its Rethink Possible tagline. It has evolved to “It's what you do with what we do”. Makes sense because mobile is personal.

Some predict apps will lose favor as the mobile web advances with HTML5. But Juniper sees twice as any app downloads by 2016.

American Idol gets lots of credit for the use of text messaging. Will it do the same for Shazam? Of course, Shazam was part of the Super Bowl telecast, but you may have been in the guacamole at the time.

Stepping Into The BlackBerry Time Machine

I stepped into a time machine this week, reliving history by seeing several Washington D.C. exhibits and more BlackBerry devices in hands than iPhones or Androids.

Because you come to this blog for mobile insights rather than my take on the political contributions of our forefathers, let me offer some thoughts on RIM’s continued large presence in our Nation’s Capital:

Seemingly most in DC wield power or are wannabes. There is no better device to bang out power emails than a BlackBerry. In other cities, we want to be cool. In Washington, power wins out.

No one does push email better than BlackBerry. In Washington, time is critical. What better device to keep track of the political flip-flops?

Long ago, the BlackBerry proved to the IT departments that it provided secure communications. There is no city in America with more need than DC for protected emails.

I had a long love-hate relationship with my BlackBerry that I wrote about here http://technorati.com/business/article/an-open-letter-to-blackberry/ and elsewhere.

For several years, I carried an iPhone and BlackBerry. Price finally drove me away from RIM. Despite the fact that I’ve been a customer for about 15 years, AT&T demanded for $50 more a month when some of my emails were switched over to Microsoft Exchange. These are the same emails that my iPhone delivers for no extra charge.

I miss the keyboard and the push capability that RIM gave me.

I don’t miss having to defend carrying what has become a dinosaur outside of DC.

The Customer Experience

Before there were smartphones, there were smart mobile people like Steve Elfman.

Steve and I worked together at InfoSpace. A tech guy more than a marketer, he had spent years understanding, even defining, the marketplace from his early days at AT&T Wireless.

Not one to be all over the press, Steve surprisingly has twice landed in the Seattle Times in the last week. 

From his spot near the top at Sprint, where he serves as President, Network Operations and Wholesale, he told reporter Brier Dudley that we’re a bit away from realizing the potential of mobile devices and network speed.

"I think that 2012 is going to be a very big year for good consumer experiences," he told the newspaper. "Maybe 2013. ... I think that '12 you'll see some, '13 I think it will be something that the customer says, 'This is a good experience.'”

Now 56, Steve says he is too old to change out his device at the industry average of 19 months.

"You can't innovate fast enough for them," he said of younger people. "Guys my age, they say, 'I don't want another thing for two years.'”

As for my take on consumer experiences, I’ve long been on record as saying my iPhone delivers the real web and turned mobile promise into reality. I’ve also written and tweeted often about the failings of my BlackBerry Bold /jeffhasen/an-open-love-letter-to-blackberry, which does email exceedingly well and provides little to no other value.

An Open Love Letter To BlackBerry

So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna be really hard. We’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, you and me, every day.

Will you do something for me, please? Just picture your life for me? 30 years from now, 40 years from now? What’s it look like?

I know what you’re saying. Aren’t you the guy who spewed venom in your tweets over the last several months? And have you forgotten the words you used to describe your BlackBerry Bold and the RIM executives behind it? They weren’t words found in a love letter or in movie lines like the ones above.

But I’m back.

I tried it without you. The list of what I didn’t miss stretches from here in Seattle to Waterloo in Canada.

Web experience? Are you kidding me? I dance every day for my ability to reach the web on my iPhone. I stopped trying to get to the Internet on my Bold two years ago when I missed my flight trying to see if it was on time through my BlackBerry.

Apps? Ummm, do you even have any? And if you do, are there any that will make me forget the innovation put forth by every other handset manufacturer?

So why am I here?

Oh, did I miss my QWERTY keyboard. For nearly a decade, my fingers flowed ever so gracefully, banging out those all important emails.

“Dear Waste Management. Please bring a third receptacle.”

Poetry.

And the push emails. I became ill when my iPhone sent me some emails in real time – AND MADE ME ASK FOR OTHERS.

You do one thing better than anyone. And I can’t quit you.

I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Just one request as we live out our days in bliss.

Throw some Canadian bacon grease or WD40 on the trackball. Don’t make me move out of the house again the next time the damn thing freezes up.

Article first published as An Open Letter To BlackBerry on Technorati.