Just to give a quick 101 on WOW (this is my interpretation):
In simplest terms, anytime you see something and you feel like ‘wow, thats amazing’ (in Chennai terms ‘superaa’?), that is called a wow experience. Examples of some of the technology related wow experiences I had in the past are:
- When I switched on the walkman for the first time in my life

- When cell phones enabled us to speak from anywhere

- When blackberry enabled us to send and receive emails ten years go from anywhere

- When Google showed it could give relatively accurate page one results in two seconds

Then came Apple – I am not talking about Apple Computers under Steve Jobs, which was competing with Microsoft for domination in the PC market twenty five years ago. I am talking about Apple Inc under Steve Jobs, which is dominating the consumer market in the past ten years.

Let me walk you through a typical buying experience with Apple products.

Overall, Apple appears to be very serious about providing the best user experience to all its customers. Here is a quick sequence of the process:

- Apple announces the launch of a new product with wonderful advertisements

- Their website is updated with lots of information about the products

- As soon as you enter the Apple store, you are welcomed by their service professionals, who look like college kids working part time, but well trained to talk with confidence on the apple products and their features. The team gives you the feel that you are talking to subject matter experts and that itself is a huge benefit in the selling process.

- Also, when you are ready to make a purchase, they get your credit card swipe it on a device that looks like a bulky iPhone – I am guessing it is an iPhone extended to accept credit cards. Once swiped, they ask you to sign on the screen of the iPhone like device and right after that the receipt is printed wirelessly on their printer and you are set to go. They even identified my email id based on my credit card (and the last purchases I had made from the Apple store) and sent an email id to my account thanking for my purchase.

- Finally, when you come home and start spending some time with the product, it makes you feel as though this is the best thing that could have ever happened in technology.

This is wow experience.

Seeing this consistency with which Apple is able to deliver the wow experience, they are now my role models who can be idolized and followed by anyone who wants to provide a wow experience to their audiences.

We at Auro Infotech are going to make a conscious effort to try and deliver the same wow experience to our clients in all our services and products. It is up to the clients to let us know if we are anywhere close to it

Less than a year ago, Google had announced its entry into the mobile devices hardware market with its launch of Nexus One. Right after the launch they used their muscle power in the advertising space to show the Nexus One phone in front of every single person. It appears that the customers have shown their muscle power and reminded Google as to who the final decision maker on this market is.

Nexus One sales have been extremely poor with Apple just ruling the market both in the mobile phone segment with their iPhone and also introducing iPad, which has been selling like hot cakes.

Google has followed one of the good fundamentals of business which is to identify losses as early as possible and stop further losses. With the discontinuing of the mobile hardware division, Google can now focus on the mobile software division, where their support of Android is catching up well with the iPhone apps on mobile devices.

A huge advantage that Google has over iPhone in the mobile software market is that they can have their apps visible on unlimited number of devices, as long as the device is ready to adopt the Android mobile operating system. This power will lead to a natural evolution process, which defines that certain effects cannot be stopped by any force, as the need is much stronger. With iPhone apps stuck to devices that are propreitory to Apple, Android apps will overtake them in just a matter of time – unless Apple does something drastic to disrupt the cause – ie ease of adoption of good apps on multiple devices.

Google’s Vik, who is one of the most popular strategists in Google, is now heading the mobile apps division and that shows the amount of seriousness that Google is showing on this.

With the fact that mobile devices are going to be the primary device of choice globally, it is no surprise that everyone is rushing to get the biggest piece of the pie. Though Microsoft is way behind in the online world, it will be interesting to see how they react to such a move from Google.

iPad is just half an inch in thickness and weights just 1.5 pounds. It has a 9.7 inch touch screen interface and looks as sleek as any other Apple device. It uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics and hence the resolution is expected to be amazing.

iPad runs on 1GHz Apple custom processor with the facility to use 16GB to 64GB of SSD storage. It supports 802.11 network connectivity and also Bluetooth 2.1.

This device is capable of running iPhone apps and this one feature has enabled the iPad to directly leverage the huge number of apps already developed for the iPhone. The device is capable of running the apps in window or pixel doubling mode. It also comes with a SDK which is also getting released today.
Steve Jobs mentioned that the cost of the device will be 499USD for the 16GB version, 599USD for the 32GB version and 699USD for the 64GB version. If 3G mobile access will cost an extra 130USD on each.

The device will be available in the market in about 60 days or so.

As we try to study more about this device there are many more limitations that are coming out.

Some of the known limitations are:
- Does not support multitasking
- Does not support flash
- Does not have Wifi
- Does not have a camera

It will be interesting to see how people react to such a device with so many known limitations.

If the device picks us well, we will see the demand for iPhone/iPad apps grow significantly. Will have to wait and see.

Will keep you updated.

(Image from Google Website. Link to the official Google website for Nexus One phone with full specifications at the end of this post).

This phone has very good features, but the one feature that attracted me the most was its ability to convert speech to text and help send emails, updates on social networking sites, etc, ie. allow users to just speak and help in converting the speech into right text. Many other firms including Microsoft has attempted this in the past, without much success.

It will be very interesting to see how Google comes up with this attempt.

Another very interesting differentiating factor is that Nexus One will allow multiple applications to be published on the phone, while iPhone has a single iPhone store, which is used as the central place where all applications have to be published and also downloaded from. This level of freedom in the Nexus One might well be the equivalent of how Facebook revolutionised the social media platform where they allowed developers to write applications on Facebook platform and publish it – a new approach which was not very common with social networks before that.

An interesting point to note about Nexus One is that this phone is not fully tied to any service provider. iPhone was tied just with AT&T, thus helping Apple to keep the costs low and at the same time allow the service provider to absorb the costs. In this model, Google is providing various options such as buying the phone as it is for a full cost. Another option is to buy it with T-Mobile as the service provider, at a discounted price when we accept a two year contract. Google’s website also says that this device will also be available with Verizon in the near future in the US, and also with Vodafone in the Europe in the near future.

Earlier there were speculations that the phone might be sold at a discounted rate, while part of the cost of the phone might be recovered by showing relevant ads on the phone – since Google has mastered this already on the web. From the announcement today, it is clear that Google has decided not to take that approach with this phone so far.

The good news is that with such good concepts, the quality of mobile phones and their offerings will grow, thus benefitting the consumer as they win at the end of this, with more features helping them with what they are expecting their phones to do.

As we all know, the key difference between Google and Apple is that while Apple launches very limited number of products and they have pretty much had close to 100% success in all their products in the last few years (eg. ipod, iphone, ipod touch, etc), Google has the pattern of releasing applications and products in bulk, out of which there is around 50% success ratio. Lets hope that the Next One phone is one of those success stories from Google.

The most important take away for Auro Infotech team in this is the fact that very soon in the near future, we are going to see the need for developing applications for this phone. We will start working on studying the APIs as soon as they are ready and update our readers here on this blog on the progress of the same.

Btw, if you are interesting in knowing about the features of Nexus One, please click this link below:
Google Nexus One Phone http://www.google.com/phone