Google's BumpTop Buy Could Push Android Ahead of Blackberry for Business
Google (GOOG) has just acquired a startup called BumpTop, giving the industry a glimpse of what the next versions of its Android smartphone OS will look like. And it may be the step that finally knocks RIM's (RIMM) Blackberry out of the hands of business-people.
BumpTop is a different kind of "desktop" experience in which icons can be piled, grouped and tossed around, instead of just arranged in a grid, as on the iPhone or iPad. To get an idea of how it works, check out the following video:
Right now, BumpTop is a desktop app for Windows and Mac OS, but it's not really at home there; something like this can't be especially powerful when it's not native to the OS, and mice and trackpads don't do it justice. But on a smartphone, where there's less data, it's all managed by finger, so a more casual system of "piles" might be the best way forward simply because it mimics the way we organize our real-world desktops. Which is to say, spatially.
The big gain for Google could be business users, most of whom still cling to their Blackberrys, seeing little reason to switch to iPhone or Android. Why? The Blackberry is a good email machine, and the current Android and iPhone OSes, while slick, don't add much potential for productivity. But a device running BumpTop could manage lots of Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, documents and emails capably for a user who is constantly interacting with their device: it cuts out all the logistical stiffness of the current Android and iPhone desktop. Forgetting what's in each virtual "pile" (the only real danger of the pile system) won't be an issue for heavy users, whose desktops would constantly be turning over.
BumpTop's Founder and CEO Anand Agarawala is out to eliminate "filing," his shorthand for how regular computers organize your stuff. In studies done for his master's thesis, during which he first developed BumpTop, he criticizes "filing" in both real-world and computer-desktop scenarios:
Filers reluctantly discard information due to the effort put into initially filing it. Filers also prematurely filed documents later deemed to be of little or no value. In addition, sometimes more than one filing category applies, or an existing category is forgotten and a new one created.But "piling," he admits, has limits to its usefulness -- it's not really cut out for full-scale desktop computers.
On the other hand, piling did not scale well and information was difficult to find once the number of piles grew large.But since smartphones have plenty of inherent limitations -- size, speed, memory, battery life -- piling might be right at home in such a form factor.
Apple's (AAPL) solution to the small screen size of its iPhone is the same as RIM's: to add "folders" into which users can organize their apps. But anytime you see Apple taking cues from RIM on interface design, you can bet there's been a lapse of reason. Folders suffer from exactly the problem that Agarawala is out to cure: they create hierarchies which force the user to create all kinds of "rules" for their own behavior. Since every app needs to be sorted into its appropriate place, and finding the right app means digging through several different silos. (Did I put the "Weather" widget into the Utilities or Location folder?)
File hierarchies are the death of multi-tasking, since the latter involves mashing files and media from several different places into one task. On the iPhone, users can't access the file system -- meaning they can't simply save documents or folders to the Home screen. Instead, files have to be stored inside an app like AirSharing or QuickOffice, meaning that bouncing text from, say, a document to an email requires quite a few ins and outs. If Android could handle that kind of heavy lifting with a 3-D virtual desktop like BumpTop, business users would arrive in droves, happy to finally -- after years of disappointment in the power of smartphones -- be able to leave their laptops at home.