So this is going to get worse as I get older?

Interruptions and multitasking are two afflictions that take a tremendous toll on our ability to focus, complete tasks, and be productive.  Our own research on interruptions shows that the recovery time, that is, the time it takes an individual to return to a task after being interrupted, can be as much as 10 to 20 times the length of the original interruption.  This means a 30 second interruption can result in an average of five minutes of recovery time, and that is optimistically assuming that one returns to the original task and does not abandon it.

It’s already been established that multitasking is not really possible for the human brain to engage in with any efficiency; instead, it is really just a series of interruptions, or task switches.  Multitasking results in lowered efficiency in all of the tasks being performed: there is no substitute for focused thinking on a single task.

New research from the University of California, San Francisco, that was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the impact of multitasking and interruptions on older people is even more pronounced.  The study took 20 young adults with an average age of 25, and 20 older adults, with an average age of 69, and showed both groups a landscape picture.  They were told to keep the picture in their mind, and were then shown an image of a face and were asked several questions about it.  Then the subjects were shown another landscape picture, and asked to determine if it matched the first picture they were shown.

While the subjects were being shown the images, their brains were being scanned using an fMRI machine to show brain activity.  Both groups were able to switch from the landscape picture to the face image with the same proficiency, however, the brain scans showed that the elderly subjects took longer to switch from thinking about the image of the face back to the landscape portraits.  (The younger subjects were negatively impacted as well, but not as severely as the older subjects.)

Dubbed an “interruption recovery failure” by the researchers, the findings suggest that, as we age, our ability to recover from interruptions is reduced.  Another (albeit unlikely) interpretation of the findings is that there are also cultural factors at work, such as the younger test group’s relatively higher exposure to high amounts of distraction and interruptions as they grow up.

A critical outcome from the study was that the initial hypothesis, that older people experienced more detrimental effects from interruptions because they fixated on the new interruption more than younger people, was false.  In fact, the degree to which the subjects switched focus to the interruption was the same regardless of age; it is the “interruption recovery failure,” or what we call recovery time, that set the groups apart.

For the knowledge worker, young or old, the study demonstrates not only the existence of the recovery time phenomenon but also that it may increase in severity with age.  We don’t yet fully understand the impact that excessive multitasking and interruptions have on the brain as it develops and ages, but we do know now that there is a very real impact on brain activity, and we should redouble our efforts to reduce both the interruptions we are subjected to, as well as those we inflict on others.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

The searcher can see that one user has given the first search result a +1, and can click on the +1 button themselves to recommend any of the search results.

If you have a public Google profile, “Google +1″ is a new feature that can be enabled on your account.  Essentially a clone of Facebook’s “Like” button, +1 is an attempt by Google to harness social search, an elusive concept that purports to improve one’s search results by factoring in the opinions and preferences of one’s social contacts.

Google +1 allows a user to recommend Web pages by clicking on the +1 button next to the site after conducting a search.  There are further plans to have Web sites include the +1 button on actual sites, much like Facebook’s increasingly ubiquitous Like button.  If the feature is enabled and the user is logged into his Google account, search results will show relevant pages that the user’s contacts have given the +1 approval to.

Google’s motivation for providing this service is somewhat self-serving: by gathering even more information on user behavior and preferences, the company will be able to further refine its targeted advertising.  In theory, there should also be a benefit for the user, as more relevant search results are elevated as other users, specifically one’s contacts, recommend them.  Additionally, the new feature may help to clamp down on Web spam in search results, by pushing relevant and useful results higher in the search results.

Improving search is critical because unsuccessful searches represent a huge and costly problem; ca. 50% of all searches end in failure, and of those searches that the knowledge worker believes to have succeeded, a further 50% fail because they result in the knowledge worker unknowingly using incorrect or out of date information.  Searching also takes up ca. 10% of the knowledge workers’ day, representing a significant consumption of time.

The ability of +1 to improve search results is not yet clear, and may be severely limited by the relatively small number of people who have public Google accounts and who choose to participate.  Facebook has had success with its “Like” feature but the company also has a huge user base (600 million as of January 2011), which has allowed it to export the “Like” metaphor around the Web.

It is important to note that there are virtually no privacy controls with +1.  Sites that a user gives approval to are viewable by anyone, because the feature requires a user to have a public Google profile.  This means users must keep in mind that there is a record of their +1 sites, which is accessible via a tab in their public Google profile.  Even Facebook, for all its failings, has privacy settings to prevent a completely unknown person from seeing a history of a given user’s “Likes.”

In what appears to be a complete lack of foresight on the part of Google, the +1 feature was announced on the same day that the company settled its privacy complaint with the FCC over its Buzz service, which drew outrage for automatically connecting people based on a user’s Gmail contact list.  While +1 is different in the sense that users must have opted in to a public Google profile, some lingering privacy concerns remain.

Similar to Google’s previous lackluster entries into social software that include Buzz, Lively, Wave, and Orkut, +1 is a gamble for Google.  We as consumers and knowledge workers hope that it can improve Google’s search results and decrease the search failure rate, but if past social experiments by Google are any indication, it may be a challenge to get +1 to catch on.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

A Yammer site shown in Dutch, with the activity feed in the center.

Microblogs and activity feeds, à la Twitter and Facebook, are the kinds of technology tools that can be both alluring and confusing.  Being able to quickly send out short missives about one’s activity and see updates from others in a condensed activity stream is sexy; it is the interface we have grown used to thanks to consumer social software, and the movement to bring that metaphor of communications and collaboration into a business setting is only natural.

The problem is that few people can clearly articulate the specific benefits that an activity stream-based social software tool brings into the workplace.  There is much talk about the positive impact resulting from ambient awareness of what is going on in an organization, the reduction of e-mail loads as users use the software to communicate, and the ability to reach out to experts with questions.  The tricky part is actually demonstrating, in terms of cost, how knowledge workers are made more productive through use of these tools.

We recently sat down with Yammer’s CEO, David Sacks, and Dee Anna McPherson, vice president of communications, to discuss this very point.

Yammer is a social software tool for businesses that allows employees of an organization to set up networks using their work e-mail addresses.  The network is restricted to those within that e-mail domain, which allows for private groups to form organically within the organization.  This is a plus in our view because it allows smaller groups to experiment with Yammer and show the value of the tool before wide scale adoption.  Companies can then upgrade to Yammer Premium, which gives an organization advanced administrative features and allows it to consolidate various networks that have been created by groups and individuals in the company.

Yammer features user profiles, communities, direct messaging, tagging of topics in conversations, group creation around projects or interest areas, and mobile access.  The main point of the interface is the activity feed, which, although not limited to 140 characters in the manner of Twitter, resembles a microblogging platform.

Sacks told us that he believes that Yammer can reduce e-mail loads for knowledge workers by pulling some communications out of the inbox and into the activity feed.  He also noted that some companies have used the service to replace meetings, or utilized Yammer as an expertise locator and question answering solution.

In our view, the potential for services such as Yammer that provide the activity stream interface for communication and collaboration is huge, but far more research needs to be done to show the specific benefits.  Reducing e-mail is an admirable goal; for example, if a question that is sent out in an all-hands e-mail to 5,000 people can be replaced with a post on a social networking tool that saves 5,000 people from an unnecessary interruption.  The use of the social networking tool still might not be the most efficient way to ask the question, but in the absence of a true expertise location system, it might be the best option.

While certain efficiencies can be created by reducing e-mail, it’s worth noting that the introduction of a completely new tool also has the potential to actually increase the amount of information that the knowledge worker is exposed to daily.  This is precisely why it is imperative to proceed with some caution when adopting these tools, although we do believe that tools such as Yammer have great potential for positive impact.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

E-mail and SharePoint, living in harmony?

One of the weakest points in knowledge worker productivity and effectiveness is the constant need to switch among applications and windows while working.  These additional steps take extra time; they also increase the likelihood of errors.  The reasons for this are myriad and range from the time penalty of moving between applications to the exposure to interruptions that sidetrack and delay work.

The concept of a Collaborative Business Environment, which includes the vaunted One Environment Rule, both anticipates and describes this problem.  It also provides direction in terms of how to address this problem. Simply put, the One Environment Rule states that the more knowledge workers stay in one overarching environment to do their work, the more likely it is that the initiative will succeed, and the knowledge workers will be productive.  Conversely, the more the knowledge workers are forced to switch work environments, the more likely they are to fail in their tasks.

We are increasingly seeing products in the marketplace that adhere to the CBE philosophy.  Last week met with Harmon.ie, a company whose eponymously-named product promises to deliver “social e-mail”.

To do this, Harmon.ie provides a sidebar that works with Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes e-mail clients.  This sidebar provides access to SharePoint files from the respective e-mail clients, as well as collaboration features such as presence awareness and instant messaging, via integration with Microsoft OCS or IBM Lotus Sametime, depending on the edition.

The mantra behind the offering, as articulated to us by David Lavenda, vice president of marketing and product strategy, is “One window, one context.”  Obviously, this appeals to us as the creators of the One Environment Rule.

Where Harmon.ie really shines however, is the way in which it deals with poor e-mail behavior, namely the gratuitous sending of attachments.  If users send a file as an attachment, they are prompted by the system to confirm whether they actually want to send the attachment, or have the system instead automatically place the file into SharePoint and replace the file in the e-mail with a link.

Research conducted by Basex in 2010 revealed that 60% of knowledge workers e-mail documents as attachments to colleagues for review.  Due to the resulting confusion when managing the multiple copies of a document this method creates, over 40% of knowledge workers miss edits and changes in documents that they get back from review.  Keeping documents in a repository and sending links not only keeps inboxes from becoming overcrowded with large files, but also avoids the many problems that creep into a document review process when reviewers work on stand-alone copies of the document.

Our research and observations at Basex have shown that modifying individual behavior patterns is extremely hard to do.  Knowledge workers, like all humans, tend to resist change and by default will fall back to what they see as the path of least resistance, even if that path is actually harder and more time consuming.  Managing document review by e-mail attachments, and making the inbox the hub of one’s work both fall into this category.  For a variety of reasons, the inbox may not be the best place to center knowledge work around, but the reality is that knowledge workers spend vast amounts of time there, and are unlikely change that behavior anytime soon.

Solutions that take the approach Harmon.ie is taking, which is to improve the tool that is already in use (e-mail) by streamlining processes and automatically correcting bad behavior (such as sending files as attachments), have great potential in terms of improving everyone’s effectiveness and efficiency by precisely adhering to the principles of the One Environment Rule, and because they do not force a large scale behavior change on the user.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Where do I click for technical support?

When I attended IBM’s Lotusphere in early February, I was struck by the number of people who were using an iPad.  Indeed, a significant number of attendees did not seem to have brought a laptop at all, and were relying on the tablet to take notes, keep up with work e-mail, and of course, tweet the proceedings.  The number of the laptop-less was still dwarfed by those still typing away on their traditional laptops, but tablets are clearly beginning to establish themselves as a viable mobile computing solution.

Despite the fact that the first tablet was introduced in 1989, the tablet market is still in its infancy.  Today, the iPad dominates the landscape thanks to its legions of Apple-fans, an early start in the market, a plethora of apps, and a polished and popular user interface.  Other companies are pushing out tablets at a furious pace, with options set to explode as numerous Android-based devices, BlackBerry’s PlayBook, and HP’s TouchPad (running Palm’s webOS) hit the shelves.  Not to mention yesterday’s unveiling of the iPad 2.

Tablets are clearly making inroads with knowledge workers.  Some companies who see value in the form factor and the mobile capabilities are providing the devices for employees, or simply extending support to employees’ existing devices.  The New York Times reported last week that General Electric has distributed ca. 2,000 iPads internally and has developed applications for approving purchase orders and monitoring transformers in the field.  The article also cited companies such as NBC Universal, Hyatt, and biotech company Life Technologies that have begun both supplying and supporting employees’ iPads.  Just this week, the FAA approved the use of iPads to replace paper charts for pilots who fly for Executive Jet Management, a charter company.  Although the approval is limited to just one company, it is indicative of tablet computers moving into professional settings, even those under strict regulation such as the aviation industry.

As noted previously, tablets aren’t new.  What’s changed is that they actually work well and, unlike earlier versions, can tap into the Internet and a vast store of business apps that will support everything from e-mail to CRM systems to enterprise social software.

A glance through past issues of Basex:TechWatch shows the launch of business applications for the iPad from the likes of Confidela, IBM, iEnterprises, Jive, NewsGator, Open Text, Oracle, Salesforce, and Sybase, to name a few.  And this is just in the last year.  Even the competitors are getting in on the action; at Lotusphere, the BlackBerry PlayBook was showcased as a secure and viable business tool that features tight integration with Lotus offerings.

Although it is unlikely that laptops will go by the wayside, tablets are increasingly being added to the knowledge worker’s toolkit, and will only increase in prevalence as more use cases and business applications are developed.  If only I had written this column on a tablet…(hint hint).

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Does anyone have a map?

Is the robot apocalypse closer than originally thought?  After watching IBM’s Watson computer crush Jeopardy’s all-star contestants this week, one must surely wonder.

More to the point, what are the various practical applications of Watson now that its dominance, at least as a quiz-show contestant on “Jeopardy!”, is unquestioned?

Watson was designed by IBM researchers, who suggested the idea of a “Jeopardy!” challenge because they considered the game show to be an excellent test of a computer’s ability to understand information expressed using natural language.

Watson could neither see nor hear, nor was it actually on the stage; an avatar that resembled a giant iPad represented it there.  Watson received all of its information electronically in the form of text at the same point at which the human contestants saw the answer.

Not surprisingly, the computer power behind Watson took up most of a large room and, due to the heat generated by the IBM servers, required extensive cooling as well.

Competing on “Jeopardy!” is a huge challenge, even for the most intelligent and well-read individual.  The provided answers are sometimes vague, make use of clever word play, and require extensive knowledge of a vast range of topics, from history and current events to art and pop culture.  Entering the clues into a standard search engine would result in complete failure.

Far from being a simple search tool, Watson is designed to use natural language processing and thousands of algorithms to understand the phrasing, grammar, and intent of a question, and then find the answer that has the highest probability of being correct.  Just as human players must rely on their own knowledge, Watson uses a content library of thousands of documents, reference materials, encyclopedias, books, and plays and is not connected to the Internet or other online databases.

Let’s look at a few of the questions that Watson had difficulty answering.

On Monday, the first day of the match, Watson was incorrect in the category “Olympic Oddities”, when the provided answer was “It was the anatomical oddity of U.S. gymnast George Eyser who won a gold medal on the parallel bars in 1904.”

Watson responded “leg”, which was ruled incorrect because Watson did not specify that it was the lack of Eyser’s leg that was the oddity.  David Ferrucci, the manager of the Watson project at IBM Research, explained that Watson might not have understood “oddity,” and “The computer wouldn’t know that a missing leg is odder than anything else.”  He also noted that given enough time to absorb more material, Watson would probably make that connection.

Another interesting incorrect response (in the form of a question) occurred Tuesday night.

In the category U.S. Cities, the provided answer was “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.”  Watson incorrectly wrote “What is Toronto”, while both humans correctly wrote “What is Chicago,” referencing O’Hare and Midway airports.  The problem for Watson, according to Ferrucci, was that Watson had learned that the categories in the show often have weak relationships to the questions, and thus Watson placed only a weak emphasis on “U.S. Cities”.  In addition, he noted that there are cities in the U.S. named Toronto, and that Toronto has an American League Baseball team, all snippets of information that may have led Watson astray.  Watson only gave “Toronto” a 32% of being correct, and only bet $947, a tiny sum that did not expose it to the risk of losing its lead in the game.

Despite a few other missteps and miscues Watson dominated the matches played displaying an amazing ability to understand what was being asked and to quickly respond correctly.

How did Watson reach a final response?  Watson considered thousands of possibilities and ranked them.  The top three were displayed, with the probability it assigned to each.  That would be a welcome addition to a Google search, an honest appraisal of how likely each result was of being correct, or even better, its usefulness.

With Watson, at least on “Jeopardy!”, we moved one step closer to the type of search envisaged in science fiction (“Computer.  Does the king of the Watusis drive an automobile?”).  We won’t have the computer from Star Trek here tomorrow, or even next year, but the technology developed for Watson does bring us that much closer to developing search tools that will resolve search’s Achilles heel, the fact that it delivers results as opposed to answers.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.  Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Did anyone see where I put that survey form?

Our current survey focuses on the personal sources of Information Overload that knowledge workers deal with, as well as the specific actions that individuals and organizations are undertaking to deal with the problem.

The survey is ongoing but some of our preliminary findings are quite interesting, and worth sharing:

By far the greatest perceived cause of Information Overload is e-mail, with over 66% of the votes for the number one cause being for e-mail.
The second largest source is a dead tie between interruptions and social networking sites, both at 20%.
Rounding out the top four is required reading (online and offline) at 23%.

We are also seeing trends emerging when we ask what the greatest enabler of Information Overload in the last two years has been.  Many respondents are selecting “Access to greater amounts information” as both the number one, and the number two factors.  This is interesting because many people who did not select it as their number one choice went on to select it as their second choice, reflecting the scale of the problem.

Thus far, we are also seeing a clear favorite method of reducing Information Overload.  When asked what the number one thing that could be done in their organization to combat Information Overload was, over 50% of the responses were to send fewer e-mail messages.

We would like to share our favorite comment from a survey taker with you.  When asked what would help reduce Information Overload, he said the following: “Have someone else read everything for me”.

A nice thought, but wishful thinking.

Please help combat Information Overload by taking this important survey ( http://www.basex.com/io1110 ).  We will provide a new update on our findings soon.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

How do we connect the dots?

The talking points at this year’s Lotusphere were all about people, people, and people.  The official tagline of “Get Social. Do Business” was tempered with an emphasis on remembering that the point of social activity is not just sharing and moving documents around, but allowing individuals to communicate more effectively with one another.

The buzz word for the new generation of Lotus products is “Next.”  The gist of Next is that IBM is taking a set of social features developed in Project Vulcan (the company’s collaboration, business analytics, and aggregation user experience initiative) and applying them to the core products, namely Notes and Domino, Sametime, Connections, and LotusLive.  The underlying idea is to build a platform that incorporates various social features such as activity streams, content sharing, and automated suggestions of relevant content, people, and groups or communities.

Additionally, the new features and interfaces will be standardized across the offerings, to create more symmetry between the Notes desktop and browser-based tools such as LotusLive.  They will also include new calendaring features such as the ability for non-chairs to edit calendar entries.  The Next group of offerings will move into beta later this year.

Here is a quick look at the major collaboration and knowledge sharing announcements coming out of Lotusphere:

Activity Stream Clients for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Nokia
This set of clients will bring the new and refined activity stream functionality to mobile devices, and allow users to take action on items without leaving the mobile environment, a concept that extends to the other announcements, and is referred to by IBM as “embedded experience.”

LotusLive Symphony
This cloud-based release of the company’s office productivity suite will feature real-time co-authoring, in-line commenting, presence integration, the ability to assign sections to specific authors, notifications of edits, versioning, and auto save.  It will be available as a technical preview next week, and is expected to be released in full in the second half of 2011.

LotusLive Next
LotusLive Next will benefit from the new activity stream, which looks quite powerful and uses complex algorithms to filter and surface relevant content, people, and groups for the individual user.  The stream presents relevant applications, content, people, activities, mail, and even voicemail.  A useful feature is the ability to hover over suggested content to see why it was suggested, such as mutual interests or past projects.  As in the mobile activity stream clients, users can view and take action on items in the stream.

Connections Next
New features will include a new media gallery for video and photo sharing, ideation, enhanced community moderation capabilities, a Microsoft Outlook social connector, ECM library integration via widgets, and plug-in connectors for Notes files.  Another new feature is a share box, which allows quick and painless sharing of content without having to leave the environment.

Sametime Next
Sametime will be seeing advancements in the mobile realm, with an upcoming (second half of 2011) native Android client that provides the full functionality of the current Nokia, RIM, and browser-based iPhone applications.  Additions include support for location information and voice-to-text and text-to-voice capabilities.  Further down the road, IBM expects to release native iPhone and Symbian3 applications and increase its focus on audio and video functionality.

For the desktop client, Sametime Next will feature video conferencing, browser-based online meetings, and audio and video functionality via browser plug-ins.

Notes and Domino Next
The big news around Notes and Domino Next is, of course, the social aspects that the features and interfaces that have emerged out of Project Vulcan, such as the activity stream and share box.  Domino will also be moving towards cloud deployment, and users of LotusLive will be able to run Domino applications via the cloud.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Who do YOU think will win?

That information functions as currency is no surprise to anyone in this day and age.  What may be surprising are the lengths that people go to collect the raw data, turn it into actionable nuggets of information, and disseminate it.

Two recent articles in the New York Times call attention to the way that information has become meaningful and critical in both the business world and the political world.

Both articles, “Computers That Trade on the News” on December 22, 2010 and “Where News Is Power, a Fight to Be Well-Armed,” on January 16, 2011, detail the extent to which information is valued in politics and trading.

The subjects of these articles are also a study in contrasts.  As junior political aides parse the news and pull out the most useful and relevant insights and ammunition for the day’s politicking, the computers of Wall Street are humming away, using advanced algorithms and linguistic-based software to extract meaning from the wealth of unstructured data available online.

Politics has always been a bit old fashioned, but the divide between how Wall Street and Washington are utilizing information has never been starker.  In Washington, the day for junior aides and staffers begins early in the morning as they read the news, monitor blogs and social networks, and condense their findings into memos for their superiors.  These information gatherers put in a few hours of data collection and selection, then report to an office for the rest of their day that can stretch well into the evening.

The staffers are valued for their ability to ferret out tidbits of information online that have value.  Describing a media monitor under his supervision, Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, stated that, “For such a young guy, Andrew has a great ability to sniff out stories that need to be handled with dispatch. During our biggest fights, from health care to the Supreme Court confirmations, Andrew repeatedly spotted potential problems in the farthest reaches of the Internet before anyone else. That information was essential to our success.”

On Wall Street, a very different picture is playing out.  Traders are using software tools that analyze the massive amount of online unstructured data to extract sentiment around companies, analyze it, and then trade on it, often without human assistance.  The software analyzes words, sentence structure, and emoticons from blogs, company Web sites, editorials, news articles, and social software tools such as Twitter.  If the software detects anything that reflects positively or negatively on a company or a section of the market, then it can trigger automated trading.
According to Aite Groupa, a financial services consulting company, around 35% of quantitative trading firms are currently exploring the use of unstructured data in automated trading.  The trend is not likely to stop there, given the competitive advantage that even a few seconds can give a firm in high frequency trading.

Could Andrew Bates, our talented political aide, sniff out information faster and more accurately than the algorithms of Wall Street?  Short of a face-to-face showdown, it is hard to say.  One thing is for sure though; he would probably appreciate the extra hour of sleep.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

It would be understandable if you were under the impression that nothing at all happened this week except for the unveiling of the long-rumored Verizon iPhone.  The launch has been hyped and anticipated for several years, in part because it would be the moment when AT&T would lose its exclusivity death grip on what has become perhaps the most iconic mobile phone ever.

So what did actually happen?  Well, for those hoping for a slew of new features, or an LTE-powered world phone, not much.  The iPhone 4 that Verizon Wireless will be offering is similar to the iPhone 4 that AT&T offers with a few exceptions.  The phone and its antenna have been redesigned to work with Verizon’s CDMA network, and there is hope that this will result in a solution to the “antenna-gate” problem, whereby users of the AT&T iPhone 4 lost calls when holding the phone in a certain way.  In addition, the Verizon version of the iPhone will be able to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices.

So now that iPhone customers have a choice in terms of a mobile operator, which network should they choose?  While the accepted wisdom is that AT&T’s 3G network is actually faster than Verizon’s, its coverage is not nearly as broad.  If you spend most of your time in a major city and currently do not have many problems with your connection, then leaving AT&T for Verizon might be a bit hasty.  If you travel around the country, and find yourself on rural back roads, away from major metropolitan areas, Verizon will be the more attractive operator.

Verizon released the iPhone on its 3G CDMA network instead of on its new 4G LTE network.  According to Apple COO Tim Cook the official reason for this is that Verizon customers “wanted the iPhone now” and that the LTE technology would have forced design compromises that Apple was not willing to make.

While the Verizon iPhone gains a feature (Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities) compared to AT&T’s it also loses some capabilities, namely support for GSM and the ability to work in most countries around the world.  While other Verizon smartphones including almost all those from Research in Motion support CDMA for Verizon Wireless’s network and GSM for roaming, the iPhone does not.  This may be a deal killer for users who travel frequently.

Because of limitations on CDMA networks the iPhone loses one additional feature, the ability of to be on a phone call and maintain a data connection at the same time.  Verizon may address this in the future, but for now, users will have to choose if they want to look up locations on Google maps or talk on the phone.

The new enhancements and limitations on the Verizon iPhone may make choosing a mobile operator for your iPhone easier than originally thought.  For current AT&T iPhone customers, moving to Verizon will require the purchase of a new iPhone (one that runs on Verizon’s CDMA network) and a possible cancellation fee (AT&T raised its cancellation fees in 2010 in anticipation of Verizon’s announcement).  But iPhone fans will have to choose between simultaneous voice and data and Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities not to mention the ability to roam internationally.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.