Mobile Concerns

How you use your mobile to communicate is about to change radically. Gone are the days of just phone calls, sms and patchy video. The latest generation of mobile devices allow you to keep up to date with your friends on Facebook and Twitter, centralising all your communication in one place.

However, this presents its own set of challenges:

1. * How do you triage your contacts? Not all contacts are created equal;
2. * How do you consolidate your contacts across different services (Facebook, Twitter, even Xbox Live)? and;
3. * How do you synchronise and manage all of this communication with your contacts when this is now in the cloud?

No one seems to have cracked this yet. Motorola have MOTOBLUR to centralise all your communications. They will even back up the communications stream for you. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will integrate your Facebook contacts and your friends on Xbox Live. Unfortunately both cripple you with this all or nothing approach.

Hopefully, in the not too distance future we will start to see some smarts in how our mobiles manage our contacts and communication. Learning about those we contact most frequently, automatically matching the different personas of our friends across different services and prioritising the messages we are most interested in at any given point in time.

With 15,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, I have to ask, “Is this really the long tail?”. The marketing department at Apple would have us believe that the App Store provides iPhone users with a myriad of applications to suit your every specific need. But is there really a need for 50 different task management applications? I think that iPhone customers would benefit from two or three best of breed applications for managing tasks instead.

So is the current App Store ecosystem in the best interest of consumers and developers? It is undoubtedly a great selling point for Apple and it is definitely easier to buy, download and install an iPhone application than a Windows Mobile application. However, Apple may have has set the barrier to entry too low for iPhone developers. Today the most popular iPhone applications will bubble to the top, but what will happen in the future? Will the next great iPhone application remain undiscovered among the noise of 100,000 lesser applications?

Yesterday, Microsoft presented a first look at the next version of its Window Mobile Operating System (OS) – Windows Mobile 6.5 – at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This version of the OS is due for release towards the the end of this year and will be the last Windows Mobile 6 release before Windows Mobile 7.

Although there have been some efforts to improve the usability of the user interface, initial feedback is that new honeycomb interface is too little, too late. What has many people baffled is how can HTC and Sony-Ericsson do such a good job of improving the usability experience on Windows Mobile 6.1 while Microsoft seems to still be behind the times with Windows 6.5.
I suspect one of the problems is that Microsoft needs to support a user interface that works on a wide variety of devices with different screen resolutions and form factors. Hence they must cater for the lowest common denominator. HTC and Sony-Ericsson on the other hand can build a fantastic user experience around their latest smartphones with state-of-the-art screens and features.

I think Microsoft should consider decoupling the user interface from the operating system, allowing each smartphone manufacturer to optimise the user interface experience for their specific smartphone. This may lead to inconsistencies in user experience, but hey, isn't that what we have had with WM 5, WM 6 and now WM 6.5?

There are reports that Orange in the UK has suspended shipments of the Blackberry Bold to customers due to problems with the device's software. I don't want to focus on RIM specifically, but rather explore the issue of software reliability on mobile devices. Why should creating software for mobile be any more challenging than for the desktop or the enterprise? I believe there are four factors at play here:

The current crop of devices and their operating systems are still severely limited in their ability to manage scarce resources (processor, memory, threads);

Applications for mobile are typically integrated very closely with other applications on the device such as PIM;

Mobile devices can connect using a variety of protocols. Not only do they connect to the Internet but they also support voice, sms and mms and;

Mobile applications may make use of device hardware such as cameras and GPS, that can vary across device makes and models.

These four factors increase the complexity of writing software for mobile and these are the issues mobile operating system makers should focus on to simplify the work for mobile application developers.

When it comes to mobiles there is a wide variety of device form factors to choose from and cater for. What I don't understand is why some manufacturers choose to segment their devices for business and entertainment use. I for one want to use my mobile to send email, manage my calendar and watch movies and listen to podcasts. Blackberry and Palm are definitely focusing on the business market - why else would you need that keyboard. The Palm Treo also has a square screen which isn't best suited to watching wide screen content.

In my opinion, the Apple iPhone and HTC Touch Diamond strike a better balance. They sacrifice the keyboard in favour of more screen realestate.

Now the HTC G1 running Google's Android tries to have the best of both worlds with its slide-out keyboard and iPhone sized screen. My question is, is the addition of the keyboard really worth it, given it is nearly 20% heavier than the iPhone?

This isn't really an iPhone issue (though it does say something about Apple's marketing). Is 3G living up to the hype? Here in Australia, there is enormous potential for this technology where people do not have access to fixed-line broadband services. Unfortunately, we are seeing experiences similar to those below when demand for 3G is so high it overloads the carriers' networks. What are your experiences with 3G?