Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
|
All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
|
|
Friday, August 18, 2006
Lifestyle designed vs flexibly designed mobile devices
That's not really a contradiction, but when talking demographic/function-specific phones it's easy to think fixed functionality, which is also how this Little Springs Design note starts out, but changes as it goes along.
Even if you add e.g. multimedia controls to multimedia-focused phones, alphanumeric keypads to messaging and/or business-focused phones etc, the mantra for the future must be "customizable by after-market software", to provide the functionality required by services no one has yet thought out.
No manufacturer or operator can predict the future needs for service functionality, so manufacturers should focus on putting hot new technology in the phones and fully open up that functionality for application developers in a standardized way. Operators should focus on the infrastructure and backoffice services needed for making it possible to do profitable business with such value-added applications and services.
New interesting services pop up every day, and phones need to be flexible enough to support those services, by advanced hooks into all the functionality of the phone, and provide an application platform that's consistent over phones, even when there are obvious feature differences between phones. E.g. applications need to be able to check if a phone supports a certain functionality dynamically.
I agree with the following:
A lifestyle device needs to be a full PCD optimized for specific market segment needs, but retaining the ability to do general purpose PCD functions
Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » Lifestyle device design
Even if you add e.g. multimedia controls to multimedia-focused phones, alphanumeric keypads to messaging and/or business-focused phones etc, the mantra for the future must be "customizable by after-market software", to provide the functionality required by services no one has yet thought out.
No manufacturer or operator can predict the future needs for service functionality, so manufacturers should focus on putting hot new technology in the phones and fully open up that functionality for application developers in a standardized way. Operators should focus on the infrastructure and backoffice services needed for making it possible to do profitable business with such value-added applications and services.
New interesting services pop up every day, and phones need to be flexible enough to support those services, by advanced hooks into all the functionality of the phone, and provide an application platform that's consistent over phones, even when there are obvious feature differences between phones. E.g. applications need to be able to check if a phone supports a certain functionality dynamically.
I agree with the following:
A lifestyle device needs to be a full PCD optimized for specific market segment needs, but retaining the ability to do general purpose PCD functions
Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » Lifestyle device design
