Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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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
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Mobile phones need better controls for gaming
MobileIndustry.biz highlights in "Out of Control" that one of the issues with playing games on mobile phones is that the user interface, and specifically the keypad, is not adapted for gaming at all.
Let's face it, phone keypads are designed primarily for aesthetics, not for usability, so this shouldn't be too surprising.
There are few phones today that have really good keypads. E.g. the Sony Ericsson W810 has perfect numeric keys (the best I've seen in a very long time; tactile and precise), but then the navigation buttons completely destroys the picture.
I'm talking the generic case of at all using the phone for telephony above. When looking at playing games there are very few, if any, phones that have buttons optimized for good game control (not counting the non-selling N-Gage and Gizmondo).
The only way to get around this is for manufacturers to more emphasize the usability and use case aspects of the phone keypad. This also applies to media control: You also want it to be very easy to start and stop music and video playing.
Fitting all this into the traditional numbers + some navigation buttons scheme probably won't work, so some lateral thinking is required.
Interestingly, if the joystick would be optimized for gaming it would probably also be more optimized for navigation. Think an analog joystick (or better a thumb disc) with a select function that would be designed to be easily and quickly pressed.
Manufacturers should take a look at portable game consoles for inspiration.
As of now I don't think manufacturers and operators even consider gaming to be important, as they don't get much revenue from this, but sometimes you have to do one thing to enable something else.
Out of Control - Editorial /// MobileIndustry.biz
Let's face it, phone keypads are designed primarily for aesthetics, not for usability, so this shouldn't be too surprising.
There are few phones today that have really good keypads. E.g. the Sony Ericsson W810 has perfect numeric keys (the best I've seen in a very long time; tactile and precise), but then the navigation buttons completely destroys the picture.
I'm talking the generic case of at all using the phone for telephony above. When looking at playing games there are very few, if any, phones that have buttons optimized for good game control (not counting the non-selling N-Gage and Gizmondo).
The only way to get around this is for manufacturers to more emphasize the usability and use case aspects of the phone keypad. This also applies to media control: You also want it to be very easy to start and stop music and video playing.
Fitting all this into the traditional numbers + some navigation buttons scheme probably won't work, so some lateral thinking is required.
Interestingly, if the joystick would be optimized for gaming it would probably also be more optimized for navigation. Think an analog joystick (or better a thumb disc) with a select function that would be designed to be easily and quickly pressed.
Manufacturers should take a look at portable game consoles for inspiration.
As of now I don't think manufacturers and operators even consider gaming to be important, as they don't get much revenue from this, but sometimes you have to do one thing to enable something else.
Out of Control - Editorial /// MobileIndustry.biz
