.Dust

If I look at what a mobile phone is today it’s very dif­fi­cult to say that is only a phone.

It is a phone when you are mak­ing a call. It’s a cam­era when you are tak­ing pic­tures. It’s a cam­corder when you are shoot­ing a video. It is a tele­vi­sion set when you are look­ing at a video stream. The list is long.
The main issue is that the phone remains the same from an hard­ware stand­point and the same is for the user interface.

In some way there should be the pos­si­bil­ity to change the aspect of the phone and the behav­ior of the user inter­face depend­ing on what you are doing.

Let’s look at some elec­tronic con­sumer devices. Not pro­fes­sional or pro­sumer devices, just the basic ones. They have usu­ally few ded­i­cated keys ergonom­i­cally posi­tioned, sim­ple user inter­face, fast access to the device con­fig­u­ra­tion and func­tion­al­i­ties. Also the mighty Apple iPod behave the same way.

Every sin­gle con­sumer elec­tronic device has found the bet­ter approach in terms of hard­ware and user inter­face in order to make it acces­si­ble to the vast major­ity of customers.

That same par­a­digm should apply to mobile phone. Depend­ing on the func­tion­al­ity I am tar­get­ing the phone user inter­face should morph and the same should hap­pen, where pos­si­ble, to the hardware.

If am using my mobile to shoot a photo I would like to have all the option avail­able just like in con­sumer cam­era, if I am lis­ten­ing to music I would like a ded­i­cated user inter­face for that appli­ca­tion. Appli­ca­tion skin­ning is not enough. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of hard­ware, soft­ware and device behav­ior that need to be changed to address the needs of the new users of these multi pur­pose devices.

Some man­u­fac­tur­ers are mov­ing in this direc­tion. Just look at some of the Nokia prod­ucts (N93 just to say one) or some of the Sony Eric­s­son prod­ucts.
That’s a trend that should not be dropped. I think that it is the way to move if we want to make the life of out cus­tomer easy.

How can we accom­plish that?

Just a few ideas:

• take the best user inter­face from exist­ing con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices and repli­cate in the phone.
• take the best hard­ware solu­tions avail­able and try to make them fit in a mobile phone.
• use tech­nol­ogy to solve the inte­gra­tion issues.
• think dif­fer­ent.

Why do I blog this? I think this will be a key issue in the next few years. We see mobile phone func­tion­al­ity increase over time but we do not see the same evo­lu­tion in the access of such func­tion­al­i­ties. At the end of the day who said that the mobile phone needs to look like a mobile phone?

Related posts:

1. The Inter­net in your phone
2. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star
3. links for 2006-​11-​27
4. Friends Gen­er­ated Con­tent. What’s next?
5. Friends gen­er­ated content