.Dust

When you buy a new mobile phone you will typ­i­cally spend the very next few days try­ing to under­stand how it works, what appli­ca­tion you may use and install that set of third party appli­ca­tions that you think you may need while you are hit­ting the road.

If I look at my mobile phone right now (Nokia E61i) I have a lot of appli­ca­tions installed:

• Jaiku
• gMail
• Google Maps
• Opera Mini
• News­ga­tor Go
• Shozu
• Intel­li­sync
• Skype
• Wid­sets
• MSN Mes­sen­ger
• putty
• mIRGGI

and some other minor stuff not worth mentioning.

It really seems that when you buy a new mobile phone you go through the very same process you go through when you buy a new Per­sonal Com­puter. Take out all of the free­bies that come with it and that you do not like, and install those appli­ca­tions and util­i­ties that you need.

I think that the sim­i­lar­i­ties end here.

After hav­ing installed all of these appli­ca­tion you will need to face the prob­lem of hav­ing these pro­gram work together. Just to make a sim­ple exam­ple I can say that if I have my e-​mail push appli­ca­tion run­ning together with Jaiku (my two pre­ferred appli­ca­tions) I am not able to run any­thing else. If I want to check my gMail account I have to shut­down some­thing before launch­ing the J2ME appli­ca­tion. That’s very annoy­ing in the long run and this is the rea­son why I think that say­ing that mobile is the new Per­sonal Com­puter is not yet a reality.

I would like oper­a­tors to work with mobile phones man­u­fac­tur­ers in order to build bet­ter oper­at­ing sys­tems that will ease my mobile life. When I buy a new mobile phone I would like to go through a con­fig­u­ra­tion process that will let me choose the fla­vor of my mobile phone.

The per­fects mobile phone would:

• allow me to make use of the idle screen accord­ing to my pri­or­i­ties. I would like to see there the infor­ma­tion that prob­a­bly I will need the most. In my case I would like to see incom­ing e-​mail mes­sages from my work account, upcom­ing appoint­ments and so on.
• allow me to take own­er­ship of the idle screen. Dur­ing the week­end I (usu­ally) do not care about work stuff and I would like to see dif­fer­ent things there just like news or per­sonal e-​mail mes­sage. This should hap­pen with a sim­ple key press and not going through an infi­nite nav­i­ga­tion inside the mobile phone settings.
• allow me to gather snack infor­ma­tion from the Net when I need. Putting an RSS feed on the idle thing would be a very good start. In a more gen­eral sense the idea of hav­ing cus­tomiz­able wid­gets on the idle screen just as you can have on the Mac­Book I am using to write this post. More­over I want my infor­ma­tion and not the infor­ma­tion that the oper­a­tor thinks may be inter­est­ing to me. I want to be free to choose what­ever wid­get I like and I will be prob­a­bly will­ing to pay for this.
• allow me to easy switch from an appli­ca­tion to another. I can under­stand that the mobile does not have infi­nite resources, but instead of dis­play­ing a mes­sage say­ing “Mem­ory full” why not help the user to launch an appli­ca­tion ask­ing which appli­ca­tion he would like to close to free some mem­ory? The mobile phone should be smart enough to under­stand which appli­ca­tions are used as snacks and which appli­ca­tions are going to be used inten­sively. Launch the snack appli­ca­tion clos­ing one of the back­ground appli­ca­tions and when the snack appli­ca­tion has fin­ished its life cycle relaunch the appli­ca­tion that was terminated.
• allow appli­ca­tion to talk to each other and col­lab­o­rate. When I am using Skype I would like to have a uni­fied con­tact list. Today I have a con­tact list for my phone, one for Skype and one for MSN Mes­sen­ger. Why? There is no point in this. Inter­process com­mu­ni­ca­tion was invented 20 years ago and I see no rea­son why it should not work with mod­ern mobile phones.
• take away the Java Appli­ca­tion Launcher. I am a cus­tomer and I do not care if you have writ­ten a native appli­ca­tion or a Java appli­ca­tion. To me they are appli­ca­tions. That’s it. Just show them as all of the other appli­ca­tions. To me, as a cus­tomer, there should be no dif­fer­ence at all.
• allow me to put Java appli­ca­tion in the back­ground. (Sony Eric­s­son Mobile is great at this)
• allow me to get rid of all of these Java warn­ings about appli­ca­tion secu­rity. I know that it’s the stan­dard but it really makes the whole things unus­able. More­over it may give false infor­ma­tions to the cus­tomer. (e.g. If have sub­scribed a flat data rate plan there is no point in say­ing to the cus­tomer that the appli­ca­tion will con­sume data that may have a cost). The best solu­tion would be to add a layer to the Java appli­ca­tion that will ask to the oper­a­tor billing sys­tem if I am going to pay for that data or not. That should be quite simple.

As you can see it is a long list but it is some­thing that I think we def­i­nitely need to make the life of our cus­tomer eas­ier than today.

At the end of the day the whole thing is to let the cus­tomer be free to have the mobile phone he wants and not what we (oper­a­tors) think he would want.

Why do I blog this ? There are lot of things that we can make to help our cus­tomers. I think that it is time to start think­ing about this.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Not We Stop Stuff­ing Mobile Phones?
2. My fat mobile phone
3. The Inter­net in your phone
4. The Fight for the Idle Screen
5. It Doesn’t Mat­ter How Hard You Push. Some Peo­ple Will Never Use Your Product