.Dust

I think that most of us went through the expe­ri­ence of unpack­ing a new Microsoft based Per­sonal Com­puter. You turn it on and you start the con­fig­u­ra­tion process that finally will lead you to your desktop.

Very often you will find your tray filled with pre-​installed appli­ca­tions like Mes­sen­gers, Anti Virus Soft­ware, CD/​DVD Burn­ing soft­ware and so on.

The next step is, obvi­ously, remov­ing most of them since each of us has its own pref­er­ences for these applications.

If we look at what’s hap­pen­ing in the mobile world today we see a lot of appli­ca­tions com­ing from the big inter­net play­ers into your mobile.

The prob­lem is that if on your PC you have plenty of ram and disk space to use the sit­u­a­tion is quite dif­fer­ent on you mobile phone.

Some ques­tions need to be answered:

• How many sin­gle appli­ca­tions can you run at the same time?
• How many of them will basi­cally do the same thing?
• What are your per­sonal pref­er­ence while you are hit­ting the road?
• How the dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions will inter­act with each other?

This is some­thing that need to be sorted out by oper­a­tors very soon.

I believe that the cus­tomer has to be given the oppor­tu­nity what’s going to be installed on his handset.

We can prob­a­bly think at the same exact process you find today on some per­sonal com­put­ers. You switch on your mobile phone for the first and you decide which appli­ca­tions you want to install on it.

If I have a quick look at my mobile phone today (Nokia N73) I found myself with:

• Jaiku (Great appli­ca­tion btw)
• Opera Mini
• Gmail
• Google Maps
• WWW (3 imple­men­ta­tion of the Novarra web browser)
• amAze
• Wid­sets
• Shot­Code
• Kaywa Reader
• Fring
• Some other minor geeky stuff

I think that I have spent at least a cou­ple of hours set­ting up the whole thing.

In the near future this process has to be auto­mated in some way. I do not want to load each sin­gle appli­ca­tion by myself and I do not want to find all of the pre-​installed on my phone.

There are only two options here:

• A phone cen­tric solu­tion where and installer like soft­ware will man­age that for you.
• A net­work cen­tric solu­tion where you con­fig­ure your mobile phone on the fixed web and appli­ca­tions are pushed to your mobile phone at a later stage.

There will be sev­eral appli­ca­tions doing the same thing on the same thing. I have three web browsers on my mobile phone (the native Nokia web browser, Opera Mini and WWW). As it hap­pens on Per­sonal Com­put­ers I want to be able to decide which is my default web browser.

This is def­i­nitely another crit­i­cal aspect if we want to trans­fer the PC user expe­ri­ence on a mobile phone.

There are sev­eral usabil­ity issues that need to be addressed here but it pretty much clear that this has to be done if we want to keep our cus­tomers happy.

Why do I blog this? Even if oper­a­tors may have their strate­gies on mobile inter­net I think that the best approach is to let the cus­tomer free.

Related posts:

1. The Inter­net in your phone
2. Tech­nol­ogy is there
3. Why you call it “a phone”?
4. The per­fect mobile e-​mail application
5. links for 2006-​11-​27