.Dust

Yes­ter­day night I had a din­ner out with a friend. He was a for­mer research fel­low at Olivetti in the shin­ing days of that com­pany.
Obvi­ously we ended up talk­ing about inno­va­tion in mobile phones and I shared some of my per­sonal views on the sub­ject. All these won­der­ful web 2.0 appli­ca­tions that are com­ing to the mobile world, Java MIDP 3.0 and all the like.

He said that it was great stuff.

After a cou­ple of min­utes he stopped me and said: “Well, these appli­ca­tions are cool but what about deliv­er­ing a work­ing phone to the users?”

I was aston­ished by the ques­tion. Did we miss some­thing in the big picture?

At the end of the dis­cus­sion I dis­cov­ered that it’s true that we are adding great appli­ca­tions to mobile phones, but, we are also de-​focusing from the mobile phone core functionalities.

Three lit­tle exam­ples that I was told by my friend:

• If I am sync­ing my phone with my per­sonal com­puter the phone is well aware of the time I have to spend in a meet­ing. Why couldn’t the phone set a meet­ing pro­file when he knows I am in a meet­ing and revert back to nor­mal pro­file when the meet­ing is over?
• I have have my phone switched off and if some­one tries to call me he will find my voice mail. When I will switch on my phone I will receive and SMS say­ing that some­one has tried to con­tact me. Why do you show the phone num­ber in the SMS and you do not do a lookup in con­tacts before dis­play­ing the mes­sage. (I know, I know.. some oper­a­tor will send you the SMS from the num­ber that called you).
• You are sell­ing phone with Skype, MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. Why do I need to have sev­eral dif­fer­ent con­tact list for each of these appli­ca­tions? I already have a con­tact list on my phone, it’s synced with my PC and it is what I use.

These are only two sim­ple exam­ples of use case that we should focus on.

I am really think­ing that inno­va­tion in mobile phone should take two dif­fer­ent approaches. The first one should focus on bring­ing to the phone the best of breed appli­ca­tions in the world. The sec­ond one should make these thing tightly inte­grated and inter-​working.

Why do I blog this ? As my friend told me, the tech­nol­ogy is there. You can use it to cre­ate new stuff or fix older stuff.

Related posts:

1. links for 2006-​11-​27
2. The def­i­n­i­tion of Smartphone
3. Why you call it “a phone”?
4. links for 2007-​02-​06
5. links for 2006-​11-​23