Posts Tagged ‘wifi’

Mobile is coming. It’s going to be big. These words rang around the room in a garage style meeting as a group of bright young things contemplated how to create the next Amazon.com at the end of 1999.

10 years on, mobile is still being talked about as the next big thing, but is the term mobile even meaningful? In the USA, when I used to pitch mobile marketing, people thought I meant putting a billboard on the back of a truck and driving it around the streets. The next definition of mobile was differentiating the way in which a device connected to the wider world. Mobile meant that a device had to connect through a network operator like AT&T or Vodafone or NTT Docomo. WIFI has changed that!

When developing applications and services for end users on new devices, perhaps it is more useful to think about the needs of the user and capabilities of the device rather than categorising the technology as ‘mobile’ or not. What is the frequency with which the device connects to your ‘network’? Does the device know where it is in time and space?

Here are some examples to illustrate how broadly the term mobile could be interpreted.

• A standard mobile phone has the ability to make calls and send and receive text messages. It is a mobile device, but it has no internet connectivity and it is not location aware.
• A Palm Pilot circa 1999 could be synchronised with the internet as often as you liked, you could download newspapers, download maps, download games and apps, but it didn’t have a pervasive connection to the internet and was not location aware. (We’ll come back to this device later).
• Android device / iPhone / Blackberry with GPS, Wifi, accelerometer, camera.
• Netbook with 3G and Skype (ability to make and receive calls / send and receive text messages) – may or may not be location aware.

The vast majority of  ’mobile’ applications take no account of the mobile properties of the device. Delivering live scores for a sport to a phone is not a mobile application if you also deliver the same information via a webpage that can be browsed from a desktop computer or gaming console. It is merely another channel to distribute time sensitive information. Those of us who don’t have iPhones know that we can browse the web from a phone and get exactly the same information as contained in a $2.00 app from the closed-shop.

It seems that a lot of people in the technology space have very short memories. For all the fuss about the iPhone and iPad, it’s hard to see how many of the applications developed for this platform are any more sophisticated than the 1999 Palm Pilot V5. The Palm device could connect to the internet, but it was not a pervasive connection. Updates might happen once at the beginning of the day and once at the end. Is this a mobile device? If not, why are most developers making apps that take no advantage of a device’s pervasive connection to the internet?

Unless your service is going to adapt its functionality based on the location of the user and other ‘context data’ (like time of day, known interests, friends) then it is not mobile. There is the Internet and it can deliver services via a screen. It doesn’t matter if that screen is a desktop computer, TV, games console, phone, netbook or electronic reader, if you are just replicating your content for a different screen resolution then it is not mobile.

If on the other hand you are stepping into the realms of augmented reality, customising the content delivered based on the user’s location or the speed at which they are travelling, then you have a mobile application.

It doesn’t have to be science fiction. Google’s mobile search has the ability to search using voice command – handy when you have a small keypad and are on the move. It also allows you to bring back search results near you based on your GPS location.

Simple. Useful. Mobile.