Tag Archives: mobile

Engadget is underwhelmed by Windows Mobile 6.5

“Instead of demonstrating its technical prowess and vast resources, Microsoft limped out a half-hearted rehash of an OS we’ve seen all too much of, and managed to blind most onlookers with a storm of big time partnerships and bloated PR. While their major competitors (and even some allies) in the mobile space seem bent on [...]

Context, Sensing and Mobiles

Here’s the presentation I gave in Sydney at Web Directions a week or so ago (great conference!).

Link: Context, Sensing and Mobiles (slideshare.net)

Google on the future of mobile

Google’s Andy Rubin thinks this of the future of mobile:

Smart alerts: Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention.
Augmented reality: Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful.
Crowd sourcing goes mainstream: Your phone is your omnipresent [...]

The iPod can’t scale

Dave Gustafson pointed to a great Gizmodo post that looks at the absurd place the clickwheel iPod has gone over the years with all the functionality that slowly got added to something that originally was designed only to play music.

“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to [...]

Enhancing social connections on mobile devices

Video from the Business to Buttons conference, with Hampus Jakobsson and James Haliburton of TAT talking about social connectivity on mobile devices.
“Mobile phones are some of the most advanced personal objects we have, but still there are just technical inventions or stylish skins. What can be done to improve personal communication and social connections? TAT [...]

Aurora Concept and the Mobile Web

The Aurora browser concept piece from the folks at Adaptive Path has lots to like about it. But overall I struggle with the idea of the web browser as a universal tool for doing things on devices, especially mobile devices. The web browser is great in that it’s a networked standard way of easily accessing [...]

Mobile components

I liked this nugget in Jakob Neilsen’s review of the ten best application UIs for the year.
“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and [...]

Modal overlays

Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.
“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that [...]

The Evolution of the Mobile Ecosystem

Francesco Cara from Nokia talks about the mobile ecosystem.

Link: Evolution of the mobile communication ecosystem (liftconference.com)

Ten Good Designs

Nokia’s written up a short article that highlights some examples of what they believe is good design for mobile.

Link: Mobile Design Showcases (nokia.com, via)

Mobile design basics

“Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what [...]

An idea every day

Rachel Hinman’s going on a generative sprint for the next three months.
“For the next 90 days, I’m going to think about, sketch, draw, and prototype ideas about mobile design and post them here. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I don’t know what is at the end of these 90 days. I’m just gonna commit [...]

Branding on mobile devices

A hypothetical redesign of the USAA mobile user experience.
“Utilizing these well-designed, iconic images already on the web site sends a message of professionalism that says “Our company is second to none. We offer style and class. We take no shortcuts, etc.” It also gives the application a little bit of an interactive feel, much more [...]