A slightly interesting article about innovation at Nokia is accompanied by some fun user-generated concept phones from their research.
Link: Nokia’s Dream Phones (businessweek.com)
Book about how mobile communication devices are changing social relationships.
“The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to [...]
Nothing new content-wise, but it’s notable that Jan Chipchase has hit the New York Times Magazine.
“This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. [...]
“Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will [...]
Yiibu has made available a wonderful little presentation about the design of mobile games.
“Design for play, quiet contemplation, exploration, discovery, suspense, laughter, friendship, joy…(remember boredom, stress, fatigue, personalization, control, play—everyone’s personal time is different)”
Link: Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail (yiibu.com, PDF, via)
Convergence has arrived. Samsung’s SCH-V960 now has a mouse. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.
“Users can point the cursor and click directly on icons on MyScreen, similar interface to that on a PC environment, and gain direct access to frequently used menus such as photo album, messaging, and music menu. Users can also use [...]
“New technologies drive many of the new designs. One example: Synaptics ClearPad, a new type of touch screen that will become commercially available later this year. Unlike today’s touch screens, which aren’t entirely transparent and often not very sensitive—we’ve all had to endlessly tap one with a stylus to get a response—ClearPad is clear, so [...]
Another fabulous piece from Jan Chipchase about the repair cultures of emerging markets, along with some great photos.
“For consumers the informal repair culture is largely convenient, efficient, fast and cheap, reducing the total cost of ownership for people for whom a small drop in price may make the difference between having or not having a [...]
Google’s developed a system for listening to your television and serving up relevant content. What if my mobile devices had the capability to listen in on what was happening around me?
“A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computer’s internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a [...]
“Many of these issues are about solving the complexity problem: enabling lots of different features for lots of different users in lots of different cultures. Will tomorrow’s intuitive interfaces use RFID to allow us to interact with our environment in a more tangible manner, in a way similar to how people in cities like London [...]
Nicolas Nova comments on a column by Erik Holmquist on mobile interactions.
“Those who still worry about the “limited” interaction possibilities of mobile devices should note that all the applications mentioned above could be used on a standard mobile phone today (with small modifications). Yet at the same time they drastically expand the interaction parameters of [...]
“We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. The research questions we are [...]
From the first chapter of Mobile Interaction Design, by Matt Jones.
“Perhaps, though, the real issue is not whether mobile devices should focus mainly on communication or information processing. There is a broader concern – should one device try to do everything for a user or should there be specialized tools, each carefully crafted to support [...]
Published by Gabriel White.