Previously I suggested using a digital picture frame to display messages from a PC, such as calendar reminders (see idea #87). The general idea is to grab the user’s attention via the “bump into effect”. An alternative approach is to play announcements through a radio, a bit like traffic alerts that break into the program. […]

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Previously I posted that operators are holding back their ability to create new business opportunities by effectively limiting innovation in their industry. This is because, unlike the Internet, a huge ocean of software innovators and entrepreneurs are shut out of the operators’ walled gardens. Operators need to find a way of courting innovators without breaking […]

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Many phones incorporate a “voice memo” feature that allows digital voice recordings to be made. However, often this feature is next to useless. To start with, open up the recordings folder and the user is often confronted by a long list of obscure file names, like 24200011.amr, 24200012.amr and so on. It’s like the old […]

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Previously I have argued for the ability to “dial a website”. At one time I suggested changing the UI on phones to incorporate a “connect” (”@”) button, as shown in the image on the left. Of course, some phones do incorporate a dedicated portal button to launch the operator’s home page in the browser with […]

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There are so many pink mobiles. When I posted a while back (pre pink-fad) about the idea of there being a “Women’s Mobile”, I said that I didn’t mean a mobile with flowers on, but that is exactly what Siemen’s latest “Poppy” design has. Things have moved on and we now have sites dedicated to […]

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Recently I wrote a conference paper for Motorola about using context-awareness to improve the end-user experience. Context awareness is about bringing any additional data, not generated by the application itself, into an application in order to enhance the user experience. For example, if I go to make a call to Fred, the “dialling app” on […]

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If you follow my list of blog ideas, you might remember a posting over a year ago that suggested that the primary UI for the handset should be a search box. This would combine on-device with off-device results and allow the search strings to be interpreted as both potential content searches or commands (e.g. lower […]

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Many in the mobile industry are realising that the idea of “mobile applications” as a category of software is losing its strength. At one point it seemed that a whole new software industry would arise around the mobile space. Of course, there are cases for mobile applications specialists, especially in verticals, but the trend now […]

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To promote greater use of mobile access to the web, operators could offer user-friendly charging schemes that allow a user cheaper access to their favourite websites. Using content-based charging techniques, it is possible to detect the traffic being requested from the mobile and to apply a specific charging rate to that traffic type. For example, […]

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