I first got a mobile phone when I was in my first year of A-Levels, this was in 1999. I remember the phone, it was a Siemens which nobody else at school had this made it quite an attraction when I first got it.
I could access wap sites on it when I was at work (at Halfords, good times) and I used it to check what was on TV. So when I returned from work I knew what I wanted to watch. I didn’t use it much beyond that apart from football scores.
Now 9 years on I have Nokia 6500 Classic. I love it for several reasons:
- It does everything I want it to do (everything I know I want it to do*)
- The battery last a good amount of time
- It’s realy slim so it fits in my pocket with no fuss
- I have dropped it several times and it hasn’t shown any sign of breaking
- The sounds quality is really good
- It looks really cool!
I has a couple of browsers built into it. One made by Nokia which serves Wap sites and Opera Mini which rebuilds website to fit them on a mobile screen.
I can’t however say I use it’s content delivery capabilities a dramatic amount more than I used to old my first phone.
I would not consider myself somebody who needs (thinks I need*) the news in my pocket or needs to update my facebook status from my mobile.
>>>>>>>>>> Goes off on one slightly
I have never updated my facebook status. Why do I need to tell all my friends that “David is going to watch the UFC on Saturday” Facebook is fun and I think it’s great for keeping in touch with friends and sharing photos etc but letting people know what I am doing during the day, it’s not for me.
From the brief amount of experimentation I have had with twitter I can see the benefits of status updates if the are contextualized and perhaps made from mobile devices. In business for example it would be productive for managers to have an idea of where their team is and what they are doing. Not so they can spy on them but so they can effectively manage them and make sure everybody is working but is also not overworked. Anyway I will probably do more thinking about this another time.
>>>>>>>>>> Stops going off on one slightly
Websites In Your Pocket
When do I use mobile sites?
- When I am at a live sports event. Half time at The Emirates I can get detailed stats about the game I am watching that I can’t get unless I go to see the TV’s and buy a pie or phone my dad. Brilliant!
- When I am not watching football and am stuck somewhere without Sky Sports News and want to know what’s going on in the premier league. I always use the BBC. Brilliant!
- I recently downloaded the Ladbrokes live betting application which gives me live odds on football and lets me bet using funds from the same account that I use on the Internet. Brilliant!
- When I at a train station and cant work out the timetable. Type in starting station, type in destination, get told when next train leaves. Brilliant!
- When I am waiting for a train and want to check the news I look at the BBC mobile site. Brilliant!
Even though I would not consider myself a heavy user of mobile websites when I do use them they are helpful and enabling services which I love using because the give me exactly what I want.
Where it all falls apart for me is the experience of moving between Networked and Mobile platforms. They are words apart and organized in a very bizarre fashion.
* If the experience of using my mobile device to access content like news and video was more cohesive and unified with the Internet then I would use it to access media more regularly and mobile for me would become as frequent a way to consume media and participate in the online community as the Internet allows me to do now.
The movement between on two platforms needs to become seamless, I should not need a new sign in name a new account or need to pay for the service. If it’s free it should be free everywhere if it’s paid for it should be paid for everywhere.
The two platforms are destined to come closer and closer and with advanced XHTML coding some sites will become much easier to mirror onto mobile through Opera mini and the like.
I also see mobiles carrying more widget based applications in future which grab certain element s of websites and port them onto mobile sites which provide users with more genuinely engaging experiences. Like those few which I currently enjoy.
- This is my first mobile post it’s thread I intend to think about more in the future. This is a kind of rough starting point as to where I think we are at the moment.
