I think it was about this point — maybe six weeks in — that I started to ‘get it’, as they say. To understand why mobile is quite so important. More important than computers and the Internet in many respects. You might disagree: I have, after all, been brainwashed by mysterious Finns in black suits. First published here, I may well come across as a little gushing in this piece, but they are ideas I certainly stand by and will expand on in upcoming pieces.
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A terrific blog post by Steven Hoober of Little Springs Design offered me inspiration this week. He starts:
Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It’s not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.
Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it’s fashionable. It’s not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.
Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people.
And he’s right. Everything that’s good about mobile technology is about the way it enhances our ability to be better human beings. We can communicate more often and more effectively. We can work more efficiently. We need never be alone. None of this technology matters for its own sake: it’s about what it lets us be and do.
I’d rather touch another person than the most incredible device imaginable. But that’s not to discount devices — and this is where I disagree slightly with Mr. Hoober. The amazing thing is that the device allows me to touch others, remotely. We become superhuman in our abilities with the aid of technology, but we don’t stop being human. People talk about the advent of augmented reality, but our reality is already augmented by the way our mobile devices allow us to do things people simply couldn’t twenty years ago.
When you leave your phone at home by mistake, that wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach isn’t because you might miss an important message. It’s because you’ve been stripped of your powers. It’s Superman faced with Kryptonite.
It’s easy to forget that when you work closely with new models and new technologies. We get hung up on how many megapixels or megahertz. And of course those things are important — but it’s like comparing the ability to jump 30 feet into the air with the ability to jump 35 feet. I’d rather have the latter, but hey — did you see how high that guy could jump?
Nokia’s tagline is ‘Connecting People’, because that’s what’s core to what it does. Mobile is not — ultimately — a technology business. It’s a business about making people’s lives better.
image credit: Xurble
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