Will our mobile phones continue to evolve at the rate they have done over the last fifteen years? Most technology sort of runs out of steam after a while. Computers today aren’t really much better than they were five years ago, for example. Televisions haven’t particularly improved for about ten years. However, there are some reasons to believe that mobiles have a bit more scope for improvement than those things.

Like all the other recent posts, this piece first appeared in the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

I remember the day in (I believe) 2002 when one of my colleagues arrived in the office with one of the first mobile phones with a colour screen. It was the Nokia 3510i. A crowd of us gathered in awe of its one-inch, 12-bit colour display. He then stunned us all by reading out the latest headlines from the BBC, courtesy of the GPRS WAP browser.

Immediately, all our monochrome devices — the standard office issue was the Nokia 3310 — looked like steampunk antiques, relics of a much earlier era.

That’s how it is with technology, particularly if you work in the sector. The new minimum specification seems to have a screen larger than 3-inches, an 8-megapixel camera, gigabytes of storage and a processor that could outplay Deep Blue. Next year, it will respond to thought commands and project a four-metre holographic display. The year after, phones will have become sentient beings and they’ll be telling you who to call.

Or will they? Not the robot uprising thing, but the idea that phones will become ever more powerful devices. Sometimes I am sceptical. There surely comes a point where further improvements actually become gimmicks.

In my opinion, for example, televisions stopped evolving usefully quite some time ago. The innovations in recent years — 3D, yet more speakers, screens bigger than your wall — probably appeal to a lot of people, yet for me, don’t add a lot to the core proposition of watching the TV. Similarly, computer keyboards, mice, desk fans, toasters, kettles and hairdryers. They’ve reached a natural end-point for improvement. People come up with new twists on these things, but they don’t really seem to take off.

The other side of this, though, the more optimistic side, is to make the point that all those things are single-use devices. Smartphones, by their definition, are converged devices. They’re a phone and camera, an entertainment console, a laptop, a television and a music system. When you look at that way, there’s still years to go, even at the breathtaking rate at which the technologies are being improved.

There’s a back-to-basics school of thought which says, “Ian, look, I’ve still got my Nokia 3310 from 2001 and it does the job.” But when I hear that, I pick up my phone, put on my headphones and watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica in HD.

image credit: Tarter Time Photography

The idea of mobile as a media platform is both very modern — by definition, it couldn’t have been conceived of before about 1985 and colour screens didn’t arrive until the mid-90s. But it’s also something that people seem to have been banging on about for ages, without anything in particular happening. At the start of every year, we’ve been reading “this year mobiles become an entertainment and information hub” in everyone’s list of predictions. At the risk of ridicule in a year’s time, I think it’s going to happen in 2011.

It was originally delivered as part of the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

Mobile is widely recognised as being the seventh mass media — after the web, television, cinema, radio, print and sound recordings. It’s also thought to eclipse each of those because of its unique advantages.

Mobile is more widely spread than any other media. There’s already far more mobile phones in circulation than there are televisions or radios. Mobile phones are found in places where they’ve never seen a newspaper.

It’s also a personal and personalisable media channel. Your phone and what appears on it is yours. Many people form intense attachments to their phones, as we’ve discussed before. And it’s always with you and — pretty much — always switched on. Increasingly, we’re discovering ways that mobile content can be contextualised to the time and location in which it’s being viewed.

So it’s very powerful stuff. Potentially.

Sadly, though, when you look at what is actually available, the experience leaves a lot to be desired. Sites that aren’t readable on mobile devices. Sites that are, but have achieved this by stripping out everything that was interesting about the site in the first place. Web-connected apps that take ages to load and don’t do as much as the websites they replicate. Even the really, really good mobile sites offer an experience that’s way behind the other ways that exist to engage with the media they present.

Why’s this? Partly, it’s because mobile is still very new — people haven’t developed the grammar of mobile media in the same way that conventions have been honed over time for other media. It simply takes time and experimentation.

Partly, it’s because of device fragmentation. A mobile site that’s made with the Nokia N8 in mind probably won’t look so good on your Nokia 3210, and vice-versa. And that’s without people’s bizarre insistence on occasionally buying models from other manufacturers…

And partly it’s because mobile is still treated as secondary by media owners. They’ve made a website — and it took a lot of time and money. Rather than starting again for mobile, they’d much prefer to repurpose what they’ve already got.

Exactly the same thing happened when the Web arrived. Media owners took their existing assets, be it words, sounds or pictures, and dumped them into HTML files. It’s taken twenty years for even a handful of websites to start taking advantage of the interaction and personalisation that the Web offers, let alone to start developing interfaces that people can actually use.

So will it take another twenty years for mobile media to develop its potential? Maybe. But the Web has matured a lot faster than it took television to mature — about 30 years. And television matured a lot faster than cinema — 40 years. We’re getting more adaptable, I think, and the inevitability and opportunity presented by new media is becoming welcome rather than feared.

I think that mobile mass media will start reaching maturity in the next two to three years. Exciting times ahead.

image credit: Kapungo

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

One of the main bones of contention when it comes to comments on the Nokia blog is product launch dates. Put simply, they are always either too early or too late. Too late because some people want to buy the products as soon as they’re announced, and any launch date thereafter is wrong. Too early, because sometimes there are bugs and they have to be fixed with firmware updates, both of which are, in some people’s minds, evidence of gross negligence. I tried to tackle some of the demands for an early release in this piece, which first appeared here.

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In the world of the Web, the expression “release early and often” has gained a lot of currency. It refers to the way web companies like Google and Yahoo! seem to have a brand new product every week. Smaller companies are in on it too. If you read blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch, you’ll find new, often innovative web services every single day. They’re labelled ‘beta’ — because they might not work the way you expect. But they’re often free, so nobody can complain too much.

Another way this is sometimes put is “fail early, fail often”. The advice makes a lot of sense when it comes to particular types of product. Try to do something. Put it out there. If it works, then great, and if it doesn’t, try again. But keep moving quickly so you can retain first-mover advantage over your competition. If your service isn’t evolving, it’s suggested, then it is decaying.

This philosophy seems to work very well in some markets. It’s probably not great advice when it comes to making phones, though.

When people buy a phone on contract, they’re making a big investment. Currently, 24-month contracts at £30 a month or more are common for smartphones in the UK. That’s £720 for your phone. Depending on the model you choose, there might be an additional payment up-front.

When you’re making that sort of investment, then you don’t want a product that’s been released early. You want something that works as advertised, out of the box. Getting a new phone is a big decision: you want to feel justified that you’ve done the right thing. You want to be able to pat yourself on the back for being so clever, not worry that you may have got it wrong this time.

Then there’s also the fact that phones are made of metal, glass and electronics. If you don’t get those right from the start, then the product is ruined. You can’t download a patch for a wonky catch or a flickering screen. Of course, firmware upgrades can upgrade or improve some aspects of your phone — and they’re very welcome — but getting something that doesn’t work right in the first place is a definite no-no when it comes to big purchases.

But where this Web 2.0 philosophy of continual releases and upgrades does work very well is in extra services. Things you weren’t paying for that you get for free. For example, no-one who bought a Nokia smartphone before January this year expected to be given voice navigation through Ovi Maps for free. But that’s what many of them got. It’s not only nice to be gifted something valuable by the people who made your phone, it makes you like them more and means that you’re more likely to come back to them when the next contract is due.

So yes, release early and often. But only when it comes to the added extras.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

Over the spring and summer, we ran a campaign called ‘Design by Community’, in which members of the Nokia blog’s community voted for their ideal mobile phone, having been given some ideas of the constraints that actually apply to manufacturers.

It was a massive success, with hundreds of thousands of votes cast and intense discussions on the virtues of various design decisions. This piece was a slightly meddlesome and contrary reminder that asking the users is one part of the design process.

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There are two schools of thought when it comes to canvassing other people’s opinions on designs, and they both have strong arguments behind them. Many of these were aired when we unveiled the draft sketches of the Design by Community concept device.

On the one hand, some people would prefer that design was left up to experienced, professional designers. After all, they’re trained and paid to do the job, and know how to balance the hardware requirements with appearances. They are also responsible for having some sort of design vision, so that the whole thing fits together properly. What’s more, they might argue, if you ask 1000 people, then you’ll get 1000 answers and the product ends up compromised, trying to balance too many wishes at once. Design classics aren’t voted on, they say: they come from inspired vision and expertise.

Those are good points, but the other side of the story is that locking your designers in a room until they’ve come up with a new phone model isn’t going to work either. Phones aren’t just electronic sculptures, they are also business ventures. If you haven’t done some homework, then your venture will fail. You need to know what people want from their phones, what’s seen as fashionable and how much people are prepared to pay. You don’t need to be a slave to that, otherwise nobody would ever come up with anything new, but in-depth market knowledge is definitely one ingredient of a successful new model.

The other thing to point towards is the power and capability of the Open Source movement. Most of the Internet is made by unpaid contributors sharing their knowledge and craft for free, both the content and the technology behind it. Wikipedia is arguably the greatest repository of knowledge that humanity has ever created, and it was done without payment. Large numbers of people can and do group together to produce really excellent things. Jimmy Wales might be the architect of Wikipedia, but he hasn’t written a meaningful proportion of its content. It’s Encyclopedia by Community.

What I think is that the truth probably lies somewhere between these extremes. Artistic vision and a tight focus are really important parts of product design. But so is understanding, anticipating and researching what it is that people want. That’s a big part of why we wanted to conduct the Design by Community project. So we can unravel together the current state of people’s expectations, learn a little bit more about the ingredients of a successful product and hopefully influence the path of future devices.

picture credit: arquera

Daring Fireball is a blog, but there are no comments.

Post Secret is a blog, but every entry is by someone different.

Stephen’s Web is a blog although it largely eschews the chronological structure thing.

There are conventions – reverse chronology, comments and authorship – but not so many rules.

So is there no difference between a blog and a website?

It’s the typical genre question. Does awkward example X belong in genre Y? Are Coldplay rock or pop? Indie, MOR or mainstream?

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter whether your somewhat-journally-website is a proper blog or not. All that matters is that is that it’s a good read and/or you enjoy doing it.

So maybe that’s what distinguishes the blog. That the people/person behind it cares about the content, not its context.

Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different — for about five minutes.

This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.

This is how I started.

I like the functionality of the Hybrid theme for WordPress. It’s got tons of page templates, plugin-compatibility and SEO right out of the box. So let’s start there.

It’s built for designers, and one consequence of that is that it looks a bit drab when you use it ‘naked’. The author, Justin Tadlock, encourages people to develop child-themes. For a while, I used his Structure template, which I customised very slightly to allow for full posts on the home page and the spaceman picture that I stole from the wonderful artist Jeremy Geddes.

Then I managed to break that, while trying to upgrade something else. I know how I broke it, and I could go back. But the breakage made me feel that I ought to be doing something else. That I should be trying to make something of my own.

So I reinstalled Hybrid and created a child-theme. This means that it takes everything Hybrid has to offer, but then gives you a blank canvas at the same time. By a blank canvas, I mean a new CSS file that can override every element in the theme.

Looking around recently, I liked the look of a theme called Clean Simple White. Up to a point. I liked the clean and simple bit, but there seemed to be loads of lines all over the place (according to my simple aesthetic sensibilities). It also didn’t work with the pages I’d already made and I like serifs for body copy — sue me.

So, I thought, I could take some of that look and remake it with Hybrid. You have to learn a tiny bit of CSS (this site makes it really easy) and you really want the Firebug extension for Firefox for testing and stealing things. And then it’s just trial and error.

I’m quite pleased with the look so far, but it’s maybe a bit wide and I want my spaceman back — maybe as a sort of ghost image behind the header area. Let’s see how we go.

Blogs are dead, right? The cool kids are all doing micro-messaging and video instead? They’re missing out on a world of value, if that’s the case.

I’ve been swotting up on mobile as fast as I can — the industry, companies, technology, the apps scene, for obvious reasons. And one of my most valuable sources is Tomi Ahonen’s blog.

Over the last couple of days, a terrific debate has emerged between Tomi and Steve Largent, the president of America’s CTIA, its leading mobile association. Here’s the highlights so far:

• Tomi lambasts the US mobile industry, claiming despotic activity.
• Steve punches right back — Tomi’s facts are wrong, he claims.
• Tomi redoubles his efforts — with a swift right-hook to Largent’s stats and a belly-punch to his argumentation.
• How will Steve come back in the second round? Is the fight over for the plucky Yank? Only time will tell.

This is bloody fascinating. It’s also long-form, packed with facts and learning for people like me and basically a great testimony to the art of the blog. You cannot do this stuff in any other format.

It’s nearly two weeks old now, but Nick Carr wrote an article at the end of May which caused a lot of people to stop and think, or otherwise lash out with the sort of outrage at which the Web is best – the over-exaggerated kind.

He was writing about the use of hyperlinks in articles on the Web and their effect on reading and readers. The nub of what he was saying was:

People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

The problem, as Carr sees it, is that hyperlinks – while being very useful and convenient in all sorts of ways – prevent people from reading properly. We start reading, hit a link and *boom* there’s a good chance that we’re suddenly on an entirely different page. I think we’re all aware this happens – it certainly does to me. We quickly developed an expression, ‘surfing’, to describe the speed of movement across the web from site to site. That feeling at the end of a session that you’ve read an awful lot of things, but aren’t quite sure you remember what any of them were.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Hyperlinks have many purposes but might roughly be divided into traffic directions and footnotes. In blog writing discourse, of course, there’s a further layer of extra linking – the nods to one’s colleagues, the helpful pointers to the wikipedia article on the subject, the indications of where you’ve written about it before. These undoubtedly add to the level of distractability, but let’s stick with traffic signs and footnotes for now.

When you go to a lot of pages, you’re looking for the traffic directions – click here to get the thing you want. In blog articles, some of the hyperlinks are traffic signals – X’s article is well-worth reading in full. Some of them are footnotes – we saw a similar thing when *IBM did this* in the 90s. Like footnotes in a book, you might go and have a look immediately, if you’re especially interested in that particular matter; or you might ignore them because you’re engrossed in the material at hand.

So there’s an ambiguity to hyperlinks, I think. We’re used to them saying ‘click here’, but sometimes what they’re really saying is ‘you might want to click here later, or open it in a new tab’. This learned behaviour and ambiguity makes it tricky to concentrate on a piece of writing on the Web, to a greater extent than it is with printed materials.

Where I am less supportive of Carr’s argument is in the deduction that all this distraction is an unalloyed evil:

• Yes, we’re less likely to get to the end of a piece of writing, but that’s not such a bad thing. A lot of essays, papers and books have said everything they are going to say in their first quarter. The rest is further examples and filling – business books are especially guilty of this. Blog posts are often repetitive and unnecessary: spinning two minute’s thought into 500 words.
• There might be a really productive aspect to this, that the first words of what a writer says sets you spinning with your own, original, tangentially related thoughts. Following those new thoughts is easier now. Being smart is as much about this, surely, as it is with digesting the content of learned tomes?
• Arguably, the Web is teaching us a new way of thinking that is less about knowledge in depth and more about making connections. What you say now reminds me of something else and I follow that and the further connections that follow from that. You might say that I’m surfing over the shallows, but I might respond that I’ve covered a lot more ground. The generalist has as much to offer as the specialist, in many areas (though perhaps not brain surgery).

Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18–29 year-old cohort and those aged 30–45. Maybe one thing you might reasonably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expression ‘silent’ come from for over-65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-year-olds.

On a related note, in a research round-up from e-Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-groups, there’s the suggestion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respondents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18–25.

Perhaps comfortingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but nonetheless less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-for-benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.