3GSM 2007
Wednesday, February 28th, 20073GSM this year was big. This year, there were an estimated 55,000 visitors and 1,300 exhibitors. That’s a lot of booths to look at and a lot of swag to collect. Naturally, most of the freebies were pens. But at least some of them were very nice pens.
As for the products on display, there were a few highlights and a lot of “do what everyone else is doing” filler. There was a concerted focus on content to mobile and we saw a lot of content providers of video, music, and games. Some other observations and cool things I saw:
1. Phones as fashion
There is a continuing trend toward mobile phones as high fashion. We all know about the iPhone and how pretty it is. (Interestingly, although there was no Apple presence at 3GSM, I could still feel the impact of the iPhone in what other companies were saying and how the iPhone raised the bar for what a mobile device should be). At 3GSM, LG had their Prada phone on display and it looks great. Apparently, fashionable phone focus interaction through a touch screen, because like the iPhone, the Prada phone did this too. Seriously, though, the multi-touch screen really intrigues me and I think there will be some great interaction advances with this technology.
2. Great customer experience
I was fortunate to be able to hear a keynote session entitled “How mobile can be the next great information and entertainment channel.” The speakers were Edgar Bronfman Jr. - Chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, Lucy Hood - CEO of Jamba, and Mika Salmi - President of MTV Networks Global Digital Media. Naturally, they all stressed the massive market potential for distributing content through mobile. But that’s easy to see. What really struck me was how emphatically they all stressed the importance of providing a great customer experience. They’re right, this is a tremendous challenge, given the technology and form factors that they’re dealing with. Both the delivery mechanisms and the receiving devices provide significant hurdles to a good user experience.
Eventually, it will happen, but my impression on hearing the talks was that in their minds, customer experience meant letting users have the content that they want when they want it. There wasn’t much attention given to how people should be experiencing all of this content on the device itself. How do you discover things? How to you manage your content? How do you facilitate social behavior and sharing? Let’s not forget that distributing the right content is critical, but it’s just as important to be able to do things easily with it after you have it.
3. Input technologies
I’m particularly interested in users’ physical relationships with their devices, so the area of input technologies is of great interest to me. There were some nice developments on display at 3GSM.
Qix is a search application that allows you to search of content on your device from the main idle screen. I like this idea a lot, partly because I had suggested it to a client during a project last year. But it just makes a lot of sense to me. Usage of Google makes it clear that the primary UI to the desktop web is via a text search. It doesn’t really matter how things are organized, or what types of content they are. Users just want to find what they’re looking for. So why not let them do this from the idle screen, the first thing they see when they look at their phone?
There are just a handful of primary tasks that users will be doing with their phone a vast majority of the time: dial a number, pull up a contact address to call or message, or find a specific piece of information or content. All of these involve key entry, so why not make that the primary interaction and let the device be intelligent about what kind of key entry is occurring?
These are new keypad layouts that allow nearly full keyboard to exist in small form factors by placing alphabetical keys in the spaces between the numerical keys. It works quite well and could be a nice way to let users type without cumbersome predictive methods like T9.
Avago has a physical scroll wheel that is starting to appear on some phones. Previous devices like the iPod, Clio, and iPaq have shown how powerful a wheel can be as an input control. Giving users an infinite, analog control makes navigating large lists so much easier than using discrete button presses, and with mobile, everything seems to be presented in long lists. The success of such input methods are tightly coupled with the effectiveness of the visual display, so it’s not an automatic answer, but it can help a lot.
The One Laptop Per Child project has gotten a lot of press and attention over the past year. I saw one of the computers in person for the first time at 3GSM and I’m amazed with what they’ve done. Not only is it really cool technology, it’s a wonder of industrial and user experience design.
Flexible display technology is here. Polymer Vision spun out from the flex display research at Philips and they had their Readius product on display at 3GSM. As with most first-generation products, this one has some issues. The form factor doesn’t feel quite right and I’m not sure the pixels per inch is where it needs to be for mass consumer adoption. But it’s still a very promising technology and putting large displays in small form factors will undoubtedly lead to exciting advances in mobile experiences.
