Stuart Corner
Friday, 15 February 2008 05:28
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The challenges facing the makers of what were once simply mobile telephone handsets as they evolve and strive to be all things to all people has been a recurring theme of some of my recent blogs and news items. It's nice to see the 'father' of cellular telephony picking up on the same issues and pronouncing the 'handset' obsolete.
Marty Cooper lead the development of cellular telephony at Motorola, made the first call from a cellular handset and more recently founded ArrayComm, the company that brought you iBurst, the first commercial broadband mobile wireless technology (world's first commercial service launched in Sydney). This week he has been reported at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saying that the industry should move beyond the idea of the mobile 'handset'.
According to this report, in Wireless Week: http://www.wirelessweek.com/Cooper-Handset.aspx "Cooper said the term 'handset' should no longer be used. 'It's not a handset. It's a device that does what it's supposed to do naturally.' Instead, the phone – which is more than a 'phone' – should be identified by what it does, whether it be a music player, wireless camera or a life-saving device, he said."
He also is reported to have said that: the best technology is totally transparent to the end-user; that this is not the case with mobile phones - where the instruction manual may be bigger than the phone itself; and therefore, the industry still has much to do to improve the end-user experience.
How true. When HTC announced recently that Telstra was launching the new HTC Touch Dual on Next G, they gave me an evaluation unit. Without a manual. After struggling with it for a few days and getting rather frustrated (in all fairness I have never used a Windows Mobile device before) I asked for and received a manual: all 238 pages of it! Just 'Getting Started' (chapter 1) takes 36 pages.
The unpopularity of manuals, the difficulty of using higher value mobile services and the potential revenue that operators miss out on was the subject of
a recent survey by UK company SNAPin (whose software is designed to solve these problems and which has
just been bought by Vodafone for global deployment ).
