Mobile metaphors...

It is my impression that very few people seem to have a view of what a mobile device should do. This seems to be because it is seen as a telephone and hence if you're not in the telephony business, there's little point in thinking about mobile devices.

Is there an alternative perspective to looking at mobile devices as being necessarily communication devices?

We usually see the future of mobile as essentially an evolution of mobile telephony. Our terminology supports this view, which is why we talk of generations, like 2G, 2.5G, 3G and now 3.5G and 4G. More recently, was also envisage an evolution of something we think of as "mobile internet", although it is still not clear what we mean by this (or what we should mean).

Is there another way of thinking about mobile devices that might lead to different product and service notions?

In essence, the mobile phone is arguably the first wearable computer. It is a computing device and it is "worn" by most of us, even young people. It is programmed primarily to compute control and voice vectors that enable it to act as a telephone.

However, most of the time, this computing device is stuck in a loop that essentially says "do nothing....until time for a phone call"...

In other words, we carry ("wear") these computing devices all day long and most of the time they do "nothing".

What if we asked people the question "imagine that you carry a computer around all day long that can do things for you....what might you want it to do?" Would this allow us to arrive at a different set of answers from the question "what can you do with a mobile phone?"


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