I've come to London to attend the Mobile Research Conference. My goal is figure out whether mobile has a place in my business any time soon. We've been calling mobile phones to overcome coverage problems for a few years now but I keep wondering whether there is more there that I'm missing. Or is it a cool solution in search of a problem?
Literally decades ago I knew a telecom guy who used to say that voice mail was the usability disaster that it is because the device just was never meant to do more than dial a telephone number. I can't imagine how text messaging ever got off the ground with anyone other than people with lots of time and patience, that is, before mobiles came equipped with real keyboards. And while web-enabled phones have opened up new doors the screen is so small, the response time so slow, and the proportion or users who actually have Internet access so low that it's hard to see how this goes mainstream anytime soon. So, yes, I see it as a classic niche application and probably in a niche where we currently don't do work.
But I am ready to be convinced otherwise. It's a shame that I have to come all the way to London to hear the latest and greatest, but I am sucking it up.
Comments
2 responses to “Mobile Research Conference 2010”
I think for now it will be a niche but that would be for the United States.
I would assume this conference is being done (2nd year) in London because outside of the US, people are fundamentally using their mobiles more and slightly different than we do here in the US (although we ARE catching up in spite of the US telecom industry’s archaic view of data usage and billing plans)
Where I can see the benefits are on downloaded applications to smart phones used to speed up the time it takes to get F2F International data collected and delivered. The need for speed is global and paper & pencil to keypunch to cleaning to availability just cannot be made any quicker at this point. Remove the paper/keypunch bit and the interviewers fumbling around with showcards and 50 page surveys and fieldtime and data delivery drop significantly.
I also think that for some segments of the population (as this wouldn’t be representative) you can get some nice Point-of-purchase data possibly.
I think mobile devices are more useful because you can access email at all times and that makes communication more agile. It is better to write to a person directly to access the voicemail.