Mobile feature oblivion and usability

So many handsets, only so many call/data plans what does one do? If you’re aged between 12 and 20 you look to your left and then the right and go with the flow, or do you? Most Gen Y girls today are opting for the "HipTop" handset over iPhone because that's what responds the best to UGC (user generated content) sites simply and looks nice with diamantes decorated around the screen offering the uniqueness factor.


It really doesn’t matter what demographic your in, most people will ignore, not understand or forget about a really cool feature that they saw on their new mobile handset in the shop. These features are carefully thought out and planned, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in research to bring to the market, sure they are probably from Korea using US study data however we should like and use them, correct?

Perhaps not, as most mobile handsets are ‘handed up’ in families, with the youth of today needing a new handset that mum or dad’s handset can’t compete with. There probably lies the Holy Grail in handset usability education, how scary! Voice is the killer application for copper and email for Internet and now Voice again wins on the mobile however SMS is up there with it. SMS is considered ‘data’ by most carriers and at the end of the day is an application where most applications today on the mobile will use GPRS or 3G, true data carriage.

In reality there are absolutely fantastic handset features that in many cases have been there for years that can literally run your life, and guess what they were born years before the iPhone arrived. Take for example SyncML which is the common language for synchronizing all devices and applications over any network. The reason most people freak-out when they loose their handset is not because of the cost of the hardware, it is the value of the content that was held in it, maybe “content IS king” after all. If people knew that with two clicks on most handsets all that data can be backed up within probably 10 seconds for free, securely online (Web) the world would be a different place.

What about when you sit down next to your work or home PC terminal and it syncs any notes, appointments, to-do’s with your Outlook/Notes you may have entered in you handset in the cab or while you were at lunch. This is all possible and has been for a while, even things like controlling a PowerPoint presentation on a big screen remotely from you phone has been available for over a year.

The point is that there are many features that handsets possess that people are oblivious to, and this is a key factor in driving mobile digital into the next decade. Many features and applications are out there and in many cases can be sent to your handset from the Web. The Internet is now open on the 4th screen, start enjoying it, although you may want to purchase that second battery.