idon’t care, istill love my iphone

the verizon/moto/android ‘idon’t’ ad attacking iphone misses the mark for me.

you clearly don’t get why ilove my iphone – revolutionize a category through product and interface design and imight learn to love you too:

microsoft’s vision of the future

after playing on microsoft’s surface i was left slightly underwhelmed – yes it’s cool but then not as cool as my iphone. however having seen this – courtesy of faris and thescrapbook – the future is definitely touch and the potential is mind-blowing:

branded utility through mobile apps

The growth in the development of mobile applications is throwing up some useful (and lots of not very useful) ideas for how we can/will integrate our mobiles even further with our daily lives.

Some things that have been talked about for years, like paying for car parking via your mobile, are now finally a reality in places like Edinburgh. And the integration of GPS adds another interesting dimension – from geo-tagging locations to locating the proximity of friends, buses or even satalites overhead.

Even applications like the one that turns the iphone into a metronome shows the diversity and simplicity of utility that the humble mobile phone can hold.

Add this to the existing inbuilt functionality such as cameras and mp3 players and the role our phones will play in our lives extends further and further.

I can now be listening to the radio (on my phone or not) and through an app I can identify the track I’m listening to, purchase it and download it to the music collection on my handset.

Or I can take a picture, add some text and send a personalised postcard to my friends from my phone. Whilst not necessarily groundbreaking, this does highlight a nicely joined up use of the functions already on my phone.

What’s interesting is that none of this development is coming from brands, yet. It is being fostered by the likes of Google and Vodafone but it must only be a matter of time before agencies and developers come together so something like the mobile postcard app comes from a Kodak.

If branded utility is the next big thing in marketing – there is a lot of potential utility but few brands are yet to be involved.

touch me

bill gates went on at ces about how touch screen technology will impact the future and it is interesting to see how already some internet sites are now being optimized for the iphone. at present this doesn’t go too much beyond stripping the content, reformatting the layout and increasing the hot-spots, much like with regular mobile interent sites. i’m sure this will change as smart young techies and designers think of interesting ways we can use our fingers to interact with digital info. it will be interesting also to see how the diversity of touch screens will change how we approach designing user interfaces and experiences. will we get used to manipulating information on screens with multiple simultaneous touches? this worked for bill gates designing a snowboard on a table-top display but would this work on a portable device that you have to hold in one hand? maybe, or maybe we will have to develop different experiences based on what the end users is doing and what they are doing it through, whether that be on mobile, table-top, out door display, laptop or tv. as the tv becomes an online interface and we continue to multitask through the same screen more e.g. watching tv whilst instant messaging, whilst shopping and keeping an eye on the news/shares etc, reading/writing email or whatever, we will want to be able to use a device to organise all this but from the comfort of our couch. therefore are remotes going to become tablet touch screens that will allow us to manipulate everything that is on the screen and enter data like a keyboard? or do i all ready have a device that can do that in my pocket if i can just sync up my iphone up to a web enabled tv.