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I'll be teaching a "WAP Design" full-day course in London and New York this December.
This course is for designers who want to know how to design for today's phones, using today's mobile browsers. It is filled with examples and exercises geared to ready designers for immediate success.
WAP Design includes XHTML, CSS, and .mobi issues in a designer-focused course covering the following topics:
* WAP Overview
* WAP, including XHTML, CSS, and .mobi
* Successful and Unsuccessful WAP Sites
* Requirements Gathering for Design
* Competitive Analysis of Desktop and Mobile Web Sites
* Mobile Design Patterns
* Expert Design Guidelines
* WAP Design Toolbox
* Wireframing
* Paper Prototyping
More Info
Register for London: 3 December, 2007
Register for New York: 11 December, 2007
 Widgets are small, single-purpose, highly graphical and interactive Internet-enabled applications. Apple's Dashboard for OS X was the commercial pioneer of the widget phenomenon, though MIT's Project Athena was the actual inventor, back in the 1980s. (See the Wikipedia entry on GUI_Widget for more information.)
Widget engines are the technology platforms on which widgets are deployed, the most well-known of which is Widsets, a well-funded Nokia spin-off with no monetization model in sight. While Widsets is available for free download, it only works on the latest smart phones. Furthermore, Widsets requires download and installation procedures likely to baffle most mobile phone users, and which could be costly for mobile phone users without all-you-can-eat data plans.
The one operator-deployed widget solution is Celltop from Alltel, a regional US operator. The left softkey label on the idle screen is "Celltop," which launches the widget engine, reputed to be UI One from Qualcomm. The engine starts with a branded animation and sound effect, lasting several seconds. Celltop emerges, with two side-by-side applications, each laid atop a subtly three-dimensional gradient bubble See http://mycelltop.com for a sexed-up demo of the experience, though you should know that though Celltop looks like the demo, it's not nearly as responsive.
Each Celltop widget is a single data application. Several "cells" ship with a new Celltop handset, including Inbox, Call List, Weather, and different sports, including Rodeo. Celltop has two modes, Navigation, and Application. In Navigation mode, one can slide the display left and right between the subscribed widgets, with an associated "whoosh" sound effect. Pressing the center select button enters Application mode, where the selected widget expands to take up the entire display. Widgets update automatically in either mode, though in Application mode, more data is obviously visible. In an as-yet unreleased Usable Products Company study of Celltop, updates were sluggish, and the data was sometimes stale. The Search cell is not yet available.
Celltop sets a low standard, being the first deployed solution. However, there are non-deployed solutions from several providers, including Nokia's Widsets, Mobidgets, BluePulse, Openwave's MIDAS, Opera Widgets, and the just announced Microsoft spin-off, Zen Zui. All have received some amount of hype.
Come to MAPOS in San Francisco 26 – 28 June, 2007 to learn more about mobile widgets, and attend a very special workshop devoted to widgets that I will be moderating. This workshop is an exciting full-day strategy session that starts by teaching the background, advantages, and challenges of each of the major platforms. It continues with group design sessions for widgets on today's—and tomorrow's phones. It wraps up with a round table discussion on policies and pricing: what should widgets cost, and also their use on a regular basis. The brightest minds in mobility will be there, so please join us! Email me to receive a 25% discount from Informa on the MAPOS US event.
I met with Beth Marcus, Zeetoo's CEO. Zeetoo is a platform technology for Bluetooth-connected, battery-operated smart peripherals. Beth showed me a key fob and several game controllers. At first I was skeptical, but both were super compelling. The key fob (pictured at left) works with a GPS-enabled mobile phone to mark the spot where you park your car, simply by locking the car with the key fob. When the driver returns from an errand, he or she simply presses the unlock button to launch a mapping application on the phone that directs the driver to the car. There are obviously some use case problems with the solution, such as when the driver doesn't want to launch the application, but the concept is brilliant. I'll post some design revisions in a future blog entry. Email me your suggestions. I saw RFID-based object finding technologies at Mobile HCI last year, but this tech is much nicer. There's a fun video on Zeetoo's site that illustrates the concept.
 The Zeemote device duplicates navigation and other button functions of the handset. Zeetoo plans joystick, trackball, and Wii type control with accelerometers. The two areas of Zeetoo's initial focus are games and Location-Based Services (LBS). Pairing seemed trivial, and Zeetoo's target is under 30 seconds.
Zeemotes will be available in small numbers in the Fall, and in mass in 2008. Street prices are expected to start at $29.95, which could include a game or game demos, up to $49.95. Including an SD slot on the unit would increase price, but would tremendously expand the applications possible. Zeetoo's technology has been fully tested on 44 different phones so far. They expect the technology to work on all newer Nokia and Motorola phones, numbering in the hundreds of models. So far, Zeetoo has targeted Java and Windows Mobile, with hope for BREW soon. If I were them, I'd target all the fun phones that Helio supports, and try to get an exclusive to build the brand. I bet Zeetoo devices will increase mobile gaming sales—that would be a fun correlational story.
The Zeetoo pairing process installs software that sets up the controller--a seamless installation without any need for further customization. Each controller has a unique ID, so crosstalk won't be a problem. New game ideas could utilize multiple Zeemotes for the same phone. This technology could be used for console gaming when enough controllers are not available. I can imagine cinematic gaming in a movie theater where dozens or even hundreds of people are playing at the same time, taking interactive entertainment to the next level.
IMS is the Internet protocol Multimedia Subsystem, which is for GSM. For CDMA, the analogous system is MMD. This conference, unlike the World Handset Forum, was about what’s coming—not what’s “now” or what’s “new.”
IMS phones will be Internet appliances, for which voice will be a single application. Other applications could be live television, instant messaging, or a shopping tool for new music downloads. The conference was about infrastructure, technology, user experience, and getting to know the players, both the vendors and the buyers.
IMS has several UE considerations:
1. Pricing of application services, data, and voice
2. Cost conveyance to the consumer
3. Policy management: digital rights, pathways (SMS vs. email vs. IM…), moving identity from a personal device to another device, either another personal device or a shared public device (like from a mobile to a TV, either in the home or in a hotel).
There's a lot more after the break...
Continue reading "IMS/MMD 2006" »
 Snow will be the new screen candy on mobile phones, since there are few options for broadcasting content to phones: place shifting, one-to-one, one-to-many, and RF broadcast. RF broadcast, good old TV without cable, appears to be the most likely distribution mechanism, since with the digital broadcast, only a few simultaneous streams per cell can be transmitted. And with such a tiny device, there's not much of an antenna. Ergo, snow. Presentations from Informa Telecoms, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments informed this entry.
Mark Burk, a Research Analyst at Informa Telecoms, suggested that handsets for mobile TV will cost $150 more than existing 3G handsets. He said that 43% of the cost to consumers for mobile TV will be the handset for the 18-month period of the typical contract. He also said that consumers were willing to spend $10-15 per month for these services. I ask, what’s Mark been smoking?
Place shifting is the technical name for video podcasting, as users would choose what programs to watch and simply download them to their phones. This choice is a bandwidth constraint that will ultimately fail, unless it’s done through a USB cable or Bluetooth/WiFi to the home or work broadband connection.
One-to-one and one-to-many are cellular transmission of mobile content. This strategy could fail, since cellular sites can at most handle three or four simultaneous broadcasts, even with EVDO Rev. A and HSDPA deployments.
Broadcast using radio frequency (RF) technology will turn mobile phones into television receivers, giving them two radios. This concept makes the most sense, as it doesn’t impact the cellular network in any way. The challenge here is broadcast quality and spectrum allocation, both of which will be tremendous issues. The program guide and other content will stream via the cellular network. I see snow on screens in the future—isn’t that a step backward?
The program guide can also combine the three broadcast methods, not necessarily even indicating which is in use. The biggest usability challenge stated by all of the speakers is the channel change time, which is longer than three seconds.
Paul Scanlan, COO & Co-Founder of MobiTV spoke about the future of mobile TV.
2004: <1 FPS with MJPEG, then 5-7 FPS with MJPEG, GPRS & 1X-RTT
2005: 12-17 FPS, MPEG, GPRS/EDGE/EVDO
2006: 15-30 FPS, MPEG, UMTS/EVDO
I’m looking forward to 2007. MobiTV has a new, sexy program guide (EPG), which has up-sell area above the programming content, which they showed on the Sprint service. While watching content, they scroll up-sell opportunities for ring tones, voting (using premium SMS), and what appears to be sponsorship banner ads.
MobiTV monitors the broadcast traffic, down to each cell site. The Michael Jackson verdict was the most popular day in their history.
MobiTV believes in WiMAX as the future.
Cost Implications of Mobile TV & Video
David Carey, President and CTO of Portelligent gave a fascinating presentation about the cost implications of mobile TV and video on handsets. It seems to be about $60 for the Bill of Materials, though Mark Burk earlier said $150 to the end user. Portelligent creates "tear down" studies of handsets, where they "kill them gently," taking them apart and lovingly photographing every aspect of the design. The biggest costs didn't appear to be the chips, but the complicated double hinging mechanisms for the displays.
 I met with Tucker Snedeker, VP of Mobile Business Development of Bluestreak, who demonstrated Bluestreak’s technology, which runs even of 50 MIPS processors with less than a megabyte of memory. It competes with Adobe/Macromedia’s FlashLite player, and runs SWF files natively. Bluestreak’s primary successes in the past three and a half years have been with cable TV set top box deployments, and they are now pushing into mobile.
Bluestreak is not a FlashLite player, but can read and run Flash files. It’s a multimedia engine that “just happens to support the Flash format.” It is also an ECMA script engine. FlashLite 1.1 is not supported, but instead Flash as web developers know it, a more robust, capable scripting engine with a Flash 7 development profile. ActionScript is a mirror image of ECMA script.
Bluestreak leverages the Flash authoring environment with a set of tools that plug in and enhance the authoring environment especially for mobile deployment. Bluestreak does not support every feature, such as Flash Video—FLV. Instead, 3GPP, Windows Media, and other standards are supported by Bluestreak.
 Bluestreak is deployed on Orange for their Orange World TV, a 52-channel live streaming TV service, launched in February 2006. Also, Bluestreak supports Orange’s League One soccer product. Tucker demonstrated the Orange World product, and it was fast, smooth, and played video like a champ. He even showed me a rich SMS authoring application, proving their tight integration with native phone functions.
The key advantage of Bluestreak is terrific performance even on very low end hardware, with a truly attractive price point.
 Haptics is the technical term for adding the sense of touch to a human-machine interface. In a mobile phone context, the simplest implementation is full-fidelity vibration. Immersion Corporation in San Jose, California, is the world leader in haptics technology. I met with Jeff Eid, VP of Mobility Business Development at Immersion Corporation. He demonstrated Immersion’s latest deployments of touch technology in mobile telephone handsets from Samsung, shipping through ten operators around the globe today, including Orange and T-Mobile in Europe, Verizon, Sprint and Alltel in the US, SKT and KTF in S. Korea, and China Mobile.
According to Eid, “Immersion’s full-fidelity vibration, called VibeTonz, has found its initial application in gaming. With the advent of music handsets, we expect the technology to be used more widely to identify callers through vibration-enhanced ringtones. We see additional applications in mobile user interfaces to enhance things like the use of touch screens and various alerts.”
Touch screens offer no affordances for when buttons are pressed. People touch the screen and don’t feel anything. Haptics is an almost magical solution to that problem, offering force feedback to indicate to the user the button action is initiated. Button size too small? Make it larger. Too much information to fit on two soft keys? Add buttons to the screen.
 Gaming: Highway Racer from Pulse Interactive is a fast paced motorcycle game deployed through BREW on Samsung N330 handset from Verizon. When the accelerator (2 digit) is pressed, the driver can feel the acceleration. Similarly, driving off-road feels rougher than driving on the road, and crashing feels like a thundering explosion.
Contact Jeff Eid for information about Immersion’s haptic technology.
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