January 2006
Playing to win in the handset market
Motorola is currently enjoying the fruits of a design-led renaissance prompted by the iconic status of its RAZR line-up. RAZR products have become the handsets of choice by virtue of their eye-catching industrial design, edgy marketing and their …
The RIM experience
Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company behind the Blackberry mobile email solution, has been embroiled in an ongoing patent dispute with a small US company called NTP for some years now. The courts have repeatedly found in favour of NTP a…
Toy story
There was an interesting article on Reuters today, looking at some of the activities underway at toy company Fisher Price. It strikes me the toy industry is undergoing something of a transformation as toys transition from objects which imitate ad…
Advertising – mission or exploration?
One of the questions I have been thinking about a lot in bringing together the speaking programme for the next PMN Mobile User Experience conference relates to advertising; specifically, the fundamental differences between capturing users’ attenti…
A brief thought on .mobi
Setting aside the ongoing debate about the necessity for a dedicated mobile domain suffix, why has the industry chosen a lengthy and difficult-to-enter character string like M-O-B-I. There are so many other letter combinations which would be easi…
The bigger picture with mobile TV
There has been extensive press coverage over the last few days of two mobile broadcast trials in the UK. Virgin and BT Movio reported the results of their DAB-based test while O2 and Arqiva shared the findings of their DVB-H trial. The two studi…
Portal power
The content discovery process on the web often starts with a Google search. In doing so, the user explicitly tells Google the nature of their ‘mission’ and the company has built a business around selling knowledge of that mission to advertisers. …
All things to all people
There has been an ongoing debate within the mobile industry for many years as to the relative merits of integrating numerous features into a single, convenient device versus creating a range of specialised products for specific tasks. The importa…