Watching a brand move
Alcatel TCL is a brand on the move at Mobile World Congress. Dwarfed by competitors such as Nokia and Samsung on most metrics – unit sales and revenues – it is taking a refreshingly creative approach to finding a niche where it can be meaningful t…
Spotify for 3D designs
Everyone’s favourite futuristic technology, 3D printing, finally looks like it could become a mainstream reality. Fabulonia, an Estonian start-up exhibiting at MWC this year, thinks so and has created a service to help designers and brands sell th…
Sensor overload
I’ve just been speaking to the guys at InvenSense about some of the sensors that they’re working on. This prototype watch makes Nike’s fuelband look like a bangle. It monitors a finer level of motion and orientation along with ambient conditio…
Pinch: a lovely little multi-device interaction
Sony’s MWC booth features a number of prize winners from their recent multi screen competition. One of my favourites was a simple gestural method of connecting multiple screens called Pinch. You just pinch the screens together, which draws a s…
A real time approach to problem solving
Much of the daily work of user experience practitioners is spent trying to understand, pre-empt and design around usability problems. Failure, however, is inevitable. No system is infallible and no user research process can hope to understand ever…
Augmentation without the cyborg
How would the digital experiences central to users’ lives change if they weren’t embodied in a touchscreen slate? Google’s Glass project provides an obvious answer by virtue of the fact it has been much in the news recently. The interest around sm…
MEX Sessions: Ed Maklouf on natural interfaces
Ed Maklouf’s May 2011 talk at MEX provided insight into how humans use sound and how these principles can help shape alternative forms of digital interface. Maklouf’s talk draws on his studies into communications, linguistics, group communica…
Customers measure overall performance
Users with a 4G subscription are more likely to give their handset a higher satisfaction rating than users of the same handset who do not have access to the faster network. According to data gathered by On Device Research, the top 5 handsets were …