My IFA Demo

Print This PageSend to friendLet’s face it, we love our mobile phones. There are now 10 million more mobiles in the UK than there are people, and 76% of us keep them with in arms length for at least 16 hours a day. We now send more texts each week than we sent in the whole of 1999, and for the first time there are more households in the UK that only have a mobile than those that only have a landline.

Much of our phone adoration is driven by a mobile’s ability to offer a convenient means of communication anytime, anyplace, anywhere. But it also due to the fact that many mobiles now provide a far wider set of functions than just voice and text, including:

Photography – Mobile cameras now offer picture resolutions and storage capacity on a par with dedicated digital cameras. Add video functionality, on phone editing and the simplicity of sharing mobile images, and it is easy to see why the sales of pure digital cameras have taken such a battering.

Music – Mobiles also offer similar audio quality and storage capacity to high end mobile music players. The advent of mobile web connections means we can also now use them to stream live radio and even access online music services such as Spotify.

Gaming – Pretty well all mobiles come with basic games preinstalled, and mobile operators have been pushing the purchase of additional game content for some time. Meanwhile, Smartphones now offer similar gaming experiences to those provided by dedicated mobile game platforms.

Web Access – Mobiles can provide users with all the benefits of web but on the move. Reducing data costs, improved data speeds and development of dedicated mobile sites mean that over 8 million people in the UK now regularly access the mobile web.

Applications – There are over 50,000 iPhone applications available, doing everything from the serious such as providing real time case data to doctors on the move, to the frivolous such as turning your phone in to a virtual glass of Guinness. Other mobile manufactures are now in a head long rush to also offer apps to their users.

However, despite the benefits of the above, questions are now being asked as to whether convergence is being taken too far, and as to whether it is compromising the mobile’s basic communications convenience. Indeed even Martin Cooper, the man who led the team that built the first mobile and who made the first ever mobile call, believes that the devices have become too complex.

He may have a point. The user interfaces of many modern touch screen devices are not designed around their use as a phone but for optimising the use of the other functions they offer. The menu structures have inevitably become more complex to accommodate the breadth of functions available. These other functions, and the operating systems required to run them, can be very power hungry, which means that advances in battery design are not manifested in improved battery life. Finally, the physical form of the devices in terms of both weight and size, are no longer as small as they could be, expanding to accommodate large screen sizes to enable an acceptable browsing experience.

Despite these concerns, the benefits of mobile convergence must surely still hugely outweigh the downsides. How happy would we be if, in addition to our phone, we also had to carry around a digital camera, laptop, MP3 player, Nintendo DS, radio plus all the other bits of technological paraphernalia that currently converge within a single mobile device? We would certainly need deeper pockets, not just to accommodate all the kit but also to pay for it.

I do not believe that I have had a damascene moment when I suddenly became dependent on my mobile. But if I sit back and think about how I use my phone I would hate to be without the rich functionality it offers. Of course the manufacturers must not lose site of its basic phone functions, and I would love it if they could do something to extend battery life, but I also believe we should be celebrating the success of these devices as little technological wonders. Now if only they could squeeze in a cappuccino maker!!!