Category: Mobile

Given that I am in the market for a new phone I’ve been bitterly disappointed by the lack of truly ‘converged’ devices out here on the market. The most ‘feature rich’ have usability problems when it comes to making phone calls (touchscreen dialing! why?), and those that have really usable decent sized phone/numeric keypads force you to use SMS or predictive keystrokes for your email. Don’t get me started on the camera features.

The always enetrtaining and rather cynical Andrew Orlowski explores why there aren’t any real smartphones – or truly ‘coverged’ devices – available.

t one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would become a smartphone.
Expectations were sky high.

Worthwhile reading.

I’m surprised Orlowski didn’t mention the 6th excuse . . . . that of device manufacturers having an economic disincentive to creating the uber-device. If customers are happily (or unhappily) buying existing products then why create a product that destroys the market for the rest of your range? Or one that threatens the manufacturer’s relationship with the networks it relies on – and thus forces any emerging device to be seriously crippled (the iPodPhone for example)?

O’Reilly on the recent open source release of Racoon – a web server for the Nokia phones that run the S60 series o/s.

The potential applications are quite exciting – even the factory-included remote camera operation is pretty nifty.

Now I’m just waiting for my new phone to be ordered so we can start testing this out . . .

The Walker Art Center has a fantastic post on hacking the firmware and interface of the iPod to make them more usable in a museum setting.

Lending iPods out to patrons is much more involved than just the simple question of how you clean them, or avoiding theft (those items of business are handled by our Visitors Services department). In the New Media world, we care more about answering the question, “how do we make them easy to use?”

Ease of use really comes in two forms. One for the user of the device, and the other for those of us having to update the content on the device itself. When there are budgetary constraints, you’re always looking for the best bang for the buck, while not overly hindering the experience because of it. So what do we do?

Liberty Science Center has been working for several years on some m-learning pilots and it looks as if their first implementation of mobile phone based learning experiences will go live next year.

As you know, the Powerhouse Museum, has also been experimenting and our in-house working prototype Mob Mark takes a slightly different approach.

Bressler, from the LSC, presents this intersting backgrounder on the LSC initiatives.

What are our youth using their mobile phones to do? They text message, play games, listen to music, and take pictures, and that’s only the beginning. Teenagers are the ones establishing the rules of this new mobile culture ad hoc. To them, the mobile phone is not a device for making phone calls, but rather, a ‘lifeline’ to the social network and an instrument for coordinating their everyday life. Can this tool, that has seemingly ensconced itself into youth culture, become a tool for informal science learning? This paper will summarize findings that have been collected as part of the Science Now, Science Everywhere (SNSE) project started by Liberty Science Center. SNSE is a recent technology initative by the Center that aims to explore the unique educational opportunities that are possible when visitors use their mobile phones as tools for learning in informal science education. Coupled with industry research from the technology and museum sectors, project research to date demonstrates an untapped area of educational opportunity that could be used to engage teens in science. Liberty Science Center believes that science centers can engage the teenage audience by extending the learning experience beyond hands-on interactives to mobile phones.