The third day...

“ I was in Hong Kong 5 weeks ago. Lot of people where using the Note as a phone on the metro. The first day it was a little weird seeing such a big (cell) phone in the face, second day was normal, third day I bought one and was using it on the metro... ”

A user comment in the AAS article Two-box solution or one? Symbian/iPad versus the Galaxy Note, basically discussing whether the Galaxy Note is a new trend, or too big for everyday use.

Designers should know code, and much more

For a long time now I've been discussing how useful it is for UX people to know about the rest of the business, and the technology used to implement their designs.

So, when that became a thing, like this article from Ryan Betts in UX Mag Concept to Code: Code literacy in UX, I was pleased. For a few minutes.

Because, like a lot of things, I am seeing this massively misinterpreted as "Designers should code." I like terms like "technical literacy" better, and have to say that after doing this for fifteen years, there's a big difference between knowledge and practice. I actually think designers (mostly) should not be production developers of any sort.

Especially since some of my best friends are designer/developers, let me explain in excessive detail.

Printmaking

After doing aerospace research and other wandering around at school, I ended up with a Printmaking degree. The fine arts one, where you cut your own plates, and make one print at a time. But in doing so, you learn a lot about the principles behind press operation, about how inks interact with each other, about how paper works when wet and compressed vs. dry.

So, a couple years later when I am doing graphic design for a living -- because art pays poorly -- I am suddenly doing presschecks on the magazine I am art directing. At 2 am I am off at a printing plant in the middle of nowhere, telling the press operators what I think of the output.

And very often, annoying them. Because I know just enough that I don't say "aww... it looks funny there..." but instead say that I think they should punch up the magenta three points on channel 7 and 8, and fade it in the two adjacent channels. They argued with me on that one even, but I made them try it. And I was right. Because I knew a little about their business, and a lot about how I wanted the implementation technology to make my design work.

This wasn't just historical knowledge that I applied. I also learned more from observing the results, and made my own color matching adjustments. I managed to find a swatch book made on the same press (well, a Komouri Lithrone 20, whereas my stuff was being printed on a Lithrone 40, but close enough) and took notes about how the results varied. I improved my technical knowledge, while never actually being a press operator.

Furniture design

In college, as part of the design side of things, I took a couple furniture design classes. I have always thought this was a hugely interesting class, as it taught from several points of view, and essentially has the design/implement philosophy totally baked in. Plus, now I can make furniture.

Sure, we had to approach it from the point of view of decoration and aesthetics. And we had ergonomics books, guidelines to follow much like usability practitioners but with pretty much no argument about how people fit into certain shapes; these heuristics were set in stone. But, despite being a studio class in an art & design school, we had to build everything as though it would be mass produced. And that meant much of the sketching started involving materials, fasteners, and processes of assembly.

Sound familiar?

In this, and industrial design generally, the designers do not then go work in factories and make stuff. But they do work with the manufacturing engineers, process designers and actual factory workers in some cases, to make sure their product can be built, can be built quickly and efficiently, and keeps being made the right way.

My Business Card Used to Say Web Developer

Okay, not really. But only because I never saw clients, so didn't have business cards.

Yeah, I was one of those generalists. I was a graphic designer, who started getting client requests for websites. I'd made some back in college right when the web appeared, so became a self-taught presentational developer. Most real software developers were too busy lamenting the loss of the Holorith card, and couldn't be bothered with the small clients we worked on, while populating the web with every business in the world, so we had to do it all ourselves.

I wrote actual software (poorly). I was a DBA for all intents, designing and implementing data storage, middleware and linkages to get to it and controll it. I wrote presentation code and sliced up Photoshop images (back when it didn't have layers!) to put in my table based layouts.

Learn more, practice less

Over time I have gotten out of being anything like a developer. I still build stuff sometimes, for myself. And I include code snippets when I know something will be tricky. I even keep my hand in enough I was able to be the technical editor for a book on developing for Webkit.

What happened is that we all became better at our jobs by being more specialized. I became an interaction designer (or often, an interaction design manager). I guided my teams of usability engineers, developers, graphic designers, interaction designers, and so on to do even cooler stuff by making sure they collaborate, and use their more specialized knowledge to contribute to the team better.

By continuing to be aware of implementation technologies, I will often write psudocode or algorithms when the team isn't getting the point. I generally use the knowledge I have of the many, many, many systems involved to help make the technical teams talk to each other.

Often, this means I can fix problems, small or large, for developers. Or, just use it to make sure a design is implemented. Just the other month, I had to ask three times to truncate by actual space, not character count. Then I just sent over the actual code (markup, one jsp version, two js versions) to implement it. Not only proving it was possible, but giving options; implement however you wish. But do implement it like I specified and stop saying it's impossible.

Okay, I like solving these problems, so I'll share two more anecdotes, from different scales and types of systems:

I delivered a design document for evaluation to everyone. Most folks love it, we do some tweaks and fix some stuff we missed. But one team is terribly, terribly worried about the data transfer requirements. It was all about doing intelligent things based on what the customer was up to, so we needed to log all this behavioral data whenever they touched the server. So, I sat down with the developers, and in 25 minutes I got them down from their estimated 100 kb of transfer per touchpoint, to... zero. It took a couple steps, but I showed them how you can encode stuff, how we don't need all that data, so can boil it to the basics, and then that we just need a user ID key and time. And then that we already are in contact with the customer so can just do all this on the server side, with no new data transfer.

One of my favorite projects ever -- even before this part of the story makes it better -- was a web-initiated SMS tool. Updated a clunky, difficult one, to one so easy it was used millions of times a day, and had no help system, and no complaints to customer care. Great stuff. But a few weeks later development comes back to ask us where the CAPTCHA goes. Well, I start by saying "we're not doing that." And we didn't. We got a few days to look into it, while they lived with evil Eastern European spambots, and discovered that individual Evil Communist Servers were sending 2,000 requests a second. We were fulfilling them. Well, that's easy. No one can type that fast. We blocked the resubmit, invisibly, without error messages to around 10 seconds*. We just removed the economic value of the bots, while not bugging our users (P.S. I have never used a CAPTCHA for any design).

These solutions were all about using data, thinking identifying the problem, analyzing the true issues, and using your multi-disciplinary knowledge to find solutions. Speed and common practices won't get you there. Thinking from just one point of view, approaching from one technical point of view, won't get you there.

Who does the design?

Which points right at he biggest practical problem I have had with the designer/developer motif: No one actually designs.

I mean /really/ designs. Sits down with paper, or whiteboards, or just talks to business owners with a totally open mind about what they want, and does not at all think about data storage or bandwidth. Or even thinks about multiple solutions, and talks to the team. Or considers options they have never heard of, and searches the internet for a few seconds.

It's not that they are bad people. I can partly say this because I have fallen into these traps myself, and it's the reason I have these beliefs. I analyzed my results many years ago, saw what I was doing was stupid, and fixed it. The problem is schedule, process, perception and peer pressure. Development is a quick solutions world. One where documentation is increasingly a bad word, and analysis is met with skepticism over the delay it will induce.

Software design is design

The best work I have seen comes from not just working with implementation (at every level) but from those development teams who take time to sit as a group with a whiteboard themselves. They do software design. Yup, that's a thing.

One of my favorite things that can happen on a project is being, as the UX guy, invited to a software design meeting. Often, these are secret; if not on the dev team you are not aware of it, much less invited. So aside from conducting such design on my own, or with my teams, I have witnessed them as a guest, with no influence over their operation. And they are brilliant.

They gather the team, come up with the best technical solution, and decide for each component whether to build, borrow, use a library or explore further. Researching better solutions is a valid course of action. Work gets split up, and is managed a lot better than you'd think, to make sure dependencies are covered and no one steps on toes.

Avoiding the heuristic solution

Good software design starts to look a lot, in principle, like what I am talking about as far as good design process. Avoiding the heuristic solution is about designers not designing, and first asking questions. As much as possibly, you divorce yourself from your practice area to get the information needed to do your job in a few more days or weeks.

When I work with development processes, I encourage the same of implementation teams. They need to stop, briefly, and understand the problem space and what is being asked for. Then they can approach the solution creation a lot more efficiently.




What this all means in the end is that I argue that designers shouldn't code, because the code gets in the way of their focus on design.

It also means that developers shouldn't design (UX, UI, Ix design) because it gets in the way of their ability to design and execute software.

But the core concept is still true: regardless of your official job role, don't be insulated from all other jobs, but learn about them, and become literate in the skills and techniques of the rest of the team. From sales and marketing through data storage, know about your business and technical domain.

Know a little about everything, but don't try to do everything. We had a backlash at the "web designer" and made generalist a bad word for a while. There was a good reason for this. Let's not learn that lesson all over again.





* This is probably still secret sauce, so I'll avoid the various actual numbers we used. We made the value variable, and it took a couple weeks to find the best balance. But again, based on observation and data.

Babies hate touchscreens

One of those pieces of self-serving anecdotal evidence I see a lot is how much some designer's kids love their iPhone, iPad, etc. I am now even seeing tweets and posts about kids raised with touch finding keyboards weird. Any day now someone is going to start calling them "Touch Natives" or "Gesture Children" or something else stupid.

This sort of stuff annoys me because...

It's totally anecdotal. Not only is it just the kids of designers, I feel it's a lot like my overview of devices I see in the wild. If you are inclined to notice iOS devices, or touch screen use, that's what you see. These kids don't use remote controls for their TV? They don't use game consoles, or have a Nintendo DS? You /really/ think they do not use buttons? I don't believe you.

It's got serious selection bias. These are folks who love, love, love their touch devices, and only reluctantly even test their work on Android. They think keyboards are for suckers, because Apple says so I guess, so their kids have relatively less exposure to hardware selection mechanisms or hardware keyboards.

It's not my experience. I have a lot of devices. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot of variation. The big one there is a Tablet PC. It's basically indestructible, so children (including random foster kids who come through) get to use it. I have tried some experimentation with this, such as showing them it takes touch input, then walking away. And they are shown by other kids, or themselves discover the pen. So far (of about a dozen kids from 4 years old onward) prefer the pen interface; they happily sit in the corner poking the device with the pen, in the dark, for hours. A lot of them have (I guess) observed keyboard-based computers, and ask to use a "real computer" (at home? on tv?) when given a post-PC tablet (e.g. iPad, Touchpad) and they get tired of typing searches, etc.



But what would be really fun is to get as far away as possible from preconceptions and learned behaviors. What if we could see how babies deal with things like this? I don't have the time or money, but I can throw out my own anecdotes as well as anyone else. Like this:



What I see (and you can only get so much from the video clip) is the 12-month-old child:

• Grabbing items on the screen as though they are real objects, with physical presence.
• Trying to move, or perform drag actions on the items (to the point it works when supported; the program shown however does not).
• Rotating the device, to see the dimensionality of the item, see around the object, get behind it, or try to approach grabbing it from another angle.
• Interacting with the hardware, such as becoming involved with the bezel (as a grabbable object) when trying to grasp the items on the screen.
• Tasting the items, or chewing on the device.

There is no clear instance I have observed of a deliberate touch action (incidental is not deliberate). Which makes perfect sense when you look at what skills he's acquiring with the objects he encounters in the real world. He grasps, feels, pushes, pulls, picks up and puts down, stacks, turns and so on.

This points me to some of the precepts of NUI. Touch in the sense of tapping an object on a flat screen isn't very natural, but how about dragging, or grabbing actions? I'd like to see dimensional behaviors; at least simulated 3D but maybe even multi-sided devices, so flipping has a real consequence, and shows different data. Hell, why not?

I am not so sure about chewing interactions. That may be less useful to the general population. We'll have to do more research on that one.

Apple didn't invent this either

So, just the other day I read this article how iMessage is killing SMS. It draws some rather startling conclusions from the use patterns of, well, himself and his friends. I may have to remember this as an example of not looking at actual market data.

After his charts, there's quotes like this:

At this point it’s clear that the graphs of text message usage on traditional carriers are going to do nothing but slope downward at this point. In fact, they’re running scared, with AT&T already instituting new plans that are more aggressively priced in order to close the gap.

Because: Apple didn't invent this. I don't mean they didn't invent SMS, but they didn't invent closed message networks. Which means we can look to the previous iterations and study them. I am sure the true fanboi has never heard of BBM but stop and go look it up. Then search around for articles like this one where it seems the closed nature of the network encourages saturated populations (e.g. disaffected youth) to use it more freely than open networks, even when violating the law. In fact, BBM is a key reason the business-oriented Blackberry had such popularity for so long among the youth market.

Apple also didn't invent killing SMS. There has been a general downward trend in SMS usage in very high internet-use countries for a couple years. This seems to be all about the use of IP-messaging services, and tying them together. For example, Twitter works just fine over an app interface, using the data channel instead of SMS. Same for whatever your messaging method of choice is, like Facebook.



The other day LukeW defended the Apple fanboi as "How long til the Apple "fanboy" label wears off & people realize they really do deliver insane results from amazing products?"

But it's not the joy at using the products, or even those who stand in line to get the newest one first, or any of that consumption behavior. No, posts like the above are why I still use the term, and especially for US-based tech writers (whether full time or just bloggers) and designers. Ignoring history in such a deeply involved manner just makes you look dumb, and ill-informed, and do a worse job at coming up with solutions.

I guarantee Apple knows all this, and more, and is doing it all on purpose and from a position of knowledge.

How many apps have you made?

Looking for work (both employment and contract/freelance) something has started to become weirdly clear. When I talk to people working on their first mobile app – or even startups working on their first product, which will be mostly a mobile app – more often than not the first question is "what apps have you built?" Often, they ask this again after seeing my whole portfolio, and otherwise looking me up. Frighteningly often, they ask literally how many apps (for a particular platform, usually) I have made. As though quantity is more important than actual experience, skills or results.

And before you say the obvious, that they are just checking out your experience in their domain, let me stop you. No one else asks questions like this. Building a mobile website? Just as one example, they are almost always interested in services, paper, graphic design, desktop web, desktop apps, and mobile apps. As well as your experience in mobile web. Actually many of them are multi-channel so prefer experience in all these. They ask about the whole range, not just for mobile web examples.

But not the guys launching an all new free-standing app. What is it with app-centric people?

The dumbest of phones is still a hell of a computer

The other day I saw one of those all-too common charts drawing conclusions about growth rates of various currently-cool devices. Actually, no need to be vague, this one:



And I start saying, mostly on Twitter, "where are the dumbphones," but even just wondered, where is Blackberry OS, or Psion/S60, or Windows CE/PocketPC/etc. Or even the PSP and other portable game devices? I want more info on every computing device.

This leads, eventually, to this response:

@lukew Luke Wroblewski

@shoobe01 at some point phones crossed the line and became computers. I think a draw the line later in time than you~

And the more I think about it, the more I don't get why. But I always try to make sense of my gut reaction. In pondering this, two threads of have emerged that keep nagging at me.

Technology

I've used a lot of crazy stuff in my day. Some because I am old enough that PCs when I was in college were rare, so I had to take screwdrivers (and sometimes, a soldering iron) to them to get them to work. But also because I was lucky enough to be around other devices. I got to use the Aspen Movie Map in grade school, for example, which is why I keep wondering where the hell my jetpack is, and find few things to be world-changingly cool; I already saw that stuff when I was ten years old. Now get around to launching it, please.

My dad was also what you'd today call an Information Worker. He was employed as a writer for various organizations, including newspapers, universities, the KC police department, and the Federal Reserve Bank. He was issued computers as they came into being, in the early 1980s. I actually used – for school papers and so on – things like the TRS-80 Model 100, a very early (but surprisingly small and useful) laptop.

It was presumably amazing, but as I said, I somehow expected all this stuff by then. It was a portable computer ten years before I was weird to have a [giant, desktop] computer in college at all. It had a built-in modem (though pre-Bell-breakup, it came with a snazzy acoustic coupler, not a phone jack) and so on. I still recall how wonky the audio-tape save/load of data was, and of course when it wasn't a CLI, it was 100% scroll-and-select, character display only, and of course monochrome.

In every measurable way, a low-end, free-with-contract, contemporary featurephone is miles more capable a computer than any TRS-80. Go ahead, complain about the limited capabilities of the device, or how hard it is to load J2ME applications. There are many thousands of them, many are free, and they don't come on an audio cassette. And for the record, the Model 100 could have up to 32 kb of RAM. The first phone I picked up from my pile, is the not-even-current Samsung SPH-M320. It has... well, they are pretty obtuse about handset specs, but it has 40 MB of "memory." Some use that for both storage and RAM. Some just keep the RAM obscure. Anyway, it certainly beats the TRS-80 for storage, because it had none.

Unlike many other computers that followed, the Model 100 came with that modem, so was aware it should be connected to others. When you add in the vastly higher-speed modern mobile network, the cloud-based functions of modern mobile handsets, location services and other telemetry and carrier-based info, the comparison continues to be off the charts in favor of the stupid little phone.

Okay, let's just stick to smartphones

I could certainly keep going with this. There are an awful lot of messaging-oriented featurephones that have QWERTY keypads, and a lot with touchscreens. But what about another key issue with this and many charts which pick and choose their data: Smartphones have been around for a long, long time.

But even if you focus on those, where are they? No matter how world changing you think iOS is, can you really say they invented the smartphone? I don't think so. What about Blackberry, or better yet the Psion > Symbian behemoth, which was still the largest selling smartphone OS in 2011. The first real smartphone was the Nokia 9210 Communicator, released in June 2001.

And before you write this off as some nerdy little niche device, they sold 2.1 million of these in 2002, before anyone knew what a smartphone even was. That would be a little line starting just below the Mac line, and ramping up massively, immediately, and staying up above all the others.

Users

For a long, long time I've been aware that users often don't even accurately perceive the difference between a featurephone and smartphone. Which is... what? In the industry, we tend to define it as "Named OS" and "Ability to load arbitrary native applications."

So? What magic does that offer up? Maybe some actual use rates can help us out here. ComScore (though I borrowed these figures from a recent post by Tomi Ahonen) tells us that actual people use (aside from voice):

1. SMS text messaging – 83% Europe/68% US


2. Camera – 58% Europe/53% US


3. Web browsing – 33% Europe/39% US


4. Apps – 28% Europe/34% US

Before you quote back any of your own numbers at me: Are you sure? If you say, for example, that 95% of anything is on one platform, I can confidently say you screwed up. This is far too fragmented a market, and when I dig into metrics I find that most folks have used some identifier that under-represents featurephones. Or, it recognizes them, but it takes a bit of messing with the results to realize it, and the Smartphone-or-Desktop mentality means all Other data is recorded on the graphs as "unknown desktop."

I've had problems finding aggregate data, but GetJar (which only has J2ME apps) has handled 2.3 BILLION downloads. So, don't say Apps at #4 above absolutely means Smartphone, either.

Okay, but people love smartphones. Well, more so in the industrialized west, but since you may only care what people in NYC and the Bay Area want, let's go with that. A TNS survey of North America, Europe and advanced Asian countries found that customers seeking smartphones based their decisions on:

1. Look & Feel


2. Brand of handset


3. Input method*


4. Model


5. Operating system

I don't care if you and your friends try to decide first between iOS and Android, your users don't. They might by anything. They often do own any number of things.

This whole thing of iOS/Android being tops is what, two years old? Smartphones as a whole go back less than ten years. we have no idea what will be happening in five years. Closing your eyes to the future, and to history is not helping.

This is not all academic

And that misrepresentation of data is a huge problem.

If you've stuck with me this far, you are pretty likely to wonder why it matters. And it's by no means a navel-gazing, internal argument.

If you assume that everyone important uses iOS, and grudgingly agree to later appeal to Android users, you are missing a HUGE percentage of the possible users. And if you justify this with bad metrics, because you think only smartphones matter, you don't even know you're missing out.

Expand your horizons, seek out real information and don't ignore data that messes with your world view.

Carnival of the Mobilists #257

It's an oddly warm, sunny day here in Kansas, so despite the wintery season, a great time for a carnival!

The Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

Several of the submissions this week were written before CES – which I sadly didn't get to go to this year. Disappointingly what with teasers and a lamentably predictable industry, hardly anything happened to invalidate anyone's claims. Next, we'll have to see what gets announced next month at MWC in Barelona. Until then, check out those who challenge your ideas and bring you the mobile thoughts you may have missed.

Bucking the Conventional Wisdom

James Rosewell, writing for TheFonecast.com asks Will the CES trend for larger screens lead to poorer mobile web sites?

“ could it be that larger displays are simply more popular because they’re closer in size to desktop and laptop computers, while consumers are struggling to use the web on smaller-screen devices because sites haven’t been tailored to fit? ”

I can see an argument that excessive, misdirected attention to one platform can cause you to miss the true nature of the market.

In response to a recent post by Flurry proving that apps reign supreme, Oren Levine (recently of Nokia) says Apps beat browsing? Not so fast

“ Really? I don’t think the data support this conclusion. Flurry’s numbers show that 49% of that app consumption is games, which do not involve “accessing information.” If you remove the game time from the app numbers, the result is 48 minutes per day for apps versus the 72 minutes for browsing. ”

This is the sort of analysis I like to see. Even if I don't agree with it (I do), numbers can be sliced different ways. It's good to see analysis that bucks the party line, sometimes.

Advertising and Marketing

James Coops of Moby Affiliates brings us a long post on The best mobile advertising networks 2012, listing the best choice for a very large list of different needs or markets.

“ Advertisers need to think carefully about what they’re trying to achieve with their mobile ad campaign and nail the fundamentals (CPA? CPC? Blind? Premium?) before they let themselves get beguiled by the ad networks’ invariably impressive claims and boasts. ”

Mobile advertising has to meet the needs of your product and region. You can't just use what is comfortable, cheap or has the best industry buzz if you want to get results.

The effectiveness of QR codes has bugged me for a while. Not that they are ineffective per. se. but that the proof is always from very narrowly focused research or from marketing intent stuff. Terence Eden is trying to answer some of these questions, looking at the Real QR Statistics from TfL. And, then a couple days later, More *Real* QR Statistics

“ It’s hard to assess just how successful these codes are. The numbers are low, no doubt about that. As I mentioned in my interview for Econsultancy, a company needs to perform proper A|B testing to see how many calls, email, or website visits they would have got without a QR code. ”

Peggy Anne Salz, among other things the Queen of the Carneys gathers up a vast amount of data to surmise that Kindle Fire might be a lot bigger deal than we've all expected, and predicts some of what might happen as it gains traction in Europe. Kindle Fire To Heat Up European Tablet Market; What Can Advertisers Expect?

“ "Clearly, the one-size-fits-all approach for digital content across TV, PC, smartphone and tablet does not work, and this has significant implications for content producers and advertisers." ”

That quote is not Peggy's, but from Bruce Hoang, group marketing director of the Orange Advertising Network, but I think it sums up a lot of design challenges, not just the possibility of saturation in the tablet space in Europe. This article is full of links to the original data or analysis, so if you have the time, I advise really getting into it.

Digital marketing specialist Tina de Souza, asks us all, Would you close your doors for business for 2 days out the week? Of course not, so why are you.

“ retailers without mobile optimised sites are losing out on nearly one-third of business based on new m-commerce research. Alex Kozloff, Senior Mobile Manager at the IAB, describes this as businesses effectively closing their doors for two days out of the week. ”

It's way past time to address every device users might use. Numbers like this make it easy to justify, so march on down to the VP of Marketing tomorrow morning and get some budget for that mobile-optimized version you've wanted to do.

The OS Wars

In a timely submission, from the depths of CES, Rodrigo Arantes asks Who, besides Microsoft, is interested on another mobile OS?. I like where Microsoft is going with this, and think innovation should be celebrated (fragmentation be damned) but he has good points about building a community and competing in this market.

“ The gorgeous Lumia 900 is the wrong answer to the real problem that is: Microsoft is designing its ecosystem for itself, not for those who should use it and make it full of value. ”

Well, the answer might be that the smartphone war is not over.

Hoi Sta tells us that Android and Apple have NOT won the smartphone war and there's a lot more at work, and a lot less stability than you'd think from the everyday mobile tech press.

“ The current incumbents (Apple & Android) are less than 5 years old! There is still plenty of time for change, and change has been happening fast. That’s an average of just over 4 years for each incumbent, but the trend suggests change is happening faster. ”

Actually, I'd like to quote about half this article. I'll refrain, but it does a great job of summarizing the reasons that we should constantly be aware of the changing market and not discount any OS, for a long, long time.

Disruption and the Future

Antoine RJ Wright brings us a short A Wearable Computing Equation

“ Smart glasses + an efficient, clipable-to-your-clothing computer + savy voice/gesture control interface + integration with all parts of your life that matters + decent price for the core (computer + 1 accessory) = wearable computing > mobile.

The only question I now have is when. Because the parts are certainly there to pull this off. ”

This is a question I ask a lot, of many different products. We can do so much more with what technology is in hand, today. If I can't have a jetpack, can I have my wearable computer now?

Ajit Jaokar at Open Gardens writes about the rest of the US market, and asks Do you ever hear of the spectrum/bandwidth crunch in Boise Idaho?

“ The Operators want bandwidth – so they paint a picture of a Bandwidth crunch. The analysts and the infrastructure providers want to please the operators to get more business. So, they also paint a spectre of impending doom. The whole industry speaks with one voice (for once!). Here’s why the bandwidth crunch may be a mirage... ”

I personally think there is a bit of a connectivity issue in the boondocks, and even used backhaul issues on vacation as an example in my book, but I think that might prove his point instead; no one can trust mobile enough for intensive operations, so no one does. I wonder what we should all be doing about it, though.

I am sad to say I've missed the discussion of French triple-play Free, but Volker Hirsch – whose day job is the Director of Business Development for RIM – brought me up to speed with some interesting thoughts. Be Free! How an ickle player changes an industry.

“ Now, the really cool thing is how they are doing this. Since Iliad owns those masses of fibre networks, they can efficiently operate this. Now, they apparently start equipping their set-top boxes with femtocels and reserve a sliver of each of the bandwidth of those for their mobile network. ”

If you asked me 15 years ago where mobile would be today, I would not have guessed we'd still be SIM-locked, contract-bound, and subject to a relatively few telco-operators. When even big-name MVNOs can't cut it in the US, something totally different is really interesting.

And finally, in this chock-full week of mobile blogging, Bruce Burke of Gulf Bay Consulting talks about how embedded cameras are the next disruptive force in mobile commerce, of all things. Picture Perfect - processing images in Generation-M

“ That’s right, you can use the connected or integrated camera on your desktop or laptop computer, or your mobile device with integrated camera, to process credit card transactions with no dongle, cradle or swiper hardware required. ”

Any time a technology moves from the obvious (camera = family snapshots!) to the unexpected, it's the very definition of a disruptive technology and I can't wait to see more.

And the Winner Is

For my post of the week, I have to choose the one that gave me the most trouble quoting. Hoi Sta's article Android and Apple have NOT won the smartphone war was maybe not revolutionary, but was such a well-assembled argument about the reality of the world it's hard to resist.

Tune in Next Week

Next week's Carnival (#258) will be curated by Martin Wilson and hosted at his Mobileweb Company. If you'd like to be included in Martin's wrap up of the week's mobile writing, be sure to submit your posts by the end of the day, Friday 20 January. Unlike me, Martin will get his out on time the next Monday.

If you would like to host an upcoming Carnival of the Mobilists, drop our leader, Peggy Anne Salz a line and she'll be happy to set you up.