[CeBIT] Tools of Tomorrow - Current Trends in Handset Design

The mobile market is a very exciting one - competition here takes place on a number of different fronts. Consumer decision to buy or not to buy a handset is influenced by colour, weight, price, features, reception quality, ease of use, brand, marketing and whether or not it's possible play tetris on it. Compare this with relatively slow-paced markets such as cleaning products or even advanced appliances like HDTVs, where the number of variables is significantly less. Social life, productivity and perceived status are all influenced by the mobiles people carry and it's no surprise that everybody wants to get it right.

While it's interesting to keep track of all of these factors, features and usability are amongst the most important to us. Pink phones don't affect daily habits anymore than white ones do - the opportunity lies in presentation and value of advanced features. 2007 brought a few fresh trends (and continued most of the old ones) that are worth looking at.

Perhaps, the most striking change in marketing and design of advanced mobiles is the shift from the "our 3G phone does it all" mentality to "our phone does this one thing REALLY well (and has the rest of the stuff, too)" model. The marketing execs have learned that it's difficult to sell mobiles based strictly on megapixels, megabytes and features (even though it works quite well for digital cameras, for instance). Some notable examples of this new approach are the Nokia Navigator (3G handset with advanced GPS functionality), Samsung P110 (SMS-oriented dual-hinge clamshell) Samsung F500 (Video Player with WMV, DivX, neat design and 5 hours viewing time), Samsung SCH-B600 (last year's 10-megapixel cameraphone), the SE 3G Walkman music phone line and so on. This didn't just happen overnight (N91 and the Walkmans have been available for a while) but it's only now that quality products are being released. Battery life has been improved significantly and the designers are not afraid to take a few steps away from the traditional form factors.

Input methods are another problem that's currently being tackled. Of course, the touchscreens are the new big thing - notably, the LG Prada phone was showcased. John is going to discuss the phone at length in the near future, but its user interface seemed hardly innovative - in most cases, it simply emulated the good ol' keypad. The Samsung F500 also introduces something called "Sweeping Touch" - a touchpad similar to the iPod scroll wheel in principle, except it allows sweeping motions from one side to another. It does make operating the device more enjoyable and easy...

One of the downsides of these innovations is that while they provide breakthrough interfaces for their respective applications, they do so without giving much attention to cross-platform environments like J2ME and Flash. It's not likely that we'll ever see features like Sweeping Touch supported outside of native applications. That once again creates walled gardens, this time on the hardware side... Web-based services might circumvent this problem - that's why so many are excited about the iPhone's full version of Safari.

 All in all, this CeBIT shows that much more attention is being given to very specific handset functions. If done right, this could be the decisive moment that proves to customers that mobile is more than just a phone (even if their handset only does one other thing well). That would be a critical factor contributing to a future mobile media revolution.