handsets

It was inspiring to see a variety of new mobile phone form factors presented at CeBIT. Touchscreens and swivel designs, transformers and sliders - they did their jobs very well, providing a comfortable experience in the areas most important to their owners. However, one thought was always in the back of my head - how will the third party developers manage to create usable applications for these rapidly diverging control schemes and screen resolutions? Having done some J2ME development myself, I remember the challenges I encountered when simply porting a program from one handset to another (arrow keys and soft keys were mapped differently). In a world where popular phones have novel control schemes and features every half a year, is it possible to create a successfull J2ME/FlashLite app? Is there an alternative?

"The Japanese are two years ahead when it comes to cell phones"

"In Asia, everyone surfs mobile Internet"

"Only old people use e-mail in Korea" 

These are some of the opinions one often sees floating around in the mobilist blogosphere. Yet we never get a chance to really try these phones and services for ourselves. News on sites like SlashPhone are limited to the hardware specs/design of the new handsets, but no asian bloggers ever discuss usability and features in English (if you know someone that does - please point me in the right direction!). Long story short, Samsung brought out some of their Korean lineup to CeBIT and we had a few minutes to play around with the devices (unfortunately, no pictures were allowed).

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.