Technology Manual

It was not easy to find REAL innovation at CeBIT - most of it was tucked away in a pavillion called FuturePARC. There, Fraunhofer booths really stood out. Fraunhofer is a leading German research institute known for its invention of the MP3 format. One project in particular caught my attention with its colourful mindmaps. MIDMAY turned out to be an extremely interesting venture, aimed at connecting various bits and pieces of personal information, securing it and delivering it to any platform (mobile included). Here's how it works.

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?

Moving low-risk patients out of hospitals and back into their homes has been a goal of the health care system for some time. Studies have shown that patients who placed back into their home recover faster and the beds they this relocation frees up in hospitals can be used to better treat high risk patients. Still, low-risk patients moved back into their homes require medical supervision ensure they become no risk patients or at least remain low risk. Costs prohibit providing care worker supervision for in-home patients 24/7 and patients can go weeks without in-home visits by professionals. Mobile medical technology offers one solution for providing in-home patients with better service while reducing the need for care-worker visits.

"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).

From public displays to cellphones and everything in between, touchscreens are in at CeBIT this year. On hand was what might be the first to market consumer touch cellphone, the LG KE-850 Prada. Alone with the phone for a precious few minutes, I took the opportunity to test its text messaging implementation. Given touchscreen technology and the ability to do anything you wanted on it from a software perspective, how would implement text messaging on a high-end consumer phone?

LG has bravely decided to emulate the standard numeric pad. Ouch (fashionistas don't worry, it still looks good).

A standard outliving its usefulness? Yes. The interface for text messaging we see today is a poor compromise between design and the limitations of a numeric keypad. Just to make our clunky method of inputting text work we are forced to implement ingenious but unfortunately unintuitive hacks like T9. Without the hardware limitation of a keypad why design cellphone software like we need a crutch keypad? Touch screens allow for complete context aware input. In the context of creating a text message, a numeric keypad does not make sense. So why provide one? If it sticks, the move to touchscreens on mobiles will force a re-evaluation of every standard on mobile phones. Things will have to be shaken up. New standards, created by the unique opportunities and limitations that touch-screens provide are already being created in the first wave of touch based devices.

Vista's tablet support is trying to introduce new touch screen standards based on real world motions. Testing out Vista on a tablet laptop for the first time I initially found writing words difficult. Frustrated, I scribbled them out with the stylus unconsciously. To my pleasant surprise the words and the scribbles disappeared. That's context aware input. Microsoft would like to term these actions are flicks but they are better understood as gestures or context aware motions . Not be be outdone, Apple's iPhone contains support for a number of multi-touch gestures. Steve Jobs specifically demoed two in his iPhone introduction showing gestures to zoom into and away from images by pinching or spreading fingers across the iPhone's screen. Even Apple's laptops have included support for gestures on their trac pad for some time. Moving two fingers along the pad is interrupted as a scrolling action.

Standards exist to minimize the learning curve across different situations. If actions like writing with a pen or erasing can be emulated on a touch-screen why not implement them? What better standards exist than those we find every day in the real world? Implementing touch screen gestures based on real world actions will ensure a smooth transition to from numeric pads to touch screens.

-jb