Our phones do not exist in sterile black studios being operated by a disembodied hands, they are surrounded by the wonders of today but for some reason do surprisingly little with it. At any given moment, most people might be within 20 feet of a full size QWERTY keyboard but we sit there and toil away with a keyboard that’s either minuscule or completely virtual. Why are we struggling to look up a restaurant review when you could just take a snapshot of the sign outside and, with OCR and GPS, go straight to the Yelp review without typing a thing?
The point is this: the things we interact with in our physical world should also interact with our phones. Geode from Mozilla Labs is a fantastic example, by creating geolocational hotspots based on GPS or W3C data, it alters the user experience according to the situation. For example, you could target all local theaters to send you phone into silent mode, or target roads + a 20 foot buffer to put your phone into car/speaker mode. Why do all of the interactions have to happen between the user and the phone?
Beyond a phone’s physical environment it still remains inexorably tied to our vast network of ‘tubes. Case in point, Google leveraged its off-site computational power when it enabled voice search by only using the phone to record the voice and nothing more. What other resource intense activities could take place somewhere else while you only use the phone to access it? How about using your desktop to stream your 250GB music collection while your precious 8GB of local memory holds just email, pics and contacts?
How can our common and expected environments inform and interact with our phones? Why do we see the only inputs as ASCII character and positional mousing? What if the phone cried out “Bring Umbrella” when the forecast was bad in the morning? What if the phone looked up places to get Cocoa when the temp dropped below 40º? (yes, these are awful ideas, the key is to use the improv addage of “yes and…”). Lets see some comments and suggestions after the jump.
Update: Just saw this pop up on slashdot from the ongoing TED conference. Amazingly relevant.
February 5, 2009 at 8:43 pm
It would be lovely if your phone buzzed a warning or vibrated when its GPS noticed your vehicle was speeding in a documented speed trap area.
February 6, 2009 at 3:44 pm
don’t know if i’m just missing something, but it’d be real nice if there was a link to the blog home page on the blog entries.
anyhow i’m excited about the mozilla phone!
February 6, 2009 at 4:09 pm
How can a phone be identifiably Mozilla? What identifies Mozilla? first thing to mind are the circular logos and unconventional convenience. Why does it have to be square? Think about ergonomic incorporation of a circular shape/logo in the hardware and innovative convenience (a more clever inlaid browser than safari mobile). Don’t be afraid of going more virtual than hardware on the QWERTY.
February 6, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Copy the iPhone, put Ubuntu Mobile with thunderbird and Firefox and finally put ur logo and sell it without contract for less then 100$
Kiss kiss bye bye
February 8, 2009 at 6:02 am
Take The best part of Iphone, Take The best Part of Windows Mobile End as last take best part of Google Android. Than you have the best phone on the planet.
February 9, 2009 at 4:06 pm
“The best Part of Windows Mobile” LOL
March 14, 2009 at 3:17 am
The device should make it easy to use open wireless networks and networks you have a password for. It should have ad-hoc wireless mesh networking.
The device should be useful when there is no coverage or even without a phone subscription. Apart from PDA apps, like calendar, calculator and camera, it should make it easy to sync data with other devices when there is a connection. You should easily discover other devices and seamlessly transfer data.