Thought I had posted this weeks ago and found it loitering in my scheduled posts.

Entertaining set of preferences descriptions for Fenec, Mozilla’s new mobile browser.

(Photo: Paul Watson)

What’s the emotional difference between shutting your computer down and putting to sleep? Or turning your phone onto silent mode instead of switching it off?

I need some input from you all (aka comments) on this one.

I’m interested in this because I’m thinking about the idea of closure when it comes to interactive experiences. Stories end, usually, with a return to equilibrium and it feels irksome when they don’t. Everyone has had the experience of watching a film and suddenly the credits roll and you think, “Huh? Was that it?” (with the exception of French and Japanese films where nothing actually happens anyway).

What makes you stop interacting with something? Is it getting the task done? Is it boredom? The bus arriving? What’s the emotional feeling at the end of it?

I feel sure there is an emotional difference between turning your computer or phone off as opposed to sleeping/muting it. There is definitely an emotional reaction when it shuts down or crashes of its own accord.

What’s your take on this? Do you have any examples of this be handled, managed, designed in good or bad ways?

Pinger is doing the rounds of Twitterland at the moment. It’s a service that allows you to send voice messages to one or a group of people anywhere from a local number. It’s not new to be able to do this on some networks and some phones, but they’ve made it easy and cross-network and country.

They’ve presented it as a kind of voice-based text-messeging, but I can imagine it might get used like Twitter too.

On the plus side, I can imagine it would be very useful if you were trying to organise some kind of gathering, either impromptu or making changes to a previously organised one.

On the negative side I can imagine an increase in voice spam from either your friends or marketing baddies.

Any thoughts?

In France at least (which is good, because we usually only get a very Anglo-Saxon view of these things).

Experientia have translated the summary of a report by The French Association of Mobile Operators on the changing culture of mobile phone usage.

Some of the really interesting points are about mobiles becoming collective items passed around social groups (in response to free talk-time packages) as well as the nature of and relationship to the devices on an emotional/cultural level.

It’s all interesting and you should have a read in detail and it’s fascinating to see how culture takes up tools and plays with their affordances. This last point about the taking of photos with mobiles was interesting to me:

The mobile phone is seen as a “average medium” that renews amateur photo and film practice.

Mobile phone images are viewed as precarious images, often of uncertain quality, not to be printed and not be shared between devices. These images always call up a description of something one should see. They serve to create memories and to prove that one really was present at the event one is talking about (e.g. a concert, a celebrity passing by …).

Mobile phone images are integrated within several reference frameworks that preceded the phone: the journalism of the everyday and one’s own life, spontaneous family images as opposed to fake happiness, the sensationalism that comes with having to set up brief, clear, efficient and striking acts.

More spectacular scenes can raise the challenge by bringing in the grotesque, the playful, the macabre, even violence. This is what lead to the videos gags, the MTV Jackass and the so-called ‘snuff movies’. The aggressions filmed on a mobile phone are one of the most recent expressions of this (although the expression ‘happy slapping’ was not used by any of the people interviewed within this study).

I’m not sure who did the translation (the blog post doesn’t show the author), but I’m guessing it was Mark Vanderbeeken who maintains Experientia. I can’t thank him enough, my schoolboy French would have bee soon out of its depth and drowning in a sea of declensions.

[tags]mobile, photography, Experientia[/tags]

John Gruber is one of the few Apple advocates that writes with intelligent consideration rather than just being an over-enthused fanboy. He has just written a pretty smart analysis of the Apple iPhone pricing, which Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer lambasted.

Before the iPhone was announced I was in a meeting with some folks at Fjord in which the team were discussing applications for various phones. Like many who regularly browse mobile phone shops to see what’s going on, I have long been thinking that there are simply just too many. But what struck me in the Fjord meeting was just how many different interfaces and products even one manufacturer made.

Compared to the iPod it seemed absurd. Sure there have been various generations of the iPod, but they have all pretty much been minor variations on a theme. The iPhone, as Gruber says, is more complex, but basically an iPod that also does a whole lot more.

All the different phones around are due to some misguided market segmentation, I believe. Much smarter would be to make a product with a broad appeal. Gruber makes a good point here:

Why worry about the iPhone’s appeal to corporate IT? The iPod isn’t marketed to businesses and Apple has sold 100 million of them. The iPod is marketed to people, and the iPhone is, too. RIM sold 2 million BlackBerry devices in its most recent quarter; Apple sold 10.5 million iPods in the same period.

And there’s a huge, fundamental difference between these two markets. Businesses, typically, want to buy the cheapest things possible for their employees to use. When buying for themselves, people want to buy the nicest things they can afford.

Personally I’d rather see less flavours of phones from Nokia and, instead, one or two really well designed ones each year. Much smarter to get everyone to love the one thing you make rather than make a whole spread of things badly.

As most of us know, phones don’t make brilliant music players or games machines. Sure, they can do that stuff, but the 0 to 9 buttons, tiny screen and perhaps a joystick are not the best interfaces. At present most mobile interfaces mimic desktop operating systems. They have a little folder and file icons that you have to navigate through. Most of them leave a lot to be desired.

So what if you made a black box that could do anything and was simply a touch-screen? That’s the idea behind this concept phone from BenQ which just won an iF Design award.

Apart from its multi-modal interface and decent typography, it’s nice to see something playful on there (the carp in the pond, which presumably is some kind of screensaver).

The only problem is that it’s so nice and glossy and techno looking that it’s going to become all scratched and nasty. It’s a common theme with new technologies, which is why I like Hulger’s collaboration with leather designer Bill Amberg. Leather looks better the more it is used and it also becomes more personal. There is still some thinking to be done in this area.

Via Mobiface.

So, Orange just announced their new Orange Unique service, a convergence of home phone, mobile phone and broadband. The question is, will their customer service match the product?

It’s not that radically different from BT’s Fusion service, though I think you get more. Here’s the Orange Unique low-down:

• Inclusive calls from home, over your broadband connection
• Up to six Unique phones per home, and up to three people can make calls at once, even when you’re surfing the Internet
• Dedicated customer helpline for registration and support
• Fast broadband connection up to 8 meg. Top speeds vary due to your distance from your local exchange
• From £50 a month including broadband package and free phone

It’s still not quite a Wi-Fi phone and mobile and landline all in one, but it’s close. I’d like a phone like the Vonage Wi-Fi ones (that can hook into almost any Wi-Fi network) as well as it hooking into my home network and mobile. But it’s pretty close and the multiple phone connections are great news. I wish they had it here in Germany though.

So, a dedicated customer helpline for Unique? Hope it works better than their normal customer helpline and why not just get this stuff right across the board?

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It really can’t be that hard, smart customer service from mobile telcos. Have these people learned nothing?

Here was my experience of Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse’s Mobile World in the UK.

Warning, there is a rant coming when you read the full article…

The Ballad of Mobile World
I have a Mobile World SIM card in order to avoid paying roaming charges when in the UK. It ran out and I wanted to top it up, so naturally I called the top-up number. But it is not a free number so I can’t call it from my mobile. Let’s just take a look at that again – Mobile World have now prevented me from paying them money to use their service more.

So, I try from a friend’s phone. I get through and find I have to register for the top-up service and register a credit card. Tedious, but okay, I’ll go for that. Except I get to the very last moment and it asks me for the UK postcode that the card is registered to. I have a UK bank and credit card, but I live overseas (as must quite a lot of people that use pre-pay SIM cards), so I can’t register it.

I decide this is probably an automated phone issue, so I go online. I have to register online as well. Okay, so I do that and now I have the same problem, I need a UK postcode. There is no mention of why (perhaps a security problem?), so in the end I have to register a friend’s credit card and pay her back. This is all because I can only top-up my account in a Carphone Warehouse shop and it was a Sunday. So, basically, I am saying “I would like to give you money to use your frankly crappy service and pay you even more money” and they’re saying “sorry, we can’t be bothered to make it easy for you”. It’s not smart.

But it gets worse. I go into a Carphone Warehouse shop and ask for a top-up. That all goes fine and the saleswoman chirpily asks me how I am enjoying the Mobile World service (clearly expecting me to say that it is great). “It’s rubbish,” I say and explain why. “I’m going to port my number to another carrier.”

“Don’t do that,” she says. “Write to them and tell them, because the more people that do that the better and they might change it”. But I’m in one of their shops and telling them here and now. She was my touch point – she should have apologised, agreed it was rubbish and told me she would pass my complaint on. Not make it my problem again.

The Ballad of Vodafone
So, I have a Vodafone SIM in Germany because, amazingly, I had a good experience with Vodafone in Australia. What a mistake and how can they foul this up so much when it is the same company? I always get sent about three spam text messages from Vodafone when I go overseas telling me I can charge-up my pre-pay account locally. Normally I ignore this, but as my UK one had run out, I decided to try this.

Carphone Warehouse (who claim to be able to top-up every network): “Ooh, no, sorry, I don’t really know. Maybe try a Vodafone centre.” Okay, that’s that. Enough from them.

Vodafone centre
“Can you top this German account up for me? I got sent a text message from Vodafone saying you could do this.” “Yes, what’s the number?” I give them my German number. The monkey on the computer behind the desk starts to scratch his head. “Actually, I don’t really know if we can do it because if it doesn’t work you’ll want a refund and I don’t know how we will be able to do it.” Confident of their service then. “Forget it,” I say and walk out of the shop shaking my head.

Note to mobile telcos
This is the age of the Internet. The Web. The Interweb to you grandad. I should be able to use any credit card from any country to charge up my mobile phone when roaming anywhere. That’s the whole point of a mobile lifestyle. It really can’t be that hard to get it right. Until then, you will continue to get a kicking and you’ll end up like Dell.

Vodafone Australia amazingly got it right (after a shaky start). They scrapped contracts, even for continued monthly billing. So no 12 or 24 month contracts. Why? I don’t know, but presumably the needed people to be able to switch to their new 3G services that cost them a fortune to set-up. In a counter-intuitive manner I stayed with them for years because I knew I could always leave.

After a while they called me and gave me (yes, for free) two V600i 3G handsets (I had two numbers with them) so I could spend more money on their services. I tried a few of the 3G things, they weren’t great, but a smart move by them to give me the handset.

It’s not hard to get this stuff right. The guy on the phone was super helpful, they even called me back about the second phone.

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