Disrupting the ancien régime
The telecommunications industry is heading towards a disruption by non-cellular wireless internet devices. Here are my two cents’ worth on the matter:
How severe the disruption will be depends on the players’ next strategic moves. It’s telecoms that’s getting disrupted by the internet and not vice versa because the telecoms industry has not proven to be nearly as innovative as its bubble-prone internet counterpart. Bluntly put, this is so because it is structured as a closed world, which is dominated by the operators. It is a royal court that goes on with its internal power struggles. But outside, legions of geeks have been quietly chipping at the walls for quite some time already, and the first bands of pioneering insurgents (led by Skype) are now storming the bastille.
Perhaps the world is ready for a new mobile device that will become the icon of the real mobile internet revolution. Most likely this new little jewel would work first in wifi hotspots, connecting from further afield as 802.11 and its siblings become more ubiquitous. It will probably do VoIP and IM exceedingly well. It’ll possibly also do email, RSS, and music. All these we can pretty much take for granted. More interestingly, it may start doing completely different things. Its ability to go where laptops can’t go, and do things that mobile phones can’t do, will create new needs and new opportunities, which make people write new apps. It might be used to access place and event information in the form of annotated maps for instance. Or it might be used to download and watch TV shows. Or make them in the spirit of podcasting and guerrilla TV. When high bandwidth mobile data becomes free, some of those old mobile service ideas that history left for dead might suddenly begin to make a lot more sense. The fact is, we don’t know what the device will be used for. That’s why the code base has to be kept open.
And what might the device look like? It would need to be small and afford effortless one-handed use, incorporating the best learnings from over two decades of mobile phone design. This points to a Blackberry-style roller wheel to scroll up and down the buddy list, the email inbox, and the RSS feeds. However, it would also need to have a QWERTY keyboard or some radical new key layout if it’s going to do text input well. The large footprint of a full keyboard suggests a flip design of some sort. But it would have to be extremely slim.
Here are a few sketches.
On the software side, the limited screen real estate requires that the active application must occupy the full screen. IM would probably be the default active app because the presence status of buddies has to be visible at a glance. Switching between apps would need to be extremely simple and smooth, like control-tab on the PC. Perhaps quick switching is important enough to warrant a dedicated button on the side of the device. Click! From IM to email. Click! From email to RSS. And so on.
Here’s a sketch about the ‘full-context switching’ between apps (it was Chris who introduced me to this term)
source: Disrupting the ancien régime
