I thought the story was funny, but it misses a certain point:
if mobile phones are a new BULK-media-delivery frontier
(arguable), they have one major advantage over both palmtops
*and* opening the newspaper wide on the train (which you
can't think of doing during commute hours in Japan anyway.)
And it's this:
Mobile phones are voice-delivery devices FIRST (in fact,
*real-time* audio-delivery devices, though that doesn't
really matter here...) And voice-delivery of bulk content
has an ample, venerable precedent: radio news and talk.
Which is to say: most truly effective bulk content delivered
in the near-term will be probably be audio, and more
specifically, voice, not visuals, since voice is what handsets
are optimized to deliver within the packaging constraints.
Video? I've owned tiny-screen TVs, and I think video at
this size has a lot of the same format-adjustment problems
that mobile-phone browsing faces in presenting web pages.
I personally would like to get news by browsing headlines,
then pointing and clicking to get a selected story read to
me, so long as it didn't mean sitting in front of a computer.
I think the only reason internet radio hasn't really taken
off is that most people like to listen to the radio while
doing something else, or while on their way somewhere, not
in front of their computer. Mobile phones could unshackle
internet radio.
Best of all, this means that all those poor saps who majored
in Speech Communications in college, hoping to become
DJs or something, will have some career alternative besides
coming to Japan to teach English. Publishers might like
it, too - instead of losing revenue to tachiyomi and magazines
being passed around, they can charge-per-listen.
Michael Turner
www.idiom.com/~turner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrea Hoffmann" <ah@anima.de>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2000 10:05 AM
Subject: (keitai-l) designing for small screens (was Re: Re: Fw: [euro-w]
Re: iMODE)
> Hi,
>
> > of data on small displays. Most people are to spoiled of the
> > possibilitys of the web, but mobiles comes much closer to the
> > (at this time) fantastic possibilitys of home computers in the
> > early 80's like the VIC 20, the ZX81 and the Atari.
>
> ... want to read another funny analogy for this challenge?
>
[deleted: making a newspaper fully legible as a wad of newsprint]
>
> This is similar to the challenge of designing content for
> the PalmPilot."
>
> source: Designing Web Sites for PDAs
> http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/20/index2a.html?tw=design
>
> Andrea
> --
> Andrea Hoffmann -- Editor in Chief -- hoffmann@westcyber.com
> Japan Mobile Information -- http://westcyber.editthispage.com
>
>
Received on Sat Jul 15 16:27:36 2000