Molecularist

Hey, that’s my line.

Well, good thing someone said it. I was on holiday. 🙂

Link: Google Calendar Arrives — But What About Mobile? at MobHappy.

As expected, Google has announced its calendar product. I’ve been playing around with it, and I’m pretty impressed — except for one glaring oversight. There doesn’t seem to be a mobile version. It will send event reminders to you via SMS — as long as you’re on one of 15 supported US carriers, though Verizon’s 51 million users are out of luck — which could be nice, but that’s of limited utility when you’re mobile. It doesn’t help a user look at the rest of their calendar, or figure out when they’re available.

Jukka, over at the S60 Multimedia Blog was talking about some of the new features in Lifeblog 2.0 (link below, and read some comments). I’ve been using it for some time now on my Nseries phone and really like the upgrade.

What I like about some products is that some of the best changes are small but have high impact. And Lifeblog 2.0 has many of these small, but impactful, changes.

One of my favorites is, in Lifeblog PC, you can select an item and then ask to extend the selection to all other items from the same cellID. Then, you can change the metadata (tags, date, location, etc) associated with them all.

For example, say you select a pic from a bar and extend the selection to all your pics ever at that bar (as determined by the cellID). You could then label all those pics as being located at the bar.

But, the real kicker is, you can then set Lifeblog to automatically label all future pics from that cellID in the same way.

How cool is that?

I think Lifeblog is finally getting into its role of mixing metadata, media, and phone info in a really interesting way that the user can easily manipulate and take advantage of.

Link: S60 Multimedia Blog.

I was wondering what kind of features actually one gets with the new 2.0 version (exclusively for Nokia Nseries phones).

Having been in the wireless business for many years, it always seems that we are repeating DoCoMo’s successes, kinda ‘me too’.

My suggestion: do what they do – go into the Lifestyle Business.

Link: CTIA – DoCoMo In The “Lifestyle Infrastructure” Business at MobHappy.

Now, Nakamura says the company is in the lifestyle infrastructure business — not selling connectivity, but developing services that allow mobile technology to pervade every aspect of its users’ lives. The focus isn’t so much on coming up with new mobile-specific applications and services, but rather ones that simplify and build on everyday life and experiences. It’s an interesting way to think about mobility, particularly coming from a carrier.

Kelly is a designer with her head in the right place. What I like is that she constantly stresses the need for designers to be embeded and work closely as part of an integreated multidisciplinary team of visual designers, technologists,
ethnographers, and usability specialists.

What I like about this article (link below) is that she stresses, basically, that design should be about making useful products that blend into the individual’s mobile lifestyle.

Link: next generation mobile authoring | gotomobile.

Technological convergence, increased connectivity and consumer expectations are merging to create a landscape of opportunity for the next generation of mobile content, services and applications. Success and adoption are dependent on creating usable and useful experiences — positive interactions that are integrated into an individual’s actual lifestyle.

Ooh, and I see she’s starting up a category on her site tagged ‘lifestyle process’ design. Looking for more under that category.

Maija, from Series 60 User Experience, was ready for a usability fight when she asked her friends why they didn’t browse the Web with their phones. Unfortunately, before she could get to the usability issue (there was one) she was stopped by complaints about price.

I think price is a false excuse, because folks will pay for things that are useful. Until she can get her friends to overcome their price concerns, they will never be able to find anything useful worth paying for.

Maybe Maija should go back and pay her friends’ browsing bills. Then she could get a peek as to how much usability comes to play in keeping folks from browsing. Also, her friends might find something useful they’d be willing to pay for.

What do you think?

And go read some of the comments she got. It’s all about price.

Link: S60 User Experience.

She got on to her operator’s home page, with the browser in a full screen mode “How do I get away from here, there’s just this whole page. I want to turn off this thing. I don’t like that it spends all my money and runs in the background”, she cried. I explained to her that the time is not the cost but the data transferred. However, she did not care – she just wanted out.