It sure is a pain to have to enter phone numbers manually into a new cellphone. The tiny screen and numeric keypad just aren’t optimized for the task. Why can’t we manage our mobile phone books through a web site and have the data just appear on the phone?
Better yet: we already have our phone numbers recorded on our computers. Shouldn’t we be able to leverage that data and all the effort it took to get it onto our computers?
Design to steal
- Let the user manage address book entries online, from the website of the mobile carrier. The actual experience would be akin to managing contact lists with Yahoo! Mail or eVite. Changes made online are quickly, quietly synced down to the user’s mobile phone. Just doing this much would be a godsend.
- Cellular carriers: insist that all future phones be made to support a single phone book standard, to insure interoperability between the web user experience and all future phones. (There is already precedent for carriers imposing standards on phone vendors: Sprint’s phones are converging on a standard battery charger connection.)
- Let the user import phone numbers into the web app from any of the standard address book formats: vCards, CSV, etc. This is a quick and dirty way to leverage data that already exists somewhere.
- Best yet, establish live syncing between the phone and the user’s data source (Outlook, Address Book). The Palm and Blackberry devices have always had this.
- Address books on the PC can get huge, with many old and obsolete entries. So let the user pick which numbers should be imported. Better yet, import everything so it’s there for reference, and let the user pick out the favorite numbers which take precedence when searching the address book.
- Don’t stop at just phone book entries: allow the configuration and management of the phone to be done using a web app. I’d like to be able to bring up a web link to the alarm configuration screen and tell my phone to go off at a certain time, rather than fussing with the little buttons and hard-to-use menu structure. I’d like to be able to add my preferred mobile websites to a bookmark manager on the phone, without using the clunky and slow phone web browser.
The broader principle
There have always been major compromises made when fitting an experience onto a small device, and there always will be. The devices have smaller screens, smaller print and their input methods are less efficient than a regular PC, monitor and keyboard.
Mobile devices should allow for configuration and data management using the richer desktop or web UI. They can and should still allow for editing while on-the-go. (The iPod, unfortunately, does not. If you hate a song, you have to delete it back at your computer. If you want to sort songs into playlists while riding the bus, tough luck.)
Palm was the first to grok this principle of managing a mobile device using a PC, with the very first PalmPilot. Its predecessors, the General Magic device, the Go Corp PenPoint tablet devices (which I contributed to) and to a large extent the Newton attempted to be worlds unto themselves; alternates or even replacements to the PC. Only the Palm Pilot conceived of the mobile device as a satellite to the PC and shipped with a sufficient desktop-based PIM. It was a visionary insight that, along with Graffiti input and long, forget-about-it battery life finally made the notion of a PDA viable. (Unfortunately, Palm Desktop has languished for years. The incompatibilities between its schema and that of the predominant desktop PIMs are a daily pain for millions.) But it’s nevertheless preferable that today’s Treos sync imperfectly than not at all.
The iPod got this right. Earlier MP3 players had no integrated way to manage your songs on your PC and on your portable music player. Because it was so hard to rotate the music, users wouldn’t bother. The players gathered dust. This integration between the iPod and iTunes desktop app was one of the key elements of the iPod’s breakthrough product vision.
The Harmony remote control gets this right. Rather than laboring over one of those loathesome programmable remote UIs, you program the device from the web. You pick out the model numbers of your home entertainment components, it downloads the codes to the remote via a docking cradle.
A prediction
The idea of setting up a cellphone from a web interface seems pretty self-evident, right? Wouldn’t you expect everyone to be working on this?
My guess is this won’t be mainstream any time soon. Why not? Because the gadget guys and the software guys are different people working in different companies. The natural propensity of the gadget guys will be to apply ever greater mobile horsepower to increasingly sophisticated functionality to the devices, despite the inherent limitations of the medium’s user experience.
To bring these two worlds together will take industry leaders with competence in both worlds, plus a pinch or two of vision and systems thinking. That gives Palm, Microsoft, RIM and Apple a sustained advantage, and will leave the commodity mobile phone vendors playing catch-up.
