The launch and success of the iPhone will accelerate the wireless industry's race to develop products crammed with the functionality of a personal computer and the mobility of a wireless device. Everyone seems to wonder where wireless is going—whether it will be a blend of BlackBerry business functionality and iPhone pizzazz, or whether the iPhone will shift the mobile paradigm from business/task focused to an entertainment hub.
In our position as business consultants to major wireless clients, combined with our training in cognitive psychology, we have identified a number of key issues and fallacies that frame and define the current wireless-device development horizon.
More ? smaller
Increasing functionality is on course to collide with miniaturization of physical devices. The joint forces of feature fatigue and demand for ever-smaller devices may be placing hard limits on usability, battery life, and quality of function. More functions result in the following: more confusion as users have to traverse more uses for a finite set of buttons, more drain on existing power resources, and a tendency to create devices that suffer the "jack-of-all/master-of-none" disease.
Asia ? US
Letting early adopter and wireless-manic Asian markets drive device development in the U.S. may not produce success in the American market. Cultural differences, as well as geographical and mass-transit idiosyncrasies can have dramatic, often opposite effects on feature value and use.
"I just got comfortabledon't change on me"
Another problem facing wireless development teams is the failure to understand that the aggressive marketplace of wireless technology, and computing in general, is not always in step with the timescale that defines people's lifestyles. Witness the reluctance to adopt Vista. Initially, people are willing to jump on board a new technology and learn how to become proficient users of it. However, once that technology has become adopted by the majority, there is reluctance by many to learn a new way of doing things. People have gotten used to the idiosyncrasies and rules that define Windows and they are just not ready to chuck that and start over. From the wireless perspective, the pace of new product development and deployment is destined to be out of step with the level of change customers feel comfortable with. Every generation of a product does not have to be a "sea-change."
These devices are unified wholes, not collections of parts
Wireless companies also fail to recognize that customers experience their wireless device/phone as a single thing in its entirety. The architecture of the OS is bound up with the usability and aesthetics of the UI, as well as with the physical perception of and affordances communicated by the device. These in turn are bound up with the quality of service and the feature/function set of the device. By not understanding how each of these components add value and how they interact to create the overall "gestalt" that is the device, developers and marketers can easily miss the forest for the trees in their race to outpace competitors.
Development focus is askew
One common development stance is to dream up ways to integrate products into people's lives rather than finding out what new features—if any—people actually want these devices to give them. This is a subtle but important distinction: there are many things that people may not want out of a wireless device. For example, is there really a good market case for having smart phones that act as credit/debit cards or TVs? One of the major problems here is that the wireless industry is still being driven by ill-advised forms of market research: opinions of advisory panels, focus groups, and checklists of competitors' latest offerings. None of these are able to adequately predict what new features/functions add quality and value for the bulk of actual customers.
Evolution is slow and wasteful
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