Posts Tagged: phones

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31
May 08

Mobile Technology and Society Book

The recently published Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies looks like it has a lot of interesting pieces in it.

Digital Divides and Social Mobility

  • The Mobile Makes Its Mark – Lara Srivastava
  • Shrinking Fourth World? Mobiles, Development, and Inclusion – Jonathan Donner
  • Mobile Traders and Mobile Phones in Ghana – Ragnhild Overå
  • Mobile Networks: Migrant Workers in Southern China – Pui-lam Law and Yinni Peng
  • Mobile Communication in Mexico: Policy and Popular Dimensions – Judith Mariscal and Carla Marisa Bonina
  • Reducing Illiteracy as a Barrier to Mobile Communication – Jan Chipchase
  • Health Services and Mobiles: A Case from Egypt – Patricia Mechael
  • How the Urban Poor Acquire and Give Meaning to the Mobile Phone – Lourdes M. Portus

    Sociality and Co-presence

  • Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self – Sherry Turkle
  • The Mobile Phone’s Ring – Christian Licoppe
  • Mobile Technology and the Body: Apparatgeist, Fashion, and Function – Scott Campbell
  • The Mediation of Ritual Interaction via the Mobile Telephone – Rich Ling
  • Adjusting the Volume: Technology and Multitasking in Discourse Control – Naomi S. Baron
  • Maintaining Co-presence: Tourists and Mobile Communication in New Zealand – Peter B. White and Naomi Rosh White
  • The Social Effects of Keitai and Personal Computer E-mail in Japan – Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman

    Politics and Social Change

  • Mobile Media and Political Collective Action – Howard Rheingold
  • Mobile Multimedia: Uses and Social Consequences – Ilpo Koskinen
  • Mobile Communication and Sociopolitical Change in the Arab World – Mohammad Ibahrine
  • Locating the Missing Links of Mobile Communication in Japan: Sociocultural Influences on Usage by Children and the Elderly – On-Kwok Lai
  • The Effects of Mobile Telephony on Singaporean Society – Shahiraa Sahul Hameed
  • Mobile Communication and the Transformation of the Democratic Process – Kenneth Gergen

    Culture and Imagination

  • Cultural Differences in Communication Technology Use: Adolescent Jews and Arabs in Israel – Gustavo Mesch and Ilan Talmud
  • “Express Yourself” and “Stay Together”: The Middle-Class Indian Family – Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Molly Wright Steenson and Carolyn Y. Wei
  • Nondevelopmental Uses of Mobile Communication in Tanzania – Thomas Molony
  • Cultural Studies of Mobile Communication – Gerard Goggin
  • Mobile Music as Environmental Control and Prosocial Entertainment – James E. Katz, Katie M. Lever and Yi-Fan Chen
  • Supernatural Mobile Communication in the Philippines and Indonesia – Bart Barendregt and Raul Pertierra
  • Boom in India: Mobile Media and Social Consequences – Madanmohan Rao and Mira Desai
  • Mobile Games and Entertainment – James E. Katz and Sophia Krzys Acord
  • Online Communities on the Move: Mobile Play in Korea – Youn-ah Kang

    Conclusions and Future Prospects

  • Mainstreamed Mobiles in Daily Life: Perspectives and Prospects – James E. Katz

    Link: Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (mit.edu)

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4
May 08

The ideal handsets

A slightly interesting article about innovation at Nokia is accompanied by some fun user-generated concept phones from their research.

nokia-360

Link: Nokia’s Dream Phones (businessweek.com)

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28
Apr 08

How phones change relationships

Book about how mobile communication devices are changing social relationships.

“The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us?

“In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions—those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the circle of friends and family—sometimes at the expense of interaction with those who are physically present—and creates what he calls “bounded solidarity.”

“Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and develop social cohesion within the family and the peer group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual interaction is a catalyst for the development of social bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile communication. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, that documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.”

Link: New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (amazon.com, via)

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13
Apr 08

Nokia Design in the NYT

Nothing new content-wise, but it’s notable that Jan Chipchase has hit the New York Times Magazine.

“This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.””

Link: Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? (nytimes.com)

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14
Jan 08

Where phones go when they’re discarded

“Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there’s little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become — how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them — we rarely wonder where they go when they die.”

Link: The Afterlife of Cellphones (nytimes.com)

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25
Dec 06

Designing games for the long tail

Yiibu has made available a wonderful little presentation about the design of mobile games.

“Design for play, quiet contemplation, exploration, discovery, suspense, laughter, friendship, joy…(remember boredom, stress, fatigue, personalization, control, play—everyone’s personal time is different)”

Link: Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail (yiibu.com, PDF, via)

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25
Dec 06

Samsung gives phones point and click

Convergence has arrived. Samsung’s SCH-V960 now has a mouse. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

“Users can point the cursor and click directly on icons on MyScreen, similar interface to that on a PC environment, and gain direct access to frequently used menus such as photo album, messaging, and music menu. Users can also use the Optical Joystick to easily scroll through the play list while listening to their music.”

Link: SAMSUNG’s Digital World – Press Release (samsung.com, via)

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3
Sep 06

The next generation of mobile interface technology

“New technologies drive many of the new designs. One example: Synaptics ClearPad, a new type of touch screen that will become commercially available later this year. Unlike today’s touch screens, which aren’t entirely transparent and often not very sensitive—we’ve all had to endlessly tap one with a stylus to get a response—ClearPad is clear, so it can be used as a sensitive overlay to a cell-phone display. Another innovation likely to change the cell-phone’s appearance: flexible displays. An electronic ink screen prototype, developed by Koninklijke Philips Electronics and startup E-Ink, is thin and flexible like paper so it can be worn wrapped around a cell phone. Users can unwrap it to view a map on a larger screen. Eventually, the display could be used to watch video.”

Link: A Quantum Leap for Cell Phones (businessweek.com)

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6
Jul 06

Repairing damaged goods

Another fabulous piece from Jan Chipchase about the repair cultures of emerging markets, along with some great photos.

“For consumers the informal repair culture is largely convenient, efficient, fast and cheap, reducing the total cost of ownership for people for whom a small drop in price may make the difference between having or not having a phone. The culture of repair also increases the lifetime of products lowering their environmental impact (though this could be offset by other factors such as inefficiency of using old batteries).”

Link: Cultures of Repair, Innovation (janchipchase.com)

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9
Jun 06

Ambient sound awareness

Google’s developed a system for listening to your television and serving up relevant content. What if my mobile devices had the capability to listen in on what was happening around me?

“A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computers internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched. Its strange, but it sounds like it works and people might really like it. Theres no indication yet whether or when this could be available as a service.”

Link: Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content (techcrunch.com)

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6
Jun 06

The next generation mobile UI

“Many of these issues are about solving the complexity problem: enabling lots of different features for lots of different users in lots of different cultures. Will tomorrows intuitive interfaces use RFID to allow us to interact with our environment in a more tangible manner, in a way similar to how people in cities like London or Helsinki already use touch-cards to pay for public transport? Probably. Will they have speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality to enable varied, fast, and context-sensitive input and output? Probably. Will they use motion sensors to allow us to input data in new ways, using movement rather than key presses? Possibly. Will they have different modes, allowing users to prioritise different things depending on context (work / entertainment / personal / social / static / mobile)? Maybe. Will they require a clear understanding of user needs and behaviour in order to be successful? Definitely.”

Link: Mobile user interfaces its time for a new paradigm (the3gportal.com)

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19
May 06

Limited interaction possibilities

Nicolas Nova comments on a column by Erik Holmquist on mobile interactions.

“Those who still worry about the limited interaction possibilities of mobile devices should note that all the applications mentioned above could be used on a standard mobile phone today (with small modifications). Yet at the same time they drastically expand the interaction parameters of mobile devices by taking advantage of local interaction, observations of the users behavior, physical input, and so on.”

Link: Designing relevant mobile interactions (tecfa.unige.ch)

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24
Apr 06

Mobile usage behaviours data collection project

“We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. The research questions we are addressing include: How do social networks evolve over time? How entropic (predictable) are most people’s lives? How does information flow? Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data? How can we change a group’s interactions to promote better functioning?”

(Are you at CHI in Montreal? Want to meet up? Send me an email)

Link: MIT Media Lab: Reality Mining (media.mit.edu)

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