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17. Mobile payments still won't take off outside Asia.
18. Presence, or some sort of availability management software/system will be a hotly desired feature by the end of the year.
The mobile phone is a wonderful thing. It lets us make calls and send text messages and check our e-mail and all sorts of other things pretty much any time we want, from any place.
The mobile phone is an awful thing. It interrupts us with phone calls, text messages and e-mails all the time, no matter where we are.
Thus the problem. There's a significant need for a balance to be struck between the two, putting people in control of the inbound communications on their phones while still taking full advantage of all the different ways in which they can communicate. With calls, it's easy -- put your phone on silent, let the voicemail pick up if you don't want to answer. Texts make things a little more difficult: you can simply ignore text messages, but in many cultures, there's an expectation that texts will be immediately answered. So if somebody sends you a text, and you don't respond, what will they infer? Things become even similarly complicated when e-mail, IM and other services get added in.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by all of this. There's always the solution of just turning your device off, but to do so means being unplugged from the network, whether it's a social network, a work one, or something else. The best solution would be able to control how people are able to reach us at any given time, while communicating to them our current level of responsiveness.
I've had several friends tell me that their employers have been willing to get them Blackberrys or similar devices, and they've asked me my thoughts. The first thing I say is that while I think those kinds of devices are great and fun and useful, along with all their benefits comes an unspoken expectation that since you can receive your email at any time, that means you can -- and should -- respond at any time. How that plays out depends on their job and their boss, really, but there's always the question if the benefits are worth being able to be reached by work e-mail at any time. It's an all or nothing question, but with presence, it wouldn't have to be.
So as services like push e-mail and mobile IM become more pervasive, so will the desire to be able to control them. We should own our mobile phones, they shouldn't own us -- and there's a great opportunity for companies that can crack this.
15. Mobile virus FUD will continue unabated, but with no real threat or impact.
16. Mobile blogging and photoblogging will grow, filling in a personal media-sharing gap intended for MMS.
MMS has never materialized as a replacement for SMS, mainly because it's not suited for the types of communication at which SMS excels. Marketing MMS as "like SMS, but with a picture" doesn't make it so. After all, how do I ask someone what they're doing with a picture -- and furthermore, why would I want to, particularly for a much higher cost than a simple text message?
SMS is great for simple one-to-one communications, perfect even. The ability to be able to send somebody a photo every once in a while is nice, but it's little more than that. With the rise of digital photos, sharing services and blogs, communicating via pictures has become a one-to-many activity, something to which P2P messaging isn't always well equipped. People like to share their photos -- look at Flickr, Ofoto, Xanga, Myspace, Facebook and so on. Melding the mobile with these types of services will grow, conspiring to still hold MMS usage down.
We've written before about applications like ShoZu that let people send their mobile photos to their own Flickr site, along with applications like Nokia's Lifeblog that let them post to their own blogs as well. These solve one side of the equation -- letting people share their photos from their mobile -- but the other side, accessing the shared photos from a mobile, is still a bit difficult. This is one place where an RSS-to-SMS service, like Yahoo's makes a great deal of sense. Replace sending multiple MMS with a single upload to Flickr, then Yahoo's service sends an SMS to all your friends when the Flickr RSS feed gets updated.
Instead of building their own moblog offerings or opening photo-sharing services based around pushing people to order printed photos, operators could instead leverage these existing services and help people better use them with their mobile devices. There's far more value in helping people get their photos onto an open system like Flickr or Blogspot than trying to fence them into a proprietary operator-labeled service. Nobody's going to send the same MMS with the same picture to ten different people anyway, so why not encourage people to use MMS (or whatever means) to upload the photo to a web service, then help them get word out to their friends' mobiles to come and look at the photo?
Photo and video sharing, along with moblogging are ideal uses for the mobile, because they're forms of communication -- the central characteristic of the mobile phone. But MMS isn't really the ideal medium. It can, though, instead of being a one-to-one service, be the platform for a one-to-many service. Facilitating this one-to-many sharing via mobile will be a hot market in 2006.
Up until now, Java (J2ME) has been mostly a platform for mobile gaming.
2006 will see a whole bunch of non-gaming applications, ranging from messaging/IM to banking, from presence management to browsers, like the new Opera Mini.
Watch the wave come in.
14. Wi-Fi enabled 2.5G Phones Go Mass Market
So far, wi-fi enabled mobiles have been specialist and high end models. 2006 will see this feature in more mainstream, mass market phones, assuming (and it's a big assumption) that operators agree to sell them.
This means that you can potentially surf the net via a hotspot or at home. And even make VoIP calls at a far cheaper rate than offered by network operators - and if the hotspot is free, your call will be free too.
Analysts are very divided over the impact this will have - will it be the death knell of operators as we all stand in one place (you can't move around, as you'll loose your connection) making cheap calls?
I think it won't have much of an impact at all next year. Setting up the phones will beyond the ken of most people, even if they understand what their phones can now do. It seems that although many of us buy new models becasue they have lots of features, these are forgotten as we leave the shop, as we settle in to the old patterns of voice, sms and the occasional game of Snake.
Wi-fi on phones will have a negigible impact until the phone automatically detects the best quality/best priced network to use and hands over from one to the other without bothering the user. That's what? At least 5 years down the line.
So yes, some of us techno fiends may set up our phones and make the odd VoIP call in 2006, but operators can sleep safely in their beds next year - from this danger at least.
Image from Slate.com
11. It will become common for low-end devices for emerging markets to have color screens and cameras.
12. Myopic thinking, bad pricing and pointless services will continue keep mobile music from realizing its potential.
I'm thinking this one is a slam dunk for Russell's year-end review next December, but I don't want to get too over-confident. Still, I can't help but feel this one's a little too easy to predict. Alongside mobile TV, operators won't shut up about mobile music. But, like so many things, theire understanding and implementation of it is off-base.
Operators want to put themselves at the middle of users' music experiences, and replace the iTunes Music Store, Napster, and any place else from which they buy music, online or off, and they think that offering dual-delivery downloads to both mobile and PC will help them accomplish this, and also justifies prices much higher than the typical online services.
They need to accept that people are never going to buy all their music from their mobile operator -- they've never bought their music from just one source, whether it was one particular record store or another, or Starbucks or Amazon or Target. Operators assume they can replace these sources, many of which feed on providing instant gratification, because people can now by music anytime, anywhere. But seeing a CD at Starbucks and deciding to buy it along with your latte is very different than thinking, "hey, I want that new Bob Dylan CD *right now*" and whipping out your phone and paying $2.50 a track for it.
Another problem is that people don't compartmentalize their music into "music I can listen to on my stereo," "music I can listen to on my computer," "music I can listen to on my MP3 player," and they won't add "music I can listen to on my phone". People just have their music, and expect it to travel across all their playback devices. The problem with dual-delivery isn't getting music bought on the phone to the PC, but getting it from the PC to other portable devices. But looming even larger is the difficulty, if not inability (depending on the operator and handset), to get music users already own -- regardless of the source -- onto their phone.
To blame this on mobile operators isn't fair. I prefer to blame the entire music industry that's forced the adoption of copy-protection technologies, and companies that are happy to implement them because they provide a significant amount of lock-in to particular products and services. The problem is all the lock out that occurs on the flip side. If mobile operators really wanted to make waves in the music download business, they'd do everything they could to foster interoperability -- let users play songs on their phones from any store, let songs from their store play on any device, and so on.
But, of course, if they let people do that, there's the potential they'd never buy anything from the operator. Forcing customers to use their store if they want to listen to music on their phones forces them to make a choice -- use the operator store, or don't use the phone for music. That's a zero-sum game, and one they're not likely to win.
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