Mobile is a prong, not the entire pitchfork
Everyone has a mobile device of some sort these days. Be it a cell phone, crackberry, pda, navigation device, etc. The list is ever growing as we as consumers desire to consume everything, in every possible way, everywhere.
Mobile is an interesting and only partially saturated area of the electronics market. Because it is still so new to so many consumers the potential of mobile devices is still not fully explored. It’s also a rather new concept to many vendors & technology integrators as well. Ten years ago, if someone had said to you, as someone had to me, that this strange company named RIM had a device that you could get your emails on… in real-time… nearly anywhere… would you have believed it? Get your emails from something other than a software client? that’s nuts! We we’re just getting used to web based email! LOL.
Now we get messaging everywhere. Software based, device based, web based, SMS based, RSS based, the list goes on and on. There’s a million ways to slice and dice your communications. The thing to remember though is that none of these new technologies eliminated the other. They only enhanced the user’s ability to function on the same data in different ways. You read the email in MS Outlook and reply to it on your blackberry and then post it on your blog via SMS, which gets read by others via RSS in their RSS client which can exist in the form of a web based reader, software client, mobile client, etc. The persistence of the data overrules the existence of the device. It’s not the medium but the message here.
Allot of people seem to think that, as everything gets smaller and more integrated, all these other, larger devices will be come obsolete and fully integrated mobile devices will rule. If history has taught us anything, we should know that that isn’t the case. Paper books and magazines didn’t disappear with the advent of online publishing. Televisions didn’t disappear when streaming media hit the net or iTunes started selling video. We just add more tools to our tool box. Some of the more specialized tools get replaced with other specialized tools, ie. walkmans became discmans became mp3 players, but we still carry the device around.
The Truth is, who really wants to watch a full length, feature film on a 4 inch screen or write a serious or critical message on a T9 keypad? There will always be a need and a place for these other devices. Devices that more fully address the need. One of the speakers at one of the CES discussions I attended stated, and rightly so, that mobile should not be the entire focus of one’s effort but rather one avenue of attack amongst many.
Mobile definitely should not be ignored but putting too much stock in its capabilities is foolish. A good example of this is the cell phone wars and the processing capabilities of their devices. Regardless of any one device’s features and functions, SMS is STILL the only common ground amongst all phones. As a technology integrator working for a creative marketing firm, this is a maddening position. We’d love to take advantage of all these new features but can’t with out a significant amount of resources spent on niche development. So we’re stuck with size restricted, character based SMS, easily forgotten short codes and hard to read, stunted version s of web sites on WAP browsers. (on a side note: Adoption of Google’s Android mobile device software stack could change all that. Let’s see if the device manufacturers get that though)
As vendors try to cram more and more features, such as video & music, into mobile devices we have to ask if those features are really necessary. Do we need to go cross eyed watching the latest episode of lost on our dinky iPod? Or would we rather the more normal and comfortable and immersive experience of the home theater. Obviously the latter. This is why everyone one involved, be it marketers, advertisers, product developers, content developers, whomever, have to focus on being well rounded. We all have to continue to be aware of ALL the avenues that we can address and address them fully and not be myopically obsessed with pouring our efforts down just one.
