While the iPhone froth continues unabated, Nokia is quietly working away on its own touch interface, S60 Touch. If you fancy taking a look at the UI in action, here it is:
I’m already sold, if only for the cutesy sensor capabilities that Nokia’s built in (although I’d rather see a UI that silences the phone alarm by sensing you’ve chucked the device across the room). But a stylus? Really? Didn’t we kill those off a while back?
There’s no denying haptics have a certain cool factor. Obviously they’re appealing to venture capital firms right now: motion-sensing software company InvenSense has attracted $19 million in a series C round of funding, led by Sierra Ventures and a load of other big names like Qualcomm Ventures and DoCoMo capital.
InvenSense, whose applications include image stabilisation and navigation, will put the funding towards “company growth and evolv[ing] both the company business and product strategy”. The company reckons motion sensing will take off in mobile gaming and in smart user interfaces.
Motion sensing is a fascinating area, but applications are still in niche and more gimmicky than useful. Still, it’s a chicken and egg problem: phones need to have the appropriate tech inside them to make use of motion-sensitive applications, and without the apps, why put the necessary tech into the handsets? Hopefully, with some funding and some R&D, the motion-sensing people out there can come up with some must-have apps.
Gizmodo has some interesting tidbits on the upcoming release of Windows Mobile 7, courtesy of a now defunct article from Pocket Now, who’ve seen the OS in action.
Apparently, Window Mobile 7 “basically addresses everything wrong with WM6 today”. While there’s no hard details on what that might mean, I’m guessing this, along with the purchase of Danger might see a more user friendly, up to date interface on the way.
That said, Gizmodo says the expected release date of Windows Mobile 7 will be mid-2009. If that’s true, it’s a long time to wait for improvements that Microsoft should really have made iterations ago.
A new survey has confirmed what most people have already been talking about anecdotally: that iPhone users are massive consumers of mobile web content. According to the latest bit of research from M:Metrics, 85 percent of iPhone users accessed news and information on their device during January, compared to the average of 58 percent for other smartphone users and 13.1 percent for the rest of mobile owners.
The data consumption spike also carried across to other services, with 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watching mobile TV or video, compared to 4.6 percent of the market average or 14.2 percent of smartphones; while 49.7 percent of iPhone owners accessed a social networking site in January, compared to 19.4 precent of smartphone owners and 4.2 percent of average mobile users.
So what’s driving the trend: it’s not the speedy network access, after all, so it’s either the huge screen or the slick interface. Either way, I suspect once carriers and content providers get wind of this, they’ll be pressurising other handset manufacturers to start moving in the same direction while keeping their fingers crossed for a spike in data consumption as a result.
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