Dial 866 272 4337 to speak to Lara

Unless you've been hidden under a rock for the last year you have probably noticed that "App Stores" are all the rage with mobile phone companies - Apple has the lead here with the success of the iTunes App Store. RIM have launched their Blackberry App Store, Palm are bringing an "App Catalogue" to the Pre, Google have the "Android Marketplace" for the G1 devices launched, and I expect to see more announcements of new, or revised applications stores from both OEMs (Nokia relaunching the "Nokia Content Download" portal, Sony Ericsson relaunching their "Fun and downloads" portal) - along with many application store relaunches of operator wap portals.

All this innovation in interfaces, business models and competition is ultimately good for mobile application developers - as with more retailers vying for their applications they should ultimately see higher revenues, and lower margins at the retail so a greater share for the developer. So with this growth in applications how are phones going to cope with all the complexity of lots of applications - how will users discover the applications, and how will they get to them? What happens when your phone has 2,000 applications - clearly something is broken. Or is it?

Actually even the simplest phone today already copes with unlimited numbers of applications. The phones have been architected from the very start to provide access to an unlimited catalogue, and have flexible billing models integrated, settlement systems between providers and the ability to perform international transactions. The mobile industry doesn't call these "applications" though, they call them "contacts".

Mobile phones come with great address books - and shortcut systems to let you bookmark your favourites, and easily find them again - "quick dial" and "call log" are excellent at this. They have a superb URL system that the phone interfaces are optimised for in the hardware - phone numbers, and every consumer understands that there is a cost associated with making a call. The infrastructure even has regulation that enable free applications (0800 numbers in the UK) - low cost applications (0845 numbers) and premium products.

Given this fabulous infrastructure and consumer education the mobile industry should be the market leader in applications surely?

Unfortunately not - while every mobile phone is optimised for voice, and dialling, I'm not aware of a single design that has taken advantage of the user interface and consumer education to enable people to "dial" applications. Simple solutions like "dial this number to get this application" haven't been implemented. Instead the mobile industry has looked outside it's core competence and core value and tried to copy the PC industry - with application launchers, application icons and browser based online stores. Maybe the phone industry would be better served at looking more closely at it's own advantages - and building on it's strengths than trying to copy solutions from outside.

So why dial 866 272 4337 for Lara? Look at your phone keypad, and the letters, it spells out Tom bRa ider

Comments

[Dom]

I think the Palm Pre does this as it happens. It's made easier by the fact that it has a full QWERTY so there is no ambiguity about which character was intended. To me it is clearly Spotlight influenced (which in turn was influenced by Quiksilver I suspect).

There is also the T9 nav software here:

http://t9nav.com/

That does a similar thing. It is an excellent idea. The Palm Pre's execution goes so far as to initiate a Google search if no matches are found which is nice.

This pushes the load onto the user (name recall as opposed to icon recognition) but for the small number of apps that most folk use this shouldn't be a problem. However, there are some apps whose names I can never remember where I have to resort to a bit of spotlight vagabonding to find the right application.

Excellent blog btw.