Technology and adoption: Mobile
services
By Sue Peters
 Do
you really want to watch movies on a tiny mobile phone
screen? Companies like NTT DoCoMo that pioneered 3G
services certainly hope so – it’s currently
their main marketing tool in the face of a largely
indifferent Japanese public. The recent research project
for the Media Research Alliance on technology and
cynicism (read
more) pays particular attention to the adoption
of new technologies, especially the evolution path
for the mobile phone. This evolution path is different
to other technologies because the future services
and applications were mapped out far in advance: people
were expected to migrate to WAP, then GPRS, and finally
3G. These acronyms have been floating around for so
long they have become part of media pundits’
common speak.
But has this really been the case? Let’s go
back to how the mobile was first used. Although the
penetration in the UK is near to 80%, the device itself
has been knocking around for a long time: remember
those 80’s yuppies carting around a phone the
size of a housebrick? But the key group that dramatically
improved mobile phone penetration were younger users,
and it was the emergence of ‘pay as you go’
tariffs that gave them access to the mobile.
In turn, teens changed the nature of mobile use.
How? In a nutshell, text messaging. Teenagers literally
got hold of text messaging and created an entire sub
culture around it, subtly transforming the mobile
into a device that communicated through data as well
as voice. And gradually, other age groups began to
get the hang of text messaging.
The grand plan for mobile development missed this
possibility (as evidenced by the fact that the instructions
for text messaging were not even included in early
instruction manuals). Instead, WAP asked us to take
a bigger behavioral leap than we wanted (coupled with
long download times, poor usability and lack of content!).
But text messaging has gradually educated us to use
the phone differently, and only now are we ready for
picture messaging and MMS that SMS introduced us to.
Users need a learning curve and WAP was at the wrong
end for the masses to use it. And so it continues.
There is a huge warning here for the technology providers
burdened by the debt from 3G licenses. Just because
the technology exists does not mean consumers will
demand it: consider the fax machine, invented in 1843
but unloved until the 1970s. The lesson so far is
that users must adapt and get used to using the mobile
in different ways at their own pace, not at a speed
dictated by phone companies. 3G will bring with it
video streaming, but only after the evolutionary path
and learning curve of SMS and MMS will we even be
able to contemplate using the mobile in such a way.
For more information about our research project "
Technology and Cynicism: The Digital Interregnum"
click here...
|
FEEDBACK