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 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.

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