Date (2nd Jan)Cherry Cheng (Original)Will Kwok (1st revision)

SHATIN 沙田

A brief history of mobile

• One of the greatest inventions of mankind• Revolutionized communications• Enabling us to reach across great distances and

share thoughts, ideas and dreams with the fellow man

• Make the world a much smaller place in the process

Mobile phone in the past

• Is a distant cousin to the telephone• A communication and information device• Nearly always connected to the Internet• You can send and receive voice and text messages• You can purchase goods and services• Can do early everything you can do with a desktop

computer• Not merely a telephone, is a long-overdue promises

that technology will make the lives easier

Modern mobile device

• Web is divided desktop web and the mobile web• The desktop web is made up of the sites and web

applications designed for a browser running on desktop or laptop computers

• The desktop context involves information that we access typically while stationary and sitting at our desk

• The mobile web contains the sites and web applications designed for mobile devices, or the mobile context which we can access anywhere at any time

Web on mobile device

• Mobile technology has gone through many different evolutions to get to where it is today

• In mobile industry, we often refer to these evolutions as “generations” or simply “G”

• “G” refers to the maturity and capabilities of the actual cellular networks

• Design not focused on G, but focus on five distinct eras of devices

• The Brick Era• The Candy Bar Fra• The Feature Phone Era• The Smartphone Era• The Touch Era

The evolution of devices

The evolution of devices

• Brick Era (1973 – 1988)• A corded receiver connected to a portable radio the

size of a car battery• Useful only to those who truly needed constant

communication, such as stockbrokers or who worked in the field, such as salepeople or real estate agents

• Expensive• Far too impractical for the majority of us• In the early 1990s,bulky mobile technology would

eventually be added to cars for increased mobility• More cellular radio towers were needed to provide

constant coverage• Power demands of the devices went down

The Brick Era

• Candy Bar Era (1988 – 1998)• Candy bar is the actual term used to describe the

long, thin, rectangular form factor of the mobile devices

• The network shifted to second-generation (2G) technology at 1991

• The density of cellular sites caused by increased usage decreased the power demands of the device, making it small enough to fit in your pocket

• It is the first time people started to realize that mobile phones could do more than make voice calls.

• Candy bar phones commonly associated with 2G GSM networks for SMS (Short Message Service)

• Users realized that they could send messages to their friends for free when voice calls were still expensive. Thus the abbreviated text language limited to 140 characters was born.

The Candy Bar Era

• The Feature Phone Era (1998 – 2008)• Up to this point, mobile phones had done three

things: make voice calls, send text messages and play the Snake game

• The Feature Phone Era opened the floodgates to a variety of applications and services on the phone, like listening to music and taking photos, and introduced the use of the Internet on a phone

• GSM network providers added GPRS allowing packet-switched data service. Called 2.5G or halfway between 2G and 3G networks

• With the introduction of cameras into higher-end feature phones and with increased consumer interest in digital photography, demand for feature phone began to increase

• At last the Web had reached mobile devices

The Feature Phone Era

• Smartphone Era from around 2002 to present• No clear description for what is a smartphone• It contains all the same capabilities of a feature

phone• Most smartphones are distinctive in that they use a

common operating system, a larger screen size, a QWERTY keyboard or stylus for input and Wi-Fi or another form of high-speed wireless connectivity

• Microsoft attempted with its initial Windows CE platform, which would later become Windows Mobile

• By combined a Palm OS, based on PDA with a phone module to create PDA-style smartphones(BlackBerry)

• Nokia created the Symbian OS, which used for a variety of mobile devices, popular models (6260 and N95)

The Smartphone Era

• Before mobile devices were still just person-to-person communication tools

• As network improve and data speeds increase, it allowed more features

• 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone in the MacWorld conference

• iPhone 3G got around 30% of the overall smartphone market

• In less that a year, more than 2000 mobile web applications were made freely available specifically for iPhone

• Within six months of iPhone 3G release, iTunes App Store had already seen its more than 10000 applications downloaded over 300 million times

• Touch Era are a completely new medium capable of offering real people new and exciting ways to interact and understand information

The Touch Era

The Mobile Ecosystem

Services

Applications

Application frameworks

Operating system

Platforms

Devices

Aggregators

Networks

Operators

• Refers to Mobile Network Operators• The operator’s role in the ecosystem is to create and

maintain a specific set of wireless services over a reliable cellular network

• E.g. China Mobile, Vodafone, Telefonica, etc

The Mobile Ecosystem

Operators

• Mainly use wireless networks• Cellular technology is just a radio that receives a

signal from an antenna• The majority of networks use the GSM standard• 2G / 3G / LTE, faster standard is in development

The Mobile Ecosystem

Networks

• 85% use feature phones• 13% use smart phones• Operators sell devices at a severely discounted

price, often one-third or less of the actual cost of the device

• Lock the devices to their networks• Most challenge the mobile ecosystem currently

faces: device fragmentation, causing different mobile devices to display content inconsistently

The Mobile Ecosystem

Devices

• Primary duty is to provide access to the devices• To run software and services on each of these

device• Three types of platforms: licensed, proprietary and

open source• Licensed: Sold to device maker, create a common

platform of development application programming, e.g. Java ME, Windows Mobile

• Proprietary: Designed and developed by device makers for use on their devices. E.g. Palm, iPhone, BlackBerry

• Open Source: mobile platform that are freely available for users to download, e.g Android

The Mobile Ecosystem

Platforms

• It used to be that if a mobile device ran an operating system, it was most likely considered a smartphone

• Operating systems often have core services or toolkits that enable applications to talk to each other and share data or services

• E.g. Windows mobile, Palm OS, Mac OS X, Android

The Mobile Ecosystem

Operating system

• The first layer the developer can access is the application framework or API

• Used to create application, such as games, camera• Sharing core services such as communications,

messaging, graphics, location, security, etc• iOS SDK, Android SDK, Web (HTML5)

The Mobile Ecosystem

Application frameworks

The Mobile Ecosystem

Applications

• A game, a web browser, a camera• Need to know the application framework and the

device• Web browser as the solution for the various of

application framework and device difference

The Mobile Ecosystem

• The last layer in the mobile ecosystem• Include tasks such as accessing the Internet,

sending a text message, etc.

Services

HK Mobile App Dev Industry

Information Technology?

Multimedia? Design?

• Mainly Makes App for Other Corporations• Involves Subcontractors

• Some Runs their Own Product• Target – International:• Talkbox | http://talkboxapp.com/• Step-ly | http://steply.com/• FileSq | http://filesq.com/• Target – Regional:• Openrice | http://openrice.com• Target – Hong Kong:• HK Movie• Quru | http://www.quruapp.com

HK App Dev Industry

• Market / Design Oriented• Cherrypicks

• http://www.cherrypicks.com/• Pacific Link iMedia

• http://www.pacim.com/• why Interactive

• http://www.whyinteractive.com/• why Interactive

• http://whyinteractive.com/

• IT Oriented• Green Tomato

• http://www.gtomato.com/• Mtel

• http://mtelnet.com/• Four

• http://www.4d.com.hk/

Type of App Dev

• Gaming• Where’s my water?

• Advertising-based / Campaign-based (Soft Sell)• iButterfly• TownCheck • Zappar

• Innovative Service• Instagram

• Enhance existing IT Solution• HSBC App• Openrice App

Type of App

• Touch Era: • Usability + Aesthetic = rise the customers’

standard

• App Store – Eye Candies to attract downloads

• IT = may not be a good app designer

• Design = may not be good at system design, performance optimization

• Which side better? No One Knows. But Mobile App with better User Interface WINS

Why DESIGN/IT?