Key to mobile innovation is simplicity and usefulness

By FRANCIS TILL

"The best ideas in mobile communications are the ones that provide users with the most flexibility."

That is, according to Robert Davis - a senior lecturer in marketing and digital commerce at Auckland University.

He says SMS - text messaging - is one example of such an idea, and has grown in ways its designers could not have imagined.

Immensely popular in Asia and Europe, texting is a cash garden for providers, who charge 10c-25c a message. According to EMC Research, about 30 billion text messages are being sent every month around the world by a little more than a billion mobile phones.

"It's difficult to pick killer apps in advance," Davis said, "but ideas that allow end users the freedom to adapt them to their own needs - such as email on the regular internet, or the graphical web browser - are far more likely candidates than more restrictive notions, like WAP."

Parnell-based artist/engineer/inventor Wayne Young thinks he has one of those simple, flexible ideas. An idea that could keep text messaging RSI to a minimum while opening up new possibilities spawned by making keypads easier to use.

With about a dozen patents and patent applications on file with the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (www.iponz.govt.nz), Young has ideas ranging from a silver foil backing that turns bubble wrap into an insulating material to his latest, a potentially revolutionary keypad for mobile phones that is designed to take the cramps out of texting.

None, so far, has paid off.

The keypad is called a "Thumbtop". It sits on top of the screen, where it can be manipulated comfortably by the thumb of the hand holding the device.

Young has two visions of the Thumbtop (patent 510480, granted and sealed), one using regular buttons and the other employing a touchscreen keypad that could be loaded with alphanumeric buttons, icons (think iMode) or pictogram characters from non-alphabet-based languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or Thai.

There's no real prototype yet. No "angel investors" have come along to get it to that stage, and so far the mobile phone companies he's talked to have been unresponsive.

Young says they're focused on high-end changes like squeezing next-generation applications into handsets and ignoring the fact that the handsets do not work particularly well for at least one of their most popular uses, sending text messages.

Most mobile phone makers have gone in very different directions - but mostly in service to handsets with new capabilities.

The Nokia 6800, for example, is a smartphone that looks like a regular mobile but unfolds to give users a full keyboard with the screen in the middle. The screen orientation rotates automatically when the phone is unfolded.

Sony-Ericsson has actually looked at Young's proposal, but Dave Georgetti, general manager for Sony Ericsson New Zealand, said it did not fit with their form factor. He also pointed out that some texters used the fleshy part of their thumbs to press keys, and that obscured part of the screen.

Sony Ericsson is also moving in another direction when it comes to texting: character recognition on screen.