Nick Jones

Is someone about to buy Palm? I don’t have any inside information on the topic, but I certainly do have some opinions. One of the rumours flying around is that Nokia might be a suitor. Would this be a good thing? I don’t think so; maybe a year ago it would have been sensible, but [...]

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An interesting working draft just emerged from W3C for something called EmotionML- Emotion Markup Language. The goal is to provide a framework for annotating information with human emotions. There is a clear need for some form of EmotionML, especially in the area of context where future mobile devices will provide lots of clues to our [...]

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I was sitting listening to a presentation at Nokia World yesterday thinking that one of the most interesting aspects of the mobile universe at the moment is that it’s in a land-grab phase. Land-grabs occur when something new is emerging, which involves some degree of lock-in and critical mass. Land-grabs in a market are interesting [...]

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We’re all fashion victims. Mobiles are basically fashion accessories with electronics inside. Technology itself has fashions, at the moment the pendulum has swung towards thin architectures and cloud services for example. But at some point thick clients will return to stride the techno-catwalk again, and we’ll all rediscover how nice it is to have a [...]

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Yesterday I went so a ceramics show. I like ceramics because it’s a craft that – when done well – combines beauty and utility. One of my favourite quotes is from a British designer called William Morris, who said:
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be [...]

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There’s a big technological deficiency in mobile phones. They desperately need better location sensing. There are already over a dozen ways to locate a mobile phone, which Bill Clark and I discussed when we wrote a research note on the topic a while back, so you might wonder why we need more. However, the problem is [...]

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Netbooks are definitely the flavour of the month, operators see them as an opportunity to sell new subsidised 3G devices and hardware manufacturers hope we’ll all rush out and buy a new category of wireless gadget. OPK has said that Nokia is contemplating making PCs, by which I guess he too means netbooks. Could Nokia [...]

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One of my colleagues recently forwarded me a link to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox posting on mobile usability. Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert who recently decided to test the usability of web sites accessed on mobile devices. Unsurprisingly he concluded that usability was awful and websites should provide special mobile versions. Duh.
I must confess Nielsen’s [...]

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Nokia now has an app store. But so does pretty much everyone else. In fact Nokia has three app stores – a music store, an nGage games store and now an Ovi store. Confused? Me too. I don’t see why a music track and a music video should come from different stores. Or why a [...]

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Some of the most interesting research and the coolest new products are in the user interface area. For example I just love Oblong’s G-Speak gestural control system which is the closest thing to “Minority Report” around today. If you haven’t yet seen it take a look at some of the YouTubes of Oblong being used [...]

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