Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

Last week, companies such as Symbian, PalmSource, and SonyEricsson became advisors to the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) group. For their efforts (and cash), they get to help mobile operators drive their businesses to irrelevancy.

OMTP is an organization created by and for the mobile carriers. The group's mission is to "create an open ecosystem for advanced mobile platforms", but they keep the focus on the operators. Small wonder this is a group based in Europe, where the operators have historically lower influence than those in Japan and some in the US.

Notably absent in OMTP is companies like Digital Airways and Trigenix (who may be represented via Qualcomm). These companies have existing platforms to do much of what OMTP is working towards, including giving the carrier or other content provider a lot of influence over the phone's user interface.

Regardless of whether OMTP or the independent companies prevail, let's think about some key implications of this.

1. Operators, not device manufacturers, become responsible for the user interface, especially the standby screen.
2. Operators don't really want a consistent user experience. They actually want differentiated and branded user experiences. Thus we can reasonably expect a "New York Yankees" or a "Hello Kitty" standby screen, with ringers, background images, news, applications, and links to content. They want to sell the space, allowing users to select what suits them best. This week.
3. Devices become differentiated solely on cost, industrial design, features, and speed. Just like the computer industry. This benefits some low-cost leaders like LG and Samsung, but probably hurts Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, and SonyEricsson. After all, the carrier provides the user interface.
4. New device features, like speech recognition, will not be well supported and will therefore be irrelevant. Innovation will likely suffer.
5. Different user interfaces have different metaphors: scrolling softkeys, Options/Back, two softkeys, etc. Either operators will have to limit what content providers can do, or they will have to support multiple metaphors.
6. Items deep in the phone's menu will be ignored. The content provider doesn't know anything about them. The device manufacturer doesn't care. Thus operators will have to define those separately. One for each UI metaphor they allow.
7. Applications, particularly the Java environment and the web browser, will not have a consistent experience with the rest of the device. Expect this to fall through the cracks on the first round of branded user interfaces, and the technology to catch up with these needs.

I'm concerned that we're going to dive into this mess without really understanding the consequences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Business, Carriers, Design, Mobile applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.