Edge Effects

Through a series of links through the blogosphere I came to an article on Lifeblog that explains in very clear terms something that has been bugging me for a number of years now.
The article describes the issue in terms of the difference between mobiles and laptops. That is a spurious argument, in my opinion, but the point is well made andit referred to mobile lifestyle rather than a device as such. Interfaces are very different depending on the purpose of our applications. The real 'clarifier' for me was to categorise the things we do into 'foreground' and 'background' tasks.

There is a tendency for people to want to combine every possible application (foreground and background) into a single device that they can carry around with them. The problem is, as far as I can see, that everyone wants their UI to be the central part.
Here's a few links to people visualising hubs for their particular application
- Fujitsu HDTV (via David)
- Nokia N91
- Motorola Rokr
- HP PDA/GSM

All very nice, but should all these cool devices have their own network access??
Now we have 'phones' like the Nokia N91 that have several modes of access, 3G, GSM, Wifi...what next, Flash-OFDM too? What networks do we use for what tasks? Foreground/Background? I'd like to tell my 'phone' to use WiFi when it's available for some background stuff, otherwise use 3G etc.
What I want is a router that I can stick in my pocket. It should be able to connect to all the networks and have configurable settings depending on my environment. It might reasonably be made by Cisco or Huawei and it will support a short range internal network. It should ensure that my foreground stuff happens without serious degradation from the background stuff (QoS on the edge!).

Let's look at what the usage on a mobile device would typically look like:


The pattern of usage for different applications will require different kinds of interface, and they can be developed better without having to worry about the network access part of the equation.
For some people with voice activated dialling and bluetooth headsets, this separation has already happened, they are the early adopters, eventually we will all have a router in our pocket.