@ MEX: We Don’t Want Device Convergence. Or Do We?

[by Jemima Kiss] From the the PMN Mobile User Experience conference in London last week:
Day two. MEX is deliciously slick, beautifully well organized and it’s a superb venue too. Massive buckets of Haribo on the tables and instant, no-password-required wireless. Praise be!
So what do we make of the fact that not one person here today was from a handset manufacturer or an operator? “Either they think they don’t have nothing to learn, or they don’t have anything to contribute,” said Ken Blakeslee, chairman of WebMobility Ventures.
Quick survey: Nearly everyone in the audience has two or more devices on them: mobile, laptop, iPod, PDA, camera. Laurent Mauvais, interaction architect with UIQ Technologies, said people will continue to carry multiple devices. (In that case I want them all to be made by Apple…) But is that because people want to carry multiple devices, or just because the killer combo hasn’t happened yet?
“Surely the laptop is the ultimate Swiss Army Knife? Getting all the devices to work together better would solve some problems – those connections between devices are almost more important than the devices.”
Francis Djabri, user experience manager at OMTP: “Someone has to go out and there and take responsibility for this. Operators need to think long term, not just what is happening in the next 6-12 months.”
Blakeslee on the ‘Swiss Army Knife (TM!)’ thing: “I’ve never seen anyone actually take one camping because they don’t actually make good forks and spoons…”
Much of this discussion takes place far above the heads of the public, of course. “People are roadblocks,” said Benoit Schillings, Trolltech CTO. “It’s very easy to overestimate how much people can adapt to technology. Some people don’t even use the address book on their phone. An evolution has to take place at the tool level that makes it easier to integrate services.”

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

Comments have been disabled for this post