Limitations of cellphones for mobile computing
There is this interesting use of camera phones to get around the trouble of typing URLs. From http://www.admpartners.com/blog/2004/05/mobilizeyourb.html:
“What is it? It’s a barcode that encodes a URL. If you have a wireless or mobile internet device, you just scan the barcode into your URL field, and voila! you load the website it links to. “
However, that such a solution is appealing shows the limitation of cellphones — the difficulty in typing more than a few characters of text.
A Japanese company Reudo makes an external full size keyboard that will accept a cellphone
— similar to the keyboards stands that accept PDAs. I found the keyboards for PDAs useful, but only to a point. For entering or editing text which is hard to do with a stylus (or a cellphone keypad for that matter), the keyboard works. However, the kinds of text applications you’d want to do on a small screen are limited. For example, these work:
- shopping lists
- short journal entries
On the other hand, the following wouldn’t work well unless you have a good visual memory to be able to deal with a small visual portal (e.g. 300×200 pixels) on a larger document. While such a skill could be developed, it may not be a generally useful one.
- spreadsheets
- paging through lots of text for revision
- web browsing
- most multiwindowed applications
The Limitations of cellphones for mobile computing by Daily Movement, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
March 10th, 2005 at 9:21 am
i’m typing this on my treo and I agree that web browsing can be done but more out of need than casual use.