James and the Giant Cellphone

Ok... so not a giant cellphone, just an interesting talk about mobile devices and applications. Today James Eberhardt made the trek to Sheridan to talk to us on the topic. It was prettying interesting and informative.

One hugely enlightening thing that came up was that Flash Lite (the Flash Mobile platform) only supports AS2... boo... The upside of this is that it may encourage me to dabble in AS2 which wouldn't be a bad thing.

He showed some interesting things that I didn't know you could do on a cellphone. Some of them involved the use of a somewhat high tech phone (higher tech than mine anyway). One that I thought was kind of fun was the ability to send a picture taken on your phone directly to your Flickr account. If the phone has GPS it will even send the information about where the photo was taken. Flickr uses this information to create a map that shows the location and associates it with the shot. Handy dandy!

Another interesting new (to me) tidbit was the use of 2D barcodes with a cellphone for browsing to a website or maybe even to download information like a new address book entry or maybe some relevant information on a popular tourist attraction. James showed examples of how these barcodes are being places on product labels and posters. People are able to just point their cellphone camera at the barcode, snap a picture and either browse to the product website or have some information downloaded to their phone. I had never heard of this before. I think there could be some very interesting applications for this. I think most people find entering any information into their cellphone to be tedious and inefficient. I love the idea of being able to just point and shoot and voila! Now if only the cost of browsing would go down so that I'd be more willing to use my phone for that task :( It would be great though if someday there were the option to carry around a personal barcode that people can scan when they want your contact information. No more hunting for a pen and paper or taking 10 minutes to enter someones number and email into your phone.

The major downside to mobile applications would by far be the cost for the user. James pointed out that in Canada it can cost the user up to $20.00 just to download 1MB of data to their phone. For example Bell has a data plan that costs you $25/month for a limit of 4MB/month. Any data downloaded above and beyond is $12/MB. Given that a short video can be 50 MB this is not a cheap thing to download on your phone! This is very prohibitive to progress in mobile application development.

All in all there is some potential for interesting new technologies in the mobile field. I think that there are still some things that will need to change for it to really take off however. I'd love to see ActionScript 3.0 for Flash Lite for one. I also feel that the cost of data uploading and downloading would stop a lot of people from taking advantage of the conveniences offered through their mobile devices.