HotThought

Continuing from the previous post, please consider:

Rethinking the iPhone’s Role in Computing
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348658,00.asp

Is the iPhone a personal computer that just happens to make phone calls, or a phone that just happens to run apps? And if it’s really a PC that fits in your pocket, does that change how you use it?

Several subtle design decisions that makes iPhone Internet surfing experience much better:

1. By not including a keypad/keyboard altogether, the screen can be larger and phone be lighter

2. The touch-screen design (which acts like a mouse in PC) with nice UI. Since iPhone isn’t designed to work with a stylus, user can operate using one hand. Also, UI focuses more on “swipe” or “gesture” (i.e. multi-touch) action instead of pinpoint button clicking (current Windows Mobile version still does that a lot), it feels more native to a small-screen phone and greatly improves the Internet surfing experience

3. accelerometer makes it easier to surf the Internet in landscape mode

In a sense, iPhone innovates a lot in the Internet experience but gives up a bit on the normal phone experience (by giving up a keypad). After the pioneering work of iPhone, lots of smartphones borrow the design ideas and really make the smartphone a viable platform for Internet surfing. In fact, we are seeing smartphone becoming more important in the Wi-Fi Hotspot market.

With the increase popularity of smartphone in the hotspot segment, it creates both opportunity and technical challenge for hotspot management solution vendor like FirstSpot. The main technical challenge for us is the delivery of message to the hotspot users (which we will discuss in future posting).

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under FirstSpot, Wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.