There’s a new Digital Divide in our world. I’m not referring to the oft-quoted divide between the digital haves and the have-nots, but the increasing divide between the mobile device world and the desktop world that exists for most of us. This was brought home to me recently when I tried to figure out the easiest way to synch my photos and music between my Nokia N95 and my MacBook Pro.

I’ve started taking a lot more photos on my phone since I became an N95 user. The 5 megapixel camera is pretty good for snapshots when I don’t have my Sony camera with me. I’ve also starting filling up my 2GB card on the Nokia with music. Making sure that our Taptu search engine works really well for the widest spectrum of music artists has had the pleasant side effect of leading me to discover a lot of new music.

Coincidentally I spotted a blog announcement of Nokia’s new “Nokia Multimedia Transfer” program for Mac OS X users. I installed it more in hope than expectation of a good solution. My experience in the past of the quality of Nokia’s old PC-to-phone synch products hasn’t been good: over-complex UI, unreliable, and often causing knock-on problems with other synching products on Windows that used to work just fine.

Surprise, surprise. It installed fast, had a great UI, it worked, and so still do all my other Mac synch programs. Someone who really cares has engineered and tested this. And to think that Nokia with their spotty record on Windows synch solutions put all this effort into the minority Mac OS X audience. I’m guessing that now the blogger community is so important to Nokia, and so many bloggers use Macs that they made it a priority.

But there is still a Digital Divide. When I invoke a synch, the Nokia program prompts me to install a USB cable to link my N95 to the MacBook, so I have to fumble around in a drawer to extract it from the tangle of 5 other cables and plug it in before the Nokia app thinks I’ve gone away. If I don’t do this, it reverts to Bluetooth and my transfers take so long that I’m worried I’ll miss any incoming calls while its happening.

Despite all of Nokia’s focus on investing resources to solve the mobile to desktop sync problem (surely it must be to ward off the impending threat of Apple and the iPhone – Apple are great at this stuff) the user experience breaks down at its weakest point – finding the physical cable. Maybe Nokia should be trying to do this synching over the faster WiFi link.

If it’s this hard to do music and photo sync well on the N95 with a special Series 60 application where Nokia have invested special and extraordinary effort to make sure it works, just think how much harder it is to do it well on feature phones where you don’t have the luxury of a special application. For most of us out there, our mobile is joined to our PC only by a very thin and awkward straw. Yet on the Web these sorts of everyday connectivity issues were solved years ago. At Taptu, we’re thinking hard about we could couple mobile search to mobile share to ease this new Digital Divide.

[Image source: ZDNet]

MocoNews’ James Quintana Pearce reports EBay’s rollout of an SMS-based service which allows bidders to be notified by SMS if they’re outbid on an existing auction, at which point they can react and increase their bid.

I’m not a regular eBay user, but it’s great to see a mobile service perform the single, and simple, task of tracking existing bids, freeing users from their desktop computer in those exciting last few moments before the end of an auction. No bells and whistle, no application download, just a clever use of SMS.

No, this isn’t the story of an Essex mum who discovered that her daughter had not gone to school, eaten or slept in 4 1/2 months because she’s joined at the thumb with her mobile phone, having texted her friends with “I ain’t bovered” 3 trillion times (though that’s entirely plausible too)

Three trillion text messages is how many 2.1 billion mobile users have sent across the world in the past year. Om Malik writes about this means of communication which can only be compared with the likes of email in terms of widespread success.

The popularity of SMS parallels that of email: It is simple, easy and doesn’t need any expensive gear to send or receive. Like email, it is socialist in its usage — a cheap $50 phone can send and receive SMS messages from a luxury model, Nokia N95 and even more snobbish iPhone.

Text messaging has undeniably become a useful communication tool when we don’t have time or energy for the polite conversation sugarcoating required in a phone conversation. SMS is direct, to the point and can be as asynchronous as you like. It’s clever and enables all sorts of long distance actions like letting your mates know you’ll be late, updating your status on Twitter or even getting your Personal Video Recorder to record something for you*.

Now, all together, “We love SMS!”

[* If you've managed to get this working, do let me know! I've yet to get it working properly. ]

A booth in the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen. Subtle, yet speaks volumes about expected etiquette.

[From Jan Chipchase via Gadget Lab]

This week’s Carnival is hosted by Xellular Identity. As ever, some great posts and interesting thoughts on our ever-evolving industry.

How many logos can you recognise? Does the logo make the company? Or do you grow fonder of an average logo once you start loving a product?

[Via Russell Beattie - note: new design a bit Google Ads heavy]

Just last week my tech-savvy lawyer friend Simon Halberstam posed me the following question: “Will the mobile phone replace the PC as main interface to the internet?” A question I have been recently asking myself, so here are a few musings on the topic.

First, a little history. Back in the heady days of WAP, there was a company called phone.com, which was later renamed as Unwired Planet, and then to Openwave. They were one of the first to evangelise the notion that mobiles would become internet devices and indeed the predominant internet devices.

Many others were caught up in the excitement, pouring hundreds of millions into building mobile portals. Remember the Vizavvi debacle? Zed and Genie? These grand ambitions were radically downsized as the internet bubble burst and the cold light of day set in: more and more phones sported microbrowsers but very worryingly, few people were using them – except in Japan.

A Jan 2007 ICM Omnibus Survey of the Mobile Internet showed that 21% of UK adults access the Mobile Internet to search for music, ringtones, mobile games or other forms of entertainment. Which means that 79% of people don’t. Not-so-different results have been observed in the US and in European studies.

I’m as sad a mobile geek as anybody, but I can’t see myself using my mobile (Nokia N95) as my main interface to the internet when I’m at work. Why would I, when I have a broadband-connected MacBook Pro right in front of me? If you’re poring through 82 unread blog posts like I am now, a 17 inch MacBook screen sure beats a 2.5 inch N95.

What I can see myself doing is using my mobile internet device as my main interface to my social network. I’m a recent convert to Facebook, and their mobile service works surprisingly well. And I’m not alone in liking it.

According to M:Metrics, 12.3 million consumers in the US and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile in June this year MySpace attracted 3.7 million US and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebook’s mobile audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.

Where do I see all this going? In ten years time, the desktop internet will still be the optimum device for office-bound knowledge workers. The destiny of the mobile internet is to be the natural place you go (several times a day or more) for social connection. It will also be the way to seek out the myriad tiny snippets of information (people, time, places) which spin out of this context.

[tags]Mobile devices, social network, community, Facebook, MySpace, M:Metrics, mobile phone, technology, gadgets, Taptu, Taptology, Steve Ives[/tags]

• In June, 12.3 million people from Western Europe and the United States visited social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, on their mobile phones. [M:Metrics report, via 3G.co.uk]
• In the UK, last year, mobiles accounted for 82 billion minutes, out of an overall total of 234 billion. The Ofcom report also said that 9% of UK households rely solely on a mobile, compared to 7% that only have a traditional landline phone.[Via SMS Text News]
• Apple may sell over 800,000 iPhones during this current quarter, beating its own target of 730,000. [Reuters]
• AT&T have finally seen sense, and will no longer send their users itemised bills (the most famous 300 pages bill unboxed by iJustine)

This week’s carnival is hosted on Darla Mack’s Days in the Life of a Diva blog, with a hand from mobilejones.

Some very interesting insight into the North American markets, with posts covering topics from how operators tie in their users (tip of the hat to a fellow Canadian!) to some figures on the US Wireless market in the first half of 2007. Some lighter content from SkyDeck pointing the finger at what’s broken in the industry.

If you’re using a Symbian Series 60 phone, whether it’s a Samsung, Nokia or LG, you probably wish it could do something more or do it differently. Well, the great news is that the S60 team is listening and looking for your feedback.

They’ve created an Application Wishlist, where you can add or rate Digg-style which features you would most like to see added. You’ll need to register to comment and rate wishes, but it’s worthwhile.

I don’t think wishes like “a tap-dancing phone” or “it turns into a Transformer when you hit the snooze button” would be likely to be put into action, but if your improvement ideas are less silly than mine, go on, close your eyes and make a wish!

[via Symbian-Guru]

[tags]nokia, s60, s60.com, s60v3, symbian, wishlist, mobile phone, technology, gadgets[/tags]