Till has over 14 years’ experience in the telecommunications field, having previously worked as a market analyst for Dataquest Europe Telecommunications Group and as Technology Strategist for both Psion Dacom and Psion plc.

Consumers will increasingly expect their mobile devices to act as the central control point for the management of their media experiences. ANDREW TILL explores the challenges in delivering simple and compelling experiences on mobile devices moving forwards…

Over the last ten years, there has been an outstanding level of innovation in the mobile world coupled with a rapid digitalisation of almost everything. These two trends have uniquely combined to redefine the way millions, if not billions of people, live their lives around the world. The instant access to content, latest emails or even Hollywood blockbusters directly on your mobile are no longer the stff of science fiction but something that we accept as an everyday natural occurrence.

Ten years ago the smartphone market did not exist; indeed Symbian had only just been born and Linux was far from being an industry buzzword. State-of-the-art hand-sets had black and white displays, picture messaging and a 9.6kbs circuit switched data capability. Today smartphones outsell laptops and the mobile has evolved to be the primary way mass market consumers are exposed to MP3 players, imaging and video capture experiences and mobile games.

So with such a rapid pace of innovation what lies in store for the next five years? While it’s impossible to cover all the areas of innovation we are likely to see, there are some key themes that I believe will shape consumer expectations and requirements moving forwards.

There will be a general trend to move from passive consumption of media to active engagement in the creation, evolution, discussion and sharing of media. This will in large part be driven by the advancement of displays, both in terms of size, sharpness and power, enabling more to be done on the devices coupled with improvements around input mechanisms providing the flexibility to manage and enhance media content quickly and simply. Over the last two years, we have witnessed a significant explosion in consumer accessing online services and browsing the Internet.

Undoubtedly, this trend has been led by Japan and Korea but is now clearly and increasingly a global development. During 2008, we have further seen the rise of consumer blogging content directly from their handsets, sending pictures or videos to social media engagement and networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

As we move forward, consumers will seek to have even richer, deeper experiences that involve not only the reviewing and posting of content but the active participation in its realtime development. Being able to capture, edit and share content directly on your handset, especially video, will be one of the key drivers in the near future. Bringing high quality product values in a simple and easy to use manner will transform the way that consumers engage not only with each other but also with businesses moving forwards. Consider for a moment the amount of news footage that is now generated by mobile devices. Now imagine as a consumer being able to capture a news event on video, adding your own voice and text commentary, enhancing the video by removing or adding scenes with professional quality transitions and being able to sell your story to a news broadcaster.

As consumers become more engaged in media creation and sharing so also the requirements around social networking will evolve. Today most consumers are focused on managing their online profilesand viewing their friends’ sites. Soon this will evolve into a much broader community management experience. Not only will consumers manage their profiles but they will seek to control all aspects of their digital personality. Let’s take, for example, the humble ringtone. Today my friends can chose to give me a personalised ringtone attached to my entry in their phonebook. However, this ringtone they have chosen may, or may not, reflect me and how I perceive myself. In the future, when I call them it will play the ringtone or video ringtone that I have chosen based on the way I want them to perceive me. Clearly this is a very limited example and with enabling technologies such as personal micro Web servers, advanced 3.5G data services and advanced on - device media transcoding I will also be able to manage much more of my digital persona.

I may for example wish to publish my latest Facebook updates during calls, automatically synchronise media content to my friends or families handsets or simply modify my imaging to remove those tired lines during a video call. The key will be that ownership will be placed firmly in the users hands for them to manage and control.

We are also seeing a new generation of consumers coming into the market place. At Motorola, we call them Generation C. These are the consumers that have grown up with text messaging and the Internet. Mastery of technology comes easily for these consumers and they are always hungry for new experiences. They are not confined to Western Europe or North America but live in all parts of the world. One of the most intriguing aspects to Generation C is their ability to consume vast amounts of data simultaneously. Research studies have found that they can consume up to 31 hours of content a day. This is driven by their ability to perform advanced multitasking such as watching TV, while blogging and conducting IM conversations. And no, the ability to multitask is not limited to just females from Generation C.

This new breed of consumers has radically different expectations of how they consume content and how their mobile devices should deliver rich experiences. They are no longer happy to just engage in a linear entertainment model such as simply watching TV but want to do many things at once. This will drive significant changes in how the mobile devices of tomorrow are developed and how the user interfaces (UI) will need to perform in order to meet their expectations. Realtime multitasking and processing will need to become the standard, driving new challenges in both chipset and overall handset architecture design. We are already seeing many Operating System (OS) vendors gear-up for supporting multiple application processors within a single handset.

The need to support intelligent predictive behavioural models will also become a key focus area. Understanding what to present to the user when will become critical to ensuring ease of use. Considerfor a moment that today most Operating Systems rely on consumers telling the device what to do. Consumers will expect the device to make decisions about what content to bring to the foreground in an elegant manner and to make decisions about what to do with other applications also running on the device. It will not be enough to simply base this on a set of rules but will rather require learning models that grow to understand the nuances of that particular consumer.

Consumers will also increasingly expect their mobile devices to act as the central control point for the management of the media experiences. This poses perhaps the greatest challenge to delivering simple and compelling experiences moving forwards. With the evolution of technologies such as Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) and UPnP/rUPnP, a world of seamless connectivity between consumer electronics devices should become a reality. However, it will take time for these technologies to evolve and become widely deployed and all the time consumer expectations are getting heightened. Therefore, it is unlikely that it will simply be enough to provide seamless connectivity options but rather that the mobile world will have to work more closely with the broader consumer electronics world to offer intelligent UI presentation of device capabilities, services and content navigation to consumers.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is also likely to play a critical role in enabling or limiting a multimedia rich future. Clearly consumers will wish to share all forms of content and for many content owners this is likely to prove the most effective sales channel they can exploit. Whilst the scope of what can be achieved is almost boundless, the ability to enable new super distribution models while protecting the rights of content owners will, in reality, be one of the biggest challenges the industry will face in the coming years. While we have seen a trend towards rights free music content over the past 12 months, we are yet to see this move in to other domains such as video or gaming.

Clearly there are many other areas not touched on in this paper, such as enhancements in location and presence and even the continued evolution of voice and messaging services, which will also play a key role in shaping the future of all our lives. However, the underlying message is clear. There is no lack of opportunity for innovation in the mobile market. Moore’s Law will continue to drive forward the hardware capabilities and at the same time consumers’ insatiable appetite for new services, UI innovations and social connectivity will continue to drive software innovation. All aspects of our day-to-day lives will continue to be touched and enhanced by the ever increasing pace of the mobile revolution.

We are seeing a new generation of consumers coming into the market place. These are the consumers that have grown up with text messaging and the Internet. We call them Generation C