Planet of the Apps

The Killer App is You

While the waters remain a bit murky, one thing is clear: Wireless users want such a wide range of services, in such a variety of permutations, that there will be no single "killer app" for mobile. For providers of next-generation mobile services, having the right range of services to satisfy very particular user needs and tastes is the killer app, so to speak. As Nokia’s Gaines puts it: "The killer app is you."

Early this year, Finnish rock group Nylonbeat released a song formatted for cell phone ring-tones. To the ears of Pekka Isosomppi, communications manager for Nokia, Finland, the bleepy version of the song sounded "awful." But its release confirmed Isosomppi’s view that what counts in wireless applications is "personal relevance."

Personal relevance, of course, varies widely across the globe. In Korea, cell phones equipped with Yamaha speakers offer a handheld version of the popular Japanese arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. In the game, players punch their phone keys in response to a series of music-accompanied patterns that appear on the Javascript-enabled screens, in a finger-tapping version of the full-bodied arcade original. In Singapore, network operator Singtel offers an SMS (short messaging service) blind date service, on cell phones installed with ground-based location identifiers.

Peter Zaballos, director of mobile marketing at RealNetworks, agrees that there is no single application that will drive wireless user adoption uniformly, from business commuters in San Jose to teenagers in Manila. Instead, the killer application is having a range of services, optimized in different devices for particular demographics and personal tastes, he says.

Asked to imagine his own hypothetical killer app, Isosomppi describes a time-management system that would organize information from incoming phone calls and text messages into a wireless schedule. "It’s quite boring, I know, but it would really help me," he says. Zaballos, for his part, describes a wireless music service that would notify him of releases from his favorite artists, store relevant digital files in a locker for later retrieval, and charge his mobile commerce account for the songs he downloaded for playback.

Nokia drives its cell phone R&D according to a range of demographic segments, and hybrid device development is likely to follow this strategy, says Gaines. In terms of current devices, the Nokia 8390, which is translucent and has a white backlight, is designed to appeal to young professionals with BMWs who "are not afraid to use their cell phones while you have dinner with them," says Gaines. Nokia will create devices optimized for different functions, from information to entertainment, according to demographics, the company said.Gaines agrees with Phil Gosset, leader of the future studies team for Vodafone in the United Kingdom, that the notion of the single, converged device that does everything is unlikely to prove commercially viable. A button-size gizmo that worked as a phone, organizer, media player and house key would be too valuable. "There’s also the question of who you call when you lose it," says Gosset. "I mean, do you call the phone company, and say you can’t get into your house?"

Before making big decisions about device or software design, companies should meet users, observe their daily lives, and discuss design ideas with them directly, says Eija Kaasinen, a research engineer at the VTT technology research institute in Finland. Companies should design products and services taking into account the physical and social context of the user, and the other products and services the user already has. "Designers believe in ‘featurism’ — the more features you load on a product, the better it will be. But in real life, people like devices which can easily do the most basic things," Kaasinen wrote in a research paper.