Most people under 25 would rather eat their own heads than enter anything longer than a friend's name on their mobile. And yet if mobile commerce is to succeed, as many believe it will, we will need better ways of inputting text than fiddling with nine tiny keys.
So far, higher portability has meant a poorer input interface, but improvements are at hand. What is quickly becoming a global standard for mobile-phone input, T9, has soothed some of the stress. But for truly simple access, quicker interfaces are a must.
The leader in this field, with its i-mode users permanently switched on to what the Japanese are calling the Evernet, Japan's DoCoMo has come up with quite a few novel ideas, such as a pen-size scanner for its 15 million wireless subscribers. The device clips neatly into mobile phones and can be used to scan bar codes at the end of magazine articles. To check out one of the products mentioned, you pass the pen over the stripes and your phone calls up the company's website. It can also be used to place orders from product and mail order catalogues, either via email or pages on the web. Japan is also pioneering a service where you key in a company's telephone number and the web page comes up.
Wired magazine, too, is now promoting scanning of its pages, but as Jan Chipchase, a researcher at the Nokia Research Centre (NRC), Tokyo, points out: "Would you carry a pen around with you just to scan articles? I quite like the idea of scanning using a mobile. The biggest problem is having different bar code systems in different shops - there are compatibility problems - and whether there are enough magazines supporting this feature."
Meanwhile, the next- generation wireless devices are now in development by Japanese electronics giants. Despite being left out the GSM agreements years ago - which renders Japanese phones useless outside the country - Japan's mobile technology has developed rapidly and will dominate the production of the much-vaunted globally-usable G3 mobile phones.
The country's biggest handset producer, Matsushita Communication Industrial (MCI) - trading as Panasonic abroad - was also largely behind the miniaturisation methods that have resulted in a phone the size of a woman's compact case. The company's development lab in Yokohama is now busy perfecting alternative keying methods for these tiny devices. Speech recognition has already been incorporated into existing models with varying degrees of success. But the best way forward would be the reinvention of the human interface, says Toshiro Iizuka, chief product designer for MCI.
"If the mobile phone is evolved, for example, to the third generation, there might be completely new applications such as video conferencing by mobile phones, or gaming battles between mobile phones with game functions. People's lifestyles themselves will be changed by such advanced mobile phones," he says.
What Iizuka and his team have come up with is a fusion of the Game Boy and a mobile handset. By holding the pad with both hands, and pressing buttons on the top with your thumbs and on the bottom with your fingers, all manner of data can be entered. The inspiration, says Iizuka, came from watching a saxophonist play, and gamers at local arcades.
Chipchase believes Matsushita may be on the right track. "I don't think keyboards are going away in a hurry. However, look at how much fun it is to enter a name for a high score using a Game Boy-type device. I'd place bets on one-hand keyboards. Not those desktop ones but one converted to fit into your semi-open fist. So you could 'chord' [type one-handed]. You could walk around with your mobile typing at the same time.
"Some one-handed 'chording' key boards are available already such as the BAT Personal Keyboard, which claims to replicate all the functions of a full-size keyboard. However these devices also require the user to learn another new skill if they are not a regular gamer.
"Chording tends to be unsellable to the mass market because people have to learn the functionality, or the combinations on the interface need to be explained somewhere. Having said that, chording is loved by a few: pianists, Street Fighter 3 players, etc."
As far as m-commerce is concerned by far the most exciting development is Bluetooth as it will help to take some of the grind out of getting to a businesse's web site, after, say, you might have been enticed to do so by an advertising billboard. this transaction. "You can take the most difficult part of the interaction process (entering in the web site address) and zap it to the users phone seamlessly", says Chipchase.
In our convenience-crazed culture it could be the catalyst for m-commerce's success.
