Where mobile devices can further extend the mobile lifestyle

I would love to see more growth in mobile devices as local sensors that are built to use and communicate with the immediate surroundings of the device. I’m not thinking of location based services, but of the mobile device as location aware (rather than location dependent), aware of the local context surrounding the phone.

The mobile phone is already a device that connects phone to phone (and people to people). This local awareness (connectivity?) connects phone to surroundings, leading to personal area networks, proximity applications, things like Nokia Sensor, health sensors, and so on.

Indeed, phones are already slowly becoming Life Recorders, collecting what we say through our messages (and recorded conversations), social connections via call logs and address books, whereabouts via cellID and calendar and BT, what we see via photos and videos. Read about some great research here from Berkeley and MIT.

This source for this commentary was mainly from Antti and Janne (see article below for more similar discussions). Thanks guys.

Link: Lifeblog: What are the true qualities of mobility?.

Successful mobile devices are ones that are background devices that don’t force themselves into the foreground. Background activities can be listening to music, waiting for appointment reminders, carrying snippets of actionable data (contact info, calendar, some notes, a to-do list), and waiting for a call or SMS.