Buttons Are Boring

I went to a launch of Samsung’s new series of mobile phones yesterday, which threw up some interesting new technologies, which I’ve mentioned here.

Outside of the units themselves, a comment made during the briefing caught my eye. According to Samsung, up to 15 percent of mobile phone users saw little or no use for a touchscreen on a telephone. And this intrigued me.

All technologies evolve, and while some people are not as fast on the uptake as others, most people generally get there in the end. Somebody was the last person to get a colour telly, or a VCR, and there are plenty of people out there who still don’t have a DVD player. Yet, to actually unequivocally say that there is no need for a touchscreen doesn’t make sense.

A touchscreen on a mobile is one of the most fundamental must-haves. It makes life so much more easier than having to use buttons. Think of how much easier it is to navigate your mobile Internet function? Or dragging the map on your mobile GPS? What about how most good smartphones turn your touchscreen Qwerty keyboard to landscape without having to utilise a clunky slider keyboard or normal numerical keypad? Or, how about the screen size – if you do away with the button keyboard suddenly you can increase the screen size to be almost the same as the surface area of the mobile.

So who is this 15 percent? People who don’t understand the technology, or are being contrary, or genuinely believe that touchscreen technology is of absolute no use? I don’t know, but I say, get with the programme – this technology is not only here to stay, but I predict within five years button mobiles will be going the way of the Dodo.

Cool, Cool, Cool!

There are a tonne of apps out there at the moment in smartphone land, but one that has made me sit up and take notice is the tramTRACKER for the iPhone, from Yarra Trams in Victoria.

What this little app does is track your tram in real time. So if is running late, or has broken down, you can log into the app on your smartphone and find out where the tram is located. It uses GPS technology so users can find out the estimated arrival time of a tram at their stop.

We all know just check it out on your phone and if it is running late, you don’t have to hurry, or if it is on time, then you can get your skates on.

More importantly, though, what I find interesting about this app is how it can be used in other public transport such as buses and trains. I know that Sydney’s City Rail has something similar, and that a few months ago they tried to stop third-party software that gave out the running time of trains.
I think it is short-sighted when companies do this because, at the end of the day, it’s about the commuter and not some petty bureaucracy getting its nose out of joint.

I hope that in the near future, more of the state public transport companies get onboard if similar applications are released for mobile phones. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Wii Helping Parkinson's Patients

A small study out of the US caught my eye as I was looking through news over the weekend. The Medical College of Georgia conducted an experiment on a small group of patients who are suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.

Using a Nintendo Wii console, researchers had patients play a game on the console for an hour at a time to test their reactions and state of mind.
Researchers say they noted marked improvement in hand-eye co-ordination, and they also claimed that participants rate of depression went down to zero (depression is understandably high amongst Parkinson’s patients).

Although there was only a control group of 20, and the length of the trail two months, what piqued my interest was the use of gaming technology being used to help sufferers of what can be a debilitating disease. This comes on the back of a recent report about gaming technology being used to help researchers find out why some babies are still born.
People who hate gaming tend to think of it as a waste of time – “you should get out more”, “can’t you do something more constructive” is often the catch cry of parents of teenagers who immerse themselves in gaming for hours at a time.

But, as these couple of instances show, there is more to gaming than just entertainment value. There is definitely a place for this technology in the wider world and I for one believe this is just the beginning of technologies used in the entertainment field will have a cross-over into other areas, including medicine.