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Andy and I went to the Future of Mobile conference at the BFI Imax on Wednesday. We missed the first half of the day, but we made up for it by furiously taking notes and photographing every presentation slide we could. This is what we remember:

Charles McCathieNevile from Opera pointed out “screens are growing, my hands aren’t”. So whilst the Apple iPhone is bringing us a web experience not too far removed from what we see on our desktop, the experience will never really be the same. The key point though, illustrated by Simon Rockman from Sony Ericsson, is that the experience doesn’t need to be the same.

When we are using a mobile web device, we are using it for a different reason to when we are using our desktops. It might be finding local hotels or checking the football scores; whatever it is, we will want to interact differently.

A further point from Rockman is that many people have more than one mobile device, he counted four for himself. One question from the audience was, how will the future of mobile associate all those devices with one person. Rockman’s answer was, “it won’t”. The four devices he owns represent different people. His work phone is Simon at work, his personal phone is Simon at the weekend, his GPS is Simon driving, and so on. Each one of those people want different information presented in different ways and for this reason, fragmentation is good. Not only for the consumer, but for manufacturers and carriers, because of the psychological billing advantage (one monthly bill at £300 is harder to swallow for consumers than three bills at £75) and the higher demand for hardware.

The key point to take away from all of this is that people operate in different modes in different environments and want to consume information in different ways. So the mobile web needs to be contextual. This seems to be something Brian Fling has picked up on. His company, Blue Flavor have released an app called Leaflets.

Leaflets is an app for the iPhone which takes full advantage of Safari’s support for CSS3. Leaflets allows iPhone users to read popular sites such as Newsvine quickly by grabbing the RSS feed and formatting it to look like the original site. This means no waiting for images to download, which is painful for anyone using Edge.

So why would anyone choose Leaflets when the iPhone has a full Safari browser built in to it, where they can view the original site almost how they would at home or at the office? My guess is because although it looks right in Safari, it isn’t the right way of consuming the information – the information isn’t contextual.

Tags: foma, future-of-mobile, mobile