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Posts: 477 | Thanked: 118 times | Joined on Dec 2005 @ Munich, Germany
#282
Originally Posted by chlettn View Post
My guess: casual web surfing, watching videos, listening to music, emailing, IM, Skype, reading PDFs, navigating. Basically, the standard out-of-the-box stuff...

Originally Posted by qole View Post
We all want music and video, both streaming and local; we all want social apps (IM/voice/facebook/twitter/email/contacts) to connect us to our friends and family; we all want some way of jotting notes/reminders/todos in a way that can be easily shared with other devices, we all want a way to easily read documents that people send us or that we download (MS Office / PDF / e-books), we all want to be able to keep up on the news (news sites, blogs, stocks, weather, etc), we all want to play games, and of course, we all want to be able to surf the web.

There are lots of other things, kinda "icing on the cake" stuff, that people would use if it was done right, especially a good camera that can do still photos and video, then upload these easily to user-defined location(s); GPS / mapping / location awareness stuff; presentation control; remote control of devices in your home; etc, etc.


The comparison is interesting in its differences. I'll give some comments, based on talks I had with no-geeks and casual observations:

-music: yes.
-video: apparently, people like to show others that their device can play videos in the first week they bought it, and then never use it any more. They find the screen too small. (Unless it is erotic/porn, then the ability to show it around wins).
-social: people who need that (but aren't they geeks then?) already do that from their phones
-notes/reminders: non-geeks use post-it.
-skype/IM: yes. Also video please. IM: most people I know use msn.
-read sent word docs: yes. Excel too.
-news: a little bit.
-games: a big yes. Please note that the iPod is silently advancing to a major handheld game platform.
-reading pdf: no.
-navigation: not as much as you think, and very gender dependent. Maybe an artefact of the fact that I know many people who almost never drive a car, though.
-camera and share pictures: they like to watch your pictures, but never upload any. When they send pictures, they use e-mail (and don't understand why sending pictures which are 5 GB in size is a problem).
-location awareness stuff: no. strong hostility.
-remote control: no.
-presentation control: I do not know.


There are other things I noticed:
-digital calendars appears to be only used for work, and then the people use the one they got from their job (e.g: blackberry)
-synchronizing various lists of contacts (e.g. cell phone and i.m.) is a problem non-geeks would like to have solved.
-mobile e-bay is a surprisingly common need.
-non-geeks hate menus. They want buttons or the screen equivalent.
-e-mail and sms are still THE major application
-videophoning is very attractive to couples in long-distance relationships (don't ask me what they show each other, I have not asked)
-games are a VERY big yes. It is always the first question asked. Most non-geeks associate any hand-held device with a game console.
-coolness and personalisation are important.
-music is much more important than video. Teens use youtube as a free music player. They don't even watch the video.
-reading text is a mixed blessing. Some (younger) people want to take downloaded texts with them to read, other refuse to read any text which is not on paper (they even print their e-mail to read it). Probably also linked to eyesight.


As to mobile web usage, I have not find out how people use it. I'll have to watch people using their iPhone to find out. But I can already say that non-geeks are not good at panning, so screen size is a problem and like animated sites so performance is also a problem.