Mobile phone sales are polarising, apparently: "it is clear that people are either getting devices that have functionality that really adds something to their life - making their life better, more enjoyable or more productive - or they are going for a cheaper type of deal"

One of the things that Trutap surprised me with was the revelation (to me at least) that in "developing" markets like India, smartphones are a popular choice despite their high cost relative to average incomes... the rationalisation being that if you're going to spend a greater chunk of your income on a mobile device, it had better be a decent one, and something you'll keep for a long time.

Recession hits the UK, and it looks like the same cost-conscious behaviour follows in its wake...

Interesting post listing some of the error states specific to mobile; one of the beefs we have had with classic Visio wireframes for representing flow through mobile services is the number of interruptions, error conditions, and recoveries which seem to blight mobile: latency, cost of data, battery life, storage and memory limitations, etc.

On the other hand, dealing with some of these issues is really finicky: take identity as an example. On the web, it's straightforward: username and password to login to a site, cookies to identify repeat visitors. On mobile aspects of identity are frequently split between the device (e.g. cookies in the browser), the SIM card (identifying your mobile number and providing a route to a billing relationship with you) and sometimes elsewhere on the network. Take that handset you used to login to that mobile site, sell it on ebay, and suddenly someone who looks like you to the site, but isn't, has access to your stuff - potentially with yourself footing the bill.

Lots of nasty edge cases here, many of which I remember our looking through in great detail during the early days of projects like Flirtomatic and Trutap. Whether it's worth designing systems to accommodate them all, or better to leave edge cases to customer support, is a different matter - and there'll be a balance to be found here.

Smule have a lot to answer for.

In odd moments on train journeys, waiting for meetings or when bored of television, I'm finding myself turning to one of their apps with increasing frequency. I first came across these guys when someone played the Ocarina video at Future of Mobile last year, and I've downloaded a few of their apps since then: the Ocarina itself, SonicLighter, and most recently Zephyr.

I suppose the best way of describing these would be social, geographic toys: do something, and see other people round the world doing similar things. In the case of SonicLighter, all you're doing is running the app; there's a screen when it begins where you flick-start a virtual cigarette lighter, but all the action occurs on a world-map where you can see locations from which other SonicLighter owners have used the app in the last 24 hours.

Ocarina and Zephyr take this principle and make it more expressive - in the case of the former, you play a song on your iPhone or hear other songs being played around the world (together with a lovely visual representation of where they're coming from, on a nicely drawn globe). Zephyr lets you trace out a message on the screen of your iPhone, send it off on its travels around the world, and brings other messages to you.

It's difficult to overemphasise how cute I find this stuff, and how much I get simply from being aware that there are other people out there, anonymous to me except for their location and the fact that they're doing the same thing as me: the connection is the meat here, and the activity around it just gravy. There's something wonderful and very human about seeing a message slowly get etched out onto your screen, after watching it ebb its way across the Atlantic Ocean, or bounce from city to city.

And of course, Smule have done a great job of keeping the whole experience smooth: no registration required, good maps, and a carefree exploration of the apps seems to be encouraged throughout.

I also note that they're starting to do a bit more with them. SonicLighter now asks me "who I'm lighting up for" and gives a number of options. Here's a distribution of who lit up for who in the recent US election:

Lessons learned here? The connection can be the application. The trivial can become interesting when you can see others doing it at a distance (perhaps only then). Identity isn't a necessity for social software - I don't know or care who the other people are on these apps, that's half the fun. And location-based apps can be delightful too :)

Firefox groans under the weight of tabs, it must be time for a link-dump:

• Mobclix have some great stats on iPhone App Store downloads, MarkJ summarises them nicely, and PEE points the way to iPhone app success;
• Ow. Some fairly outdated views on mobile, music and DRM from Hugh Griffiths of Microsoft (wasn't he previously at O2?); locking music purchases to handsets? Hopefully this'll be one of the things MS amend and change after getting feedback from users, few of whom I can imagine will support such locking;
• For reasons which I hope will become apparent later this year, we're very interested in cross-cultural design right now: putting Hofstede to bed, the washing machine that ate my sari, and this excellent article on design for international users have been good brain-food;
• Robots: organic and sweating;
• Palm vs Apple, a lawsuit seems inevitable...
• And for comedy value, SnifTag (eerily similar to a use case we stuck into some design work for an operator back in 2003), and I Get Your Fail, a blog of game cockups (probably getting funnier the more you know about rendering technology, I suspect);
• Cute example of thinking beyond the UI your software provides, courtesy of 37signals;
• Mobile marketing is "burning hell hot" - more details of the ad campaign Tomi Ahonen referenced at the Future of Mobile last year: "Tohato introduced two very spicy snacks, the one called ‘Burning Hell Hot’ and the other, his archenemy, ‘Bazooka Deadly Hot’. The two flavours were represented as masters of an army that could be joined by buying one of the two flavours in the supermarket. Using the QR-codes – 2D barcodes - on the packaging, the consumer could join the army of his master in a massive online multiplayer game. Every night at 4 a.m. a new battle between the two armies would start at one of the 31 different online battlefields, indicated with names like ‘Sweet Suckers Execution Hall’ or ‘Ouch, The City of Anal Torture’. By either training or recruiting friends to signup, players could get promoted and have a better chance of winning. "
• Interesting interview with Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, who've funded Palm - particularly good to hear him critique the iPhone as a device strong on consumption, weak on production;
• Depressing news from the average hotness rating of various academic disciplines;
• Conference videos from PICNIC last year - yay!

I've just finished a 2-day training course with Mike Cohn, with the grandiose title of "Certified Scrum Master". It covers a basic introduction to Scrum, and details of how to implement the process into a company: roles, responsibilities, processes, etc. The format was very participative, with Mike setting frequent exercises that demonstrate aspects of self-organisation or collaboration, and got us thinking about issues which might affect Scrum teams.

We've been using Scrum for over a year now and I've been grokking this agile stuff personally since 2004, so I was pretty confident with the introductory side of things - but still came away with a load of tips, ideas and practices from Mike which I'm looking forward to trying out. I'm also thinking of trying to divorce our release planning from sprint planning a bit more - doing broad estimates for the former in story points, and finer-grained task estimates during sprint planning in hours.

All very interesting stuff, and particularly good to have a range of folks in the class: from different types of companies (startups to the QA departments of banks), with different levels of expertise and clearly different perspectives and needs. Our table exchanged cards at the end of the two days, it'll be interesting to see how much of a support group we can provide for one another when we take what we've learned home :)

Next stop for me is the follow-on qualification, Certified Scrum Practitioner. I'm actually ambivalent of the value of CSM myself, as it doesn't involve much in the way of tests or practice. It gives a great grounding, but I think that (as with so many things) the only chance to learn this stuff is by doing. But the CSP qualification involves having a years experience and being able to write cogently about real-world application of Scrum - something I feel able to do on paper as well as on this site :) As a small business, sometimes we talk to people who want reassurance of our ability to deliver; perhaps a certification of some sort can help here. Plus CSP seems to be a slightly more exclusive club - I counted about 35,000 registered CSMs on the Scrum Alliance site, but only 500 or so CSPs worldwide.

If you get a chance, I thoroughly recommend getting to one of Mike's courses.