Go read this article, "There is more than one mobile context".

For some time now I've been becoming gradually uncomfortable with the notion that mobile content is purely about snacking on small chunks of content or limited to snatched moments of time - though I'll hold my hand up and admit this is a view I've held, and frequently espoused, for years.

A few observations have drawn me away from this view:

1. Watching Trutap become a primary means of connecting to web services for a couple of hundred thousand folks in Asia, and learning that there's a huge middle class who are leap-frogging ADSL in favour of 3G;
2. Noticing that peak times for a casual gaming service we run are after 11pm, when I'll bet most folks are at home near their PCs or games consoles, not on the bus; and
3. Slowly finding that around the home, my iPhone is replacing my laptop as my means of quick web access. It's not as fast, as large, or as flexible, but it's always there. Walking 10 feet and opening a zip-bag and case may only take 10 seconds, but as the Googlers know, when reduce the time between wanting X and getting X, you sell more X;

I think that, in the UK at least, this is still unusual behaviour. But when you see this happening in a tiny corner of one territory and already starting to play out in others, there's not much conceptual hopscotch to be played: it's not if this happens, but when.

A quarter of iPhone users say it’s displacing a notebook computer. 28% of iPhone users surveyed said strongly that they often carry their iPhone instead of a notebook computer.

My gut instinct is that this isn't purely an iPhone phenomenon, and that there's something more happening here - an acceptance that availability trumps screen size? An across-the-board improvement in access speeds and UI?

There is more than one mobile context. Decide which you’re interested in.

I think this article is lovely, but the author has left out one context: the mobile as your primary means of getting online, not because you're away from home, but because it's yours, it's nearby, and it's how you choose to be online in general.

More notes from XP Day, courtesy of some scrawled-upon index cards I just found in my bag:

• Rachel Davies emphasising the need to take actions from retrospectives immediately into planning!
• Gwyn from New Bamboo on "team building through ritual violence": using The Sword of Integration as a physical commit token. He also alluded to the Hammer of Scrum. I'll have to write about our Standup Plunger some time...
• Chris Ambler of Microsoft on their approach to game testing. He used a nice phrase, "1st time delivery", to demonstrate the difference between launching web-based software (which you can update after-the-fact) and shipping a physical CD. With most mobile apps being a pain to update, I see mobile as nearer to 1DD than not. Chris also delineated scripted and unscripted testing, touched on coverage as being vital (particularly in iterative development where you might plan to throw away lots of stuff), and a few other goodies.

Google are backing down on net neutrality, apparently.

I don't understand what "net neutrality" means, even after a heated^H^H^H^H^H^Hlukewarm debate with a Googler chum a few months back. I mean, it alliterates nicely and sounds kinda cool and Swiss... but what does it mean?

It seems entirely reasonable for, say, my ISP to run extra cables to the BBC if they want to serve iPlayer traffic better. It seems reasonable to me to prioritise videoconferencing traffic over SMTP to provide better-quality video. Are these breaches of net neutrality? Doesn't the internet interpret dodgy traffic policies as damage, and route around them?

I don't get it and lots of smart people I know seem to really care about it... which would seem to point to a gap in my understanding.

Strand Consulting has a report on the iPhone: "The fact that the iPhone is currently receiving so much attention from the press is probably due to an uncritical press that have allowed themselves to be seduced by Apple's unique PR machine - and that have not analysed and examined the underlying business models and the financial success of the iPhone from an operator’s point of view."

I last saw John Strand talk a few years back at World Telemedia, and first came across him when he gave European operators launching I-Mode a right ticking off several years before that. History proved him right on European I-mode, but I'm not convinced that everything he said last time about niche MVNOs has come to pass here in the UK (though I suspect it has, *somewhere*). It's nonetheless interesting to hear some well-informed views on the iPhone from someone well grounded in telco-land.

An interesting presentation on agile design; a rerun of a good talk on Design Studios in the agile process; and an article about getting real with agile and design.

One of the things I was quite surprised about at XP Day was how little talk I found around integrating design and development. I suspected at first that this might be because (a) there's no hard-and-fast rules or (b) everyone was sick of talking about it and going round in circles, but Joh corrected me. I should've proposed an open space about it, but a combination of being fascinated by everything else there and a little ill on the morning of day two put a stop to that - ah well.

I'm doing a talk at UX Matters in January, and I think I might try and draw together a few lessons we've learned over the last few years at FP. In the interests of massaging these into a coherent form, a few thoughts:

• I don't think that designers and developers are as far apart in aspirations as they're sometimes presented. I don't see a love of documentation, or producing documentation, from either side. Good people from both disciplines relish communication, create models and prototypes, and accept change (often managed through iteration).
• My own output gets better when I work collaboratively and with folks from different disciplines (usually pigeonholed as design, development and business). I don't believe I'm atypical here.
• The terms "design" and "development" are each placeholders for a set of activities, some of which are more easily estimated and managed than others.
• Design, development and the business are heavily intertwingled: decisions made in one area frequently impact on the others. Reducing the cultural or geographic distance between them speeds decision-making.

Oh, and if you get a chance avail yourself of a copy of HCI Remixed - it's a series of essays from top-notch HCI types (Bill Buxton, Scott Jenson and Terry Winograd all stood out for me) on works that influenced them. Very dip-innable, and a few gems here.