What does Mobile Mean? - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 255

common—they trade reduced power and display
size for their compact dimensions, but this allows
them to be taken to more places and used in oc-
casional moments. Ideal for when a users' task is
not based on the technology, but having sporadic
access to it is useful, they are finding roles in sup-
porting travellers on planes and trains, journalists
in the field, and photographers on safari. The
smaller screen height when open also presents less
of a social barrier to visual communication with
other parties, making them seem somewhat more
acceptable for use in meetings and other such set-
tings (at least, this is my impression based only on
personal experience, observation, and discussion
with other users). Other devices are much more
portable: the PDA offers pocket sized assistance
with notes, reminders, documents and support,
but has recently been superseded by the latest
generation of smart mobile phones, that offer all
the capabilities of the PDA coupled with integrated
data connectivity and voice communications as
well. As phones become every more powerful,
they are increasingly provided with more and
more applications to increase their functionality:
indeed, Apple's AppStore, which is an e-commerce
site for Apple and 3 rd party add-on software for
the iPhone, is used as one of the strong selling
points of the device itself.
However, all these characterisations of these
devices are technology-centric: they define mo-
bile in terms of how portable the devices are: the
more portable the device, the more mobile. And
hence this has defined the way mobile applications
are created; they are created for small, portable
devices and designed to the limitations of such
devices. However, my contention is that the real
issue is not the 'mobility' of the devices, but the
mobility of their users. Mobile computing is not,
in my view, about computing on small portable
devices; instead, it is about computing for users
who are not in a single location, but are moving
around. They may be migratory, moving from one
place to another but spending much of their time
in a known location, or they may be much more

active, being truly mobile and out and about, mov-
ing from location to location far more frequently,
and computing whilst on the go as well as when
at their destinations.
For example, the European-funded Mobilearn
project looked at the issues involved in mobile
learning. It developed a context-aware architecture
(Beale & Lonsdale, 2004; Lonsdale et al., 2004)
that utilised location, user interest, and previous
activities to determine the information and activi-
ties that the user would most likely want next, and
provided that information to them. The intention
was to make the usage experience as seamless
as possible, so that the user rarely had to interact
directly with the device in order to move through
material or navigate an information structure,
but would instead be presented with the right
information at the right time. The idea was that
this would provide for a less intrusive but more
personalised and appropriate learning experience
than other approaches (Syvanen, Beale, Sharples,
Ahonen, & Lonsdale, 2005), and in general, this
proved successful though was constrained to the
specific domains for which it had been designed
(guidance around a museum, first aid, art gallery).
When we start to consider users and being
mobile, rather than the technology, other interac-
tion opportunities become apparent. For example,
there is a growing trend in e-science to allow
end-users to participate in information collection,
allowing them to provide immediate information
on things from wherever the user happens to be,
via a smartphone or similar. Whilst the device
does need to be small and portable, this is not
a requirement of the data gathering but rather
that the user needs to have it on him/her at the
time, and so the mobility is inherent in the user.
Examples of this include on-the-spot weather
information collection, reports of bird and other
natural phenomena sightings, and so on. This ap-
proach provides a modern corollary to the Mass
Observation approach to collecting social and
other information from ordinary individuals that
was originally carried in Britain in the 1930's