Too Early For Mobile Media?
Advancements in the Mobile world are fast approaching, opening up a whole new area for multimedia developers to explore, but is it too much too soon? Sure there are advantages to this new genre of interactive media, the ability to have access to content anyway, small and easily traveled hardware, but there are impacting and sometimes debilitating disadvantages. Compatibility across multiple pieces of hardware and the enormous cost of downloading content through the cellular network are some of the major issues.
Let’s start with the advantages, the ability to access content anywhere is a really interesting realization and it goes hand in hand with easily traveled hardware. Having the entire internet at your disposal anywhere, provides use with many world scale opportunities. The invention of QR codes to read in data and relay back to you the information encoded within them is not really new technology, think store barcodes, though this application has many opportunities.
CBC’s The Border is hosting a contest based around these QR codes. But an even more interesting application is Semapedia is making great use of this, by placing the little QR codes in locations around the world; you have access to historical and cultural information about your current location at the touch of a button. This idea would also be interesting to see based off of GPS coordinates but that may be a few years down the road.
Now onto the disadvantages, compatibility is a big issue for me and I would assume for a lot of developers out there. Not only does every phone display things differently, they also support different programming languages. Java seems to be a consistent cell phone language, though Flash Lite has very little market penetration. Another issue is the fact that not even the newest version of Flash Lite supports AS3. Seems like what we are learning now in Interactive Multimedia is a little too advanced for mobile devices.
The costing structure of Rogers internet downloads/browsing is simply ridiculous. At its current 5 cents/KB or 3 cents/KB depending on your current package, it would require well over $100 for a normal 4mb song. This is simply outrageous and you won’t catch me downloading anything on my mobile device anytime soon. The reason for this is the lack of competition within the mobile industry in Canada. Until we see a real competitor to the Rogers network, we won’t see the widespread use of internet based mobile applications.
Weighing the pros and cons of the mobile industry, I can’t really see a big market, other than MMS, for mobile applications, at least here in Canada. But in the future, when prices come down (and Flash Lite supports AS3) I can definitely see some practical applications for this technology. But until then, I’ll remain a desktop based developer.
Check out the page of James Eberhardt for an inside look at the mobile industry.
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