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A New Device Taxonomy
The current mobile device market uses ill-defined and irrelevant market segments. The difference between "phone," "smart phone," and "PDA" is arbitrary and useless, as a smart phone is a phone with PDA capabilities, and a PDA can readily have phone capabilities. This distinction appears to be based on the evolution of the device types rather than actual market segmentation.
The whole concept of "phone" is becoming less relevant; voice communications are a service that can be tacked onto any of a wide variety of devices. Similarly, personal information such as contacts and calendar can also be tacked onto a wide variety of devices.
A better device classification scheme is based on user needs and behaviors. Note that hardware and even function can be shared across these categories; the difference is in data stores, device configuration and optimization.
- General purpose work devices, currently dominated by desktop computers, tablets, laptops, and the like. These devices can do a wide variety of information-centered tasks. Contrast these with special-purpose work devices, such as the UPS Diad delivery driver device. Users are likely to have a general purpose work device available or carried while working, but not while outside of work hours.
- General purpose entertainment devices, such as the iPod video and Sony Playstation Portable. These devices might be game-centric, book-centric, or media-centric, but are intended to readily support the use of other entertainment media. They may even have communications service.
- Communications and control devices, which include phones, desktop phones, PDA, Blackberries, and a plethora of future devices. These devices that allow the user to communicate with others via voice, text, and other methods.
- Specialized devices, or information appliances. These include watches, iPods, ATMs, GameBoys, and so forth. These devices are focused on delivering a specific experience to the user, and if they do other things, those secondary items are very secondary. An iPod has a calendar on it, but it in no way interferes with the use of the device as a music player.
While each of these device categories is its own industry (more for the specialized devices), I find the most interesting one to be the communications and control device, which becomes interesting when you consider the mobile version. I find this category so important that I refer to such a device as a Personal Communications Device (PCD).
A PCD is our personal companion and will serve a larger and larger role in our lives. Left the oven on? Use your PCD to turn it off. Somebody at your front door? Talk with them using your PCD. Need a bit of information for that meeting, or to post a blog entry from the road? Use your PCD to do it. Spend a little down time with a bit of music or Bejeweled on your PCD.
A PCD is always carried, and is thus described by The Carry Principle. It is multi-purpose, but will be configured to market segments' needs. Like some drivers need small efficient cars and others need large trucks for farm work, some PCD users need a messaging-centric device and others need a voice-centric device. Still others, such as doctors, may actually need an information-centric device. The Danger Sidekick is as much a PCD as is a Nokia Communicator or even a Motorola RAZR.
PCDs do not replace work devices: few people would want to carry a device with a full-sized screen or keyboard, regardless of the form of the screen. PCDs do not replace entertainment devices: providing game controls on a phone is likely to be unwieldy as a phone or unsatisfying as a gaming device, as the N-Gage illustrates. These broad categories have overlap of features and data stores, but not overlap of purpose.
So my consultancy actually has a simple statement of purpose, but only if you understand the definitions: Little Springs Design designs the user experience of products and services related to PCDs, and helps companies with their process for doing the same.
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