What makes a Mobile device successful?

Now there are more choices than ever when it comes to choosing a mobile device to suit your needs. You can choose among mass-market consumer phones, smart phones, full-fledged pocket communicators, and PDAs. These devices all have a few things in common, but some are clearly more popular than others. So what makes one device more successful than another, when they all do pretty much the same things?
In this section, we dissect two very different devices, examining their merits and failures.

The Pogo

The Pogo was a PDA and phone device that was way ahead of its time (back in 1996) and unfortunately doomed to fail for this very reason. The Pogo, shown in Figure 2-10, featured an entirely Flash-driven UI. The UI was a touch screen, designed to be operated by a finger or with the supplied stylus pen. The screen was fairly large, and the software fairly intuitive. The software provided e-mail, telephone, games, and music functionalities. So what went wrong?

The Pogo was underpowered; technology at the time just didn’t have the processing power to run the Flash player at a decent speed (the Pogo had a 75-MHz processor), and the bundled games illustrated this. The device also looked fairly awkward. Holding a large rectangular screen up to your ear to make a call not only looked strange, it felt awkward in the hand. Also, the front-lit LCD screen wasn’t very bright, making the tiny text hard to read in anything but direct sunlight.

The Pogo was also very expensive; at £3002 for the unit and a monthly charge on top of that, there simply wasn’t a widespread demand for phones of its caliber. PDAs catered to the more demanding tasks, and the average consumer just had no need for it. The cost of data at the time was very high, even over GSM, and the Pogo had no PC connection; everything had to be downloaded or transferred via memory card. This indicates a distinct lack of infrastructure, which we now have, and convergence was clearly still in the distance. The Pogo was a device that would have most likely been successful if brought out a few years later. With its high-speed use of the GSM network (using a proprietary compression algorithm), and integrated e-mail, MP3 music, and games, it resembles today’s smart phones.

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