The problem with mobile

In my capacity as a mobile researcher (yes, that's my day job), I have found that creating services for the mobile sector is far more complicated than it is for the Internet sector. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of the Palm Pilot, which just introduced the Foleo, illustrates exactly how complicated it is in the mobile industry when he comments about phone design:

Palm Foleo (right), with the Treo

Hawkins says: "You want to make this thing (the Treo) smaller. You want the screen to be bigger. You want the keyboard to be nonexistent, but you need to type. There's all these really difficult tradeoffs." Although he was talking about phone design, what Hawkins says has relevance to mobile services too. Creating services for the phone is hard precisely because of form factor-related problems. For this rea, when people talk about the phone being the main device for people to access the Internet, I think it's still a long time coming. They need to solve the form factor problem first.