Google certainly seems to think that it is and who can disagree when all you have to do is look around you. When Chichester Design was at the #TFMA conference at Earls Court2 London a few weeks back all we could see were people fiddling with their smart phones when they were on the tube, queuing to watch talks or sitting in the networking bar. Our team certainly used queuing time as a great opportunity to take part in the TFM&A Live Social Media Mashup and catch up with our emails.
There are a lot of us who use our phones as work tools on the go, and even more so in the freelance sector; when you have a smart phone there is never a minute lost to make a bit of dosh. Basically, anywhere you can get a wireless connection or some good old 3G is not off limits as a work place to the smart phone owner and Google had some rather interesting insights into this during their TFM&A keynote speech: The Future is Mobile….
According to Google, the growth in mobile use is a result of more mobile devices, more mobile use and more access to the internet and we are fast approaching an era of 10 billion mobile devices. Wowsers!
When considering smart phones, there is one that seems to stand out far from the crowd and that’s the iPhone, and I’m not just saying that because most of the Chichester Design team has one. It is the most successful product of internet use and, despite having only 11% of global shipment share, iPhones drive a whopping 65% of all internet usage, compared to Android’s 8%.
Then there are Apps, a phenomenon that’s been around for a while but has taken off really well over the last year. The Apps Store has recently received 3 Billion downloads! What’s more 25% of iPhone and Andriod users spend 2 hours per day playing around with Apps. Who can blame them when they have easy and instant access to games such as DoodleJump and Monopoly, music such as Spotify and Last.fm, social media platforms such as TweetDeck and Facebook as well as practical stuff such as Tesco Clubcard and TubeMap?
The thing about smart phones is that each individual part has more sophistication than it first may seem. Ok the camera on the iPhone isn’t likely to produce you a winning Wild Life Photographer of the Year entry any time soon but it becomes your eye to the world, even more so with Google’s introduction of Goggles.
Googles is an App allowing you to search the world by taking photographs, so if you were to go and take a picture of Chichester Cathedral with your phone and then ask it to perform a search it would recognise the image and pull up search results for Chichester Cathedral so that you could essentially find out what it is and its history before deciding to go in and visit. This is also designed to work with works of art, movie posters, business cards and signs for businesses on the street.
There is already capability for your iPhone to become your ears with the Google App that allows you to perform a website search using voice recognition. Therefore, if you say “Chichester Design” your phone will chuck back the search results for us and you’ll find our website, no problem. However, there are some issues with accents and we would hazard to say that you are far more likely to find what precisely what you’re looking for if you have an American twang as the feature still has issues with more unusual words such as “tapir”.
Google has taken this concept a step further and is soon to introduce a speech recognition feature to Andriod that helps you to compose texts and can also translate foreign languages. So, you would be able to simply scan a Spanish menu and it would be able to tell you in English what’s on offer- food for thought indeed!
What about navigation? If you thought your SatNav was the epitome of clever then you haven’t seen anything yet. The new Google Navigator is set to provide route information along with real-time traffic info so that you can change route according to how busy it is. It will even help you to make sense of the world around you by providing satellite imagery of your route so that you can see landmarks and traffic jams for yourself. As well as this, it will help you to search for food outlets, showing all those along your route when you type in a simple search command such as “burgers”.
It seems a mobile future is well on its way. There are already a significant amount of people using their mobiles for both work and play, and with the introduction of smart phones this use has gone colossal. Apps and features using real-time data are always going to produce the most sophisticated and timely results; receiving them while on the go is an added bonus. Also, features such as voice recognition will make online search more accessible to those who are committed to multi-tasking or are limited by their sight or the use of their hands. Is the future mobile? We should coco!
Find out more about the services offered by Chichester Design by visiting: www.chichesterdesign.co.uk. If you would like us to help you with anything from web design to copywriting then contact us today.
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