Kaizen, for mobile phones
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007The other day, Niara and myself were discussing about patentable ideas to improve mobile phones, she had come up with a pretty impressive list. So, I started thinking about things that I would like to see and here’s what I came up with:
- Camera-phones should have an option to ’start an album’ and ‘end an
album’ so that we can make albums instead of having one huge mess
of photos. Equally important is that bluetooth transfers should
work for albums as a whole. This makes it easy to transfer photos
instead of pressing yes for each and every photo that gets
received.
- Stretching the idea is to use tags – you have a running set of tags that gets applied to each new photo that you click.
- Contact details should have an auto-filled field that displays when
you last talked to this person, this helps keep track of whether
you’re in touch with your friends.
- Optionally, you can set an alarm to warn you if you haven’t spoken to your best buddy in a week.
- Browsing the address book should be sorted by how frequently you call these contacts rather than just alphabetical order.
- A default way of exporting the address book via bluetooth into
a zip file or something that can be again imported (whenever the
user wants to retrieve from backup).
- Preferably a standard format that works across different manufacturers.
- Character-voice-enabled. Instead of voice recognition for words, it should work for just one character at a time – such as alphabets, numbers, etc. It saves the trouble of typing… Of course, this idea could use some refinement.
- One touch voice recording. Quickly jot down your thoughts or todo
items you don’t want to forget. This would be very handy for me.
- Maybe even podcast it. Could be achieved by an accompanying decent PC software.
- Self-organizing start menu. If you use the calendar option a lot, then it bubbles up and becomes one of the important menu items so that you can quickly access it.
But, alas, as she rightly pointed out, these are not revenue-generating ideas, just usability ideas…
P.S. The irony is that I hate mobile phones. Maybe that’s why most of the above ideas are PIM-centric.






