S60 Open to new features

What stops us creating new totally unforeseen applications for mobile devices? Why are there no services that truly change the life of consumers? How come the use of features is mainly limited to SMS, calendar, alarm clock, and camera? (Use of mobile email may be growing now. I haven’t seen the latest statistics.)

What is striking about the nature of those most popular features is that they tend to be mobile versions of something that already exists. The short text messages are the only feature that was truly innovative (although not really since I used to send little paper messages to my friends at the age of 10). So, in the sense, the mobile society is not very radical in its foundations.

To alter people’s behaviour radically would require something unforeseen. We can continue adding computer-originated or non-digital features into mobile devices but these “innovations” may remain as quite limited specialities. (You can, of course, ask why we should change the behaviour.)

I think convergence of activities is one answer. Not convergence of devices – then we just see mouse-phones to store shelves. But convergence of practices.