I am sitting in a conference centre in Singapore attending the annual MobileHCI conference. This is where academic and industry researchers get together to chat about new interface designs for mobile devices. On Sunday, there was a workshop on the use of speech interfaces for mobile devices - a lot of this work was from the developing world as speech skirts the literacy issue. One system in particular was a kind of voice yellow pages from IBM India. Artisans can call in to the system and leave a voice advertisement. Potential employers can call in and search for the service providers they need and select an artisan. Nice.

 

Currently I am in a session on how people interpret the battery meter on cellphones. It seems some people charge when they are near their charger, regardless of battery level. Other people only charge when the phone hits on bar. On average, there is still 40% of energy let in the handset when there is one bar. Given how hard it is to charge a handset in much of Africa, a good feature for a developing world handset would be a higher granularity of battery status meter.