Time and Tidings and Time to Stick a Fork In It...

Great Timing For Voice Navigation

Great timing from the people at Mobivox. They get a lot of this Telco2 stuff and it shows in this white paper. It reminds me of a personal assistant service in the US a few years ago called WildFire which had a virtual personal assistant in the middle of a unified communications service.  I think what we are seeing with Mobivox though is the emergency of a kind of two sided revenue model a little further down the chain. Telco's pay for getting to market without huge forklift upgrades, and end users get "mostly free services" with some paid for add-ons (maybe payments functionality). This also comes hot on the heels of Google voice based search offer on the iPhone, which everyone is going a little ga-ga for. Perhaps the most important element of that is that users are being trained by the biggest players on the block to use "Voice User Interfaces".

Time To Stick a Fork In It: Blackberry Storm

New Blackberry storm was handed across the table to me yesterday, and let me tell you, the experience sucked eggs. Almost no part of the experience was intuitive. From how the hell do I get the SIM card in there (oh take the battery out first), to how do I get the SIM back out  (still trying to sort that one out). The touch screen interface is annoying with basic "handling" of transition from one functionality to the next super-clunk-e. How do I get rid of that keyboard when I am just finished with that bit of typing? why can't I seem to just press on a text entry box in the browser to put in the password? I could go on. On the positive side their desktop manager does allow you to add a new device to an old account so all your passwords and setting move across and that is useful indeed. God, I hate the touch-screen so much.