Chapter 10: Dawn on the Wireless Multimedia Highway

Overview

Jussi Pekkarinen and Jukka Salo

Since the early 1990s we have witnessed fundamental technology changes in telecommunications, which created growing usability challenges for mobile terminals and wireless services. The introduction of GSM had moved a considerable portion of voice telephony from fixed landline to cellular networks. It also enabled the wireless transfer of text through short message service (SMS). Further GSM evolution provided faster access to various applications through high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD) and General Packet Radio Services (GPRS). The Internet allowed easy and inexpensive access to a huge amount of information independent of its-or the user's-location.

The mid-1990s saw growing interest in putting mobile data and Internet services together. Downloading information through an inherently narrowband cellular channel, however, was a challenge that had not been solved in the mid-1990s; it had not even been investigated on a large scale. When the call for projects in the European ACTS Framework Program went out, we decided to tackle the problem. This gave us an opportunity to collect all the value chain players into the consortium to implement new multimedia services and try them out in a genuine second-generation cellular network. The trial evaluation was to be done from the viewpoints of all players. These presented potential benefits in understanding the customer needs and requirements.

The Mobile Media and Entertainment Services (MOMENTS) project was established in 1995 at an early evolutionary phase of mobile multimedia service development, and ran through 1998. The project was started even before HSCSD emerged in a chain of digital wireless information transfer technology steps through GSM and SMS to HSCSD, GPRS, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and onward into future third-generation services with Wireless Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and all-IP (Internet Protocol)-based networks. MOMENTS was actually one of the first end-user field studies on third-generation (3G) multimedia services and contents using enhanced second-generation (2G) technologies: prototype solutions that were based on GSM.

Besides being one of the earliest attempts at mobile internet, MOMENTS is also an example of the methodological challenges involved in developing and evaluating new kinds of information service solutions. These solutions and their evaluation are multidimensional problems, as we'll see. The technology itself is constructed out of several layers, namely, mobile terminal, network and mobile service content production. Services are provided through a long value chain involving a number of stakeholders, and are consumed by disparate users in varying contexts. Further on, we found it nearly impossible to understand consumer responses to our solutions without comparing them to consumers' prior expectations. And since these services are so novel, consumers' attitudes toward them are subject to change as they learn and adapt. The evaluation criteria for these solutions had to be established, but it was by no means obvious what they were. Indeed, MOMENTS tells a story about working with only partially defined innovations where the problem, the solution, and the evaluation criteria are all intertwined and require fresh perspective.



Mobile Usability(c) How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
ISBN: 0071385142
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 142

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