I'm seeing a trend for the smartphone to be more always-ready. Three examples of this include:
- iPhone Camera at the ready: "You can open the Camera app right from the Lock screen" in iOS 5
- iPhone Siri at the ready "There’s more than one way to talk to Siri. When the screen is on, simply bring iPhone 4S up to your ear. You’ll hear two quick beeps to indicate that Siri is listening to you."
- Galaxy Nexus Face Unlock at the ready: "With Face Unlock on Galaxy Nexus you can now unlock your phone with a smile. No complicated passwords to remember, just switch on your phone and look into the camera to quickly unlock your phone."
The app-centered phone computer suffers from how many steps between idealizing and realizing a task. By the time you unlock your phone, locate and launch the photo app, aim and shoot the UFO is gone.
Smartphones should add these to this sense of ready:
- Unlock and Go App: combining Face Unlock with voice to confirm your ID and launch a specific app.
- Siri APIs: Developers can create apps on a Mac that are Spotlight-aware, giving semantic capabilities to the OS X search engine (find all files that are images in landscape aspect ration taken with ISO 800 speed since last year). It would be nice if iOS apps were Siri aware so that you could trigger specific apps to launch in a specific state based on Siri responding to your request. Much like launching Apple's built in apps like Calendar, Contacts or Safari, you should be able to write an app and register its semantics (somehow) so that Siri could take you there.
- QRCode Ready: This is the app that got me thinking about the above. I attended a webinar on mobile marketing with a focus on QR Codes, and clever ways that they are leading people from an encounter in many online and offline contexts to a specific app or web-based action. But when I see Jimmy Fallon holding up a QR Code on his show, (yeah, I know that's what the pause button is for on my DVR) and I fumble for my phone, enter the code, unlock it, find the icon for my QR Code app, launch it, chose the right mode to scan the barcode and aim and focus it on my TV screen, the moment has passed. Adoption and use of QR Codes would be greatly increased if I could aim my phone at the code and click and there it goes:
What else would make your mobile device ready-to-go?
