There’s a number of myths about mobile, so this post may well turn into a series - if there’s a myth you’d like to bust, perhaps you’d like to leave a comment.
However, I was put in mind of one of the most prevalent and enduring myths by a post over at Ewan’s incredibly prolific, if maybe tautologous, SMS Text News. Apparently, 35% of US young adults say “they’ve read or sent an e-mail or text message under the dinner table during a holiday family gathering”.
The myth in this case is that it’s hard to input text into a mobile phone. It may well be for you (and it certainly is for me, though my fingers nearly fly over the qwerty keyboard on my Nokia E61). But to anyone who has actually grown up with a phone, that’s simply not the case.
These Digital Natives, really can input text for an sms or email, under the table, in the dark - without looking. And I think if you polled kids in Europe, the percentage would be even higher, as sms has been mainstream for that much longer.
So if you’re thinking about launching a mobile website, as an example, and you’re agonizing over a URL that’s “easy” to input on the mobile - really, don’t worry. It’s about as important as whether Santa gets gored to death by Rudolf this Christmas.
My other favourite myth is that while people demand free stuff on the web, they’re happy to pay through the nose for the same service or content on their mobile. To those people who believe that - don’t worry, I was only joking about Santa and Rudolf. Of course they’ll be bringing your Crimbo stocking stuffed full of goodies this year.
I’ve sent SMSs under the table many times at meetings, and I’m 44.
As you know, both the display and keys are lit up, so the myth we are really busting here is that it would be impossible to see anything while SMSing under the table. Try it yourself.
All in good Xmas spirit.
I have send messages, but not that long. But the thing of your quote says: “send or READ”. Reading doesn’t take long inputs, so that’s much easier to do than replying. With the new Gmail client I do read a lot of mail on lost moments, but I rarely reply…
Aha - so dot mobi *does* have a future then
[…] I might be able to blog with a prolific sense of wonder or maybe I’ll need to bottle it all up and blog later on. We’ll see. Standby Huston. […]
Hi there,
I couldn’t help myself on commenting this one… Well, we run a couple of SMS-based service in our market (Mozambique, in Southern Africa) and while I agree that people are getting used to typing withour looking at the keys, there are a couple of issues I would like to point out:
1. It’s very different to send a SMS to a person (who can easily forgive use of abbreviations and mistakes) than to an application that is programmed to recognise a specific keyword.
2. Our own experience in our market show a high % of errors when people send SMS-requests for content and voting, more than 20% in fact.
3. Typing in long or complex URL’s poses many problems: a. typing mistakes will take the customer nowhere; b. special characters like “/” are quite cumbersome to type in; c. it is quite boring, unless I really really want to get to that page.
On point c. above, please take into account that while I may be very motivated to type under the table a long message to my friend, I will not be so inclined to do the same for a URL received from some subscription service.
I agree with Riaz - I consider myself a “mobile native,” having had a mobile phone for the past 10 years of my life and practically using them like an extension of my brain… but I hate entering long URLs. Other young mobilists probably have the same view on this… how else do you think TxtSpk has arisen? It’s to save the number of keypresses to compose a message (as well as to fit a longer message into the 160 characters in an SMS).
[…] I might be able to blog with a prolific sense of wonder or maybe I’ll need to bottle it all up and blog later on. We’ll see. Standby Huston. […]