The mobile computer, like any other mobile artifact must add value to the mobile user. Having established that mobile usage is at the same time dependent and independent of place has crystalized one thing: it's really quiet simple, the swiss knife syndrome is not going away, on the contrary it will continue to grow.
So users have become more and more accustomed to an artifact that has lots of different features, well this perception is not going away, but it is however being realigned. After years of seeing users fill their mobiles with contacts, images, music, videos...[myths and events] some entities now want to get users to start perceiving the mobile not as a tool but as container. A container which happens to comprehend some really useful tools.
Here lies the paradigm shift from mobile phone to mobile computer. Here lies the cry for standards. Here lies the need for UI and service innovation.
Containers
We learn to recognize forms of containment: we experience our bodies as containers for vital fluids, organs, gases...; we are contained within rooms, walls, clearings; we learn to perceive other physical objects as containing one another. All of this sensory-motor activity, most of which is carried on unconsciously, gives rise to a recurrent pattern or schema of containment: in each case some space or object is circumscribed or enclosed by a spatial expanse or volume. Although each particular instance of containment will have its own distinctive features, it is crucial for a organism's maintenance that there be a repeatable generic structure that permits us to characterize all of these as instances of a containment schema.
Our bodies are also containers for our emotions, and our minds containers for our ideas. Our linguistic expressions (and their sentential formulations) are containers for our thoughts. And we come to understand all sorts of abstract objects (institutions, societies, communities, mathematical sets, logical categories and so on) as abstract containers for both abstract and concrete objects.
Once we start to think about it we realize the container schema is present in our understanding of virtually every aspect of our experience. So how are mobiles OS and its inherent user experience taking this into account? They are not because they have failed to understand that the boundaries must not be set by the system but by the content that makes up the users 'faceted' identity.
The basket
As we moved about as hunter-gatherers...
Pierre Janet saw in the conduct of the basket, the origins of human intelligence (Les Débuts de l'intelligence, 1932). Provision/ pre-vision. Apes gather fruits, but do not store them. Humans do. There is nothing binding the individual to the community that does not arise from an intricate web of myths and events. The conduct of the basket satisfies both these demands. It both makes it so that the past legacy is not lost, and it allows descendents to revise themselves in it.
As mobile communication devices enlarge their capacity to store, they approach the hybrid nature of the basket, but they are not allowing for individuals to shape the basket. Individuals are relegated to the production of content and the uninteresting experience of watching its demise in inappropriate filing structures.
It seems technology is indulging in the compaction techniques of monotheism without giving it to much thought. To practice the diminishing augmentation has been the trademark of Hebrew geniality [Tefillin]. The symbol means more than the thing itself; to empty so as to consolidate. From the very beginning religious performance has trimmed the superfluous. This in turn came to catalyze abstract thinking and scientific methodology, moving the individual into a diluted and predictable background while the code took center stage.
To gather is to synthesize by ways of choice. What choice is the current mobile user experience giving us? Due to the nature of this post-modern basket, the tools used in the synthesis are primitive. So far, the nature of the mobile tools is still closer to the basket than to the being, this is perceived in the homogeneity of representations and social performances catalyzed by existing devices.
To merge these tools and the unique nature of each individual's social performance is necessary for the subject to reclaim center stage. The being before the machine.
It is unfortunate that this change should come about from the service layer, rather than the layers closest to the machine. But if one thinks about it long enough it is also natural. Semantic standards for content are learning and inducing novel user behaviour. This in turn is not only catalyzing a vibrant interoperable market [web 2.0] but also new mental models that make possible the migration towards more intelligent containers.