I'm continuously bumping into the phenomenon of people using two phones at the same time. I think this is one of those not-well understood aspects of mobile as a mass media channel, that compared with the PC based internet (as we call it, the 6th mass media channel) is very well optimized for stationary large-screen two-handed operation. To consume the PC based internet, we have a large keyboard and a mouse to help us navigate the big screen. And the screen is able to capture most of our attention and viewing space.
Mobile (the 7th mass media channel) is very different. On mobile we have a small screen and we tend to be walking or moving when we use it, and we often have other things we also do, so we often multi-task while we use mobile. But now, as half of European phone owners have two phones, and worldwide over 30% of all mobile phone subscribers have two or more subscirptions (often meaning two phones - think iPhone owner who also has a Blackberry) - we see the phenomenon of two phones used simultaneously.
This was not expected. But think about how often this happens. We listen to the music on one phone, receive an SMS on the other phone, and happily respond to the SMS while still wearing the earphones and not pausing the music. We were consuming two services on two separate phones simutaneously. I often in my workshops talk of being able to consume two telecoms services simultaneously, for example while talking to one person, our other phone rings. We see who is calling, decide not to take that call - and the call is diverted to voice mail. What happened? We were on one voice call, while the other voice call was directed to voice mail. No problem at all, for anyone to consume two telecoms services simultaneously.
In our book Communities Dominate Brands, Alan and I introduce Generation C for Community Generation. We talk about Gen C being able to multitask. Since the book, we found that a UK survey by Carphone Warehouse in 2006 that revealed that 48% of British youth admit to sending text messages while talking to someone else. This can be a real person, talking to mom and dad, while holding a phone in the pocket and sending a text message to the best friend. That is multitasking yes, but not using two phones and services. The more amazing part, is to see youth absolutely conveniently carry on one phone conversation on one (mobile) phone while simultaneously carrying on an SMS text message conversation on the other phone. Now we do have two uses of two phones and two mobile services simultaneously.
There are many more examples. Using the mobile internet on one phone and sending text messages on the other. Talking with one person on the phone while voting on American Idol on the other, etc. The point is, that the phone is optimized for one-handed operation. This is actually a very old idea, first suggested by Matti Makkonen (the retired Finnish mobile pioneer who was an executive at Telecom Finland (now TeliaSonera), Nokia and Finnet Group, who recently won the Economist innovation award for inventing SMS text messaging). Matti suggested this over 20 years ago, and I remember he mentioned it to us, when I worked at Nokia and seeked Matti's guidance for my Consulting Department, and he gave lessons to us about what makes mobile distinct from existing channels and tools.
Optimized for one-handed operation. It means we can rather easily learn to use two phones in two hands. This gives the mobile a powerful advantage over other digital mass media, whether the PC or Playstation or Digital TV - we tend to only consume one of those at a time. But we can rather easily consume two distinct mobile phone based services - on two separate phones - from two competing networks even - simultaneously. Or, we can consume mobile services while we are supposedly paying attention to the other older media such as our broadband internet (sixth mass media) or TV (fifth mass media) or a video game (ie recordings, the second mass media channel).
This changes the comparison to "apples and oranges". There are single-use mass media, like all legacy mass media (print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV and internet); and now the newest innovation, there is multi-use mass media, of which mobile is the first (and no doubt, will not be the last mass media channel).
So yeah, mobile is very different from the legacy mass media channels. And the joke that I have on the back of my current hardcover book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, where I say "...On the other hand, you have your other cellphone." (and the cover illustrations too have me holding one phone in the front cover, while hiding my second phone behind my back, on the back cover) - this is increasingly becoming a reality, not only a joke. Yes, more and more young consumers are fully prepared to consume two separate mobile services on two phones, simultaneously.
There is a very interesting research from Burst Media about that. According to it, 58,3% of internet users watch TV while surfing in the internet, 33% of them are working, 31,1% are reading a book, 29% are reading a magazine or newspapers and 23% are talking to someone at cell phone. Maybe even people who are not in generation C are learning to be multitask.
Posted by: Mariana Oliveira | February 02, 2009 at 04:47 PM
For myself, tarnished with the monniker, a digital immigrant I do wonder what the social psychology of all this is. I personally feel that it all adds up to a distraction as Mark Curtis posits. The time-space compression where we are involved with instant gratification sounds like it is going to be doubled with using two phones. We are entering a different dimension here perhaps. I think I prefer to be a digital dinosaur and not have the TV on in the mornings!! Oh showing my age!
Posted by: Tim | February 02, 2009 at 05:34 PM
hmm, i think having two phones has more to do with being on 2 different contracts than using 2 devices and i think we`ll see phones which can use 2 SIMs _simultaneously_ in the not too far future, definitely would sell like hot potatoes, especially in developing nations. so i can`t see other benefit in splitting up the money between 2 devices and having all the annoyances of them being not synchronised and less capable, etc. since having a powerful device means that you can listen to music, write SMS, jump to the browser, send someone onto voicemail, etc all the same time - though no luck here for sad iPhone users :) and also having 2 hands means that you can type much faster! with the flexibility of touchscreen i think we`ll have the quick, one hand, portrait usage and the more immersed, 2 hands, landscape usage. point in case: Nokia 5800, i got this not too long ago and use the landscape virtual keyboard 90% of times - that being said they could tweak the input methods a bit throughout the OS, it`s a bit inconsistent at the moment.
Posted by: dain | February 08, 2009 at 03:24 PM
Hi Mariana, Tim and dain
Thank you for the comments. I'll respond to each individually.
Mariana - Good statistics. And yes, its one natural human response to the added stimuli and data overload. In previous times there was probably not much more total media offering than what a person might consume in a day. Consider the 1970s before the internet and cable TV. We'd get the newspaper in the morning, listen to some radio during the day, get the evening TV news at night. Television would transmit only a few channels so even the home video recorder was not really "needed" to capture a lot of programs on alternate channels, now the 2 tuner TiVo/PVR (Personal Video Recorder ie hard drive video recorder) seems not able to capture everything we want at any one time - while watching a third channel..
So yes, we adjust to it, but I think the youth here have even a bigger opportunity where they grow up naturally using the phone keypad for messages etc. Makes them even more in tune and connected to peers, while consuming several media at the same time.
Tim - yes, I agree, and great point about Mark Curtis's excellent book, Distraction. Yes, it captures so well what we are now feeling in trying to deal with the overload.
dain - thanks for the comments, and I appreciate what you write, but the world actually is well beyond the vision you have. Those two SIM card slot mobile phones already exist, here in Hong Kong for example there are many Samsung models that accept two SIM cards etc. China has had those from smaller manufacturers for many years and I just saw some of the Samsung models in Jordan last year. Nothing new there.
But also the assumption about human behaviour is flawed. Yes, there are many who have two networks and occasionally two separate phones to save money on their communications. No problem with that. But that it would then trend to a desire of one phone and feature set is not natural. The UK had a famous consumer survey by Office Angels I think two years ago, when half of British youth now think its cool to walk around with two phones.
The reason is that someone with two phones is "more connected" and more cool and has more friends and is more successful. The second phone can be from work and this itself a sign you have a cool job, etc (Working your first job at Macdonald's doesnt' get you a free company paid phone, ha-ha).
Now, if the youth preferences have started to shift that two phones is better than one, its a lost cause, and we'll increasingly find that also in our future.
I find lots of colleagues and friends, obviously first in the telecoms professionls in Finland for example, but now increasingly among all white collar jobs around the world, who really find utility and convenience from having two separate accounts - and two phones. Its easy to see that the Blackberry is the work phone and the Samsung is the fun leisure phone, so you can pick up the right device with you when you go to the restaurant with your wife, and only want the personal phone with you but not the work phone, etc.
All what you write about, was stuff I heard ten years ago, and even myself often wrote about and claimed. The world has really moved beyond it, and now two phones is the reality. Like I said, more than half of Europeans have two or more subscriptions and most of those also carry two phones. It will only get "worse" not better, even with the two-SIM card phones, as most employed adults have post-paid (contract) phone accounts which means usually they also get at least a partial subsidy on their next phone.
A global replacement cycle of 16 months now means you get a new phone every 8 months if you have two post-paid/contract accounts.. And on two networks, odds are you will have access to almost all the cool phones if you pick your networks well. The iPhone in 2008, the Nokia N97 in 2009, why not..
Finally on the typing. Again dain, I hear you, and it makes sense, but only for older people like myself (I love the full QWERTY keyboard on the Nokia Communciator series like on my current E90). Young people who can easily average 100 SMS sent per day, can type out messages as fast on a keypad, without predictive text - and without looking at the phone - as I can using two hands on my QWERTY keyboard on my Communicator.
They PREFER the phone keypad ! Just like young people prefer driving playstation car driving games using the playstation controls rather than a "real steering wheel" on some driving control simulator systems, the youth also prefer the phone keypad to a large keyboard. There already are small phone keypad layout USB based keyboards that you can plug into a PC or laptop, to use the familiar phone keypad layout rather than the "cluttered" 101 key based QWERTY keyboard that we older people are so familiar with on the PC.
I don't mean it isn't a great idea to have keyboards on phones, in particular when they have touch screens like the iPhone. Good. And yes, slider keyboards (I went publically on record one day after the iPhone was announced, that what it needed was a slide-out keyboard for better texting).
But the phone needs ALSO the ability to operate it single-handed. We often don't have the luxury of two-handed operation when something urgent happens and we need our phone. We may be carrying something heavy on our other hand etc. So then the phone also needs a keypad - like the Nokia Communicator does when its clamshell is closed. So you can easily and conveniently use it also single-handed, also to send messages etc.
If you learn to send SMS using the phone keypad, and are able to use the phone single-handedly, and then you have two phones, its a small step then to start to use both on separate hands. I thought this was a very weird situation when I occasionally would do it when I worked for Nokia a decade ago, and then would spot a fellow Nokia colleague doing it too, but its gradually appeared on all continents and its not at all uncommon, for example when an airliner lands, to see several frequent fliers with two phones, using both to send immediate update messages after the frequent flier has landed. No longer just the Nokia-geeks from Finland ha-ha..
Don't think the one-handed keypad entry will disappear anytime soon. SMS text messaging alone was over 100 billion dollars worth of revenues in 2008, far over 110 billion this year. That is as big as the global music industry, plus the global hollywood movies industry, plus the global videogaming industry, by revenues, combined.
That kind of economic power is not going to disappear silently. The operators/carriers love SMS and will continue to promote phones that are strong in using this cash cow.
Thank you all for writing.
Tomi Ahonen :-)
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