Mobile Fizz

Now every now and then I move between phones and most of the time (maybe 99%) I usually go between android devices. Last year I used a total of 13 phones in one year, a record for me and one I don't think I could ever beat. By use I mean USED put my sim card in and copied over my whatsapp messages and re-login to everything and use it as my daily driver. Sometimes the playing around would last 2 weeks and other times more, currently the phone I was using the Moto X held the record of 3 months if you include this January. One major reason for this is because as part of my job I need to know my way around all phones and how their UI and use cases differ. Within android all the different skins make each device different whereas the iPhone has stayed pretty static, even the recent update was more a lick of paint in my eyes than a complete rethink of iOS. The second is the fact that it is for me anyway really easy to move across between android devices, text messages, whatsapp, images...

An interesting thing is happening in mobile and that is the fact that mobile is becoming the first internet connected device for a majority of the next 1 billion people to get online. This next billion will not be mainly from the developed world but the developing world and that is where there is a hell of a lot of innovation taking place to make that a reality. Having access to the internet can change lives whether that's access to a medical journal and doctors or knowing what the weather is doing so you know when is best to harvest crops, having access to the internet will be one of the biggest changes for good in this century. We can start to see the importance of mobile in the developing world where often you can’t invest billions of dollars in wiring to get peoples homes connected to broadband. This is why you have to think out of the box and innovate in different ways, for example in Kenya nearly 33% of the countries GDP actually goes through mobile. What an incredibl...