Today's smartphones are quickly becoming the most important things to us. Think about it: mobile technology has advanced rapidly in the last ten years, and it seems to be going light-speed as of the last three years.
Needless to say the world of communication is going very mobile.
Online content has been a fantastic way to educate, research and publish content. Through the right channels it has the ability to wide spread very quickly and reach masses. To add something to this, we are now in a position to go completely mobile with the internet in our "pockets" through mobile technology.
Today, you can use a standard smartphone to check your email, text, play games, do research, store data such as music and movies, plan out your week, orchestrate travel, confirm reservations, and maybe even call someone when you get the chance.
The future of wireless / mobile technology
The future of mobile technology is probably going to see us paying for goods and services (a scary thought to be honest), starting our vehicles, closing our curtains and even allow wireless power to charge our phones' batteries through electromagnetics.
The reality is that smartphones are more like mini-computers than phones in this day and age, and they seem to be continuing on their technological fast track that, truly, has no end in sight. Mobile technology is quickly becoming the spine of all communications, and it’s only going to become more prevalent as time goes on. With all of these new and innovative digital devices, we can also expect the way we handle these devices to change.
Today, education programs exist that will help train people to understand and utilize mobile technology.
How is this information relevant to those of us who want to reach a wider audience?
From a content standpoint, in essence, mobile devices have been built to handle the content available on the web, however with fiber optic soon to be available at the door of houses in a short space of time the amount of data you can transfer in a short while will be vastly increased. Wired internet speeds will become up to 10 times faster as a result and the mobile world will be unable to scale at the same rate. We must therefore be very conscious of the type of content we expect people at home / work to be able to view and those on mobile devices.
Looking forward, the idea of getting content out to all channels will incorporate friendly device design (responsive website design for example) and ensuring that during a mobile hungry movement that all content is available irrespective of the device being used.
A few recommendations on this front would be:
- Ensuring your website uses a responsive design
- All content served is in manageable chunks for all devices
This should ensure that you don't burden users with content that is either not viewable or too large for mobile download.