Mobile Practices & Search: What’s Hot!
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Megan Fox, Associate Director, Library, Simmons College

pop. as a whole doesn’t have as many smartphones yet… still provide good lib services

new 12m pixel phones with face and smile recognition (won’t take pic until person is smiling

palm pre:
has a “synergy” feature to pull together contacts and calenders for multiple sources
multitasking finally
wireless charger

multimodel interaction, typing is not so easy
visual access- pic of book, QR codes, pic of bar code
(extelligence, versus intelligence)

QRcodes all over the world much higher adoption rates

increasing audio interactions

“Tell Me” -  gives audio info

gesture interactions

3 camps of content users could be getting on the phone:

full, transcoded, or true mobile page (created for and optimized)

w3c mobileok checker

study by abphone.com, “snacking the web”

mobile users need fast easy answers with minimal amount of typing

much of reference desk info is now on their mobiles at point of need

Library Journal has a mobile version

Skokie Public Library

University of Houston checking out Itouch’s with mobile lib apps to give patrons an idea of what they could do

III Airpac has been revamped for iPhone use (m.ocls.info)

Suzanne Chapman’s Flickr for mobile library screenshots

Library app, helps you find local libraries

Traveling Classics reads books to you

Istory app – like Choose your own adventure

Paper – for scholarly paper

Sit or squat — clean public restroom finder

Text more popular than calls, especially among 13-17 year old

Boston: trash cans when almost full, send text that they need open to central office — why not our book drops

Libraries: request hold, send call numbers, ref questions

mLibraries section of Library Success Wiki

vLingo works better than Google voice?
can use to run commands on your device… “Send text message to Bob”

Leapfrog is about to come out with “text and learn” blackberry for 3 year olds

SMS/Text Search (check Megan’s slides)

University of Arizona, color, flexible touch screen will be on market in 18 months

projector in phone

Asus selling keyboard for with keyboard and touchscreen built in

Samsung, solar-powered, touchscreen phone made of recycled plastic

Megan’s slides (and excellent site) are here

Anyone using Wordpress would do well to look into the WPtouch plugin/theme. I’ve just installed it on this blog and I think its interface is superior to any of the other “mobilize” services I’ve seen.

This is what the blog looks like on my phone:

For those who aren’t using Wordpress, or if you’d just prefer to go with a different interface, Ellyssa Kroski has a nice write-up of some alternatives for your blog.