Multimodality — the future of the wireless user interface
1.The importance of the user interface
With revenues from voice calls projected to fall, the mobile industry has a huge challenge ahead of it to drive revenue growth from mobile data applications. Multimedia messaging applications will clearly be the first major step in this direction — however, they will not be the whole answer.The mobile environment presents some unique challenges for data applications not seen in the traditional PC world, centring around the user interface. In the PC arena, mass-market adoption began with the move from command line interfaces to windowing interfaces. This enabled PCs to be used by a wider range of people and generated the computer industry as we know it today.However, we cannot expect to see the same explosion of applications (particularly Web applications) on mobile devices unless there are radical improvements in the mobile user interface. By comparison with current mobile devices, the PC has a couple of huge advantages in its user interface:
• it has a large screen that can display a lot of information,
• it has a full size keyboard and mouse on a stationary desk through which information can be entered with great ease.
