Last time I saw anyone famous out in Bristol, I didn't have a miniscule camera and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) on my mobile. So none of my friends got to see that Trude Mostue from Vets in Practice was some five tables away from me towards the back of the restaurant. Not entirely sure that I would have taken a snap of her anyway - what exactly would that achieve? Yet all the current TV ads for picture messaging emphasise this aspect as if we should expect regularly to bump into celebrities who'll say 'cheese' with us.
The full functionality of MMS just hasn't yet been adequately explored, though analysts expect phones and PDAs with imaging functionality to sell 151 million units by 20061. But there are some positive uses for the latest breed of mobile phones, besides their obvious usefulness as telephones.
A very large number of mobile phones now come with colour screens, limited internet browsing capability, good audio formats such as Midi and Wav, built-in cameras and, of course, can be used to access vast libraries of revolting ringtones. The industry sometimes describes them as 'smart phones'. Plus, with their graphic sophistication increasing all the time, the richness of the games experiences available has now far surpassed Snakes.
Indeed, the processing power, display and memory in modern multimedia smart phones exceeds that of the original Nintendo GameBoy by some length, making mobile phones increasingly the focus for games developers. Within the last year, SEGA has signed with Nokia as games development partners, while THQ has partnered with Motorola, and IN-FUSIO has teamed up with Orange.
This latter partnership even announced in 2002 the launch of the first ever 3D game for mobile phones - Mission 3D, a first-person shooter. It is of course far from the graphic brilliance of modern consoles, or even of the GameBoy Advance (the frame rate on the current generation of phones is around ten frames per second, compared to 30-60fps on GameBoy or console games), and, like most mobile games, it still cannot support multiple simultaneous button presses, which are the staple of most modern games. Nevertheless it exhibits the growing sophistication of games for mobile phones.
Your phone's specification will dictate the types of games you can buy. The current wave of phones are Series 60 models, with games produced in development environments such as Symbian Native, J2ME and BREW, and programmed usually in C++ or Java. Games, the vast majority of which are platform-based and 2D, are downloaded from the internet, and are thereafter available to play offline.
Some of this is going to change, however, with the advent of even more high-spec machines. Mission 3D, for instance, is available on Orange's latest offering, the SAGEM myG-5, a dedicated games mobile phone, the handset for which has been specifically designed to appeal to serious games players.
Nokia, too, is close to releasing a phone dedicated to games. Their N-Gage product looks more like a GameBoy Advance than a phone, and SEGA is its main games developer. Though Nokia has released little information on this machine, it has been made clear that all games for it must be Bluetooth compatible for wireless peer-to-peer gaming. It is the first phone to offer truly mobile gaming that makes explicit use of the phone's communicative elements.
With the three major consoles only just on the cusp of realising their online potential, N-Gage could offer a unique and powerful service for the delivery of games which require cooperation and collaboration - although in the first instance at least it is unlikely to offer much more than competitive action games.
Whether mobile phones have any relevance to the educational sector though is contestable. Platform games and 3D shooters demonstrate very little applicability unless, as with the case of massive multiplayer online games, players are able to form teams and communicate in-game to find solutions to problems, and strategies that secure success. Other games, such as the BBC/Orange collaboration on The Weakest Link interactive SMS game, are unlikely to encourage teachers to allow mobile phones in classrooms.
What may be more appropriate are educational projects that are location-sensitive. The pan-European Ad-Hoc project is investigating the role of mobile telephony and personal desktop assistants (PDAs) as supporting devices for learning languages. The intention is to develop a multimedia language tool that can be used in the destination country, maximising the potential of all the visual, audio and textual components of mobile phones - with all data available for ad hoc transmission depending on the sophistication of one's handset.
The limitations of current mobile phones, as opposed to PDAs, means they may be unlikely to catch on as tools for use in education, despite their ubiquity and user-friendliness. Nevertheless, as some new devices demonstrate, mobile telephony is beginning to segue into other media, with a possible future scenario being that your mobile phone is also your PDA and pocket games console - perpetually connected to the internet (or a version thereof) and to your peers.
In this scenario, maybe the children of the future will be using mobile phones as field research instruments, capturing vocal data, images, other audio, and text - and delivering those resources to other, remote locations. In fact, Ultralab is already involved in projects which investigate that very potential. Lab Director Stephen Heppell says, 'mobile phones are about communication. They offer two-way interaction, which is what learning should be about'.2
The first of these projects, e-viva, allows students to present oral work through mobile and speech-to-text technologies which offset the nervousness many learners experience during teacher-invigilated viva voce examinations. The m-learning project is a pan-European initiative designed to appeal to 16-24 year-olds through subject matters such as football and urban survival to engage them in literacy and numeracy learning activities.
If a phone can be used for peer-to-peer gaming and for transmitting images whilst 'on the move', then seriously, what's to stop them being used for something more educational? As one well-known mobiles corporation might say, the future's bright...
Notes:
1. Image-enhanced mobile forecasts
www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2002_08_13_091423
2. Stephen Heppell interview
www.education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,869659,00.html
Links:
Ad-HOC mobile learning project - 21st.century.phil-inst.hu/m-learning_conference/
Malliou/Mall_short.htm
In-Fusio 3D games - news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2225466.stm
Immersion - news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2677813.stm
Orange SAGEM myG-5 - shop.orange.co.uk/NASApp/esales/esales?handle=
HandleHandset&SearchType=HandsetID&SearchValue=480
Nokia N-Gage - press.nokia.com/PR/200211/880085_5.html
Ultralab projects - www.ultralab.ac.uk/projects/
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