As mobile devices become more common and less expensive, applications and branding become persuasive reasons to choose one device over another. The author became involved in these issues when he participated in the development of the mSports application, which allows users to follow major league baseball in real time on a variety of mobile phones.

Experiences with applications and the devices they work on fall into three categories: physical perception, usability, and usefulness. The constraints on the designer of an application include the physical constraints of the device; platform and device variations, such as screen size and resolution, color capabilities, and operating system; the number of primary uses for the device; competing brand messages among the applications on the device; and the availability of support by the device manufacturer for third-party software.

Rondeau groups mobile devices into three categories, by their ability to handle applications. Single-purpose devices, such as the Apple iPod, are the easiest to manage, and to maintain brand integrity for, because the application and the device are designed together, and are controlled by only one company. Accessories can sometimes be added, but both the third-party developers and the users understand the need to live within the design constraints of the primary use.

Multipurpose devices follow the personal digital assistant (PDA) model. They have an operating system, typically Palm or Windows, and application developers live within the constraints of both the hardware and the operating system. Rondeau considers the Blackberry to be a multipurpose device, but it has a significant resemblance to a single-purpose device. Multipurpose devices encourage separate experiences from each application, and, in fact, the applications often compete for user attention. Rondeau believes that application usefulness is the best competitive tool, rather than arbitrary visual design or color styling.

The third type of device is the most limited: the enhanced mobile phone. Unfortunately, this is the model that Rondeau chose for his mSports application, and is also the type of device that seems to be growing fastest in the marketplace. The problem with this type of device is that it is limited by its primary purpose, to be a telephone, and all other applications become subservient to this need. For example, keyboards or cursors have to accommodate the usual phone keypad and mobile phone function key conventions. Further, phone manufacturers compete vigorously on style, forcing other applications to potentially work differently in each type of phone, substantially raising the cost of development and support for third-party application vendors. Rondeau suggests that the current best strategy is for the application developer to keep the user interface as simple, and as interchangeable among devices, as possible.

The problems raised in this paper are, in a way, a tribute to the power we can now put into our mobile devices. As Rondeau says, his article “may be a first step toward a larger discussion of branding on mobile devices” (page 66).