... and some nifty bits I've pulled out of the box marked "design":

• Design on time: "Larry Cheng created a ‘free time’ dispenser that hands out free time in ten minute increments in the form of printed tickets. What you do with that time is entirely up to you. Nice idea, but Ted Howes and Adam Vollmer decided to try it out in the real world and took the dispenser on their Caltrain ride back to San Francisco the other day"
• Lovely piece on the design of the Classics book reader for iPhone: "Real-life testing was an important part of the application; users could be lying in the park grass reading a book on their iPhone in the bright afternoon sun, and if they are, they should be able to still read pleasantly without having to squint an eye or going indoor and looking at an interface that’s completely black on white" (oh, and isn't the mobile books space busy right now?)
• Cultural probes: "Users are met in their environment and given a ‘black box’ or a mock-up of a device. They are then told what functionality the device has and are asked to go about their life as they normally would…They are given a digital camera for a week and asked to take pictures of the situations where they would use the 'magic thing'."
• The N79 launched: "Simply, in the case of the N79 comes with a handful of interchangeable Xpress-on covers that feature an embedded chip to enable the replacement of a cover to automatically trigger the on-screen theme to morph accordingly"

Go read this article, "There is more than one mobile context".

For some time now I've been becoming gradually uncomfortable with the notion that mobile content is purely about snacking on small chunks of content or limited to snatched moments of time - though I'll hold my hand up and admit this is a view I've held, and frequently espoused, for years.

A few observations have drawn me away from this view:

1. Watching Trutap become a primary means of connecting to web services for a couple of hundred thousand folks in Asia, and learning that there's a huge middle class who are leap-frogging ADSL in favour of 3G;
2. Noticing that peak times for a casual gaming service we run are after 11pm, when I'll bet most folks are at home near their PCs or games consoles, not on the bus; and
3. Slowly finding that around the home, my iPhone is replacing my laptop as my means of quick web access. It's not as fast, as large, or as flexible, but it's always there. Walking 10 feet and opening a zip-bag and case may only take 10 seconds, but as the Googlers know, when reduce the time between wanting X and getting X, you sell more X;

I think that, in the UK at least, this is still unusual behaviour. But when you see this happening in a tiny corner of one territory and already starting to play out in others, there's not much conceptual hopscotch to be played: it's not if this happens, but when.

A quarter of iPhone users say it’s displacing a notebook computer. 28% of iPhone users surveyed said strongly that they often carry their iPhone instead of a notebook computer.

My gut instinct is that this isn't purely an iPhone phenomenon, and that there's something more happening here - an acceptance that availability trumps screen size? An across-the-board improvement in access speeds and UI?

There is more than one mobile context. Decide which you’re interested in.

I think this article is lovely, but the author has left out one context: the mobile as your primary means of getting online, not because you're away from home, but because it's yours, it's nearby, and it's how you choose to be online in general.

More notes from XP Day, courtesy of some scrawled-upon index cards I just found in my bag:

• Rachel Davies emphasising the need to take actions from retrospectives immediately into planning!
• Gwyn from New Bamboo on "team building through ritual violence": using The Sword of Integration as a physical commit token. He also alluded to the Hammer of Scrum. I'll have to write about our Standup Plunger some time...
• Chris Ambler of Microsoft on their approach to game testing. He used a nice phrase, "1st time delivery", to demonstrate the difference between launching web-based software (which you can update after-the-fact) and shipping a physical CD. With most mobile apps being a pain to update, I see mobile as nearer to 1DD than not. Chris also delineated scripted and unscripted testing, touched on coverage as being vital (particularly in iterative development where you might plan to throw away lots of stuff), and a few other goodies.

Google are backing down on net neutrality, apparently.

I don't understand what "net neutrality" means, even after a heated^H^H^H^H^H^Hlukewarm debate with a Googler chum a few months back. I mean, it alliterates nicely and sounds kinda cool and Swiss... but what does it mean?

It seems entirely reasonable for, say, my ISP to run extra cables to the BBC if they want to serve iPlayer traffic better. It seems reasonable to me to prioritise videoconferencing traffic over SMTP to provide better-quality video. Are these breaches of net neutrality? Doesn't the internet interpret dodgy traffic policies as damage, and route around them?

I don't get it and lots of smart people I know seem to really care about it... which would seem to point to a gap in my understanding.

Strand Consulting has a report on the iPhone: "The fact that the iPhone is currently receiving so much attention from the press is probably due to an uncritical press that have allowed themselves to be seduced by Apple's unique PR machine - and that have not analysed and examined the underlying business models and the financial success of the iPhone from an operator’s point of view."

I last saw John Strand talk a few years back at World Telemedia, and first came across him when he gave European operators launching I-Mode a right ticking off several years before that. History proved him right on European I-mode, but I'm not convinced that everything he said last time about niche MVNOs has come to pass here in the UK (though I suspect it has, *somewhere*). It's nonetheless interesting to hear some well-informed views on the iPhone from someone well grounded in telco-land.