Tag Archives: iphone

Whatever happened to e-contacts

For some reason completely opaque to me a thought popped into my head when I received my new iPhone 5, the latest pinnacle of the mobile experience (discuss). Whatever happened to the idea of automatically swapping electronic business cards? I know there are many iPhone apps which help manage contacts but that’s not really what I mean.

Way back in 1996 the PalmPilot Personal came out and we all marveled that we could sit around a conference table and swap contacts electronically with the click on one button. Obviously everyone had to have a PalmPilot to make it work, but still, it seemed like it was obvious that exchanging contact information with anyone was bound to become a standard protocol.

Yet here we are in 2012 and we can’t even do this natively from the most popular smartphone. There are individual apps which have tried to solve the problem on the iPhone such as these but the compatibility problem is still here. Given the ubiquitous requirement for swapping contact details it is a mystery to me why a standard has never emerged.

Phone becomes wallet

I have been reading an interesting post from Springwise (one of my sources of innovation inspiration, by the way) which points the way to an ever greater role for the smartphone in our lives. Navigo is shortly going to be trialling a service in Paris which will allow travellers with NFC enabled smartphones to pay for their tickets with their phones. NFC is already in some Android phones and the chances are the iPhone 5 will incorporate the technology too. Is this the beginning of the end for the wallet.

Blogging from an iPhone

I haven’t used my iPhone to blog yet so I thought I would give it a go. I can’t find any authoring tools so I’m using the basic WYSIWYG editor on Blogger itself. One funny thing: it wouldn’t let me enter text except in the HTML box – although that seems to be working OK. The autocorrect is working on the key board too – which is a good thing as the iPhone soft key board takes some getting used to!