16 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age HIGH-LEVEL RESEARCH Bob felt exhausted after the delayed fl ights, the packed train, and the horse carriage ride to his Davos hotel. He had volunteered to research the spirit of the small alpine town to prepare for the cell’s planned protests during the upcoming World Economic Forum summit. He did bring his hiking boots, just in case high-level research would be needed. Bob checked into his room and started to prepare for the next days’ talks with their local allies. They had gained the confi dence of a local Internet service pro- vider who had promised to host their net connections during the protests. The cell planned to cover the centre of Davos with a closed Wi-Fi network with repeaters and suffi cient redundancy to allow encrypted push-to-talk calling. It was likely that the authorities would monitor short-wave radios and even GSM presence, but with Wi-Fi they had more options to cover themselves. Now it was time to get to the ‘net. That proved to be harder than expected. He had brought his mobile gear, the laptops, the wireless access points, routers, and stuff. However, there was no connectivity in the wall jack. After checking the IP setup, calling reception, calling the hotel manager, summoning their tech main- tenance person, and much debugging, he was fi nally able to ping the cell’s home server. However, for whatever reason, the VPN connection never worked. Bob was not enough of a hacker to fi gure it out. After a few hours of wasted trying, Bob decided to call it a day. He opened the storm windows, inhaled the distant smell of horse manure, listened to the cowbells, and decided to talk about net connection options with their provider the next day. Over a pot of fondue, he hoped. The developments outlined above – increased mobility of people, ubiquitous data access, freedom of time and place, fragmentation of activities, multitasking, short attention spans, nomadic use – together defi ne important parameters for the use of mobile devices and, con- sequently, mobile content. They set requirements that mobile systems must be able to fulfi l. For instance, human–machine interfaces designed for mobile use should support glance-and-click interaction allowing people to carry out meaningful functions in brief periods of time. Or, since people can create and enjoy content anywhere, anytime, we cannot make too many assumptions on the use situations. Such require- ments will be discussed at length in Chapter 6. 2.2 Mobile Device Categories What makes a device mobile? There are numerous factors that affect mobility, for example, carryability, battery life, and intended