288 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age are developed and offered to the consumers at a breakneck pace. There is a more or less functional solution available next to every imaginable GEMS action, to a wide variety of different content types. Obviously, most come with their own proprietary approach, incompat- ible with the others. Discussing a signifi cant portion of these is impos- sible. The approach we choose is to point out solutions that we consider signifi cant, either as of today or in the future, or that have gained some foothold in the marketplace, while hereby acknowledging the existence of the remaining 99.99%. 7.1 General Characteristics of Mobile Applications As discussed in Chapter 3, many aspects of personal content manage- ment that have previously taken place in homes and offi ces are cur- rently moving into the mobile domain, making it possible to create and enjoy content while on the move. Furthermore, mobility brings along new usage patterns and content types – and with them, necessarily, new application types. Many mobile applications are but crippled ver- sions of their desktop counterparts, such as light versions of word processors or e-mail clients, but others are designed purely for mobile use. As an example on how mobility changes the applications, consider PDAs. Many PDA models are not connected to any network, but are synchronized with the latest information once they are connected to their homebases (usually a PC). This non-continuous mode of updating shows up in many PDA applications, such as e-mail, calendars, news, etc., all based on updating the latest information only when connected. This also shows up in the application design, where the user is assumed to be aware of the various issues relating to synchronization. Besides PDAs, the same model applies, for instance, to mobile phones, laptops, and MP3 players. Consumer software sales for desktop computers are an everyday business, with games and standard offi ce applications usually ranking highest in top selling lists. On the contrary, the market for software for mobile devices has been far more limited, not least due to the many proprietary closed systems that do not support third-party applica- tions. A direct consequence is that most users settle for the software provided with the mobile device and never bother to buy additional applications. With the increasing availability of open mobile platforms,