30 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age Eddie explained that Joey looked for the open ports in the short-range links that were common in today’s devices, and then worked his way into the shared fi les. Often Joey did not even have to break anywhere, as sharing was on by default in many devices, but sometimes he had to spend over fi ve minutes to uncover the encryption codes. Angie found it appalling. It was maybe fun to bring your songs into the party, but what about other data? What could this hacker get into? She had a lot of private things on her phone that she wanted to keep to herself. For all she knew, this Joey Hacksta could copy all her data to that DJ laptop. When Eddie was not looking, Angie switched off her phone. That’s a barrier even Joey can’t cross, she thought. 2.3.1 Teeny Weeny UIs Any user of a mobile device is painfully aware of the limitations of the mobile UIs. For instance, most people would probably agree that the displays and keypads in their mobile phones are too small. Yet they are prepared to type and read lengthy text messages with the same awkward UI, as long as the topic of the message is highly valued. Given suffi cient interest and patience, we will tolerate almost any limitations in our gadgets. We will compromise quality and convenience for added mobility. It is diffi cult to make the keyboards and displays on a phone larger, as that would make the phone larger. On the contrary, customers seem to prefer smaller and thinner phones. The input/output devices of a phone must necessarily refl ect compromises between desirability, usability, reliability, and price. The same compromises pester the makers of all mobile devices. However, there are ways of getting around the size limitations. For instance, while the keypad of the average phone is too small to include the QWERTY layout, a lexicon-based predictive input method (such as T915 ) can give higher text entry speeds with fewer keys. Speech recognition does away with the keyboard altogether, yet introduces a number of new challenges (Chapter 6). Displays can be shown on virtual head-worn screens (Figure 2-5), or moved to other nearby devices. In short, there are various ways of designing around the limits, but at the same time, new complications are introduced. 2.4 Because it Can! If there was a single enabler for advances in electronics in the past several decades, it would have to be the continuing trend in miniatur- 15 http://www.t9.com/