46 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age It is one of the primary drivers for the need for mobile content: “I want my content here, now. No need to worry where it has been stored or how I can fi nd it. Just give me what I need, whenever, wherever.” Mobility is not only accessing content. An equally important aspect is the creation of content; storing important events and experiences by the means of photos, video clips, audio recordings, or textual blog entries. Not to mention the implicit content creation activities, such as creating a heart rate log while jogging, or a dictionary entry for the T9 predictive text-entry method when typing a text message on a smart phone. The mother of all personal devices, the mobile phone that is always on, always with you, is increasingly recording such information. So it is not surprising that digital personal content creation is becoming a common daily activity. Yet another aspect inherent in mobile personal content is shar - ing. The basic human need for sharing experiences with loved ones (or even with the general public) not only characterizes personal content but also couples it tightly with mobile communications technology. This chapter discusses mobile personal content, while considering its primary characteristics. Essentially, mobility (the content going with you wherever you go), with its distributed nature opens up new per- spectives in understanding the phenomenon of digital personal content. It infl uences the user experience by providing new opportunities for creating and experiencing the content regardless of the time and place. However, it poses constraints related to small screens, limited input modalities, and so on. Another point worth considering is that many issues related to mobile personal content are dynamic. The necessary technology stan- dards are still under development, the usage patterns have not settled down yet, and the whole ecosystem is just starting to take shape. Thus, the underlying technologies and behavioural patterns will radically affect the ongoing development in the near future. These aspects are discussed further in Chapters 5 and 6. There are several ways to approach mobile personal content. A traditional approach is related to a comparison between traditional digital personal content and pointing out similarities and differences. This is a promising approach, since much that is taking place within the domain of mobile personal content has earlier traversed through similar phases within the desktop computing domain. As content that has traditionally been analogue (for instance, photos, and recorded TV shows) is captured and used in digital form, it is also important to compare it with the devices that were used earlier for creating and