Alerting Function of Smartphones
Today, there are many different kinds of mobile computing devices in the market. Each different mobile device category has critical mobile computing purposes that it serves. Smartphones have unique capabilities in that their owners look to their smartphones to alert them when someone wants to talk to them. Smartphones, like all cellphones, alert their owners when either a phone call is placed to the phone or a text message is transmitted to the phone. Smartphones can also alert their owners if emails are received by mailboxes being monitored by the smartphone. Even simple cellphones today have substantial capabilities to alert their owner due to recurrent timed alarms, or based on items on their personal calendars, or specialized events the user wishes to be alerted about. In order to serve this function best, it is important that the smartphone be the one computing device that its owner keeps with him or her at all times, and rarely turns off.
The alerting function of smartphones determines many of the properties of smartphones. They must be physically small. They must have significant battery life. They must be excellent at alerting their owner of events. They must be easy to answer quickly, since phone calls are time-sensitive. Finally, they must assist their owner in determining the priority of each alert almost instantly. Ideally, a smartphone can alert the owner of the smartphone without interrupting a conversation or a meeting that the user is participating in.
All of these primary properties of a smartphone add together to limit the physical size of the smartphone, and thus, of the display on the smartphone. This led to the discovery that devices with only a single application display are much easier to use than multi-window desktop or laptop computers. Smartphones led the way in creating single-window graphical user interfaces. We have discovered that these interfaces work very well for information processing tasks that one would like to perform when mobile, when the probability of distractions from the owner's environment are very large.
We have also learned, however, that it requires a large degree of skill with one's smartphone in order to create content of professional quality. What we already know about laptop computers tells us that we can make smartphones much easier to use to create content of professional quality if we have the ability to display two different applications at once.
Village Green Technologies believes that the second optional display is an excellent way to achieve this significant improvement to the ease of use of creating content of professional quality on a smartphone.