Thanks to fast evolution of products, new and modern technologies are taking the place of less productive and outmoded accessories. Life is going so fast that we cannot sense so many things  which are vanishing gradually from the scene. Few years ago, I would have told any new usability specialist to spend time learning about the Internet. These days, I would not talk about the web that much. Yes, it still offers a million opportunities to usability specialists, but it is not as cutting edge or as interesting. I would point a new usability specialist to mobile phones.
In the beginning of this century, we had Public Call Office (PCO) industry growing very rapidly throughout the country. One could easily find PCO, not only in big cities but in far flung areas as well. Even some mobile companies including Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Warid and  Zong played their active role in PCO industry, and introduced specialized handsets for the purpose.
But today, we find not that much call offices as compared to few years back; in fact they have become obsolete. Question arises, where did they go? What happened to those PCO operators, how are they earning their livelihood now? And answer to this question is that majority of those PCOs are now converted to easy load centers, which are busy sharing loads for mobile consumers.
This change was gradual, we cannot say all this happened at once. However, today majority of them have become load sharing centers.
Let’s talk about another industry – before the popularity of mobile, although landline phone was working well but people used to write letters to their relatives.  However, now all the post offices are used or we can call they are alive to send registries.  By the way total share of letters is just 2 percent of the postage of Pakistan Post, every day.
More interestingly, even these two percent letters are mostly from students, and job seekers or for official correspondents. The traditional letters are almost out of business like telegraph in the country.
Short messages through mobile phones have made the letter writing obsolete as millions of SMS are being sent on every network and the companies are offering bundle SMS packages.
It may be possible that after a time of five to ten years, our new generation may not know about the traditional letters.
They may take it as cultural heritage at that time. At that time, Post Office department may be called as the billing department of the utility services or money transfer point for the citizens.
SMS has now become so fast that there is no need to rely on the old fashioned letters.
The other major development is from dial-up to broadband and now fiber to the home and people are getting used to high data speed and usage of data and information accessibility which is much in trend these days.
“I believe that mobile will develop into a ubiquitous platform for messaging, social networking, entertainment and web
access in the coming years,” said Khurram Bhatti, a senior officer in a private company.
Usage continues to center around various forms of communication, and text messaging has superseded voice calling  as the pre-eminent means of communication on mobile devices, he added.
Another innovative technologies are 3G, 4G or E-Edge which has been introduced in many countries and are adding value to mobile user experience.
Another thing, which had been our pride and privilege, wrist watches, which are actually now disappearing from our society. Before the arrival of Mobile phones, almost everyone used to wear watch – it happened to be the status symbol. Rado and Casio watches were the most popular brands in the 90s when digital watches, which were inexpensive and more accurate. Anyway, we know the rest about what happened to wrist watches. Even a time has come (now) when the vendors were offering a watch for just 20 to 30 rupees.
We used to have Timepiece for the sake of alarm. They were being used in our country for the last three or four decades but now there is no need as almost every mobile has this facility and consumers are using mobile phones as their alarm as well. Other than this mobile device has the option to use as a calculator, music player, radio, TV and as a computer
(blackberry). It looks that after some time we will have one thing very popular and essential in our daily life.
Even our mobile will be a good guide in the future. These are only few uses of mobile set, which are now very common.
It looks that it will be a total cultural change for our modern societies and the modern mobile will dominate all its
competitors easily.
Now, we can say that a mobile phone -  a complex mix of hardware and software is a wind of change and getting to be as
powerful as, if not more important than our desktop or laptop computer. The future of usability is mobile.

By : Shahid Ali Butt

Source: Daily Mirror