The Normob Gulf; How many of your friends use mobile apps?

Jonathan Jensen, fresh from wrestling with handsets for his son and daughters, has been pondering on the (I suspect, rather large) gulf between Normobs and … well.. us…

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Ewan has blogged about Normobs (“normal mobile phone users”) before. What fascinates me is the gulf between us mobile geeks and the Normobs in terms of what we use our handsets for.

My friends and family all use mobile technology, to varying degrees, but very few of them come close to realising the full potential of the device in their pocket – web browsing, email, GPS, better software, photo sharing and of course social networking. Most of them are happy with calls and texts, a few do a bit of browsing and download some music.

So what’s going on? Are my friends and family visitors from a parallel universe (some definitely are!) or do they represent many of the real mobile users of today? My hunch is the latter.

For all the effort the networks put into marketing the cool stuff you can do on your handset why are so many people not interested? Is all this extra stuff really irrelevant to them or is it just an education challenge? Normobs might, and do, argue that calls and texts are all they need. However they are missing the convenience (a subject I will return to in a future post but in a different context) and value there is in the extra stuff.

Are the networks wasting their time or are they slowly building awareness that will eventually pay dividends for them? I’d like to think it’s the latter but my gut feel is we are a long way from seeing widespread pan generational take-up of all the great stuff current handsets are capable of.

I’ve struggled to get some of my Normobs interested in stuff like Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku on their PCs – forget trying to do it for mobile!

I’m going to keep trying but come on friends and family – you know who you are – help me out here please!

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What’s your experience of getting friends and family to use their handsets beyond simple calls and texts?

Jonathan’s also at Sevendotzero.