ReadWriteWeb

eYeka, a crowdsourcing company that specializes in "online co-creation" of products, has published some intriguing concepts for future smartphones. eYeka's community came up with the following list of requirements for a next generation smartphone: a minimalistic, non-complicated design; more features (which may clash with the previous requirement); a design which feels like an extension of the human body; the ability to be a "life guide" (Chandler, anyone?); eco-friendly; transparent (meaning to project information as a hologram).

Mobile companies like Nokia and Ericsson have been inventing next generation prototypes for years. But it's the breakout products like Apple's iPhone that ultimately win out. Some of the features shown below may be in whatever is the next iPhone, whether it be created by Apple or another company. You be the judge: videos of the two winning concepts are embedded below.

A new iPad app launched this month called Planetary. It visualizes your music collection using the solar system as a metaphor and it's visually stunning. It also seems gimmicky, at first glance. The concept is that stars are music artists, planets are albums and moons orbiting a planet are the album tracks. You can browse and listen to your music as if it was a universe. One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." With probably unintentional irony, the reviewer gave Planetary just 2 stars.

With all due respect, that critic is missing the point. Behind the design coolness, Planetary shows how data visualizations will become the new interface to your computing experiences. Whether on your mobile phone, tablet device, or walking along an urban street, increasingly you will control how you interact with apps using data visualizations of the kind offered by Planetary.

Yesterday we compared the recent launch of new photo and video sharing app Color to the arrival of Twitter five years ago. Like Twitter, Color is an innovative app that has intrigued early adopters and has the potential to catch on in a big way. It's also popularizing a new buzzword: proximity. Yesterday we looked at an early use case for Color: photo sharing at the premiere of a Hollywood movie. However, it wasn't clear what value Color users at that event got from the app. So we asked the company for more information about the user experience so far and to give us more examples of how Color is being used.

In this post we explore some of those other examples of Color usage, including a concert and a BBQ. Also we talk to Color's Chief Product Officer DJ Patil and ask him to explain more about the product vision.

Love it or loath it, the smartphone app Color is one of the most innovative Web products to have launched this year. It has a user experience that is as unique and different as Twitter was 5 years ago. This has led to confusion about how to use Color and questions about its value. In this post we look at the early uses of Color and analyze its chances of emulating the success of Twitter.

Color launched last month in a whirl of hype, mostly due to the eye-opening $41 million prelaunch funding. But since then, the user experience has been the center of focus. Many people have complained that the app is difficult to understand - mainly because the benefits of the app are only clear once you use it amongst a crowd of people and in real-time. The user interface of the app has also been accused of being confusing and inconsistent.

First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology? That's the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact. They've come up with an intriguing prototype for a camera that incorporates smartphone technology - a.k.a. a SmartCam. Artefact claims that innovation has stalled in the camera industry, that there hasn't been much new in camera devices over the past 10 years. They're aiming to shake up the camera industry and are already talking to camera companies (and others) about implementing their vision. I spoke to Artefact's founders to learn more.

This is the fifth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming - and producing - media is changing with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad, RSS Readers on smartphones and online radio in cars.

For online radio service Pandora, the car was a logical place to take their web app. At a SXSW Interactive panel on connected cars, Jessica Steel of Pandora noted that radio is already a well established experience inside a car. "50% of all radio listening happens in the car," she said, so it was "a really important strategic destination" to bring Pandora into the vehicle.

This is the fourth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad and RSS Readers on smartphones. Today we go well outside the traditional PC world, where the Web has only just begun to make inroads: the car.

It's the one year anniversary of the launch of the iPad. But has the iPad had as much impact on the online world as smartphones like the iPhone and Android phones? In an internal discussion here at ReadWriteWeb, at least one of our number uses smartphones far more than the iPad. Personally, I use both the iPad and iPhone frequently - but I'd have to say that the iPad has had a bigger impact on my browsing and interaction habits over the past year. For my colleague, it's been the opposite.

Below I'll explore some of the differences, but I'd love to hear your view in the comments. Which has had a bigger impact on your life over the past year: the iPad (or another tablet), or the smartphone?

RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

When the iPad launched in April last year, news media companies were among the first to create applications for the new tablet device. We're now a year into the iPad era and some of those news apps have dramatically changed how we consume news. But it hasn't been the apps from traditional news media. Rather, it's been two iPad native apps that have enhanced our news consuming user experience: Flipboard and Newsy. Some big media companies have attempted to be revolutionary, with less success. Rupert Murdoch's The Daily launched in February with claims of being the "future of the newspaper." However its user experience fell flat, especially in comparison to Flipboard.

This is the second post in a new RWW series looking at how the user experience of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. Yesterday we explored the thriving world of music on smartphones. Today we look at news apps on the iPad.

We're living in an exciting era for media. The user experience of consuming (and producing) media is changing rapidly, as new devices take hold of the consumer market. Smartphones, tablets, Internet TVs, eReaders, and more. It isn't just new devices either. The content we're consuming is beginning to change too. For example, it's only natural that the type of television program you consume on a tablet device can - and increasingly will - be different to traditional television.

Today we're starting a new series on ReadWriteWeb that will explore how the user experience (UX) of media is evolving. Over the coming weeks we'll look at television, movies, music, books, blogs, news, art - anything that is 'content' on the Web. In today's post, we're going to explore the new UX of music on smartphones.