It was a wager, but it has worked. MobileH CIuse dt obe a w orkshop,of ten heldi n conjunction with other events. Instead, this time it was a true symposium. I felt there was a need for this change because ofth e ever increasingin terestp romptedb yth e issues involved in interactive mobile systems and the lack of specific eventsf ocusing on such aspects. Although there are eventsa ddressing thebr oad areaof ubi quitous computing, they tend to concentrate on other topics. For example, a paper on criteria for the design of interactive mobile phone applications would bec onsidered inappropriate for such events, whereas it would certainly be relevant for Mobile HCI. The response to the symposium has been positive in terms of submissions and participation. The contributions, especially the long papers, werese lected carefully by the International Program Committee. The result is a set of interesting and stimulating papers that address such important issues as location awareness, design criteria for PDAs, context dependent systems, innovative case studies, usability evaluation in small devices, and novel interfaces for mobile devices.
The interest shown in the symposium has truly been worldwide: we have authors from 16 countries on three continents. There is a good balance of contributions from academia and industry.