Most mobiles…

Sara Corbett just completed a lengthy piece on mobiles and economic development for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.   Its primary focus is the interesting and influential work of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, and it also touches on other exciting developments in the field, including Grameen Village Phone and M-Pesa to kiwanja.net, and the World Resources Institute. 
This paragraph, in particular, is a nice summary of what a lot of us are up to:

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.