A Thursday afternoon panel at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference was “Thinking Experientially: What creates good mobile user experience?”

Wired Gadget Lab Editor Dylan Tweney moderated this panel of mobile product specialists. The team was made up of Jason Devitt, CEO of cellular phone call and text tracking site Skydeck , entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and now Google, Mobile Design Strategist Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path, and Jeff Taylor of Hutchinson Whampoa /3.

The popular approach to new mobile design seems to leave it at, “It’s a PC that you carry in your pocket.” This leads to keyboards with toddler-fingertip buttons, limping Internet and nauseating interfaces. The process of creating an intuitive, native mobile experience seems to be as easy as taming a rogue unicorn, judging by the mobile market today. The concensus of the panelists was that the structure of the wireless world is partly to blame. With a tangle of service providers, software developers, hardware manufacturers and others, the need to innovate is displaced by the need to make money as quickly as possible.

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Matthew Glotzbach delivered the second Keynote speech today at the Office 2.0 Conference. Glotzbach is Head of the Enterprise Product Team at Google, rather a secretive section until recently.

His topic: “10 things I can do in the cloud today that I couldn’t do a year ago.”

(Assume all applications are Google’s unless otherwise noted)

“#10 Anything Everything on the go”
The iPhone makes all cloud-based workflow, including Google Apps, possible in a more accessible fashion while traveling.

“#9 Search through all my email…”
With 25 GB in Gmail, the concept of never deleting email is possible.
“…and check email from my IMAP client”

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Best Buy will be the first major U.S. retail store beyond to sell the iPhone 3G, beginning September 7.

The Minneapolis retailer announced Wednesday that it will sell the iPhone at its 970 stores. “Quite honestly, many of our customers come to our store every day asking for it,” said Best Buy’s mobile division president Shawn Score. “We’re excited we’re going to be able to say yes.”

Despite its incredible popularity and enviable sales, Apple’s phone is currently only available in two places, Apple and AT&T stores. Best Buy will sell the iPhone at the same prices as at the other outlets, and will still require a two-year AT&T contract for activation.

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One of five short-lived Apple [AAPL] iPhone applications is causing quite a stir. Notorious $999.99 “I Am Rich,” effectively does nothing: the program loads as a screensaver of a glowing red gem… That’s all. The app was in the iTunes store for only two calendar days before the Cupertino-based company pulled it off, but not after 8 people purchased it - at the maximum possible price for an item on iTunes.

The flurry of fussing since last Tuesday, the day “I Am Rich” was published, has been monstrous. The initial shock that Apple would support a useless Money Suck struck some as poor business or even a sign of incompetency. Two people bought the app “by accident,” at least one because he thought “it was a joke .” It turns out that neither Apple nor his credit card company thought it was a joke, but Heinrich claims he will return the money to both individuals. But the furious debate continues on whether this app was a scam, high art, or just a waste of time. Heinrich says to the Los Angeles Times , “The App is a work of Art and included a ’secret mantra’ — that’s all.”

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Several newly launched initiatives in the U.S. and other countries aim to allow governments to mine our personal data at border crossings. Legislation in the U.S. and Australia would give governments great freedom to search – and in some cases seize – our personal electronic devices.

U.S. Homeland Security can now seize laptops and other electronic devices taken across the border and hold them for an indefinite period, copying hard drives without need of warrants or probable cause. Officials are authorized to deep-scan hard drives to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and copyright infringers.

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In an interview with the BBC, Steven Prentice, analyst for the information technology research and advisory firm Gartner, says that the mouse will largely be replaced with other means of interface within the next five years. The mouse’s place will be taken by technology developed for entertainment, video games, and computer access for the disabled.

“You’ve got Panasonic showing forward facing video in the home entertainment environment. Instead of using a conventional remote control you hold up your hand and it recognises you have done that,” Prentice says in the article.

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While it’s not Madden Day, nor does it match the hysteria of the first iPhone release that we covered, today’s Apple [AAPL] iPhone 3G launch is not without its own quirky drama.

From professional line-waiters making a few hundred bucks by waiting to buy for someone else, to the publication of “iPhone line” restaurant lists, to and the Warholian fame of the first in line (the story arc of Dale Larson’s wait reads like pop-culture tragedy), iPhone Day 2.0 was already making for an entertaining Friday even before the stores opened.

San Francisco line-waiters began lining up at Apple’s downtown store early Thursday morning (see Mathieu’s pictures). Doors opened at 9:00am, and customers entered 30 at a time. As each group of customers entered, they were greeted by clapping employees, who were required to greet the customers with cheers. But maybe they should have been greeting them with hugs instead, as problems quickly developed.

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The ’smartphone’ arms race has just gotten a bit colder. Nokia upped the ante Monday, or at the very least began the catch-up process, by purchasing Plazes, CNBC reported.

Much like its more established predecessors Twitter and Jaiku, Plazes is a social networking start-up service. But where Twitter and Jaiku provide venues for “micro-blogging,” or character-limited forums by which to inform all friends and contacts also using the service of present activities or thoughts, Plazes focuses, as its name would indicate, on place.

It grants subscribers access to “location -aware services,” explained CNBC’s article, so users can better prepare for their social activities.

So buying the service, should make Nokia’s phones more competitive in the Internet-equipped cell phone arena cluttered with BlackBerries, the original iPhone and the upcoming iPhone G3, among others.

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