Source: UN, 28 May 2009

The best ideas to make mobile easier to use have been announced at the MEX Conference in London.

The MEX Mobile User Experience Awards have been presented to an audience of more than 100 of the mobile industry’s leading innovators, including representatives of all the major handset manufacturers and several network operators.

The second MEX Mobile User Experience Awards, sponsored by Nuance, Immersion, and Digital Communications Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), has been an open design challenge to the mobile phone industry, designers and students, and seeks to make using mobile devices much more easy and intuitive.

The winner of MEX Innovator of the Year was Aaron Rustill a student that created a Digitag - enabling users to secure and personalise any mobile phone with the touch of a thumb.

Lastminute.com scooped the prestigious Commercial category (for a product launched in the market) with an application called “nru”. This lets people find things to do based on where they are in a city. Uniquely the application enables you to point a phone to see sites and attractions in the direction that you are facing. The application works on the T-Mobile Google G-1 phone and is available in the United Kingdom.

Marko Balabanovic, Head of Innovation at lastminute.com labs said: “Lastminute.com is about enabling people to have the best experiences not only when they travel but whenever they do anything in their free time. We all love to find great new attractions, either when travelling or close to home. This application makes it easy for people to see what is around them and find their way to great new experiences in a City.

Marek Pawlowski, the founder of MEX said: “We were overwhelmed with the number and quality of the entries we received in this year’s MEX Awards. We all use mobiles every day and the awards enable people to use their creativity to put mobile technology to good use in new and exciting ways such as the lastminute.com labs nru application.”

MEX User Experience Award winners in full