Mobility and Wireless: Opinions

Don't underestimate 3G data services, industry experts say. These offerings will tie mobile laptops and voice/data smartphones into corporate networks with something approximating a useable desktop computing experience.

While WiMAX appears to be set for commercial deployment in some US markets by year-end, the technology itself has been plagued by various fits and starts.

On the keynote stage at Apple's 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs looked like a man who could use a Gatesian escape from the glass house to a quieter life spent in pursuit of passions that a CEO hasn't time to explore. The difference between Steve and Bill is that Steve's passion is already in his grasp. iPhone can be seen as a culmination point for much of what Steve has set his mind, hand, and brain trust to in the past decade.

Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based services are garnering a lot of attention in the mobile broadband industry, despite the fact that they are at least two years away from being deployed.

Let's talk about RFID. But first, let's imagine the Internet as it might be. Suppose every ISP required its users to buy only its own brand of modem. And use only its own proprietary Web browser. And connect only to Web sites certified by the ISP to work with that modem and Web browser.

We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the iPhone's release, so people who feel strongly about the popular smart phone have had plenty of time to weigh in with their wallets -- it's been a consistent seller since its US release last June 29 -- or with epithets. (Remember the early description of iPhone fans as "iPhonies?")

There are moments in history that place one-to-many communications media in pivotal roles. These events ("Where were you when you heard...?") become elemental markers in history not just because of the enormity of what happened, but also because of how they were conveyed to the world.

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte railed against complexity in mobile phones, recently, and said that "simplicity is the biggest challenge that handset makers face."

For most of us, technology is changing the way we work and play. But some recent surveys show that change is happening at vastly varying rates in different sections of our society.

An April 2007, Time magazine feature called, "The Hyperconnected," was illustrated with a picture of a person's wrist handcuffed to a mobile device. This image faithfully conveys a common and growing reaction to the explosion in connected devices and communication applications in our culture.

There's no such thing as bad publicity, so Take-Two Interactive executives must have been rubbing their hands with glee when the launch of its Grand Theft Auto IV was greeted with moral outrage by Christians, parents, teachers and even senior police officials, who warned the game was teaching children how to kill. If you listened carefully, you could already hear the cash registers squealing.