Mobility and Wireless: Opinions

Revolutionary mobile devices, phones, touch-screen PCs, and ultra-portables have recently created a huge stir among consumers. High-tech devices are rapidly growing smarter. The success factor is quickly shifting into new branding, product and brand identity, and brand loyalty models. Devices and services have to be far more realistic and a lot more useful than last year's models.

Taiwan's High Tech Computer (HTC) revealed its new Touch Diamond handset early last month to rave initial reviews, and it beat Apple to announcing a 3G (third-generation telephony) handset.

Microsoft has welcomed the transformation of the Symbian mobile-phone platform into an open source project, because the software giant contends the change will create a host of new problems for the Symbian community.

In the 1984 cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer , author William Gibson describes a future in which people can acquire knowledge by buying special chips called "microsofts" that plug into a surgically installed jack behind the ear. Once you plug in the chip, your brain can access its database and - voila! Knowledge!

It's hard to determine whether IT departments should start thinking hard about Google's open source mobile Android platform, mostly because no Android devices or enterprise applications actually exist yet.

All evidence points to the fact that smartphone viruses will be a threat to your network even though they aren't at this moment. After all, the latest mobile devices are packed with more and more applications and corporate data, are enabled for real Web browsing and online collaboration, and can access corporate servers. What's more, they live outside your firewall and often make use of three wireless networks (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular).

Whether fixed-mobile convergence is for you in the near-term depends in part on how you define it, but for most, there's no rush.

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.