Russell Beattie has got a prediction to make, 2005 will be the year Americans Get Mobile Phones in a big way. Silicon Valley and the blogosphere is already waking up to this. Dave Winer recently wrote about communicating to others on a hiking trail via Bluetooth. We recently covered in this blog, The Mobile Revolution Is Next Only To The Mobile Revolution and also Nokia and RFID advances. Suddenly the stuff that we have been dreaming about for years is starting to sink into the general tech populace. This is a good thing.
There are few ideas out there that still have to die:
- First is that WiFi is somehow going to be a competitor to mobile networks. It's not. As more and more people have access to higher speed cellular network technologies such as EV-DO or WCDMA, they're going to realize that for most people, these speeds will be more than reasonable to check email, browse the web and stream media from wherever they are on the planet.
- The second idea that needs to die is that mobility involves any other device other than the mobile phone. "Multiple Devices" are spoken about as if there would be doing much browsing or email on your TV or iPod.
The future market of data services revolves completely around the the mobile phone. The latest predictions are for there to be 2 billion mobile phone subscribers by 2006, and the percentages of those subscribers with access to IP data is growing on a hockey stick curve. This year shall see a lot more people realize the capabilities of the device in their hands, and start to do some really cool things with it. There is a a sense that most things that can be converged into a device have been converged and now it's time to think of the current crop of mobiles as *the* platform on which to build next generation services. Always on, anywhere you go, always with you companion products which enhance your daily life. Russell adds, "Think about how GMail, Del.icio.us and Flickr changed how we think about web based apps, and now think about all the innovation that's waiting out there to be done to mobile phones"...
The term "smart phone" is going to be picked up by the marketers and slapped on any advanced mobile phone out there. We are going to be seeing a lot of mobility related innovations at the file system level, OS level and usability.
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