Mobile Technology

Introduction

While wireless data has always enticed us with a tantalizing vision of always-connected mobile computing, adoption has been slower than for voice services. In the past several years, however, adoption has accelerated, and thanks to a number of key developments. Networks themselves are much more capable, delivering higher throughputs at lower cost. Awareness of data capabilities has increased, especially through the pervasive success of SMS, wireless email, downloadable ring tones, and downloadable games. Widespread availability of services has also been important.

History of Mobile Technology

Today, at least 90 million people subscribe to mobile telephone services in the United States, and this figure may be conservative. Moreover, mobile phones, or "handsets" as the actual telephones are called, are shrinking in size and cost while offering new and innovative services. (Swenson 20) Customers can use a handset not only to communicate by voice, but also to access phone mail, voice mail, stock prices, sports scores, and even restaurant reviews. However, as common and high-tech as these wireless devices may appear today, in a few short years they will look positively antique. This may not be surprising given the emergence of "Internet Time" and three-month product lifespan, but what might surprise many Americans is that the United States will not lead the next generation of wireless technology. Instead, Europe and Japan, where mobile phones are even more common than in the United States, will be the first economies to unveil more advanced "broadband" wireless services. These countries will soon enjoy a host of new services, including fully Internet-ready handsets, streaming audio wireless headphones, and personal digital assistants with video and gaming capabilities. (Buckley 32) In the upcoming Age of Ubiquitous Computing, countries will look to broadband wireless systems to solve technological deficiencies while complementing existing cultural preferences. As a result, the next generation of wireless systems will be as diverse as the number of systems constructed.

The features found in cellular telephones are expanding at a rapid rate, and today include large color displays, graphics viewers, still cameras, movie cameras, MP3 players, instant messaging clients, email clients, downloadable executable content capability, and browsers supporting multiple formats. All of these capabilities consume data. Meanwhile, smartphones, with their emphasis of a rich computing environment on the phone, represent the convergence of 1) the personal digital assistant; 2) a fully capable mobile computer; and 3) a phone in a device that is only slightly larger than the average cellular telephone. Many users would prefer to carry one device that does it all. Wireless data is becoming more important to enterprise companies. About 20% of IT budgets are dedicated to wireless data, which was defined as including wireless LAN and wireless wide area network (WAN) equipment and services. About half of mid-size and large enterprises use wireless data today and another 30% are planning and evaluating future use. Three quarters of current WAN data users plan to increase their usage in the future.

Common wireless data applications include email, access to the web, spreadsheets, and word processing ...