Voice Unpopular?
I found this comment about cellphones kinda amusing:
Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones, while Wi-Fi and WiMax use ever-growing amounts of network bandwidth.
What world is that? I wanna go there. To me it seems like everyone I talk to outside of technology and say something like “mobile website” or “mobile web” or “websites meant for mobile phones” the common response is “You can get the web on cellphones?” Penetration is still very very very small, especially in the US. Things get dangerous when people start to assume that the behavior they see out of the four people with whom they share an office in SOMA is the way that everyone behaves. It is most certainly not. I live in Silicon Valley, I know a handful of people with wifi enabled handsets of some form. Taking a look at overall data usage, most of my data still flows through cellular with occasional bursts through wifi.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love for it to be time to change the name of the cell phone to something like Navi. I just don’t think we’re anywhere close to that vision yet.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Cell phone vs. other functionality…
Yesterday, there was an interesting comment in SlashDot, referring to a BusinessWeek article that suggested renaming of cell phone: “Once upon a time, the now-eponymous portable derived its name from the small sections (deemed “cells”) into which a …
November 28th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Why not? A cell computer - a mobile communications device with the full functionality of a desktop/notebook computer (http://geocities.com/gene_technics/)
Do you remember about pagers?
November 28th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Why not? Because the networks are closed proprietary systems, the devices available are filtered based on the ability of network operators to capitalize on them and not their suitability as consumer platforms, battery technology still can’t really give a compact lightweight form factor that allows for driving a general computing device through a full day of usage, input technology is stuck at a keyboard that isn’t really suitable for use out in the environment, location based services are well - same as ever, cartography info tied to models that are more suitable to software as a package and not software as a service. Even if there was a general device with good battery life and great connectivity, there’s more that needs to be done before we’ll be at the stage where “most people” would find it useful. I would love to make it happen, but lets not confuse the vision of a thing with the thing.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Thank You