Computerworld
has a nice summary of the state of play in the mobile / PC connection market area. For starters:
The handset market is already crowded with far too many phones. If the PC makers are really serious about entering the cell phone market with distinctive products people might actually want, why not improve cell phone "awareness" of computers, and vice versa?
The best thing the PC makers could do is enter with a common operating system and UI - the fragmentation here makes the economics of developing anything except the most rudimentary of applications extremely poor as you wind up with a total fragmentation of tiny markets to support.
...it can be such a pain in the neck for our phones to interact with our PCs. Synchronization, file transfer and backup and other functions between devices isn't ready for prime time on most platforms, so most people just don't bother.
We work on documents, then go home and work on them some more. Why don't phones automatically carry the latest version and upload it to whichever PC we're using?
As someone who has tried to work on mobile devices (I was an early iPaQ adopter, my proudest moment was signing off a major bid document on it) all I can say is that sucks. Email (ie "short form text") is about the highest level of thing you can do easily on a small screen. The iPhone is
nearly at a size to make basic e-reading possible, but to interact with any useful documents imho needs something like an EEE 9"screen at a minimum.
PCs would benefit greatly from awareness about the location of the user. Is she sitting in front of me? Is she out of the building? Imagine if your PC performed routine maintenance, or kicked into security mode when it knew you weren't around. Since we take them wherever we go, cell phones are ideal devices to inform our PCs whether we're in the room or not.
I think there are a large number of applications in this space, but we are faced yet again with the plethora of devices. What we need is to know at the OS and UI levels that the apps built will work on a large proportion of the real estate, or else it's just really R&D. The only thing I'd bother to write these sort of apps for right now is the iPhone, as it is more coherent across different operators' stacks (ie the operators aren't fiddling with its intenals to "add value")
Many phones can, and all phones should, serve as mobile broadband modems for laptops. Yet most users don't take advantage.
Right but (i) some phones do and some phones don't and (ii) there is often a pricing difference between data to a phone and data to a 3G card, that makes it worth having the 3G card with even a fairly low usage.
PC makers: If you're going to enter the cell phone business, what do you have to offer? Can you make a better phone than RIM or Nokia?
The iPhone has already shown that...the question is can you make a better phone than Apple
Why not drive innovation and standards in the industry to make RFID readers standard equipment on PCs, and RFID chips standard equipment in cell phones? Why not drive better wireless cell phone connectivity, applications that sync with cell phones and secure, user-updatable "personalities."
Ahhhh...m2m...the great hockey stick in many a mobile business plan - it will come...in fact its here already (see
here), it's just just unevenly distributed....
The issue is no party is sufficiently motivated to sort out the holistic solution - handset makers, PC makers, operators are required to be part of it, but Planet Mobile is notoriously unco-operative with itself (witness the inability to get a common UI in all this time - imagine if the motor or PC industry had faffed around for so long) and this means that any single solution - with the possible exception of the iPhone - is just too subscale to be worth doing the work. Google's Android may be part of the solution, but as yet there is little beef there so its a commercial risk to develop too early.
So....PC guys - if you want to get into this market its simple - collaborate on the UI/OS like you do in the PC market and don't let the operators f*c.....alter the device config. Link in to Android or whoever so we have a good end to end platform ecosystem, present the data and metadata thats in the network at API level, but leave the apps building to the innovation cloud at the edges.
