Mobile devices are a combination of hardware, operating system, networking, and software. To understand the growth and limitations of mobile technology it is easiest to examine each piece of the technology.
Hardware
Mobile technology hardware is in the process of evolving. Devices are getting smaller and more portable. The current trend has been to combine different devices into one device and identifying the practical uses for these new hybrid devices. We can now buy a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) like a Palm Pilot or Handspring, which can turn from a PDA, to a pager, a mobile phone, a GPS system, a music player, or a video game player.
Operating System:
Mobile devices are a new and immerging technology. New technologies go from no standards, to many competing standards, to a shake out with one or two dominant standards. The mobile landscape looks much like the PC landscape of the early 1980's. In the early 1980's many different vendors came out with a solution using proprietary operating systems. It took around 10 years for Microsoft to emerge as the dominant standard. Currently, for each type of mobile device multiple operating systems have been developed. As these device converge through hardware each operating system developed for each unique device has grown to support the utilities of the other devices. For mobile devices there are many operating systems, no one operating system has emerged as a dominant standard. The most popular operating systems for mobile phones is WAP and …, PDA use Palm, Symbian, and MS-CE, games use operating systems developed by each of the game player companies, and music players, GPS systems, and pagers use operating systems developed by the creators of these devices. Until there is a dominant operating system for mobile computing applications to be built on, the market will be stratified, devices will be cumbersome to integrate and use.
Networks:
As with general computing networks mobile networks can be broken into local area networks and wide area networks. Wide mobile networks let you communicate with people in other area's while local mobile networks let you communicate with nearby devices.
The current mobile phone network was developed for wide area voice communications. Voice communication uses relatively low bandwidth circuit-switched networks while data communication needs higher bandwidth packet-switched networks. There are proposals out to change the entire mobile network technology to 3G (third generation) mobile technologies. This change from current, 2G technology to 3G technologies is estimated to cost upwards of $300 billion dollar. To date standards for 3G technologies have not been decided. Most markets are looking at easing into 3G by using bridging technologies referred to as 2.5G technologies. Since current 2G technologies differ around the world some countries will find upgrading from 2G to 2.5G easier or harder then other countries. The bridge from 2G to 2.5G will provide end users with higher bandwidth from their mobile devices (28.8 speeds rather then 2G's 9.8 speeds). Until there is a standard 3G technology consumers in Europe, US and Japan who's 2G networks all use different standards will not be able to travel to the other market and use their mobile devices.
The goal of 3G is not only to provide higher bandwidth but also to provide technology to converge local and wide mobile networks. 3G devices will have the intelligence to know when the user needs to access the wide network or is looking for a local device. For example, if you are using your mobile device, receive an e-mail with an attachment that you want to print out, your mobile device will display the closest physical printer. With a click of a button your e-mail is sent to the printer and printed out. In your office your mobile device will have the intelligence to send and receive e-mails, pages, and phone calls through a local router. When traveling your device sends and receives e-mails, pages, and phone calls through the cellular network. This technology is available today; cost, complexity, and availability are the current issue.
Applications:
The standard applications for each of the mobile devices have proven themselves and proliferated. These include, phone calls for mobile phones, short messages for pagers, calendar and phone book services for PDA's. New applications are being developed to expand the capabilities of the current applications and integrate applications with standard computing collaboration software. Most notably are custom applications like checking in and checking out goods (FedExp packages and car rental) and people (patient tracking at hospitals).
