Mobile Wandering

Entrepreneur writes its special annual report on technology products, trends and innovations that make the life of the mobile entrepreneur a little bit easier. David Linsalata at IDC said, "We're finally at a point where consumers understand they can do more with their mobile phones than voice. Voice will always be the killer application, but they're starting to look beyond that."

Linsalata also noted that handset manufacturers "will continue to stress more multimedia features into early 2006, improving cameras and enhancing audio capabilities. While these advances are primarily consumer-focused, they will provide the foundation for business applications such as two-way mobile videoconferencing."

Regarding the slow adoption of smartphones, Todd Kort at Gartner said, "The fact is that any smartphone is something of a compromise between a great phone and a great PDA." He added that, "It's pretty clear that wireless e-mail is the first sort of killer application there's been in the wireless device market."

High-speed 3G data networks will help speed up the adoption curve over the next 18 months. Ellen Daley at Forrester Research said, "Generally speaking, the 2.5G data uptake has been marginal both in the consumer and enterprise space. But the carriers have been deploying 3G-type services."

Also as more and more converged devices come enabled for both 3G and Wi-Fi, will multimode handsets be far behind? Daley predicted at least three years for multimode technology to become mainstream: "Still, we're moving toward a tapestry of access methods that ultimately will be interoperable," she said

Regarding GPS devices, Kort advised , "What you want with a good GPS device is a large display, high resolution, and an interface that isn't cluttered." However, as Linsalata at IDC pointed out, "At the end of the day, GPS is not something that is a killer application for handhelds," due to the trend of making devices smaller and compact.