Spiral Arm News

Computing roundtable survey: 47% say PDAs and smartphones most important for their mobile business strategy (24 June, p.56).

"'Up until last year, there was a perception that mobile came under the telecoms strategy,' says Cook [industry sector head of sale at Vodafone]. 'What we are seeing this year is more mobile strategy being built into the IT plan.'"

"...a high proportion of use of mobile data was in blue collar [field force] workers. Now, as services have improved and bandwidth has increased, we are seeing far more white-collar, bandwidth-hungry applications moving onto mobile services."

Survey: Which of the following is the most important for a mobile computing strategy?

• Notebook PC: 28.5%
• Wireless network: 24.4%
• PDA/Handhelds: 36.7%
• Smartphones: 10.2%
• Unsure: 0.2%

M-Agers: New generation embraces mobiles (BBC).

"Phones are rapidly replacing address books, diaries, watches and alarm clocks as people turn increasingly to their handsets to help manage their lives. They are also becoming photo albums as people personalise their handsets with things dear to them, such as pictures of friends and family."

Enterprise data usage to double over next five years. Yankee Group forecast, reported by Unstrung.

Open Mobile Terminal Platform Alliance launched to direct future handset development, reports FT (23 June, p. 28). Encouraging non-proprietary open standards for mobile phone applications.

Members include: Vodafone, Orange, NTT DoCoMo, T-Mobile, MM02 and several other operators. "The new alliance aims to lobby handset makers [...] as well as providers of phone operating systems such as Microsoft and Symbian to develop more user-friendly phones that suit their customers' needs."

"Operators want to encourage non-proprietary operating systems that will interact with open programming languages such as Java [...] But the alliance is also seen as an attempt by operators to encourage greater competition in the market for mobile phone operating systems [...]".

"The alliance is known to have been talking to Savaje Technologies [...] a developer of open-plan [sic] systems for mobile phones".

"The mobile workforce is a reality, not a prediction", reports
The Feature.

"The device formally known as the cell phone": The Economist (Technology Quarterly, June 17 2004) reports on the changing design and purpose of the mobile phone.

Nokia: "We understood that the devices weren't technical devices any more but part of the end-user's personality" (p. 3).

Motorola: "...the term 'cell phone' has now been banned. The handset is now turning into more of a 'personal network device'..." (p. 5).

On the shape of handsets: "...it's wrong to think that any one design will dominate in future, says Mr Nakaizaumi [head of Sony Ericsson's design centre]. Instead, different types of user will want different styles, depending on whether they mainly use the devices for voice calls, text messaging, music or games. He suggests that five years from now, the market will roughly divide into three categories: traditional voice-centric handsets, 'Swiss Army knife'-style phones that try to do everything [...], and task-specific phones aimed at particular types of user, for whom telephony may be a secondary function." (p. 5).

Other possibilities: module handsets, where a basic device is supplemented by add-ons. Despite the disadvantages of this, it could make radical designs possible (jewellery, sunglasses).

"Dead time is costing British businesses almost £8bn a year". ComputerWeekly
report "people would be much more productive if they could work on the move."

The BBC report on fears of industrial espionage from camera phones. "Regardless of bans and clampdowns on the use of such gadgets, the popularity of camera phones seems unlikely to wane."

Decision-making unplugged: the FT business intelligence supplement on keeping managers informed with key data.

Case studies include:

• Deltek, a US software consulting company, which sends critical reports to mobile devices. Example: to alert account managers on outstanding invoices.


• Britannia Airways switching to use PocketPCs to take customer and sales information, integrated with their back-end database.

"In the future, Mr Neale [product manager with Business Objects] envisages that executives who visit company plants with have real-time wireless access to key performance indicators and metrics. 'We may see an increasing move away from detailed paper-style reports to a "scorecard" that shows KPIs colour-coded red, green, [or] yellow, depending on their status, and an arrow that shows the trend,' he adds."

CNET has published a collection of articles on the decline in the PDA market.

Computerworld: "Enterprises look to keep it simple with mobile apps".

PDAs and smartphone on the increase, reports
Computing.

"We are seeing an increasing growth in the mobile enterprise but let's not be too upbeat yet," Canalys analyst Rachel Lashford told vnunet.com. "The devices are still primarily being driven by individuals."

Meta Group: "almost half of global enterprises are planning to roll out full mobile email access because mobilising their staff can give them a commercial advantage". Reported in Computing.