In the New$... It's the ecomomy !

With the economy dominating the new$, it has also impacted the mobile device market. As companies wait to see what consumer spending will look like, announcements on new products and features seemed to have slowed. It is hard to tell what the impact to my project will be except to say that the impacts may not be fully seen until after the election and the holidays.

What I wanted to highlight this week was some articles and web pages related to mobile technology. I also am seeing that it looks like the most feasible inroads to mobile computing for college students is wifi enabled devices (cell phones, pda's and mp3 players). With the GCC campus (as well as most college campuses) being wifi enabled, a free Internet connectivity option is already available to introduce mobile content (Syllabi, assignments, lectures, and supplemental resources) to students as part of class.

I see wifi enabled devices (even if access is via a wifi enabled mp3 player like iTouch) as a real area of optimism. As an experiment, I went to Google and eBay to see the number of options for wifi enabled cell phones and also the options available to me with my provider (Verizon). On the Bizrate web site I found a number of wifi enabled mobile devices that were cell phone at a variety of prices (prices $20 to $1700). Obviously the higher price products were newer and include more and better technology.

My second experiment was to go to eBay and search on "Verizon cell phone wifi". eBay returned several pages of cell phone devices for Verizon with again, prices anywhere from $50 to $1000 dollars depending on the features and if the device was refurbished. I was surprised a the number of options and the pricing.

I have a couple of articles/web pages from lifehacker.com in this blog. The first article just came out out today (10/16/2008). It is an extensive review of the T-Mobile Google Android G1 product. It reviews features and contrasts it with the market leader in smartphones, iPhone. The reviewer is a iPhone user and presents some interesting observations.

My last article/web page comes from www.lifehacker.com where it recently asked its members to vote on their favorite mobile operating system. The implication here is that the winning operating systems will determine what software development options will exist. The vote produced what I would consider predictable results:

(1) iPhone (versions 1 and 2) 38%
(2) Microsoft Mobile 16%
(3) Blackberry at 9%.*

*Interesting was 13% are waiting for Google Android G-1 even thought it has not been officially released by T-Mobile yet.

The numbers are probably predictable since lifehacker.com is a popular tech site and the folks who visit it are likely to be more of the "tech junkies" who tend to favor the Apples leading edge products.

Have you seen the latest output from the MLX1 tool that creates one html page that can be viewed on a PC (large screen) or mobile device (small screen)? Check out the mobileDot web site and test it out.

Do you like this blog? If you think it is important. let me know with a comment. If you would like additional/other topics, also let me know.