Mobile Technology – How important is it ?

I used to work in the Mobile Communication Labs in HP a few years back . I remember how excited we all were developing applications for Mobile Phones. The projects were really diverse in nature ranging from providing billing solutions to developing a mobile portal. There was also a group focussing in aggregating web services – SOA as they call it now.

I believe that the cell phone is more powerful communication device than a TV or a computer simply because of the nature of the device . The response time when using a cell phone is much faster than a email . We have blackberries and PDA’s in the market but they have a long way to go before they can even get closer to competing with a normal cell phone.

I have read articles about people wanting to use blogs as a medium to announce emergencies. Clearly blogs are one of the best ways to express your personal views but it is definitely not the forum for fast communication. After the Virginia incident there is more focus on using SMS (Short Messaging Service) to announce emergencies. MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is the next step which allows the user to send images and short videos using thier cell phones. Alerts can be sent to all subscribers . This kind of approach is called the “Push” model .  Even for software systems it is a preferred setup to send text messages to on call engineers so this is a proven model. When there is an emergency the tendency for anyone is to “Call” not “Send email” so by its very nature cell phones are the best devices for services requiring immediate attention

The cell phone is the one and only “personal device” and I honestly believe there is going to be lot of advancements in this field in the years to come.