The Useful Life of Cars - and Handsets

Craig Mathias — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:32:39 -0400

It's a well-known fact that all automobiles, no matter how well-maintained and -loved, eventually die and need to be replaced. The day comes when the maintenance costs become untenable and off to the dealer we go. Car sales are in the dumper right now, a function of the overall macroeconomic picture and high fuel prices, and this situation isn't going to improve anytime soon. But the replacement-car market is also motivated by new gadgets and features, along with styling and clever marketing.

Thus it is as well with the cell phone/handset market, which allows essentially everyone to partake of a small and mostly-affordable luxury on a semi-regular basis.

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Microbrowser No More

Craig Mathias — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:54:55 -0500

Back in the early days of wireless and the Web, around 1994-1995, I remember giving a number of talks where I stressed that there needed to be no difference in functionality between the desktop and mobile/wireless Web experience. This was based primarily on my feeling that we needed common Web standards in order for the Web to proliferate for information display, let alone for Web services, and that users would have a hard time dealing with one Web in the office and an entirely different Web on a mobile device. Keep in mind this was during the early days of text-based WAP browsers, and it was indeed remarkable that a mobile phone could display anything from the Web at all, even if it was just text.

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skyfire

The Useful Life of Cars - and Handsets

Microbrowser No More