Did my predictions come true? Part 1

OK, here are the results of the other four predictions I made at the beginning of 2002 - let's see how I did:

*Prediction #4: Small wireless ISPs will go out of business as they run out of cash.

Comments: I'm not sure I was on target with this one, so I'll count this as a miss. Wayport is still in business, and Boingo Wireless is making a big push in the wireless hot spot arena. Still, we saw T-Mobile take over the reins of MobileStar's wireless ISP business, indicating that larger carriers will get into the wireless data arena (if they already haven't). I'm still confident that larger phone carriers (Sprint, AT&T Wireless, Cingular, etc.,) will either take over or enter into agreements to provide wireless data services either on the hot spot (802.11b wireless LAN) or wide-area level.

* Prediction #5: We will finally get a look at 3G wireless services.

Comments: Ding! Ding! Ding! Give that man a cigar. AT&T Wireless rolled out its nationwide General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), as did Sprint, Verizon, Cingular and T-Mobile. Early indications on the wireless data front were that the experience of trying to connect wirelessly through these networks would be equivalent to a 56K-bit/sec dial-up experience. Not bad when you consider we were at 14.4K and 19.2K bit/sec a few years ago.

Many of the vendors focused on voice, as well as color phones, games and cute ring tones. Not much hype on the new data network side of things; perhaps the carriers were burned by the initial "Wireless Web" fiascos from before.

* Prediction #6: A BlackBerry phone/device will appear.

Comments: Ding! Ding! Another winner. Research in Motion launched a GPRS phone through T-Mobile, and at year-end Nextel launched its version of a BlackBerry that could run on its iDEN network. Also, Verizon announced it would have a BlackBerry device with a phone that could work on its Code Division Multiple Access 1x network.

Battery life was an issue with some of these devices, as the power drain from staying on all the time was different for these other networks than it is for Cingular's Mobitex network. Still, these are great devices for keeping up in touch via both voice and e-mail.

* Prediction #7: Laptops will get faster and smaller.

Comments: They definitely got faster - in December you could buy a notebook from PCLaptops (the E-Pro Max 585) that included a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor for $2,999. Less expensive laptops were available from a range of vendors (Dell, Gateway, etc.) that featured a range in speed from 1.5 GHz up to 2.4 GHz, and prices from $900 to $1,700.

On the "smaller" front, laptops have been subdivided into several different categories, so weight becomes less of an issue. If you want a lighter laptop, you should order a "thin and light" or an "ultraportable" notebook. For consumers who want to have more power on their machines, you go for the "desktop replacement" models. This means that overall the weight of a laptop might not be going down, as you sacrifice features and sometimes power with the lighter models. So I'll give myself a half-point on this one.

Overall, I got five out of seven predictions, a .714 winning percentage (not bad at all!). Stay tuned next week as we present predictions for 2003.

Keith Shaw is Reviews Editor at Network World. In addition, he writes the "Cool Tools" column, which looks at gizmos, gadgets and other mobile computing devices.

You can reach Keith at kshaw@nww.com.

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