I am once again very pleased to have the opportunity to Chair the Mobile Business Conference at Interop 2009 in Las Vegas, going on this week. This is the wireless and mobile part of the one of the largest independent business technology events in the world. Someone once said that this conference would be COMDEX if we just added PCs, which we wouldn’t, of course, and, regardless, this is a much more technical IT event than COMDEX ever was. COMDEX was ultimately about the channel; we’re ultimately about how evolving information technology can serve the enterprise – ever more important this year with a renewed emphasis on efficiency and productivity.
The mobile program is quite large, with many sessions and tutorials, but I want to focus just on my two sessions. What I normally do is recruit experts to Chair the conference sessions, and then I take whatever’s left over – hey, it’s all good. But this year I reserved the keynote session on “Is Your Next Notebook a Smartphone?” for myself, since I love to debate this topic, and I also wound up with a very technical session on green technology as applied to mobile, entitled, cleverly enough, “Going Mobile, Going Green”. I like this one because, with so many mobile devices out there, environmental issues from extending battery life to what to do with the hundreds of millions of devices that become obsolete every year abound.
With respect to the first session, I could argue this one either way. I made, in my opening remarks, the point that the notebook has survived over the years because, like a successful living organism, it’s well suited to its environment and mission. But it’s also large, expensive, heavy, and has a high associated operating expense – not to mention boot times that work against the requirements of a fast-paced mobile workstyle. On the other hand, the handheld (smarphone, platform phone, etc., whatever) is very convenient, as we have to carry a cell phone anyway, but the tiny screen and keyboard similarly work against efficiency. What’s the answer, then? Are we forever condemed to carry two (or more) devices everywhere?
And the answer is, likely, yes. While all of the panelists agreed that a small percentage of mobile workers would be carrying only a handheld in 2012 (ranging from 2% to 25%; I give it about 12%), there’s probably no way that a handheld alone will do everything we need. The single-device paradox is still very much with us, as there are just too many conflicting requirements to get the bulk of required functionality down to a single device for more than a fraction of users out there. Still, add video out (VGA, etc., not just composite), a few slots and connectors for modular expansion (this could extend the useful life of a given device and help cut down on the landfill alternative), and we may be able to reduce the need to carry the notebook just a bit. A Mobile Internet Device (I’m using an Asus Eee 1000 to write this) is probably the best hope for eliminating the requirement for a full-blown notebook PC, as least in the near term, with bonuses of lighter weight, lower cost, and faster bootup.
The Green session was also very interesting. The biggest issue here is that fundamental limitation to mobility: battery life. No juice, no nothing else. Our panelists agreed that major advances in battery technology are unlikely (I still have some (but not a lot) hope that advanced battery initiatives will yield at least modest improvements in capacity, power-to-weight ratios, and useful life), but that greater use of VLSI (to cut down on the number of chips required, as well as their power consumption), power-saving protocols, and higher-performance wireless devices (more bits over the air per unit of time and spectrum – yes, .11n, as Bill McFarland, the CTO of chip-maker Atheros Communications, noted, consumes less power than Bluetooth!) will all help. I personally think we need our mobile devices to do less, not more; just gimme a great browser, WLAN and WWAN (ideally with monthly charges shared with a second handset), a few local personal-productivity apps, and I’m happy. Like I said, MIDs are the model, and perhaps we’ll even see them packaged as a handheld…
