PC World Business

We've just elected a new president. Barack Obama starts a four-year term starting January 20. There's no way to know how America and the world will change during this time. But we can see how mobile technology will change.

Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-note will soon cost as little as US$99. The catch? You'll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your mobile phone.

Reports have Motorola announcing as soon as Thursday a big push to build new Android phones, but the more important move would be a potential plan by the handset maker to reduce the number of mobile operating systems it uses, analysts said.

In the past two years, mobile phone and laptop companies have unveiled breathtaking innovations -- from 24-hour battery laptops to dual-screen laptops to "augmented reality" mobile phone applications.

Who says gadgets have to be expensive? Here are two simple and effective iPhone/audio accessories that will enhance your ownership of portable audio devices.

Nokia has announced its Symbian mobile operating system will join the likes of Android and will become an open source operating system. The announcement was made Tuesday at the Smartphone Show in London and is seen as a bid to maintain and possibly grow its developer base. This move comes at the same time Google makes its Android source code available to developers. The Nokia news contradicts previous reports on Nokia adopting Android OS.

The economy is in full-blown meltdown. Home values are dropping. Businesses are closing. Layoffs are coming. Maybe it's time to escape from civilization and wait out the crash?

You don't have to be a programmer to be a mobile innovator. All you need to do is open your eyes to the fact that a smart phone or QWERTY handset is a personal computer, sans legacy baggage. In the future, user-facing computers will have more in common with the high-end mobile devices of today than with the eight-core desktops and quad-core notebooks of 2009.

InfoWorld has been all over this week's official launch of Android, the new smartphone platform from Google. With its slick interface and open application platform, Android shows every sign of giving Apple's iPhone a run for its money when the first phones begin shipping in late October.

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

Whenever I plan and configure an enterprise WLAN system, I always advise that an additional 10 to 20 percent of the capital budget be reserved for expansion and filling in holes in coverage or capacity that couldn't be anticipated during the planning process.