Mobile Advisor

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was all set to give this week's column over to a new register-direct implementation of a JavaScript interpreter that's many times faster than all currently available implementations. It's not exactly growing hair on a billiard ball, but a nitro-boosted JavaScript will put a shine on AJAX and keep my most beloved language on track to becoming the gold standard for dynamic languages.

Don't look now, but your mobile phone is out to get you. This deadly device can cause accidents, give you cancer or even kill you, according to a rising chorus of alarmist reports.

Whether you're building an application for the 3G iPhone in the United States or trying to figure out how to deliver health information via SMS (Short Message Service) to a rural community in Botswana, the mobile space is diverse and exciting in equal measure. It touches on more fields than you could throw a phone at: anthropology, appropriate technology, electronics, programming, telecommunications, geography, literacy, gender and poverty to name a few. It's this diversity that makes it so exciting. Yet, at the same time, it's this same diversity that presents us with many of our greatest challenges. In many ways, the mobile world -- particularly in the ICT4D (ICT for Development) field -- is fragmented and often misunderstood.

I have no excuses - I should have known better than to let my gadget envy get the better of me. But, with all the new way cool features added to the iPhone 3G and the fact that my existing AT&T plan allowed me to upgrade at US$199, I decided to join the other crazies in line last Saturday afternoon and spend 2 hours to get my hands on a new iPhone 3G. I've spent more than 20 hours since then trying to get it to do what I needed it to do (i.e., synchronize with Outlook, stay charged up for more than a day, not die when I touch a button, etc.) and then I spent another 3 hours yesterday trying to return it. For more about why I now feel like a moron, read on...

With the iPhone 3G launch now a week behind us, it's time to look back and see how the second coming of the iPhone turned out.

Like the presidential seal that vanished without comment from a politician's press podium, the competitive marketing brickbat that Apple flung at BlackBerry -- that BlackBerry's push e-mail works only with Microsoft Exchange, as if Exchange were an onerous burden -- quietly vanished from Apple's campaign.