2. A better BlackBerry. Regular readers know I'm not a fan of the BlackBerry outside its messaging capabilities, but I respect the BlackBerry's innovation over the past decade in making real-time messaging easy over that era's slow paging networks. Research in Motion highly optimized its device for those low-bandwidth networks, and unfortunately today that has led to a mindset that avoids data-consuming capabilities such as rich Web browsers. RIM recently bought a company that has a WebKit-based browser (like the iPhone, WebOS, and Android OS), which may signal an acceptance that wireless broadband is real and should be used.
So far, RIM's iPhone-like product, the Storm, has been a failure composed of an awkward touchscreen and old-fashioned UI not suited to the modern mobile world. But if RIM can reinvent the BlackBerry -- or come up with a separate platform for the iPhone/Android crowd -- that would be good for the industry and for users. Imagine an iPhone-like device with the security, the manageability, and even the keyboard of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 -- wow! Palm was able to reinvent its platform this year, so here's hoping RIM can do so as well.
3. Mobile money becomes real. The idea may scare some people, but I love the idea of a smartphone also being an e-wallet. The idea is not new; SMS messages have been used to transfer funds in Africa for years, for example. But my vision is a bit more sophisticated. I'd like to link my smartphone to a checking account or credit card, or at least to a stored-value account such as those used in gift cards and in many tollway and rail ticketing systems, and have it work with point-of-sales terminals.
Already, RFID-equipped contactless debit and credit cards are becoming standard issue, so you just can wave the card near a terminal to pay. That's fine, but it's a marginal improvement over swiping. But give that capability to a smartphone, and you get real value. For example, the device you use to pay can also check your bank or credit accounts to see your balances, and you could have apps that monitor your spending and send you alerts. It's a combination of the smarts of the smartphone, the fact you carry it around all the time, and the fact it's wirelessly connected that would let mobile money transcend how we spend today.
4. AT&T's pullout from wireless data. As my colleague Robert X. Cringely points out, AT&T hates the iPhone and is mad that its customers dared actually use it frequently on the AT&T cellular network. AT&T is mad that its iPhone customers, who comprise 4 percent of its user base, account for about 40 percent of its wireless data usage. (I'm shocked that AT&T is shocked: What other devices does AT&T sell that actually use much data? Just the BlackBerry, which is rarely used for Web or rich data access.)
AT&T is flabbergasted that people actually use the iPhone for what it was designed to do, so it is proposing to limit data access through as-yet-determined pricing bands or usage caps. AT&T claims that its 3G network is not as bad as we all know it is, arguing that the problem is mainly in San Francisco and New York, where iPhone users are concentrated -- if only iPhone users went elsewhere, they'd get a better experience.
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