Full Disclosure: Finally, Instant Information Is at Hand
With a Web phone, you're always in the know.
Stephen Manes
That's when it hit me: This nearly instant access to even the most obscure facts truly puts us in the age of "Information at Your Fingertips"--the concept that Bill Gates began touting in his 1990 Comdex keynote speech. But whereas Gates saw a Windows-based universe of computers large and small, it's now clear that more and more people will instead be getting lots of info via Web-enabled cell phones. If I'm watching a ball game on TV and want a quick stat, I no longer have to run upstairs to the computer; I simply grab the Treo from my pocket.
Mobile data's great overarching advantage is its ubiquity. Today you can get data service, meaning Web and e-mail, just about anywhere you can make a phone call, meaning just about any venue with a higher density of people than cows. But mobile data is still in its infancy and remains a slave to the peccadilloes of the wider Web. Although it's already pretty good, here's what's needed to make it great.
Better reliability: Data services are improving, but they can still be even flakier than voice. Providers need to do a better job of deploying and maintaining networks.
Smarter sites: Web sites are increasingly being optimized for Internet Explorer and broadband. Alas, the bandwidth-intensive graphics and media that are such a nuisance over dial-up connections are downright infuriating in the mobile world of sluggish speeds and small screens. Webmasters will need to improve the way sites present themselves to users who are on the go--by stripping out inessentials, not by dumbing down content. The golden example in this area is, as usual, the uncluttered, fast-acting Google.
Clever clients: Even the best handheld browsers can't render some complex pages at all, but you never know which ones until it's too late. Browsers must get smarter about offering on-the-fly control, trading graphics for speed and original layouts for intelligent reformatting.
Mobile Internet mail clients need real spam filters and better ways of organizing and displaying documents. Users will also want improved mobile-oriented applications such as word processors, so that we can more easily massage all that information we summon up.
More bandwidth: Data services for devices like my Treo run at speeds comparable to bad old-fashioned dial-up. Fast pipelines like EvDO and UMTS are on the way, but it will be a while before they're widespread and longer before they're cheap. Still, they'll enable even full-motion video eventually, and we'll look back at today's era as charmingly lame.
Yet even the present slow-moving world of mobile data can become so addictive that you forget its great bonus mode: Hold the device to your ear and talk to almost anybody in the world. Call it "Information at Your Earlobes."
Contributing Editor Stephen Manes has written about technology for two decades.
