Mobile computing devices abound. Most of us have them in our pockets and purses—the joy of the omnipresent cell phone. The newer the model, the more likely it is to be "computing capable." A new cell phone has computing power equivalent to that of a 1998 desktop computer; next year's will be better yet. Yet, for the time being, the computing power of mobile devices has gone largely unutilized. This is about to change, however, and the exciting part is that this change will encompass just about everything—you included.
Mobile computing is not a new concept. In fact, Microsoft acknowledged its importance in the software industry some time ago when it changed its vision statement from "a computer on every desk and in every home" to "empower people through great software any time, any place, and on any device." This vision shifts the location of the software. Whereas it used to reside on "every desk and in every home," software will now reside everywhere and on every device. That device includes your phone. Mobile computing is one of the new starting players in the technology lineup. It may be a rookie, but it has MVP prospects.
The Transformation of "Everything We Do"
The answer is simple once you consider that creating mobile software applications has traditionally been very difficult, painful even. This difficulty has led to the dearth of mobile applications, which subsequently relegated the PDA to little more than a glorified address book. The "software is the constraint" [BG, PDC 03], and for mobile computing this has certainly is true—until next year, that is. Next year, the release of Visual Studio.NET 2005 (VS.NET '05) will provide software developers with a viable software development environment for creating sophisticated mobile applications for the Pocket PC operating system. VS.NET '03 was pretty good, but VS.NET '05 is better because it makes key technologies more accessible: SMS, PC telephony, Bluetooth, and message queues (admittedly, Bluetooth might yet be simplified, and where's my G3—precursor to handheld porn?"). For example, VS.NET '05 eases the difficulty in building applications that can place phone calls (which may lead to a renewed interest in PC telephony) and makes it significantly easier to build applications characterized by intermittent connectivity. Developers should soon be able to focus on function rather than feature and, as author Chris Date writes, on "what to do, rather than how to do it."
The software story is only half the picture, however. Until a few months ago, the hardware also left something to be desired. Personally, I reluctantly became Inspector Gadget, "strapped" with a Pocket PC on each hip (a Hewlett-Packard 5550 and a T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition), ready to pull out my "gat" and point and click. The T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition was useful, but certainly not enterprise ready—no wireless LAN and no Bluetooth (thereby useless for enterprise applications). The HP 5550 had impressive features such as wireless LAN, Bluetooth, and fingerprint security, but it lacked a phone. I ended up having to take both with me, the HP providing the Bluetooth needed to communicate with a Bluetooth navigation system (maps and directions), while the phone functioned to "integrate my life."
