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Seamless mobility: approaching simple, continuous connectivity.

Article Excerpt
A balance of technology and usability provides the key to effective mobile data solutions.

on April 23, 1973, from the streets of New York City, Martin Cooper, the general manager of Motorola's Communications Systems Division, placed the call heard around the world--the first public telephone call from a portable cellular phone. It was a short courtesy call to his counterpart at AT&T's Bell Labs, but the value proposition of the technology he was using came across loud and clear to a worldwide audience. It promised unfettered communication through continuous connectivity--the ability to go anywhere and still send and receive vital information for business and personal matters.

Despite the widespread success of the cellphone today--there are an estimated 142 million cellphone subscribers in the U.S. and approximately one billion around the world--the cellphone took several decades to become commercially viable. Public and corporate enthusiasm for the endeavor came with a number of broad, sometimes unrealistic, expectations about what it could do and how easy it would be to use. These expectations were drawn from users' experiences with the entrenched voice technology of the time, the landline phone. The processes used to carry voice data over the two types of networks is quite different--microwave transmissions versus a web of physical wires--but user interface, and therefore user expectations of solution simplicity, were very much the same. Consequently, when a customer picked up his or her cellphone, he or she expected to be able to place or receive a call with little effort, no matter the location. That put the onus on the new technology to catch up to 100 years of infrastructure build-out in an effort to reach every corner of its potential market. Exacerbating the problem was a prevailing lack of cooperation between the developers of the technology and an overall lack of standardization in the U.S.

Today, public mobile data services are in a similar position to cellular voice services in the mid 1980s. The technology is here, publicly available, and it provides a scope of possibilities that exceeds the promise of cellular voice services. The cellular services carried only transitory voice messages; mobile data services offer users ubiquitous access to text, documents, images, and video. However,...

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