Chapter 6. Mobile Data Services
In this chapter…
The most extravagant claims for wireless technology surround mobile data. If the cellphone vendors are to be believed, we will soon be able to watch high-definition TV streamed live to a pocket-sized panel, while surfing the Web and participating in a videoconference. Nokia and Ericsson have both committed themselves to making every new cellphone Internet-enabled, from 2002 onwards.
This mobile Internet is a long way from the cyberspace that surfers know and love. Data rates are still painfully slow, and the first wireless Web technologies are aimed at reducing the features of sites rather than increasing the data rate. Amidst the hype, it's worth remembering that most mobile data traffic still takes the form of messaging services—text transmissions, which seem horribly primitive to anyone who has used email.
But mobile data is still exciting, its potential perhaps greater than any other consumer technology. The mobile phone companies say that messaging services were really designed just to test out the technology, not as a serious application. Yet they have become incredibly popular, especially among the young. If primitive text-only email can do so well, argue its advocates, think what real data services can do.