In the midst of all the different mobile phones and smartphones, a niche is being carved out. Mobile Internet Device, or MIDs, are wirelessly connected devices that are designed for web browsing and email.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve looked smartphones a few times but haven’t really spent much time looking at the different mobile operating systems. Here’s a quick tour of the main players…
The inspiration for the earliest flip out handsets came from Star Trek. The famous detective Dick Tracey used his watch as a video phone and Maxwell Smart wore his phone on his foot. In those days we looked at fiction and some of what we saw become fact. So, what are we seeing today that is likely to end up in the handsets of the future?
The mobile phone has almost always been the site of two sided battles. At first it was the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile vs Palm. Then it was Windows Mobile vs Blackberry (although that one’s still raging). Then it was everyone vs the iPhone. We’ve had CDMA duking it out with GSM and the list goes on. The next battle, for your mobile communications heart and mind will be between LTE and WiMax.
Who remembers their first smartphone? For me, it was an iMate running Windows Mobile and my main memory of it was that it was slow. While it did everything it was designed to do, like give me access to my calendar, make calls, play the odd game of Bubbles and run a few basic apps it was horribly slow. Well, time has marched on and we’re now on the brink of another improvement as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform is ready for the world.
Who remembers using Lynx back in the early days of the web? Back in the 1990s, the web was but a babe and many computers were limited to text-only output. Lynx was a text based browser that was soon overtaken by graphical browsers, like Mosaic, that led to the massive uptake of images, and later video, to create the web we know today. By the early 2000s, mobile phones were improving and the world wanted a way to get web content on their phones.
When I was a kid one of my favourite shows was The Jetsons. I used to love it when George would answer a call from his boss Mr Spacely and you could see Spacely’s face getting redder and redder as he chastised George for some irrelevant or minor misdemeanour. Back then, I used to wonder if we’d ever get video calling. Well, we did but it wasn’t quite as I’d imagined as a child.
By the time a product or standard reaches its third version you expect it to be reasonably robust and reliable. With mobile communications, it’s taken until the evolution of 3G to reach that point. But what is this thing we call 3G? It turns out that 3G, or 3rd generation, communications networks aren’t just a single homogeneous standard. 3G is a more nebulous term that covers a bunch of different standards.
