Guy Kewney

Last year, the worlds biggest mobile phone conference was, as usual, only marginally wireless-enabled. Well, you can sort of understand it. Twenty-five thousand nerds, all with at least three phones each, in a tiny community that normally would expect to have a couple of hundred cell phones in the same area. Finding enough base stations […]

Everybody knows there are several operating systems for phones: Symbian, Windows, Palm. So why would anybody come up with a new one? But thats just what Texas Instruments has announced in its joint venture with IXI Mobile. At this weeks 3GSM World Congress conference and exhibition in Cannes, one of the big surprises is going […]

David Potter, founder and chairman of Psion, is not a financier. Hes a genuine geek. So when he pulls out of Symbian–and make no mistake, thats what hes done–its for technical reasons. So what has Dr. Potter got in mind? The obvious suspect (Windows) is almost too appalling to consider. Here we have a world […]

You would think that the makers of photo paper would be rending their garments. All those camera phones producing low-quality, tiny pictures that can be viewed instantly and transmitted to remote sites. Its throwaway art: who would want to print it? However, at the PaperWorld exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany, this week, quite the opposite is […]

Question: How many 802.11 wireless transceivers would it take to cover a 50-mile stretch of road? Answer: Only one, if its a railroad. Just put the transceiver in the train. Then fly a plane with broadband microwave on board just above the train. No, I aint kidding. Daunted by the capital cost of trying to […]

It isnt very often that Europeans suspect Americans of being pioneers in anything to do with wireless, but the growth of “contactless” credit cards could mean that the New World will leapfrog the Old World in mobile payments. What isnt clear, is whether society–business society and private society–has calculated the “social control” implications of the […]

A European plan to bring wireless to every inch of every highway could spell the end for an awful lot of wireless Internet service providers (WISPs). Then again, pricing could head north and kill this telemetry plan before it gets into first gear. The plan is being advanced in several European countries, with Japan following […]

So tell me, Intel: when is a de facto standard – say the x86 instruction set – a good thing? and when should it be opposed as a threat to industry unity? And Cisco: should we adopt the de facto LEAP security standard (developed by Cisco, naturally) and the CCX extensions that go with it? […]

LONDON—The CEO calls his MIS team in and says he wants a wireless LAN at work: “Look, I have wireless networking at home. I installed it myself. How hard can it be?” “How hard could it be?”—words that IT admin people hate to hear because normally, its not as easy as it looks. Especially when […]

Its been assumed that Microsofts devotion to “wireless industry standards” makes its White Paper on Mobile Web Services a good thing. Ill bet the Trojans felt the same warm, comfortable glow about the Greeks and their Trojan Standard horse. Its far, far too early to speculate on all the places where Microsoft is going with […]