Wish List

I keep reading what the vendors want to sell me in the way of data phones and new wireless services and the latest advances in lightweight yet heavy duty laptops and trying to put that together with the actual experience of life on the road.  We are, after all, the target audience for whom all this stuff is theoretically designed.

I try to keep that in mind as I try to remember just how many devices I packed and where they are so I can take them out of my bag and put them through Airport Security in the now-required out-of-the-bag process.  It’s easy to see this is a problem.  All of us stand there juggling laptops, PDA’s, cell phones and various connectors, adopters, and accessories, trying not to drop anything.  Numerous bits and pieces inevitably get left behind.

At our destination, working in a hotel room – or presenting in a hotel ballroom or client’s conference room – whether the individual pieces will agree to work is always in question.  Intervening switchboards and telephone systems, arcane formulas and expensive connection schemes, and just the time consumer in finding a flat surface, adequate lighting, a telephone and a data connection, and electrical outlets in reasonable proximity can be a challenge.  (Seasoned road warriors carry their own extension cords and 3-to-2 plugs.)

So it is with high hopes (and great cynicism) that I greet the newest converged products like the Danger Sidekick PDA-phone and the new Treo.  I want them to work, but I doubt that they can replace that heavy bag of tricks I currently carry. 

Just today, a major component manufacturer, anxious about the slowdown in the industry, asked me what I thought it would take to get the wireless part of the industry really moving.  “Compelling applications, of course,” I said.  And the realization that no business or consumer will buy something that doesn’t seem to have a value that exceeds its price.  That’s the real lure of these new devices – with their low price tags; they don’t have to prove nearly as much.

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