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Past Symposium/ITxpo
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Thursday, 7 November 2002 Manufacturers keep coming up with smarter and niftier handheld, wireless devices -mobile phones, PDAs, cameras, music players, location finders, camcorders and combinations of any of the above. For enterprises wishing to exploit mobility for business, it is a huge challenge to identify how to achieve return on investment with such a proliferation of devices. Every six months or so there will be dramatic shifts in device designs and capabilities and in development platforms, says Gartner vice president Ken Dulaney, and this will continue through 2006 (0.8 probability). Speaking at Symposium/ITxpo 2002 in Cannes, France on Wednesday, Dulaney said the proliferation of device choices will make the process of content delivery more challenging than ever. There will, he said, be a tendency toward common functionality, but there will not be common form factors. Smart phones that combine a PDA with a mobile phone may seem to offer the ultimate converged mobile device, but usability factors, Dulaney argued, mean they are “neither optimal as a phone nor as a PDA.” That should improve as more optimized products based on the Symbian and Microsoft platforms emerge, but it will never be as optimal as separate devices, says Dulaney. Choosing the right kind of mobile device is becoming more difficult, but early experience shows that certain classes of applications work better with certain classes of devices. The parameters, as usual, are size, input, platform, functionality and output. As always, there are trade-offs so that, for instance, a keyboard may leave space only for a small screen. In choosing devices, different enterprises will have differing considerations such as balancing central control, local operation and context of use. In a hospital, for example, with its own wireless LAN, a thin client using the large display of a tablet makes sense. For a travelling salesman depending on public wireless facilities, some of the offline processing contained in a clamshell is needed. But the use of corporate data means central control and security will also be needed. Platform choices are still very open. In 2001, a credible alternative to Palm’s dominance of the PDA world emerged with Compaq’s iPAQ device using Microsoft’s Pocket PC. The Pocket PC and Windows CE and CE.NET platforms will battle with PalmOS, Symbian, Research in Motion, J2ME for different segments of the markets. Enterprises, Dulaney said, should assume that the Wintel environment will become dominant on enterprise PDA deployments while J2ME will be dominant on enhanced or smart phones for consumers. To justify investment in mobile applications, Dulaney said enterprises should look to “reduction in errors, the time criticality of information or improved customer service.” There are also situations where mobility is inescapable, as in surveys, inspections and picking and packing. Dulaney said that knowing the application and knowing the user will be key to choosing the right product. He said enterprises should expect wireless e-mail and synchronization with personal information management systems will remain the top application for their companies, but he warned that enterprises should impose strong security policies as security threats will increasingly emerge from insiders. Jonathan Green-Armytage Gartner Staff |
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