Derrick
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by Dr Windsor Holden of Juniper Research
In case you hadn’t noticed, or celebrated the millennium in spectacular fashion and have only just woken up, we’ve moved on a bit. Everyone has a mobile phone – except my mother – and most of us have cameras in them; in the UK, we have sent over 80 billion texts between us this year; about a third of us have 3G phones. And those nice people at Apple who make the Macs have turned the mobile ecosystem upside down.
Oh, and mobile videotelephony was a damp squib.
It really has been an extraordinary decade for the mobile, which is now up there with the wallet and house keys in terms of must-have items when we leave the house; it is our address book, our camera, our photo album, our 24/7 means of accessing social networks (note to those just recovering from your millennium excesses: social networks are new this decade. Look them up on Wikipedia. That’s new too, but you’ll soon get the hang of it.)
So much for the past: where are we heading? All I can say with any certainty is: I don’t know.
I have expectations as to what may happen, based on assumptions derived from trends I have observed over the past year/two years/decade in this industry, on tenuous timetables for product launches, on what I have been told by operators and vendors; but I cannot predict the future.
As the great Peter Medawar once observed:
“Wise folk may or may not form expectations about what the future holds in store but the foolish can be relied on to predict with complete confidence that certain things will come about in the future or that others will not. It is well worth insisting upon the clear distinction of meaning between the two. A prediction always pretends to foreknowledge where an expectation is merely a hypothesis with a future setting; a hypothesis which the passage of time will either corroborate or confound.”
The problem is that “expectations” isn’t a very sexy word; nobody searches for “Top 10 Expectations for 2010”.
So, although it’s somewhat of a misnomer, we too have our Top 10 Predictions (based on assumptions derived from trends etc – see below for a full list). We fully expect 3G networks to face severe constraints on their capacity as users wholeheartedly embrace Internet on the mobile: only last week, Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T, warned ominously of the need to introduce “incentives” to reduce average data usage amongst high-end customers. We expect operators and vendors to ramp up drives to improve sustainability and reduce CO2 emissions, and for a raft of “ecotainment” apps to hit handsets and app stores. We expect to see far more deployment of cloud-based platforms, services and apps.
It should be an interesting year…
Top Ten Wireless Predictions for 2010
Please see below for a full list of the top ten wireless predictions, with each prediction explained in more detail in the free report available to download from the Juniper Research website.
1. Mobile data traffic explosion to strain 3G Networks, spur data pricing overhaul
2. Mobile ecosystem starts to go green
3. Mobile heads for the cloud
4. New Category of Merging Smartphone Functionality and Netbooks to Emerge
5. Apps stores all round
6. Mobile social networking to integrate with other applications including M-Commerce
7. NFC phones appear in the shops
8. At least 10 LTE networks to be launched into service
9. Smartphones to get augmented reality makeover
10. Christmas kindle sales expected to herald the rise of the connected embedded consumer devices
In case you hadn’t noticed, or celebrated the millennium in spectacular fashion and have only just woken up, we’ve moved on a bit. Everyone has a mobile phone – except my mother – and most of us have cameras in them; in the UK, we have sent over 80 billion texts between us this year; about a third of us have 3G phones. And those nice people at Apple who make the Macs have turned the mobile ecosystem upside down.
Oh, and mobile videotelephony was a damp squib.
It really has been an extraordinary decade for the mobile, which is now up there with the wallet and house keys in terms of must-have items when we leave the house; it is our address book, our camera, our photo album, our 24/7 means of accessing social networks (note to those just recovering from your millennium excesses: social networks are new this decade. Look them up on Wikipedia. That’s new too, but you’ll soon get the hang of it.)
So much for the past: where are we heading? All I can say with any certainty is: I don’t know.
I have expectations as to what may happen, based on assumptions derived from trends I have observed over the past year/two years/decade in this industry, on tenuous timetables for product launches, on what I have been told by operators and vendors; but I cannot predict the future.
As the great Peter Medawar once observed:
“Wise folk may or may not form expectations about what the future holds in store but the foolish can be relied on to predict with complete confidence that certain things will come about in the future or that others will not. It is well worth insisting upon the clear distinction of meaning between the two. A prediction always pretends to foreknowledge where an expectation is merely a hypothesis with a future setting; a hypothesis which the passage of time will either corroborate or confound.”
The problem is that “expectations” isn’t a very sexy word; nobody searches for “Top 10 Expectations for 2010”.
So, although it’s somewhat of a misnomer, we too have our Top 10 Predictions (based on assumptions derived from trends etc – see below for a full list). We fully expect 3G networks to face severe constraints on their capacity as users wholeheartedly embrace Internet on the mobile: only last week, Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T, warned ominously of the need to introduce “incentives” to reduce average data usage amongst high-end customers. We expect operators and vendors to ramp up drives to improve sustainability and reduce CO2 emissions, and for a raft of “ecotainment” apps to hit handsets and app stores. We expect to see far more deployment of cloud-based platforms, services and apps.
It should be an interesting year…
Top Ten Wireless Predictions for 2010
Please see below for a full list of the top ten wireless predictions, with each prediction explained in more detail in the free report available to download from the Juniper Research website.
1. Mobile data traffic explosion to strain 3G Networks, spur data pricing overhaul
2. Mobile ecosystem starts to go green
3. Mobile heads for the cloud
4. New Category of Merging Smartphone Functionality and Netbooks to Emerge
5. Apps stores all round
6. Mobile social networking to integrate with other applications including M-Commerce
7. NFC phones appear in the shops
8. At least 10 LTE networks to be launched into service
9. Smartphones to get augmented reality makeover
10. Christmas kindle sales expected to herald the rise of the connected embedded consumer devices