All Hail the New Technologies!

Day 2 of Mobile Business Expo was just as enjoyable as the first. Today I threw caution to the wind, took off my anti-virus researcher hat and locked my habitual suspicion away. Today I simply soaked up what the future has to offer in the way of mobility.

It’s a future that’s awe-inspiring, particularly when you consider (as one presenter pointed out) that the current generation only really knows mobile devices. It’s a generation that’s aware of desktops, but which shuns them in favour of modern smartphones and their prodigious communication functions.

There were a lot of predictions of increased smartphone use in the U.S. and the convergence of as-yet-unstandardized data transmission techniques. These will ultimately complement each other to provide better coverage and higher bandwidth capabilities for 3G and so-called 4G mobile devices.

A representative from Palm included some interesting statistics in her presentation: 65% of the U.S. workforce is mobile, and therefore equipped with a range of mobile devices, including laptops. And another statistic: 744 million smartphones in operation worldwide, with 104 million of them in the U.S. Far fewer than one might expect given how much of the workforce is considered mobile. I think these numbers show we can expect to see a significant rise in the numbers of mobile devices used in the U.S. for work purposes.

I put my anti-virus researcher hat back on to consider these statistics. With numbers like these, how long will it take before we reach the “critical mass” of mobile devices that gets talked about so often? And how long will it take before we see a corresponding rise in the number of mobile malware attacks?