Only the Europeans will deny themselves, and worse - their customers - that.
Actually, I think that the Europeans, along with the South Koreans and the Japanese, would be the first to implement the "docking stations" that Jacobs talks about all the time, given the high levels of wireless penetration there. The driving force behind the proliferation of these stations should be increases in processing power rather than data rates, with the former being a metric that doesn't depend at all on the protocol a phone happens to be using. Sure, 30 kbps GPRS might not be the same as 50 kbps 1x, but it should still be enough for standard web browsing.
With that out of the way, I think that Moore's Law should allow enough processing power to exist on these devices, so that they can run applications such as web browsers and office suites (perhaps through a thin client?), soon enough, as the specifications on ARM's next generation cores (both Qualcomm and TI currently use ARM cores) show:
arm.com
arm.com
arm.com
Eric |
