Technology Futures

Back in July, I traded in my aging Treo for a 3G iPhone. After using it for three months, it has exceeded all my expectations. I was a bit nervous about doing so, because I had heard so many complaints about poor service from the AT&T network. But I have found AT&T service to be widely available, even in the small towns and rural areas we visit from time to time. The sound quality of phone calls is noticeably better--crisp and clear. My one complaint about the AT&T network is that 3G service, when available (mostly in large cities), does not work very well. According to news reports, this is due to so many iPhones trying to use the company's 3G network simultaneously--the network can't handle the load. But AT&T's slower Edge network is still quite fast--fast enough to handle most Web browsing comfortably and email downloads work very well.

Where the iPhone really shines, though, is with its ability to download and use a wide variety of third party applications. The iPhone App Store, run by Apple, has thousands of useful and inexpensive applications running from the mundane (tip calculators) to very sophisticated apps like Molecules, which displays and rotate 3D representations of complicated molecules.

My main reason for switching was to get improved access to email when traveling, and the Mail application that comes with the iPhone is superb. It is fast and extremely easy to use, compared to the clunky mail app that came with my old Treo. Mail downloads quickly, even on the Edge network, and I can now check mail almost anywhere, at any time.

Some of the other apps I have found useful include JetSet, which the first travel receipts program I have ever used for more than a day or two. I tried out several on my Treo, and they were all so difficult to use I abandoned them almost immediately. JetSet's data entry is quick and easy, and emails a completed trip record to you that is ready to import into a spreadsheet.

The Treo had a Web browser that was notable only for it's constant crashing. It crashed so much that most Treo users never bothered with it, which I think contributed greatly to the Treo's slow decline. The iPhone's Web browser is fast, easy to use, and the large screen makes it very comfortable to read news sites. The ability to quickly magnify the size of the page with a simple two finger pinch means virtually any site can be viewed comfortably.

One little program really shows off the versatility and power of the iPhone. Shazam is a free application that will listen to a song playing on the radio (or any audio you can hear), record a portion of it, transmit it over the AT&T network to the Shazam database, identify it, and send it back to the iPhone. In about twenty seconds, you can find out the artist, the album, view the cover art, and make a one button click to purchase it from the iTunes Music Store.

Another free program is provided by Apple. The Remote application lets you use your iPhone in your house or office to control music playing via iTunes on your desktop or laptop computer. This little program hints at a whole new category of remote control software that will allow the iPhone to control a whole variety of devices. Indeed, AT&T is already talking about being able to use the iPhone to do things like starting your car on a cold morning to warm it up.

The iPhone has now taken second place in global cellphone sales, ahead of RIM (the Blackberry) and Microsoft. It's a great device that is troublefree and easy to use.

According to this news report, Google's YouTube subsidiary has reached a deal to make full length movies available online. The deal proves that competition works. When YouTube refused to work with the movie studios a couple of years back, that gave rise to Hulu, a competing video site designed specifically to support full length movie and TV show downloads.

Hulu has been wildly successful, and YouTube has been forced to sit down and work with the studios or risk being marginalized by the competition.

The impact on the Internet, though, will be continued pressure on bandwidth. The cable companies have had to continually increase their "up to xxx megabits" to keep pace with what their users want to do, and DSL, which is not upgraded quite as easily, is already being described as "dial up" by some folks in communities we are working with. But neither cable modem or DSL is capable of meeting the demand that is growing month by month, and fiber is the only long term solution.

It is a bit difficult to take any article seriously that claims in the title that "this technology will change your life." But Twitter, a strange cross between blogging and text messaging, may "a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/136443/2008/10/twitter.html">finally be growing up. Twitter may actually have some real value with respect to public safety, because you can have lots of people subscribed to a Twitter feed that can then quickly send a message to a lot of cellphones all at once. Twitter may also have some uses as an internal messaging systems for businesses and organizations, both for some kinds of routine messages ("the staff meeting starts in 5 minutes") and non-routine messages ("fire in the supply room, evacuate immediately).

Long term, it is hard to guess just how many different communications channels we A) want, and B) can manage. Most of us already suffer from email fatigue. It has taken nearly one hundred years for the automobile to evolve into the trouble-free, powerful transportation systems we take for granted today, and they are still changing and improving. We are barely out of the Model T era of computer and communications technology.

This short video has been around in various forms for several years. This new version has been updated with current data, and should be required viewing for all educators, economic developers, and elected leaders.