New Mobile Technology – What Are the New Technologies and How Can I Utilize Them?
The world of mobile technology is a quickly changing landscape, with manufacturers vying to satisfy the mobile users’ ever increasing hunger for new features and better equipment at reasonable cost in a viciously competitive market.
So what’s new? Who hasn’t heard of the latest incarnation of the most successful, and some would argue still the best, mobile touch phone – the Apple 3G S. It’s faster, has more storage, a better camera that can now take videos, voice control, maps, internet access – the list goes on. It’s also now cheaper.
Next up we have Mobile VOIP: Voice Over Internet Protocol – a means of making a phone call from your 3G enabled mobile using the internet to carry the call instead of the mobile network as you normally would. The main advantage is the cost – as most internet access is on a fixed cost, you can use this method to call anywhere else in the world with an internet connection. Savings can be huge; particularly for international calls. Currently Skype (popular for PC to PC phone calls), TruPhone and a company called Fring offer a mobile VoIP service for 3G smart phones.
But how are the mobile providers going to keep up with people’s ever increasing desire to watch video and TV live on their devices? The current batch of 3G (3rd Generation) devices are okay, but have their limitations. So, in development is the 4G (4th Generation) mobile. This will give the user not only high quality on-demand video streaming (for TV), but also access to broadband internet, video chat and fast download of video and music content. A great mobile entertainment center for those who live their lives out of a suitcase.
Lastly, an interesting, yet potentially irritating craze has developed taking advantage of one of the most used features of mobile technology – Blue tooth. Initially intended as an easy method by which two Blue tooth enabled devices could exchange messages and information over short distances wireless, it now has an added function: ‘blue jacking’. ‘Blue jacking’ simply involves sending un-solicited (and anonymous) messages to another person’s device within range of the perpetrator. One regular ‘blue jacker’ was quoted as saying, “The priceless expression on the face of my first victim as he tried to work out what was going on has turned me into a regular blue jacker.” That being said, there are easy ways to prevent yourself being ‘jacked’ – turn off your Blue tooth when you’re not using it: don’t make your device discoverable – but a lot of people don’t bother.