Gartner suggests eight mobile technologies for next two years

Gartner’s top-eight are: Bluetooth 3.0, mobile UIs (user interfaces), location sensing, 802.11n, display technologies, mobile web and widgets, cellular broadband, and NFC (near field communication). “All mobile strategies embed assumptions about technology evolution, so it’s important to identify the technologies that will evolve quickly in the life span of each strategy,” explains Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner. “The eight mobile technologies that we have pinpointed as ones to watch in 2009 and 2010 will have broad effects and, as such, are likely to pose issues to be addressed by short-term strategies and policies,” he adds. He points to the Bluetooth 3.0 specification, for example, due for release this year, with devices starting to arrive around 2010. “Bluetooth 3.0 will likely include features, such as ultra-low-power mode that will enable new devices [peripherals and sensors] and new applications, such as health monitoring,” he says. The point: whereas Bluetooth originated as a set of protocols operating over a single wireless bearer technology, Bluetooth 3.0 is intended to support three bearers: classic Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ultra-wideband (UWB). Gartner’s view is that it’s possible that more bearers will be supported in the future. Wi-Fi is likely to be a more important supplementary bearer than UWB in the short term, because of its broad availability. But Wi-Fi will allow high-end phones to rapidly transfer large volumes of data. And it’s a similar story with mobile Uis. Jones explains that UIs have a major effect on device usability and supportability. “They will also be an area of intense competition in 2009 and 2010, with manufacturers using UIs to differentiate their handsets and platforms.” The point: new and more-diverse UIs are likely to complicate the development and support of business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications – so organisations need to prepare themselves for more user and customer demands for support of specific device models, driven by interface preferences. And that point is echoed with location sensing, which makes mobile applications more powerful and useful. Gartner believes that in the near future, location awareness will be a key component of contextual applications. The growing maturity of on-campus location sensing, using Wi-Fi, opens up a range of new applications exploiting the location of equipment or people, says Jones. So companies delivering those applications need to explore the new potential – keeping aware of new privacy and security challenges. As for cellular broadband, he points out that wireless broadband exploded last year, driven by the availability of technologies such as high-speed downlink packet access and high-speed uplink packet access, combined with attractive pricing. “The performance of HSPA [high-speed packet access] provides a megabit or two of bandwidth in uplink and downlink directions, and often more. In many regions, HSPA provides adequate connectivity to replace Wi-Fi hot spots, and the availability of mature chipsets enables organisations to purchase laptops with built-in cellular modules that provide superior performance to add-on cards or dongles,” advises Jones.