Mobile computing: PC redux?

SAN FRANCISCO - Mobile computing has some growing up to do if it is to have serious enterprise appeal. That was the consensus Tuesday at an Intel event aimed at fostering discussion about how best to address the nascent enterprise mobile computing market.

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Improving interoperability between the bewildering number of mobile computing devices and enterprise software from companies like Oracle and SAP was a key issue for attendees, many of whom represent software companies that are developing middleware to connect laptops and PDAs (personal digital assistants) with enterprise software.

"As long as you have proprietary vertical interoperability, nothing grows," said W.S. "Ozzie" Osborne, the vice president of alliances and operations with IBM's Pervasive Computing division, at the Mobilized Software Occasion in San Francisco.

Despite the software integration challenges ahead, many attendees see reasons to be hopeful about growth prospects in the enterprise for mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and tablet PCs.

Microsoft Vice President of Office Program Management Antoine Leblond predicted that there will be more than 100 million mobile workers in the U.S. by 2006.

The fact that 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots have now been installed in the U.S. is an indication of mobile computing's growing importance, according to the general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, William Swope. Growth in the laptop market, which is expanding at 30 percent per year, is also encouraging, he added.

"There are very few legal markets that are growing at 30 percent per year," he said.

Another promising sign is the new generation of mobile processors, like Arm Ltd.'s ARM9, which will have up to 15 times the performance of its predecessor, said Openwave Systems Distinguished Engineer Benoit Schillings. The ARM9 chip, along with Intel's XScale processors, will open up mobile devices to many new kinds of applications, he said. "You look at what Intel is doing with XScale and you wonder what are we going to do with all that power?"

In fact, Schillings believes that the mobile phone industry is looking at the same kinds of problems that the PC industry addressed as processor performance increased in the early 1980's, starting with a poor user experience. Making user interfaces easier to use will be critical if the industry wants to transform mobile phones into information devices, he said.

While most mobile phones today include advanced features like Web browsing, they are not designed in such a way that customers intuitively know how to use all of their capabilities.

"Basically, people don't know how to use their cell phones," he said. "They think of the cell phone as a device they use to make phone calls."

Schillings predicted that faster processors will lead to more capabilities like faster scrolling, better image manipulation and better "predictive input," where the handset can accurately guess the function the user is most likely to want next.

But greater processing power creates new problems for mobile devices. As it becomes more common to download software to mobile devices like handsets the industry will have to pay more attention to security, he said.

There is also a risk that processor power could be growing too quickly, said exhibitor Krishanu Seal, the chief systems architect with Bellevue, Washington, middleware vendor Aventeon Inc. "It's actually a double-edged sword," he said "Battery technology is not advancing as fast as Moore's law."

Seal pointed to a handful of consumer PDAs running Aventeon's software, saying that because of processor-intensive features like wireless networking, they only last a few hours on battery power.

The battery problem is just one of many that the mobile computing industry faces as it tries to switch gears and become a supplier of enterprise products, said J.R. Bibb, an innovation advisor with a large petroleum company who was one of the few customers attending the event. After years of focus on the consumer space, tougher economic conditions have forced mobile computing companies to shift their focus back to the enterprise, and that translates into experimentation as companies search for ways to apply consumer technology to the enterprise demands, he said.

As with the PC 20 years ago, mobile computing's penetration into the enterprise is being led by tech-savvy users who are finding business applications for PDAs and other mobile devices, Bibb said. But mobile devices are meeting with less resistance than did PCs.

"We learned from the experience with the PC that wireless and mobility is going to happen whether we plan for it or not," he said.