With the introduction of the next generation of the iPhone there are a lot of new terms being bandied about.  One of them, which has been well-known for years by insiders in the wireless industry, is "3G."  It can be confusing to try to figure out some of these abbreviations and especially so in the case of the iPhone - read on to find out why.   

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Femtocell DiagramAn astonishing number hit me the other day: 16%  That's the percentage of households that have only wireless phones.  Another number that makes that even more remarkable is an additional 13%, which is the percentage of households that have a landline and a wireless phone but make and receive the majority of their calls on their wireless phones.  Combine the two and you've got a head-slapping "Holy cow!" moment when you realize that more than one out of every four households - and darn close to one of every three - is using their wireless phone either exclusively or nearly exclusively to make and receive their calls.

While this is great news for the cellular companies of the world and pretty lousy news for the old-school landline companies whose livelihoods depend on constant month-after-month subscription fees for what it apparently a dying service (I ditched my landline a while ago, as regular readers of this blog will know, and posted a series of stories about it called "Going Wireless").  It's also presenting different types of challenges for the people who are using the wireless phones: how to manage the number of minutes used and how to ensure that you've got sufficiently good coverage in your house to be able to use your wireless device as your primary phone.  There's a development that you'll start hearing about more and more which will help users address both of those challenges, though, and it's called a "femtocell."  Here's what it is and how it works.   

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I hear a lot of whining from people who purchase a phone for $49 and want to know why they have to sign a contract for two years in order to get it.  Frankly, I'm stumped about how to answer them politely without just saying, "Duhhhh... do you really think that phone costs just $49???"  But, my mother having brought me up to be a more polite fellow, I try to explain.  So, for the benefit of those that often wonder why they have to commit to a contract for a year or two when they purchase their phone, here are some reasons why. 

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There's an ever-increasing buzz around the iPhone - and with good reason.  Having used or owned more than 50 different handheld cell phones in my life I can tell you that the iPhone is unequivocally the best one by a mile. That said, there are some things that even this product could stand to do a lot better.  Apple has already released their software development kit (SDK) that provides the tools for people to write applications that address some of the things that it doesn't do very well.  I'm hoping that Steve Jobs has been listening to the complaints and reading some of the blogs that ponder these issues.  And I hope that he, and the developers that he's now cut loose through the SDK intro, address some of my pet peeves, which are:

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I've often been asked the question by casual observers and industry experts alike, "What's stopping the adoption of advanced wireless services?  There are so many great technologies available to people through their phones, how come most people don't take advantage of them?"

It's an interesting question for anyone - but for me it carries particular interest because of my prior position as CEO of the WAP Forum... one of the "bleeding-edge" technologies that was being used as a tool to modify the behavior of mobile device users.  I've often wondered why there's such inertia around the functionality of wireless devices.

There are, in my estimation, a few factors at play here:

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