Overview

In the last five years we have seen the IT sector move its focus away from personal computing to mobile/wireless communications. Mobile phones have been gaining in popularity, and encroaching into the realms of PDAs and laptop computers. However, it's not just the popularity ofmobile phones that has been so interesting to the marketer, but also the explosion of multimedia services. We have entered a new era the all mobile , era in which mobile phones do it all. Many who will read this book will have seen it in the Internet explosion, and if you are lucky enough to be as old as me then you will have seen it in the desktop publishing era. Marketing has changed. Let's look back a few years and try to define the foundations of the mobile era.

Mobile phones have become much more than entertainment handsets. Consumers already expect a high-end electronics experience from their state-of-the-art digital cameras, camcorders and game consoles. They are beginning to expect that same experience on their mobile phones, with a broad range of compelling, interactive content. Current 3G handsets now feature high-resolution colour displays, integrated video cameras, audio and video content streaming, Internet access at broadband speeds, location-based services, and multi-user 3D gaming. These rich computing environments will encourage and facilitate the development ofbusiness applications for mobile phones. We are finally seeing the convergence ofthe PDA, the mobile computer and a telephone in a single device.

High-speed data transmission with UMTS/3G is widely available in...