Gartner: One wireless device may not be enough

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By Stephen Lawson

(IDG) -- You want to go wireless, but you're waiting for one device that can do everything. You could be waiting for a while, according to a Gartner Group presentation in Hong Kong on Thursday.

A variety of handheld devices and operating systems will continue to crowd the market over the next several years, with users carrying different wireless Internet devices for different functions, said Ken Dulaney, vice president for mobile research at Gartner Research.

Gartner projects sales of 700 million cell phones, 30 million personal digital assistants, and 10 million pagers per year by 2004, with individuals commonly carrying three computing and communications devices beginning as soon as next year.

The proliferation of portable devices, including PDAs, "smart" Web-enabled phones, and Wireless Application Protocol handsets, will force software developers to transform the way they write software and will create headaches for enterprise IS managers, Dulaney said.

Corporations will have to add special "PDA firewalls" to secure their data and act soon to put in place standard synchronization software for all employee devices, he said.

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Keep in touch

At the center of this explosion of new technology is the desire to stay connected, Dulaney said.

"The number one application that people are going to do with these devices is nothing but sending and receiving messages," he said. Instant messaging is quickly joining e-mail as a popular use for handhelds, he added.

Another growing use to look for in the next few years will be digital photography using tiny integrated cameras, for uses such as manufacturers checking shelf displays at retail stores and government workers documenting maintenance of housing projects, Dulaney said.

Bluetooth personal-area wireless technology will be the glue that holds the pieces of all these devices together, allowing individuals to use one Internet link for three or more portable computing devices. Meanwhile, notebook computers will not go away but will remain crucial for reliably using full PC applications until at least 2006, he added.

"Everybody needs a notebook or desktop that's fully compatible" with databases, spreadsheets, and other applications that may have a number of customized features within a company at any given time, Dulaney said.

Security needs

With employees essentially carrying a wireless LAN with them wherever they go, management and security problems will only increase, he added. It can help for companies to take on purchasing of portable devices for their employees -- and they may not end up being as inexpensive as they seem. A PDA that carries a price tag of a few hundred dollars may have a total cost of ownership of $2500 a year, he warned.

Meanwhile, software is only now being developed to secure mobile devices as effectively as wired computers are protected.

"You've built this great firewall in front of your enterprise, but the back of your enterprise is like Swiss cheese," Dulaney said. He suggested that functions such as exchanging business cards between Palm PDAs via infrared might open up the PDA, and the corporate systems behind it, to snooping or interference.

However, enterprises are adopting real-world applications for handheld devices, such as insurance adjusters inputting claim information and photographs on "clamshell" computers with small keyboards and cameras.

The need to adapt data for a wide range of different interfaces, including both voice-recognition and displays, calls for software development on a single platform with an XML layer to convert the raw content to different formats, he said.

"You should take all user interfaces out of your applications," Dulaney said. Otherwise, any enterprise or Internet content provider will have to have "40 or 50 servers" to support all the different devices in the field.

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Gartner Group

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