J. Gerry Purdy

There’s a really cool solution to getting Internet access while traveling called MiFi (pronounced “My-Fi”). It is a small device that is basically two wireless components in one package: a wide area wireless cellular modem and a Wi-Fi access point. Verizon Wireless provided me with a MiFi unit to test a few weeks ago, and […]

When the iPhone was introduced two years ago, it was a paradigm shift in smartphone technology, providing what most people feel is a very natural user interface (no instruction manual was needed), along with a sleek industrial design. I can remember thinking, “It’s going to take quite an effort for someone to outdo Apple and […]

It seems amazing to me that three of the leading mobile platforms today are being developed near each other within Silicon Valley. This is an area that is approximately south of Highway 92, north of Highway 17, bounded on the east by the San Francisco Bay and on the west by the foothills-although there’s no […]

Short Message Service (SMS) message volumes continue to grow significantly in the United States each year. Mobile subscribers sent and received more than 900 billion SMS messages in 2008. This is an increase of 132 percent over the 2007 SMS volumes. SMS penetration also increased from 45 percent to 53 percent in 2008. Multimedia Messaging […]

When I first arrived in Las Vegas for the annual CTIA Wireless show, I thought it might be just like the old days, with hundreds of people in line. I couldn’t help but ask, “Why in the world did they spend tens of millions, if not more, on developing a nice monorail system to connect […]

You have to hand it to Doug Brackbill. He’s been relentlessly focused on mobile e-mail for most of the past 20 years. Some call him the “father of e-mail” since he was the creator of MCI Mail back in the pre-Internet days. He created one of the first wireless e-mail services when he was with […]

I have written in the past about the need to do regular backups. I pointed out that, while having a local external hard drive is important to back up your most important files, I also recommended that you back up your critical files via a remote online backup service. This way, if you lost your […]

I’m sure that you need, at times, to get access to information located on the Web or in your PC while mobile. Take the case of having some favorite photos that you’d like to have available on your mobile phone to share with friends. Or you might like to share a photo album via the […]

You might think that running a 26.2-mile marathon is about the most difficult human activity. It isn’t. Rather, it’s keeping track of the places and times for 30,000 or more people that are running (and walking) in the race. I have fortunately run three marathons in my life, with the best one being the Los […]

The economy is, overall, just terrible. It’s like watching a horror movie every night on the evening news. But there are some sectors that are still doing well, wireless being one of them. That’s because wireless is no longer just an option but, instead, a necessity. Companies-including wireless cellular operators-should be investing in wireless services […]

Now that the New Year is here, I could try to predict what will happen (often things don’t turn out that way), give major trends (nice, but aren’t specific enough for most people), or I could state what I hope would happen in the mobile and wireless market for the coming year. I have chosen […]

Someday, we are all going to be reading books with some form of eBook reader. While some may doubt this prediction, let me explain why. And I hope, after you read what I have to say, that you just may agree with me. First, let’s counter the prediction with an observation about reading books on […]