US PC Dominance Holding it Back?

from the always-a-problem-somewhere dept

Back in the late 80s and early 90s I remember all the complaints about how the US had fallen behind by not having HDTV or some other thing that the Japanese had. Then, all of a sudden everything went digital, and the US was at an advantage because we didn't have this infrastructure tying us down that the Japanese did, so we could leapfrog ahead of them. Now, some people are predicting that the US rapid adoption of PCs is holding us back on new wireless devices. It could certainly be true. We definitely have been slower at adopting wireless devices, but I'm still not convinced that's the end of the world.
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  • identicon
    Pete, 7 Aug 2000 @ 9:55am

    PC ball-&-chain for US?

    I think not. The PC, PDA, and moblie phone all have their distinct advantages. The dumb companies will try to squeez full internet/computing capability to everything and anything (WAP?). The smart ones will maximize the strength of each device model *and ensure the smooth interchange of data between the three models.* This means we won't be able to do spreadsheet crunching on our PDAs and we won't be able to see all the nice trimmings on the full internet sites on our phone. But that's perfectly o.k., as most of us do not intend to use the portable devices for heavy-duty computing or grahical surfing. We'll us the PDAs for document viewing and use the phone to search for the nearest Starbuck and check on the health of our portfolio. No need to shove the whole of internet and the desktop on to the mobile phone, but the phone could use a lot more functional features than what is currently being paraded (hyper-focused on the internet). I mean, what's the deal with that Samsung 1Gig flash memory? When are phone builders going to have 1G resident memory plus a slot for extra memory, for music, voice recording, dictionary, ect. modules?!!!!
    pete

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