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  Jon Acheson, 13 Jul 1999 @ 4:13pm

  
  

  Interesting take...

  Given the popularity of pagers, I can see how the general population might go for infobites delivered through wired PDAs. It's got to be cheap, though, and cheap is probably a few years away.
  
  In the meantime, a dirt cheap Gameboy PalmPilot sold as a high school graphing calculator could easily beat the wired model into people's pockets. Another possibility is that companies like Motorola will build instant messaging functionality into the cellphones that people are already carrying. After all, why carry two electronic gizmos when one will do both jobs?
  
  The big thing that companies probably want is not so much to control the manufacturing of the widgets themselves as to be making money off the message traffic that gets sent around. At a few cents a message, teenagers could burn through a lot of small change in a Saturday afternoon.
  
  Jon

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  • 

    prash, 13 Jul 1999 @ 7:19pm

    
    

    Re: Interesting take...

    The US is pretty far behind Europe when it comes to wireless services. In Europe phones support SMS (Short Messaging Service) which lets users send instant messages between phones. The conventional wisdom right now is that smartphones with wireless data capabilities will be the killer info appliance of the near future.

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