At the risk of dating myself, there was a computer revolution that happened back in the early 80’s when I was just a child prodigy, a young buck if you will, when the old DEC (Digital Equipment Company) company began marketing their new "super-mini" computer called the VAX 8800. This was an affordable computer for small high-tech companies to buy versus the warehouse sized IBM behemoths that were reserved for companies the sized of, well, IBM.

It was a grand and glorious day when the six technicians arrived to deliver and set up our company’s new mini computer. They skillfully maneuvered the one thousand pound machine on dolly’s into its new climate controlled specially built room. The engineers were absolutely giddy about the prospect of accessing the awesome power this machine held. It ran at a blazing fast 22.22Mhz clock rate with 64KB of cache and up to 128 MB of main memory.

The pace of technology accelerated from there because about the same time IBM introduced their IBM XT personal computer. This revolution in computer technology caught the imaginations of a generation of programmers who brought office productivity software into reality with the first killer app: VisiCalc. This was quickly followed by Compaq’s "portable" computer that looked more like a sewing machine than a computer but you were able to at least take it on an airplane and haul it from one office to the next with a neat suitcase-like handle.

Fast forward a bit more and you had these newfangled "lap top" computers coming to market. These were ten pound slabs of plastic you could shove into your briefcase provided it was big enough and haul it through Heathrow stopping every five minutes to rest your arms and/or shoulder depending on whether you briefcase had a shoulder strap or not. It was unheard of back then to use a backpack as a briefcase.

The revolution slowed a bit and for the next decade or so. Innovation was all about improving performance and reducing power for the laptops while the desktop computers became more like mainframes and then migrated to gaming machines with multiple CPUs, huge hard drives and enough fans on the back to cool a Formula One race car and almost as loud too.

Innovation picked back up with improvements in CPU performance, advancement in battery technology, and reductions in power consumption allowing a laptop to last about 5+ hours; just enough to get you from San Francisco to New York City.

And now, here we are again; right in the middle of another revolution every bit as transformative as the introduction of the first "mini" computers and PCs. Major changes are taking place right before our eyes at light speed with the advancements in mobile technology including smartphones and the newer tablets.

Smartphones today are sporting 1Ghz processors with 32GB of storage. These devices have orders of magnitude more processing power and program storage then the old DEC VAX minis and a thousand times more bandwidth. The whole smartphone platform is being reinvented every 18 months with more and more powerful processors and memory subsystems to handle the expected bandwidth that will be required in a few short years.

And enter the tablets. These devices will, again, change how and where we work, play, and socialize. One’s whole life will be integrated with a tablet. Much like how the cell phone became an appendage of the human body. The tablet will be your window into the world around you; for you to see out and others to see in.

These new hardware devices have spawned a whole new industry of building applications, or apps as there are called, that can do just about everything. There is, indeed, an app for that. The Apple Apps Store has recorded over ten billion downloads since it opened in July of 2008 with over 400,000 available apps. The number of Android apps is growing at an astounding rate as well; about 3.3 billion apps have been downloaded from about 145,000 apps in little over a year. Microsoft was late to the party but will keep throwing money at the mobile space so they should not be counted out with their Windows 7 Phone OS. They will certainly be a player but it’s not clear how big of a player.

At the end of the day, it will be the software/apps that will make or break a mobile device and not, necessarily, some unique hardware feature because if the consumer that feature, every manufacturer will find a way to provide it. It happened with touch screens.

A huge shakeout is looming for the tablet suppliers. It is going to be very tough to compete against the likes of Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy. There were hundreds of tablets offerings at the recent CES from a variety of well-known and not so well-known companies. Most won’t make it in the market place. There is one thing that tablet suppliers need to understand, however, and that is pricing. If they want market penetration like the ubiquitous feature phone, they’ll need to offer high-functionality tablets at about a third of where they are priced today. Apple may be in a unique position because they have never been the price leader on anything. But, certainly the rest of the field will need to consider a price that will fuel the market beyond the early adopters and gadget freaks.

In a little over a week the biggest mobile tradeshow and convention, GSMA, will be held in Barcelona. It’s going to be interesting to see what new entries to this current revolution will be introduced, especially after all the new gadgets introduced at CES only a month ago.

Just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas; total sensory overload. Of course all the big guys were there in a very big way. Samsung's “booth” looked as big as a football field. They had everything there that they make from cellphones to refrigerators and everything connected to the internet.

It was all 3D all the time. The 3D presence was even bigger than last year and it wasn’t limited to TVs. Mobile devices including laptops and cellphones were shown with 3D capability. Sharp showed a smartphone with a 3D display. Didn’t need glasses. Several vendors were showing the next innovation in 3D TVs. Sony showed a 3D TV that didn’t require any glasses. It was OK but not really ready for prime time. You have to be at a specific distance from the screen and pretty much directly in front of it. But you can see that the R&D folks are working hard to eliminate the requirement to wear glasses. One step before that though, LG showed a TV that uses passive technology which means you can use the cheap type of glasses they use in theaters. It was very good. They were touting the medical hazards of wearing active shutter glasses too much and passive glasses were much better for everyone.

Once again, Lady Gaga made an appearance at the Polaroid booth, albeit 40 minutes late. It seems that Polaroid and Gaga “collaborated” to create the Gray Label line of products which includes an instant mobile printer, an instant digital camera and some extremely ugly and bulky camera glasses.  I guess Polaroid is going back to its roots of instant whatever.

 ATT said that they were moving aggressively into the 4G LTE space. They plan to launch 20 4G devices this year and have their 4G network fully deployed by 2013. Everyone was showing their 4G LTE devices by the hundreds most on Android OS.

And, here comes the tablets. Motorola showed their long awaited Xoom, Android 3.0-based device. It will be sold through Verizon. It a pretty neat tablet. Initially it will use the 3G network but will be upgraded to LTE sometime this year.  It has a front facing camera for video chats and supports 1080p HD video. It also has an HDMI port so that you can display your content on your big TV at home.

Everyone is getting into the tablet act to try and thwart the iPad juggernaut. Samsung, RIM, LG, along with Motorola were just a few of the many screaming at the top of their lungs about their offerings. There are variations in screen sizes ranging from a 4 inch model from Panasonic to a 10 inch model from most other vendors.  And kind of like smartphones, if you stand back about 15 feet, they are all beginning to look the same. The differentiation eventually will be in software and apps. One odd observation: Apple defined what a tablet is with the introduction of the iPad. A couple of companies apparently didn’t get the message. They were calling, what looked to me like a netbook, a tablet. It was the traditional clamshell device with a keyboard on one half and the screen on the other. I guess they saw the writing on the wall that tablets will kill the netbook market and just wanted to see if this strategy will keep them alive.

With CES put to bed and all the hullabaloo around tablets, 4G phones, and Android done, I’m wondering what’s left to announce at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in about five weeks. Should be interesting.

Seeing all the excitement surrounding smartphones and the capabilities these gadgets bring leads me to think that the future of the feature phone is looking a bit bleak for a couple of reasons. With much higher margins that handset manufacturers can garner by selling a smartphone versus a standard feature phone, it just stands to reason that the companies will go where the money is. The smartphone has all the bells and whistles that consumers want, or at least, think they want. I have both a feature phone and a smartphone and haven’t powered up the feature phone is about a year. The last time I did just to make sure the battery had a charge; I couldn’t remember how to use it. It wasn’t intuitive at all and seemed so antiquated, clunky and cumbersome.

The technology being designed into these future smartphones is extraordinarily impressive, to say the least. There is more compute power available to the average smartphone user than there was to the astronauts in the Apollo 11 space program that took them to the moon; by an order of magnitude.  We’re talking about a thousand times the bandwidth. The average desktop of the 1990’s had only 1/100^th of the performance of the current smartphone.

When I was at the recent CEATAC show just outside Tokyo last month, I noticed almost all of the attention in the handset manufacturers’ booths was on their smartphones and their poor feature phones languished in their little cradles untouched. There was even a 3D smartphone prototype from Sharp that had a queue of about 100 people waiting patiently in line to see it; no special glasses needed.  I managed to get a surreptitious peek. While still needing a bunch more work, it was impressive.  

Performance will continue to advance in leaps and bounds while costs will continue to decline squeezing out the feature phone market segment. The smartphone of today will become the mid-range replacement of the feature phone tomorrow. What will take the place the current smartphone at the higher end will be yet another more powerful and more capable device, combining functionality and features only dreamed about today: more location-based applications, augmented reality, 3D graphics, 3D gaming, 3D touch screen, HD everything and connectivity to anything. These new devices will need advanced memory sub-systems that can handle the bandwidth demands to make such applications viable. Serial Port Memory Technology will be right there keeping up with the ever-changing requirements of the mobile and consumer electronics market.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area chances are you have to commute to work especially if you are like me and live in the "City" and work "down on the peninsula" in Sunnyvale about 50 miles away. Now, normally I travel the wide open I280 where you can pretty much go as fast as you want so the driving time to my work isn’t all that bad. I can usually make it in less than an hour.

The other day I had the occasion to go home from work using US101, the main street of Silicon Valley, which runs parallel to I280 but about five miles further inland. It was early afternoon so there wasn’t the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic which is usually why I don’t take it. For the past couple of years the California department for highways, Cal Trans, has been upgrading 101 and repaving it, among other improvements. It has been quite some time since I last traveled 101 from the Valley and was admiring the nice new smooth freeway surface. As I was making my way toward San Francisco I noticed something that was quite disturbing. This freshly resurfaced roadway was inundated with tire skid marks and scrapped paint marks on barriers. They were all over everywhere. The road looked like the landing point on the runway at SFO except here the skid marks were swerving in all different directions. You could just see where people suddenly realized they were going to hit someone in front of them and in a panic, slammed their foot on the brakes, cut the steering wheel sharply right or left. Almost always there was an abrupt stoppage of the tire marks; a definite smudge at impact. They either hit the center divider or whoever was ahead of them. I used to travel this road a lot and I never noticed such a multitude of skid and impact marks before so I was wondering what was going on when I got the familiar ping on my iPhone signifying an incoming email. I instinctively pickup up the phone and glanced down to see the message and like a lightning bolt striking, I knew why there were so many skid marks.

People, it will ruin your day and the day of the other person(s) ahead of you that you crash into for the instance it takes to look away at an email or, God forbid, send a text message while you are driving a vehicle. So STOP IT! No matter how important you think you are or how urgently someone needs to reach you, it can wait.

I love mobile devices particularly smartphones and have devoted the past several years my life driving Serial Port Memory Technology into this market to give these great gadgets ever more capabilities. But we simply have to be sane about where we use them. Behind the wheel of a 4000 pound moving mass of metal and plastic isn’t one of them. Enough said.

The last couple of days have been awesome for the SPMT consortium. We held an event in conjunction with IEEE at the Marvell headquarters in Santa Clara California. We were given the opportunity to present the technology and hold a panel discussion taking question from about 100 engineers from around the Bay Area. The panel consisted of Jim Elliott, VP of marketing and product planning from Samsung, Camillo Martino, CEO of Silicon Image, Dr. Sehat Sutardja, CEO, President of Marvell, Arun Kamat, VP of marketing for Hynix, Dr. John Heinlein, VP of Marketing and Physical IP Division, and myself. After remarks from Dr. Sutardja and me, we went into the panel discussion with a lot of interesting and probing questions from the audience. The panel was followed by some great food and good conversation all around. Great event and great exposure for Serial Port Memory Technology.

Yesterday, the SPMT Consortium participated in the Memcon technical conference focused on the future of memory technology. It was an intensive one day program packed with a lot of great presentations and information. Alan Ruberg, SPMT Architect, presented the SPMT architecture that was very well received by a packed conference room. SPMT also had an exhibit there where the team was mobbed by engineers eager to learn more about SPMT. Later in the day I participated in a panel to discuss the future of memory interfaces where I predicted that a serial (SPMT) interface will become the next major general purpose standard for DRAM. Both the mobile and consumer electronics industry have recognized that the current parallel interface architecture is hitting the wall and serial is inevitable.

The momentum for SPMT has significantly picked up in the last couple of months as other proposed memory interface alternatives have fallen to the wayside because they simply cannot match the combination of low power, high bandwidth, low latency, and low pin count that SPMT offers. To quote the Dr. Sutardja, "The time for SPMT is now!"

I just returned from a two-week vacation in Paris with my family. I like to call it a “fakcation” because you are never far away from some form of communication with the office; email, text, phone. There’s always something happening that needs attention and can’t wait until you return.

We did a home exchange with a French family, which is a whole lot more comfortable than staying in a hotel room and a lot less expensive, too.  After a couple of days the kids were bored. This is the third time we’ve been to Paris. We hadn’t been to the Eiffel Tower yet so we decided to take them. We took the metro to the Trocadaro station, which is on the back side of the tower and takes you to the rear steps of the Palais de Chaillot. When you are walking toward the Palais de Chaillot from this direction you can’t see the tower. It’s blocked by trees and buildings. There is a point where you make a right turn to go up some steps and boom! Right in your face is Tour Eiffel and the air just gets sucked out of you. We all froze in our tracks. It’s the most stunning view of this magnificent structure. It seemed so close that you could reach out and touch it even though it was several hundred yards away. While in the days ahead the kids still got bored, they eventually got into just being in Paris.

So what does being in Paris have to do with mobile devices? Over the course of two weeks, I noticed how different it was with people and their cell phones or smartphones. When you move around the Bay Area of California or major metropolitan areas in Asia, everyone is on their smartphone. They are either staring at it, talking on it, or thumbing it. Not so in Paris. As we rode the metro around the city, which we did a lot, you didn’t see everyone engaged with their mobile device. It was the exception rather than the rule. I did not see a single iPad anywhere. Even in the bistros, which are the equivalent of Starbucks, one on every corner, people didn’t have their heads down working on their laptops or checking their phones. They were simply out of sight. On this trip we decided to stay further out from the city center avoiding the tourist areas to get a feel for how regular Parisians live so I know it wasn’t a matter of tourists not using their smartphones and being on vacation. I haven’t been to Paris since the introduction of the iPhone so I expected it to be like the other places I’ve been to with everyone having some sort of smartphone gadget in their hand as an extra appendage. It just wasn’t so.

Are we in the mobile device industry just talking to ourselves? Do we think the whole world is like us; that the handset device is so woven into our social fabric that we think it odd not to have one in our hand at all times? Or is it just a matter of being in a place filled with Renoir, Monet, Chagall, Cezanne, Di Vinci or the Louvre, d’Orsey, Rodin or Picasso museums and of course the Eiffel Tower that who in their right mind, would have their head down looking at their cell phone?  

By the second week in Paris, I believed it was the latter.

C’est la vie!

The SPMT Consortium reached another milestone today. We are pleased to welcome Marvell into the SPMT Promoter group. The promoter group makes up the governing body of the Consortium and is ultimately responsible for approving any specifications released to the members. According to Dr. Sehat Sutardja, chairman, president and CEO of Marvell, he has been investigating serial DRAM for quite some time and believes that Serial Port Memory Technology is the way of the future. I couldn’t agree with him more. When you take a look at the cadre of future memory interface architectures being bandied about in the industry today, nothing comes close to Serial Port Memory Technology in meeting the industry requirements in terms of high bandwidth, low power, low pin count, and low latency. Dr. Sutardja, who is recognized as one of the foremost experts on memory and is also an expert in analog design, says that the future for serial DRAM is now. He stated that the mission is to bring this technology to the industry as a standard. From the beginning, that has been the goal of the SPMT Consortium and we are glad that Marvell along with Samsung, Hynix, LG, ARM, and Silicon Image share the same belief. But, as they say on the 2:00 am infomercials (sometime I suffer from insomnia) " But wait, there’s more!":

We are also announcing a new and very exciting enhancement to the SPMT specification which is available to SPMT Consortium members as of today. We are introducing SerialSwitch technology. This is a game changer. It brings together the best of both worlds into a single memory interface. SerialSwitch enables systems to take advantage of the low power capabilities of parallel memory when low bandwidth is required and when the system demands high performance and high-bandwidth, SerialSwitch technology automatically switches the memory into high bandwidth mode, up to 6.4GB/s, while maintaining the low power benefit of SPMT. Additionally, the architecture allows for plug-in replacement of LPDDR2 memories so that the SoC developer doesn’t have to choose between parallel and serial at the time of the development. Because the SoC is designed for LPDDR2 and SPMT-enabled memory, this gives flexibility to the system designer as well to choose the appropriate memory device, either LPDDR2 or SPMT memory, based on price, availability, and system requirements but using the same SPMT-enabled SoC; as I said, the best of both worlds.

These are exciting times for the Consortium. The response from memory, SoC, and system designers has been incredibly positive. We have been reviewing this enhancement with industry leaders for several months and all say that the technology hits the nail on the head.

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Back from Barcelona where I attended the GSMA Mobile World Congress -- the annual confab for everything cell-phone related. What a great place to have a conference and exhibition. Barcelona is my second most favorite city in the world, second only to Paris. In a lot of ways it is much like Paris; great culture, unique architecture, fabulous food and wonderful people. Ok, maybe that last one I’ll give to Barcelona.

As expected, everyone was present and accounted for at GSMA. Well, everyone except Apple and Nokia. I didn’t expect Apple to be there, but Nokia? What’s up with that?

But, everyone else was certainly there. Here’s some of the coolest phones I saw: Sony Ericsson showed their Xperia™ X10 smartphone. It was really nice and certainly rivals the iPhone in look and feel. The user interface was extremely slick with floating images and pictures, definitely a cut above the current Apple offering. Samsung showed a new AMOLED touch screen that is awesome. It was very bright and easy to see in all lighting conditions; something that is a bit lacking with the iPhone. Samsung’s Bada platform for application development was, indeed, bad – as in very cool! There were a number of independent application developers there all showing their products on the new Samsung Wave smartphone. Transitioning between apps was extremely smooth and seamless. While the applications themselves may be unique, the usability and user interface was consistent across all of them. There’s also on-the-fly editing of widgets which was pretty neat.

HTC had a huge presence. This is the company that used to make phones for others to brand. Now, they are branding their own phones. When you look across their lineup, you can recognize who they may have designed phones for in the past. For years, they have focused on hardware because that’s what they were paid to do. Now they need to catch up on the software side and the user experience, if they want to be a player.

Motorola was all about their Blur environment. They had some good phones, but they were really pushing their Blur technology, i.e. cloud computing. Blur is an environment that organizes all the social media sites you may belong to: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. as well as all the contacts from across all your various email and contact programs. Let me stress -- ALL. It seems that when you buy a Motorola phone like the Cliq and start it up, it prompts you to open a Blur account. When you do, it will search everything and create contact info for anyone you know, whether you like it or not. Apparently, there’s no way to be selective about who you want be in contact with. Again, this is across all social sites as well as your email accounts. (Sounds like an oops to me.) All of this information is stored on their servers at their sites (in the "Cloud"). Not that I have anything to hide or that I’m paranoid, but this just seems a little exposed to me. However, I got the distinct feeling that they were really targeting a different demographic to which I don’t belong, one which doesn’t really think about things like privacy or government "oversight." Like the sub-30 crowd?

One notable bright spot and I can’t believe I’m saying this, was Microsoft and their Windows Phone 7 OS demonstration. WOW! Very impressive. With this OS, you can actually turn your smartphone into a virtual laptop, including full-throttle Windows Office applications. They definitely upped the ante with this one. Windows Mobile is now just a bad memory.

For me, the biggest takeaway from this year’s GSMA was that the hardware is becoming homogenized. Most handset manufacturers have moved toward the iPhone style form factor. Sure, some might have square corners verses rounded corners but when you do a little measuring they are all mostly the same: about the same physical dimensions, a button at the center on the bottom, a touch screen, swooshing to navigate. Really, it would be very difficult to tell which phone came from which company. The differentiation is going to be ultimately in the software; the kind of apps offered and how intuitive the user interface is. I think Google may have figured this out before anyone else did. And by the way, Android-based phones were everywhere.

The PC industry went down this very same path. Early on, you could tell an IBM PC from a Compaq PC pretty easily. But after a few years, ok maybe a decade, all PCs looked pretty much the same (not talking about Apple). It was very difficult for the PC manufacturers to differentiate themselves based on the hardware. I see the same thing happening to the cell phone market. It will basically come down to what kind of processing power you have, battery life and the user experience the service providers want to sell you. Form factor will be less of an issue. Smartphones will all have touch screens and they are all moving to the largest LCD form factor that fits in your pocket. Granted, the feature phone and low-end phones have a little more variations in form factor than the smartphone, but smartphones are the fastest growing segment. And based on what I heard from industry executives at GSMA, I’m pretty sure that the smartphone feature set as we see it today will certainly migrate to the midrange and will eventually become standard at the lower end of the market. This will leave the upper end to innovate with cool new features mostly based on application innovation.

So we’re back to, "It’s the software, stupid!"

Just back from CES in Las Vegas and it was like old times compared to last year. The place was packed. You got a sense that people were anxious to shrug off the malaise of the last two years and get on with the new 2010 and a new decade. "Hope springs eternal."

Most of the major companies pulled out all the stops: Samsung, Panasonic, Microsoft, Sony, LG, Motorola and even Polaroid! (I thought they were out of business, but more about them later). There were three major themes for the show: Tablets, eReaders, and 3D TV. The one with the most WOW factor was 3D TV. It was everywhere. If there was any way an exhibitor could tie to 3D TV, they did. While most of the TV vendors were also touting other innovations like 240Hz frame rate technology and ultra thin LED backlit panels, everything was overshadowed by 3D. And I must say I was more than skeptical that 3D could rival what you see in a modern digital theatre featuring a 3D movie, but everything I saw was fantastic! Yes, you had to wear the glasses, but some of the vendors made them look like hip European eyewear so you didn’t look too goofy. Frankly, I thought having to wear glasses would be a real put-off, but I don’t think it will be a big deal for the consumer if the glasses are cheap enough, which may pose a bit of a challenge. Every vendor that I visited used the active glasses as opposed to the very cheap plastic polarizing kind found in theatres, known as passive technology. The active kind uses a shutter technology that synchs with the TV to trick the viewers’ mind into seeing 3D. They are heavier and a bit bulkier than the passive kind and have an on/off button which means there is a small battery somewhere. All of this signals high cost to me. When I mentioned this to one vendor, he said they were not expensive at all, "less than $50!" Passive glasses are just a few dollars, if that. All I can say is that if the TV industry wants the consumer to adopt 3D TV as the next biggest thing and use the active glasses, they better figure out a way to reduce or hide the cost of them. Can you imagine walking across a dark living room and hearing a crunch under your foot or how about your two-year old deciding to see how far the ear pieces will spread apart! I also overheard a few people complaining that watching 3D with the active glasses gives them a headache. So it sounds like there are a few things that still need to be worked out.

It will be a long time, many years and perhaps a decade, before 3D broadcasting will be as common as broadcasting in color, if ever. I mean, the broadcasters just made a huge investment to switch to HD. I just can’t see them making another big outlay of cash for new equipment for some time to come. However, most TVs will come with built-in dual mode where certain programs will be in 3D and most others will be in standard mode and the TV set will just switch between them automatically. Most likely the 3D content will be reserved for special types of shows or events like sports or the "3D Movie of the Week." I’m guessing that the bulk of 3D content will be provided by the cable/satellite companies. Discovery and Disney say that they are already preparing a 3D cable channel. It will be very interesting to see how it all evolves.

The show floor was packed on the days I walked around. It was in a lot of ways a typical trade show. To attract attention, Polaroid hired Lady GaGa to do nothing but sit and stand on a stage while hundreds of camera flashes went off and just as many cell phones waved in the air trying to capture the event. You couldn’t get within spitting distance of the booth. Other exhibitors had mini-stage shows with attractive spokespersons and all kinds of "trinkets n’ trash". It was really difficult getting up close to the products and try them out.

On the mobile front, the big elephant wasn’t there. No, I’m not talking about Nokia. I’m talking about Apple. They were conspicuous by their absence, leaving the electronics orgy to others while they wait for the calm after the storm to introduce their rumored tablet. Others chose to introduce their tablet offering and quite frankly, after a while, they all started to blur. I really didn’t see anything that had a big WOW factor other than touch screens replacing the need for a stylist. eReaders were everywhere causing me to wonder where that market will go versus the tablet. Supposedly, the tablet could double as a reader and will support full color which is much more attractive to magazine type of content. But if I can download a book to my tablet, why would I need an eReader? If I have an eReader, I’ll still need a laptop or a tablet which makes the eReader redundant. So on the surface, eReaders are an interim step. I don’t see a huge market and if the tablet takes off, the eReader market will be even smaller. I, for one, don’t want to carry multiple devices if I don’t have to. I have a tendency to either break them or loose them so less is better.

Most of the cell phone manufacturers were at CES, but frankly I didn’t see a whole lot of innovation. Pretty much same old stuff. I’m betting they are all waiting to do their announcements at the Mobile World Congress (GSMA) in Barcelona next month. (SPMT will be exhibiting there as well.)

One of the more interesting exhibitors at CES was Ford. They were touting their connected car. They announced MyFordTouch which is supposed to replace conventional buttons, gauges and knobs with voice commands. There were built in LCD panels with slide bars to adjust various functions in the car. The main LCD panel in the center was a touch screen that allows you to control just about all the creature comforts of the car. There is a media hub that has an SD slot, RCA jacks, a MP3 jack and a USB port potentially turning your car into a mobile hot spot. Talk about a distracted driver!

One of the trends I’ve blogged about in the past is the merging of mobile media devices with the cell phone. I predicted that in the future you will carry a single device that acts as your laptop, cell phone, music and video player. I’m not talking about the netbooks or tablets as they are defined today. It was pretty evident at CES 2010 that that trend is accelerating. There will be some shake out for sure. Some devices, perhaps the eReader, will have a pop in popularity, but will fade over time. MP3 players as a standalone device are already fading. The laptop will become your desktop and something else will take its place; maybe a tablet, but who knows. Let’s see what Apple struts out in the next few weeks. As is their custom, they could very well set the stage for the future of tablets and turn the industry on its ear causing most of the current vendors to go back to the drawing board. We shall see.

I guess I’m a member of the “old school” when it comes to storing personal data in “The Cloud.” This cloud thing has been around since the 1990’s first fostered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. I scoffed at the idea then because I couldn’t imagine anyone storing personal information on some remote server in a cavernous warehouse in some god- knows-where location. What would happen if something went wrong with the server or the database program? What would happen if someone hacked into the server and stole the information? It was just too risky for me; not that I have anything that anyone would want to steal. To this day, I still can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of storing anything in the Cloud with the notable exception of my Yahoo! mail which I don’t have a choice. Why would I want to pay a monthly fee to store anything in the Cloud when you can buy a terabyte of storage for about $100. A TERABYTE! You could buy two and have one back up the other.

But it looks like using the Cloud for storing data is going to be the norm with the proliferation of new memory hogging applications designed for smartphones and netbooks whether I like it or not. The recent disaster with the Sidekick from T-Mobile seemed to vindicate my outmoded stance. Something happened to the server or the database software that was storing and managing information for about a million T-Mobile customers who pay a monthly fee for the service. The server either crashed or the database got corrupted or both and there was no backup. Those poor people lost everything, notes, pictures, e-mails, calendar info, contact lists, everything. Gone. Kaput. They were told it was unrecoverable. A few days later, thankfully, T-Mobile said “most” of the data was retrieved. But still. I would be hard pressed to trust the system again. You would expect the service provider to have redundancies in place to protect the data. I guess they didn’t.

As new mobile devices come to market that have much more capability and many more data intensive applications, the need for storage is only going to accelerate. While onboard storage is getting denser and cheaper, it will not keep pace with these memories hungry applications. There is even talk of having HD video recording and playback on these future devices. It’s inevitable that having a spot in the Cloud for the data you create will become a necessity. Let’s hope this incident with the Sidekick will spur the service providers on to develop systems that are failsafe.