Johannesburg, 18 Oct 2011
The current mania and hype surrounding mobile technology needs to be put into perspective. With the buzz surrounding tablets, smartphones and other untethered devices, one could be forgiven for thinking we are undergoing a computing revolution, says Chris Wilkins, CEO of DVT.
But as we have seen so often in technology, nothing really changes. We need to have a presentation layer, an input layer, and a logic layer.
That's pretty much it. You need to be able to communicate with a device, it needs to be able to communicate with you, and you need a central processing unit.
Where everything seems to have changed was when the Internet came along, enabling a new era of connectivity. Somewhere, people lost a sense of perspective and reality. This coincided with the MTV era of instant gratification.
Mobility, in terms of computers, has long been an aspiration of users, and vendors have sought to satisfy this requirement. Can you remember the now-defunct Osborne mobile computer, released 30 years ago? It weighed 12kg, had 64k of RAM, and cost the rand-equivalent today of R12 000. It had a 5cm-wide monitor.
But it was portable, and with its little modem, it allowed field workers to connect at 300baud. It came with a word processor and spreadsheet program, and ran a basic operating system and utilities.
It was mobile/portable, even if it weighed a ton.
Today, a basic cellphone has more computing power than that which was needed to put man on the moon. The point of this history lesson is that the term mobile technology can mean many things to many people. The term can refer to applications for mobile devices; any technology that enables human interaction with a mobile device; transacting over a mobile phone; collaboration between mobile devices and other software; providing a mobile device interface for other systems; and even integration between an enterprise and handheld software.
But to view mobile technology as a separate concept, a separate discussion point, and a separate topic is a red herring.
What we are really talking about is allowing functionality that is already in place in many enterprises and other systems to be made available, in some form, through a handheld device.
There are constraints inherent in handheld devices, an obvious one being the size of the interface. Most tablets today are seven-inch, which is a constraint in itself for some folk who prefer a larger display. And then there is the lack of a physical keyboard.
But of course, there are also major benefits, such as the portability, availability, and rapid access not found in laptops and other traditional devices on the market. Not to mention bragging rights.
But at the end of the day, the mobile revolution will merely become another aspect of software and devices, just like the Internet, and the concept of browser interfaces.
Today, all software and systems have some form of Internet or Web interface. It is just another aspect of software development to consider, rather than a concept that exists in its own right. So we should not get too caught up in the hype of mobile computing. Far better, as has been the case since 1950, to focus on the back-end and secure the user interface.
We, as an industry, have struggled for 60 years to get the basics right, as in capturing, securing and displaying data, and allowing users to capture this data correctly. There is nothing inherently wrong with mobile technology, but unless we apply the same basic techniques to untethered devices as we do to tethered ones, we put our organisations at risk.
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