iPhone OS 2.0: The New MS-DOS

With Apple's launch of the new App Store, the iPhone has become a full-fledged mobile computing platform. Much like Bill Gates and Microsoft introduced a new, relatively easy-to-use operating system in the 1980s amidst the many incompatible software platforms that were available, which quickly became the standard in the computing industry, Steve Jobs and Co. have introduced a new, extremely easy-to-use, yet advanced, operating system (and being that they're Apple: exclusive hardware to run it on) that certainly has the potential to become that Windows of the mobile devices industry. With Apple planning to sell 10 million iPhones this year and analysts expecting 40 million devices to be sold in 2009, the iPhone would be right on track to greatly surpass RIM's Blackberry, the current smartphone market share leader. The iPhone already accounts for around 0.1% of all web browsing, from both standard desktops and notebooks, as well as all mobile devices combined.

Sure, even at 50-some million iPhones by the end of 2009, the iPhone would be nowhere near the number of Windows PCs in the world, but it would be at a similar market share among cell phones and other mobile devices. Apple has most certainly done a fabulous job with the iPhone and as long as they continue to improve it and maintain their humongous lead ahead of the competition, the iPhone has the potential to not only stir-up the mobile industry as it has already, but truly revolutionize it and become that industry itself. We may very well be witnessing personal computing history unfold with a brand new leader/standard for mobile devices.

UWB? Gimme a Break!

I'm going to be blunt: Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is going to fail. First of all, just by looking at the increases in WiFi speeds between 802.11b to 802.11g to 802.11n, the math indicates that the next iteration of the extremely popular wireless technology should be at around 1,886 Mbps* by around somewhere from 2013 to 2017**. At those speeds, over a combination of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, as 802.11n uses, and maybe even new frequencies, WiFi could certainly handle wireless streaming of full, uncompressed HD video at resolutions of 1080p or higher. It would theoretically even be possible with 802.11n. (However, some compression may be necessary there.)

Because you will be able to wirelessly stream HD video throughout your entire home, why would you need another technology just to stream the video from a receiver to your TV? The TV will simply have WiFi built in. Due to both this and ever increasing Internet connection speeds, optical media as a means of transporting audio-video data will become a thing of the past as it quickly is already. Although Blu-ray won the HD format war with HD DVD, it will most likely fail as far as becoming the standard for viewing movies. Online digital content downloads are certainly the future - it doesn't take an expert to figure that one out. With Xbox LIVE Marketplace's HD video downloads and Netflix streaming, the iTunes Store's HD video downloads, and the PlayStation Network's new HD video downloads, the Internet, along with the wireless connections to transport that media to your television, is the future of home entertainment. There will have to be some way to get the media to a receiver for your TV anyway, which will have to be wireless (WiFi seems like a good candidate, now doesn't it?), so that same technology might as well be used to move the content directly to the TV - especially since UWB is a short-range technology and would absolutely have no chance of streaming the video over the Internet, like WiFi can. UWB will only work if there is physical media involved, which there definitely will not be.



*Math explanation: The increase from 802.11b (11 Mbps) to 802.11g (54 Mbps) was equal to 3.909090... times faster. The increase from 802.11g (54 Mbps) to 802.11n (300 Mbps) is equal to 5.55555... times faster. That's an increase of 1.1316872427983539094650205761319 times in the amount of improvement between the wireless technologies. That means that the increase between 802.11n and the next iteration of 802.11 should be equal to 6.2871513488797439414723365340655 times faster. That would put the next WiFi spec at 1,886.1454046639231824417009602196 Mbps.

**Timeframe explanation: 802.11b and 802.11a were released in 1999. 802.11g was released in 2003. 802.11n will be released in 2009. That puts the various year differences at 4 and 6 years. If that pattern of increasing by 2 years continues, the next wireless technology could be released in 8 years. That makes the overall range anywhere from 4 to 8 years from 2009 (therefore, 2013 to 2017).