Nick Jones

Symposium this year has moved up-market and we have a lot more CIOs attending than in the past. As I chat with them I’m seeing a number of different attitudes towards mobility and consumerisation. So here are a few (very slightly exaggerated) samples of CIO opinions from the US and Europe.
The only safe place for [...]

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One of the themes emerging from attendees here in Cannes is the growing problem of employee-owned devices. An informal poll of the audience at yesterday’s mobile scenario presentation showed around 50 percent who expected they’d have to support more employee-owned mobiles accessing corporate systems in the future. User demand for consumer devices like iPhone is [...]

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I spent several hours roaming around the London Symbian show SEE 2009 yesterday. SEE is a rather unfocussed event, the exhibitors range from companies selling mobile virtualisation and low level touch screen IP through testing tools all the way up to consultancies wanting to build high level applications. SEE really needs to decide whether it’s [...]

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One of the interesting things I can do as a Gartner analyst is to mine some of the data that we collect from our web site. I just trawled through the anonymised search strings for the July to September quarter and in the mobile / communications domain the topic people were searching for information on [...]

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The mobile device world seems to be populated with companies driven by what Alan Greenspan once called irrational exuberance. One example is Mobinnova who’ve announced a netbook running Windows CE powered by Nividia’s new Tegra chipset.
Leaving aside the question of whether the world actually needs yet another netbook, the choice of Windows CE is bizarre [...]

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Android is riding the hype cycle roller coaster at the moment and I think it’s right at the top of a hill and heading into a dip. Not in terms of the platform itself, it’s a great mobile OS and there are lots of nice devices in the pipeline. We’re optimistic about Android, we expect [...]

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I managed to survive a whole week of vacation without a laptop or internet connection, probably for the first time in a decade. It wasn’t too bad, due mainly to regular glasses of German wine and beer which dulled the withdrawal symptoms a lot.  But I’m back online now and have toggled from withdrawal to [...]

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As you may have noticed I’m a bit of a netbook and MID sceptic, and not only because I still haven’t found a manbag in which to carry one. As Gary Woodill pointed out in a comment on my blog last week one of the big problems with netbooks is that they’re under-specified, under-powered and [...]

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I was chatting today with some Intermec guys who were showing me their latest ruggedized handhelds. These are wonderful mobile devices, you can throw them across the room, pour coffee on them, and even drive a car over them and they can still make a phone call and read a barcode. This is a market [...]

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I’m encouraged by the suggestions that ASUS may release a low cost two screen e-book reader in Europe. However, despite this I’m still not going to sell all my bookcases and go electronic. One reason is I just worked out that I can’t afford it. Let’s do some sums here…..
First the cost of e-books. A [...]

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