In 2007, it was estimated that 36%-40% of the world’s population carried a mobile device giving us an estimate of 2.4-2.7 billion people carrying at least one phone. At that same time several writers projected that based on current growth estimates, sometime around 2010 to 2012 (depending on who you asked) we might hit 3.3-3.6 billion mobile devices.

Well, here we are in 2010 and according to a UN report published in March 2009 it was estimated that there were already 4.1 billion mobile phone subscribers  at the end of 2008 (60% of the world population), with the fastest growing country being… Pakistan.

Additionally, it was noted that there had been a clear shift from fixed to mobile cellular phone use and that in the same reporting period there were over three times more mobile cellular phone subscriptions than fixed telephone lines globally. Two thirds of those mobile phones are found in the developing world compared to less than half in 2002.

Why does this matter?

Because among Gen Y (and younger) and throughout many parts of the developing world the cell phone or other mobile devices are becoming the first device of choice (or necessity) for interacting with the Internet, for making online purchases, for banking, etc… South Korea, a country considered to be at the leading edge of digital communications is a place now where nearly everything is done through your cell phone and the simple idea of getting a plastic card to use for purchasing is archaic and offered as a courtesy option to banking customers who think they might be traveling out of the country.

This leads us to another thing to be aware of when you look at that graph above. The racing climb of mobile devices also represents a growing class of web users that may be visiting your website, buying your products, trying to get customer support.

It was estimated that in 2008, the number of mobile Internet users had reached 1.05 billion, surpassing the number of PC web users (1 billion) for the first time ever.

The natural questions become, why isn’t your website mobile friendly? And, if you’re doing any kind of e-commerce, why isn’t your store front not only mobile friendly but able to accept payments in the common methods of payment frequented by your customer base?

If you don’t have the answer, your business could be in trouble. Even the best established business relationship or brand loyalty can dissolve in the blink of an eye when there is a major change in the way society communicates.

You can see this taking place right now across all aspects of the publishing world. Non-Internet based media companies have spent the greater part of decade trying to figure out how to apply their business models to Internet communications rather than the other way around. For example let’s take the contemporary case of the newspaper classifieds. Classifieds were the mainstay of newspaper revenue for over a hundred years in the U.S. but they were never a perfect process for users. Limited words, fees, trying to figure out what days you wanted your ad to show up… these things all presented challenges to customers using the service. Then a very basic website called Craigslist showed up which was free to read, free to post (short of fees for job postings and some services) and had no real limits on word counts or listing durations. Within a few short years the classifieds industry was decimated and many newspapers soon found themselves going out of business because they could not or would not adapt.

So let’s bring this all around… in short everything I’m talking about here relates to location and convenience. These fundamental elements have been key to business success since the dawn of time. Real-estate agents get it “Location, Location, Location!”. Traditional marketing people get it “Go to where the customers are”.

People are on the web, people are using their cell phones to use the web. People are using their cell phones for the majority of their day to day communications when you take in voice, SMS, web, chat, gaming, etc… Do your children have their own cell phone? Does each child have their own cell phone? When they grow up to be a consumer, will your company be positioned to communicate to them in a way that they expect to be talked to or are you simply expecting them to learn an archaic way to talk to you based on how you talk today? When you get that Fax with their answer let me know.

Get it? Good. Next you need to actually have something relevant on your website for visitors to see when they get there on their cell phone, but that’s another conversation all together.

My thanks to the following resources for my data:

• http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html
• http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2009/07.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/25iht-mobile.html
• http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3019
• http://www.tomiahonen.com/ebook/almanac.html
• http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Since we’re on a roll talking about telephone technology let’s branch out.

The most obscure phone device that more people have seen than used is the acoustic coupler. Did you see the movies WarGames or TRON (boy talk about dated references eh)? These days, these are probably the most likely place people will see an Acoustic coupler in action. Back when you had to lease your phone from the Ma Bell and when most people still had rotary dial phones (instead of Touch Tone based phone systems) someone figured out a bright idea for how to connect two computers together over a phone line.

The acoustic coupler was a device that most commonly plugged into the serial port on your computer and would convert the data sent to it into audio tones. It would then pulse those tones over the phone line where the recipient computer would record the tones and turn then back into data to be processed (in many ways it analogous to data storage via audio cassette tape on early computers, but that’s a whole other subject). You would dial the phone manually and tell the person on the other end to put their receiver on their coupler and set their computer to receive. Then you put your handset on your coupler. Once the computers were connected you would start data transmission.

After the AT&T/Bell break up I mentioned previously, people eventually had the ability to plug any device other than a Bell telephone into the phone network. From there you saw modems that you just plugged the phone line directly into. These modems would also be able to issue the dialing tones to initiate a call and would be able to monitor the line for a ring in order to provide an unsupervised answer (this led to the dawn of home computer run Bulletin Board Systems). The last progression was to move the modem directly into the computer as a board that plugged into a slot. Less and less people are using modems now with the spread of broadband internet services. Although in very remote locations where the only communication is a old style telephone landlines, some people still use modern acoustic couplers that run off the USB port. As cell phone tethering becomes more prevalent though this too shall likely pass.

Another soon to be lost piece of one common phone technology are RF based Beepers and Pagers and eventually their cellular technology based cousins. Before everyone had cellphones, someone working in a job that had to be on call might carry a beeper. Initially beepers were tied to an operator, and then to a voice-mail system. Someone would call you and leave a message. Your beeper would buzz/beep. You would call your operator or voice-mail system and retrieve your message.

The first major upgrade of these featured a small display on the beeper that would display the phone number of the caller.

Following that, pagers got to the point where the display would show any number that the caller punched in so you could send a message that included other numbers that represented agreed to code number systems which allowed you to get the gist without having to call the voice mail.

The last generation I’ve seen most commonly used supported texting/SMS services like you would have on your cell phone.

Beepers used to be expensive and common in nearly all professions but from personal experience for IT workers in the 90′s having to carry a beeper for their employer was more of a curse than a benefit. It may have been this way in other industries as well for all I know. The curse being that you had no excuse for missing that alert at 2am when the server actually crashed.

One reality scenario here was:

1. Your employer thought their systems were so important that they needed a 24/7 baby sitter.
2. But they were too cheep to actually pay staff to sit in a data center around the clock to monitor for problems.
3. So now you get lovely false alarm beeps waking you at 3am when the random Windows server reboots unexpectedly.

Additionally, for a number of years having a beeper (just like early cell phones) was used as a status symbol for the rich and famous to help make sure they looked important even if they never used it.

Some good extra reading if you’re up to it:

http://www.corp.att.com/history/
http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/

Or, jump back to Part 1 or Part 2

Just got my Pre and initial reaction… Awesome phone. Definitely a 1.0 software release though.

Classic mode is a lie though, it’s does not come with the phone and it’s $30 (are you kidding me?) to use it for more than a seven day test period. It’s totally useless. If you are heavily invested into your Palm Desktop don’t count on using it with this phone. I had initially planned to migrate Memos, Contacts, etc… as a crutch until I got the hang of the new system. Hah, joke’s on me.

Back to the Pre itself, I have have two hard-core complaints:

• Memo migration? Let’s see, I had over a hundred memos all carefully categorized, now they’re one big endless scrolling mess on one page in no particular order. That was useless, thanks guys!
• Contact list… No categories?!?!?! WTF! That would have been worth a 30-day delay to make sure it was implemented at launch. Seriously.

So until they fix these last two items my Treo 755p (now with the phone portion disabled since I moved it to my Pre) is still a staple of my pocket clutter.

Not a happy camper. Optomistic, but not happy.