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September 23, 2003
The Smart Phone Invasion and Sales Automation
We're coming up on another subtle convergence point in the realm of personal technology where the PDA is combining with the cell phone to make 'smart phones'. Smart phones signal the dealth of the PDA as we know it, according to Bill Bennett in the Austrailian news article on the topic.
Personally, I can't wait for the day, and I'm betting that there are a large percentage of sales people out there who are saying the same thing. Imagine the following scenario:
Your client leaves you a voicemail "Hey Bob, just wondering where we stand on getting those machine parts in...".
The connected sales rep pulls up the client's information from his local address book in his phone, based on the customer's phone number on the caller ID, and connects to the company's XML enabled order status system to check on the client's request. The sales person then takes that data, and through an "email this information" link, submits exactly what's in the order status system, to his client, via email.
Problem solved - next voicemail please. Better still - this entire process could have taken place in a voice activated manner, or via a keypad, the system doesn't care.
More quotes from the article...
Hand-held computers were always meant to be mobile communications devices. Almost a decade ago Apple's marketing for the original Newton PDA showed young professionals sitting in cafes, wirelessly transmitting data to and from each other. The Newton came and went, however, long before that dream became a practical reality.
The problem is that connecting a hand-held computer to the phone network has always been a bit tricky. In general you need to carry a phone and a computer along with something to connect them. It is sometimes possible to use infrared links between the two devices, but an old-fashioned cable is generally more reliable.
Smart phones sidestep these problems by integrating phone and computer hardware. Connecting the devices, however, was only part of the problem. Until recently, most mobile phone networks in Australia could not reliably transfer data at speeds faster than 9.6Kbps. This might be fast enough for dealing with email but browsing the Web is painfully slow, even allowing for the cut-down Web pages used by today's hand-held devices....
...Mobile-connected computing won't really take off until 3G networks are in place... In theory, 3G networks can run at 2Mbps, though few users will see anything like that. More realistically, users can expect to see a few hundred Kbps.
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