“The Device That Ate Everything”

I love that title from this new article in the latest Economist. The article is refering to the growing influence that mobile phones are having on society. There seemingly isn’t anything a cell phone can’t do for you these days, which has led to others referring to them as the “Swiss Army Knife of consumer electronics.”

You can play games, download videos, surf the Net, type e-mails, take pictures, schedule meetings, and oh yeah… you can call people too! Regardless of what you want to call them, mobile devices are revolutionizing the world of communications and challenging all the traditional assumptions about this sector being a natural monopoly. It always kills me to watch members of Congress or FCC regulators standing at a podium delivering a speech about how nothing has changed in the world of communications and how some of the old wireline players are still poised to quash all the competition. And then you look down and affixed to their waistlines is a veritable Batman-belt full of wireless gadgets. I’m not kidding, nobody on this planet uses more wireless devices than a U.S. Congressman. If you took away their Blackberries for a day, they’d have to shut down the government. (Not a bad idea now that I think about it.)

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