A lot of attention has been given to sub-$100 e-readers such as the new crop of Kindles. But a report from PaidContent suggests another generation of sub-$100 devices might be on the horizon: the sub-$100 smartphone. PaidContent reports that consultants at Deloitte see an impending wave of cheap smartphones hitting the market—as many as 500 million of them by the end of the year. By and large, these will not be Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian, or Windows Phone based phones, but rather they will run on closed, proprietary platforms. Most consumers care more about touchscreens or keyboards than...

Responding to the incident in which Alec Baldwin was kicked off his flight for refusing to shut down his cell phone, Salon.com’s pilot columnist Patrick Smith has written a column about the question of interference from electronic devices—including e-readers—on takeoff. Much of it is about what you would expect—while it hasn’t been proven that cellphones are a flight danger, airlines choose to err on the side of caution. But I did find interesting the part that specifically addresses e-readers: As for the restrictions pertaining to computers, iPods and certain other devices during takeoffs and landings, this...

In addition to looks back at the last year, this is the traditional time for looks ahead at the year to come, and Seth Weintraub has an interesting one in Fortune’s “Fortune Tech” blog. Weintraub predicts that, due to falling prices and improving networks, 2011 is going to be the year the smartphone (particularly the Android smartphone) really takes off, bypassing traditional computers as the way the majority of the world’s population accesses the Internet. In terms of price, Weintraub points to new and forthcoming chipsets from Broadcomm that should allow Android smartphones to retail for under $100, possibly...

Are the days of unlimited wireless data plans numbered? ReadWriteWeb reports on a speech by a wireless researcher who believes that they are. Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela, director of wirelss research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, notes that the more people use smartphones, the more data usage is going to go up. Only 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data, and as that usage grows, soon the cost of providing “unlimited” bandwidth data plans will surpass the revenue it brings in. Valenzuela believes that metered pricing is one possible answer, but there are also...

Audrey Watters of Read Write Web reports that the final version of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), centered around improving educational uses of technology, calls for making sure that educators and students have 24/7 Internet access and for implementing policies that “enable leveraging the technology that students already have.” As Watters points out, the most ubiquitous technology among students is cell phones—more than 75% of kids between 12 and 17 own them, and a lot of schools have policies regulating or banning their use. Cell phones’ drawbacks include that they could distract from learning, contribute to cyberbullying, pose...

Mobile technology is amazing, isn’t it? Various companies and charitable organizations have made a big deal out of the necessity of getting to a $100 netbook or tablet for third-world educational purposes, and for the sake of domestic poor and homeless who might not otherwise be able to afford their own computer. And we’ve been getting there—though netbooks actually of sufficient quality to be useful are still around $130 in refurbished form. But another form of mobile technology has fallen to the point that it’s pretty much already at universal affordability: the prepaid cellular phone. As I was...

On The Literary Platform, Tony White (of Piece of Paper Press, which I covered here a couple of weeks ago) writes about an interactive storytelling project he has been working on with renowned artists Blast Theory. The project, Ivy4Evr, is aimed at drawing teens into the drama via messaging on their cell phones. White writes that over the course of planning the project, it was necessary to “forget about apps and ebooks for a while”, because they made a number of interesting discoveries. Most notably, most young people don’t have smartphones—but the phones they do have are almost...

E-books aren’t the only way to “TeleRead”. Whenever we receive a text message, or an instant message on line, you could say we “TelePhoneRead”—as different a form of communication from the phone calls of old as e-books are from printed books. I covered a similar article from TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, but Om Malik of GigaOm has posted a piece on “Why we never talk anymore”—an article about the decline in phone voice communications and the rise in other forms such as text and possibly soon video. Malik talks about his personal history growing up...

On Wired.com, John Siracusa (who I’ve mentioned previously for his insightful look back at the early e-book industry on Ars Technica) looks at the argument being raised in some quarters that Apple should license its iPhone OS to other hardware manufacturers, lest it risk being relegated to a tiny fraction of the mobile market by Android, much as the Mac was relegated to a tiny fraction of the PC market by Windows. Siracusa is skeptical of this argument, and for good reason. As he points out, the situations are not quite analogous. For one thing, whereas PCs could...

A MobileRead forumgoer reports that the latest Project Gutenberg newsletter contains an announcement of a new Project Gutenberg mobile website, m.gutenberg.org. The site is to be optimized not just for iPhones, but for any mobile phone including browsing-enabled dumbphones. Writes Gutenberg: There are 4.5 billion such devices in the world, versus only 1.15 billion computers, and more and more readers, in spite of what the pundits say, are surfing, reading, and everything else on such mobile devices. We’ve previously covered a couple of stories—earlier this year, and last year—on the possibility of using...

When I saw the article in Google Reader, I had already clicked “mark as read” before going, “…what?” and hastily going back to see if I’d read what I thought I’d read. Ars Technica has a piece on the Overbite Project, an open-source effort to bring the Gopher format to modern computers which already has an alpha release for Android devices. Gopher is the hypertext network protocol that was in use before the development of the World Wide Web. I still remember using it back at college in the early ‘90s to find information on the...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece from young-adult publisher Jacob Lewis on why he has decided to create an on-line community called Figment where teens can write and share stories. Lewis was inspired by the way teens have adopted cell phones in Japan for many and more general purposes than they are usually used in America. But there was more to it than just wanting to see how well that would work over here. One aspect of the Japanese model that is particularly compelling is the intimate relationship created between writer and reader. Delivered...