October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
October 11, 2009
Free Market M.D.
October 11, 2009
Economies of Scale in Compliance
October 11, 2009
Balan's Challenge
October 10, 2009
The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
October 10, 2009
Gonick the Great - and How He Could Have Been Greater
October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
October 9, 2009
Not From The Onion
October 9, 2009
Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
Oh, absolutely not. I'll stick to my laptop and archaic bound parchment, please.
"The UK is 18 months to two years ahead of the US cellular market," Tappuni says. "Only 35 percent of Americans have sent a text message, as compared to almost 100 percent in the UK."
1) The UK, like many foreign countries, has similar "caller pays" structures for cell phones as they do for landlines, unlike the US. Inbound calls are free.
2) As a result, calling a cellular phone in most other countries is more expensive than calling a landline, unlike in the US.
3) Also as a result, cellular phone packages provide fewer calling minutes in the UK and such countries.
3) seems to be responsible for a large part in the more rapid adoption of text messages in the UK. The heavier use of trains and subways, where texting is allowed but talking often not (as opposed to planes where neither are or driving where talking is safer than texting), also drives the use of text messages.
Therefore, "18 months to two years ahead" is a fairly irrelevant statement. It has little to do with adoption of technology outside of these other factors. It's unclear that it will ever necessarily change in the US, due to these other factors.
That seems a lot like RSVP. It's fairly common PDA and smartphone software. I use it all the time to read books at around 400 wpm. Even wrote a little program to convert e-texts to mpeg movies so I could use it with my relatively dumb mp3/movie player.
These people obviously have not seen the device, which is similar to "sun glasses" that can plug into a video iPod and give one the effect of a full screen. Adaption to cell phones should be close at hand.