Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion equivalent to half the global population on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said. Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world. "The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement. "For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when," Newman said. In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth. The

In a blink of mere months, the mobile “smart” phone has been transformed from pricey corporate gadget to an affordable alternative for ordinary folk. Cingular Wireless has unveiled three devices priced as low as $200. The shift began in May with the ‘Q’ from Motorola that Verizon Wireless introduced for $200 and now sells for $100. But no carrier has gone as wild with consumer-friendlier smart phones than Cingular, which rolled out four such devices since September. I tried out three of them: Nokia E62, the Samsung BlackJack and the Palm Treo 680. Samsung BlackJack: The BlackJack stands out among the three devices, if only because it is compatible with Cingular’s new high-speed wireless Internet network. It’s small and weighs 3.5 ounces. Despite the size constraints, the phone features a slot for removable memory to store music and photographs, as well as a 1.3 megapixel camera. One omission is GPS satellite capability for location-tracking. Nokia E62: The E62 is the first mass-market