Features are still lacking, and wireless service is slow everywhere and spotty in places. But give Moore's Law another year or so to work its miniaturization and bandwidth magic, and then try to control your IT infrastructure without one of these gadgets. Meanwhile, these handy devices give IT road warriors the immediacy and freedom of information access, and the ability to harness the power of enterprise systems whenever and wherever they need to.
Time is reclaimed in bits and pieces that add up to big productivity gains by the end of the day.
One of the most popular wireless gadgets of the moment is Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry. When a message is sent to the user's desktop account, it's immediately available from the BlackBerry. As director of digital business ventures for Eastman Chemical Co., Mark Klopp knows the future is wireless and he helped introduce the RIM BlackBerry to his bosses in the IT-executive hierarchy. While prospecting for companies to invest in and incubate, Klopp suddenly noticed a rash of the BlackBerry devices among venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs. We had cycled through some offline PDAs, but the RIM BlackBerry is really catching on.