That was going to be my comment. My wife is intolerant of confusing user interfaces. User interfaces need to be streamlined around usage patterns (hers, of course) and need to be intuitive & largely self-explanatory. (This is easier said than done, obviously.) It's not that she isn't smart -- she's just not interested in doing what we're all doing right now -- passing the time by poking around tech forums.

The Washington Post today had a brief quote in an article unrelated to the phone wars. There is apparently an iPhone app to record contractions in labor. That is the power of a 100,000 app library. Not one killer app but thousands of apps, one of which is just what you need. This was also one of the reasons PalmOS was able to beat back the various incarnations of WinMo. So don't look for the big common opportunity, look for the simple niche app and polish it till it shines.

Exactly...rewind back to the early 1990's. Most people (myself included) who needed to be contactable remotely had a pager. We also carried a brick style 'transportable' - I hesitate to use the word 'mobile' - phone. My manager liked the pager, because I could hand it in after a month on call and he could use the message history to justify the overtime payments to the bean counters. The telcos meanwhile made a handsome profit from both pager and portable telephony services.

GSM got invented. Some bright spark realized that once a call was set up and in progress, there was some redundant bandwidth to be had by using the control channels between the subs equipment and the cell base station. This was just enough for approximately 160 characters of text if encoded right....The rest, as they say, is history, with the total number of text messages sent during 2008 approaching the 80 billion mark, and that's just in the relative backwater of the UK market.

It's not always clear what the next 'killer app' is going to be in any given field of endeavor. Sometimes it just takes a fresh approach to an existing feature, a bit of the good old ingenuity that we humans are famous for. In my experience, a reliable test for the applicability of a new idea is that the principle is immediately blindingly obvious once it's been pointed out and you wonder why the hell nobody thought of it sooner...

So very true. I remember the first PCs. My company bought them to replace dedicated word processing machines from companies like Wang. At the time, nobody though anything of a small program called Visicalc. A year later, its spreadsheet had become the killer app which pushed PCs beyond the secretary's desk.

Can gcstar use a bar-code reader? That would be a great way to catalogue all the books I have.

And I'm not a girl.