'Twas a couple of afternoons before Christmas, and as I'm sitting here, realising I'm rapidly running out of time to get my remaining Christmas shopping done, I find my mind wandering to the subject of my hopes and wishes for developments in mobile phone technology.   One thing's for sure - 2005 is set to be the year of the 3G mobile phone.   It's only a matter of time now before nice 3G smart phones (with great Java support!) begin to appear.

So I don't need to wish for that.  If I could ask Santa for one thing, it would be a good solution to the problem of data entry on mobile phones.  I don't want SMS style T-9 predictive input.  I don't really want hand-writing recognition (as impressive as it sometimes is).  And I don't even want fiddly little QWERTY keyboards, even though this is the probably the best solution we have right now.

No, what I want is something that lets people be as productive entering data on their phones, as they are at entering data on their PCs.   So... I wish... that this kind of technology (a full-size virtual keyboard, where an image of a keyboard is projected onto a flat surface by a laser, and you simply type on the image as you would a real keyboard)...




... is improved, minituriased, and integrated nicely into a Java-enabled Smart Phone.  Then we'd be cooking!


But enough of all that. Time for me to start really thinking about Christmas now.  I wish everyone out there a wonderful Christmas, and a prosperous New Year.  'Tis the season to be jolly, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la...