Motorola's Zander sees the cellphone's future

Although Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) CEO Ed Zander has won a bit of time to try and turn around the fortunes of the company he leads, there is still much work to do. Billionaire financier Carl Icahn has apparently lost his bid for a Motorola board seat, and the pressure in Zander has eased a bit as a result. But Motorola still needs to get back in the wireless handset game after seeing rivals storm its gates in the last 18 months. So 2007 will be a tell-all year.

Even so, I'm not so sure I share Zander's prediction that many PC-like applications will soon port over to the cellphone, though. It's true that some web browsing and email are things I currently perform on my cellphone, but customer relationship management and forecasting software? On cellphones? I think modern wireless handsets will need a power boost and much better batteries before we even get close.

Motorola is apparently betting some of its future on this scenario, but some massive technological breakthroughs will need to happen to even enable this. Zander stated that "we're making a bet that what happened to PCs will happen to these [smart phones]." That's a fine sentiment, but I'm not holding my breath. Do workers really need these applications on a cellphone (even a Treo or BlackBerry)? Traveling pros already have that three-pound sub-mini notebook computer -- why duplicate that onto a tiny cellphone with a tiny battery and limited processing power? This makes very little sense to me, but I guess it did not stop several manufacturers from making the "Ultra-Mobile PC" -- which has flopped in the year plus since it was introduced to the market.