As many of us depend on portable devices like tablets and notebooks for both work and for leisure, it"s sometime a pain to deal with the fact that many tablets, and the majority of notebooks, don"t have built in cellular wireless connections, relying only on Wi-Fi.
Glenn Lurie, the head of the emerging devices division at AT&T, believes the time is past where having a cellular wireless connection for tablets, and indeed all computing devices, is a nice option. AllThingsD.com reports that Lurie would like to see cellular wireless technology everywhere.
He states:
Wi-Fi only is not enough. We try to look for all the opportunities in the world to get the OEMs to understand that they shouldn’t be building two devices. They should be building one device with Wi-Fi and 4G. It’s more efficient for them than having two [product] lines.
Lurie does say that having that kind of hardware on board is still something that companies need to persuade customers that they need to buy, even if it makes the hardware itself more expensive. Of course AT&T would also love to get more customers to sign up to use its own wireless network, and get more money in the process.
Sooner or later, all portable electronic devices will have some way to always connect to the Internet, no matter where their location might be. The two big questions are: "When will that happen?" and more importantly, "How much will it cost?"
Source: AllThingsD.com