2007 has been a turning point for the mobile industry with carriers finally accepting they were not fancy-shamcy media companies but just dumb pipes!

After poor results in mobile TV and the video calling and multimedia messaging flops, mobile operators needed new growth opportunities to cover their 3G license costs. And, as Fred Vogelstein explained in "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry", the launch of the iPhone in mid-2007 finally triggered this shift by forcing carriers to give more power to manufacturers, developers, producers and consumers.

The result in early 2008 is an intense competition in mobile broadband offers. Keeping your laptop connected wherever your are now starts at £7.50 a month. Even non-geeky newspapers like The Guardian are now helping their readers to find the best deal.

So the time might have come to replace our old ADSL subscriptions by a 3G dongle... and no longer rely on those patchy wifi hotspots!

If you're craving for an iPhone but haven't planned to fly to the US before xmas - or just don't want to take the risk of unlocking it despite the good news from the activation unlock contest - have a look at the Neo1973 from OpenMoko.

The open-sourced Linux mobile phone, which had been introduced before the iPhone last year, not only looks like an iPhone but also has a similar multi-touch screen, a wifi interface and 3D accelerometers. However, there's a major difference between those two nice toys. While the iPhone is locked and its applications are strictly controlled by Apple, Neo's software and hardware are designed to be expandable and fully configurable by the developer community.

The Neo1973 is already available online in its developer preview version ($300 without WLAN). The consumer edition will be released in October. So, are you iPhone or Neo?

Official site: http://www.openmoko.com

Excellent article from Clive Thompson in the July issue of Wired about the success of Twitter and how/why those constant-contact media applications create a sixth sense he calls social proprioception.

Clive explains that, although most of the Twitter messages, taken individually, seem pointless, being constantly ping about what your friends are doing, creates a sort of collective consciousness, a subliminal sense of coordination similar to proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are.

Read the article here: http://tinyurl.com/2np4um