WiFi on the A1010 means mean

It was interesting to follow how quickly news about the A1010 was spreading around in forums and sites around a month ago. At first I did´nt trust the buzz, mainly because it's so easy to fake a story like that. But after the 3GSM conference the news seems to be true. As of today Rafe at All About Symbian updates his story about the A1010 and provides a link to an interview with a Motorola rep. When I first learned about the A1010, three things caught my attention.

First, it won´t be available until Q4 this year, possibly later. That's  good news for this blog, since it's life  is dependent on how long I have the A1000 (the blog might end up in a museum next year or so :-).

Second, maybe I'm crazy, but the first thing I saw was that the navigation key has grown (see the picture). In a previous post I complained about the slippery key. Fat chance that Motorola saw that, but it's good that they have understood the problem and done something about it. It's going to be interesting to see how many of my hardware related annoyances will spill over to the next generation of A1xxx users.

Finally, and here comes the mean stuff, the A1010 will have WiFi. Whow, will that change how I use the phone at home, and whenever there is a WiFi-spot around! But the real strike will hit the operators. It's easy to imaginate an application that senses when the phone comes into a WiFi are, downloads some music, video, data and sends outboxed stuff that was not time critical. Talking about lost Mbyte revenue for the ops. Ooops. Besides that, voice over ip (e.g. Skype) will also most likely support a change of power back into the hands of the hardware manufacturers (which nowadays are pulled around by the operators). Wonder if the overpaid telco analysts have included that in their estimates of the operator's market value (doubt it, because I've been looking for such signs for many years...)