Are mobile apps really apps ??

I'd say more than 50% of the apps that I use are not "self-sustaining" apps. They wont work without the internet. They are dumb apps that are driven by webservices / web data. I am really wondering if the mobile apps are really apps or just an extension of the web data into our mobiles..Many pundits claim that this is the age of mobility and that mobile computing / technologies will dominate over the traditional computing systems. In a way we all see that. We see a lot more smart mobile devices being used compared to 4 - 5 yrs ago. Sure! they are a revolution but I think the internet / web is a more powerful phenomenon than the mobile revolution. Instead of using browsers on a desktop / laptop to access data from the cloud, we (or atleast I) are using so called mobile apps to access the same cloud. I use facebook / twitter more from my iPhone than my laptop. Infact mobile computing is boosting up cloud computing.
Sometimes I am at the crossroads of technology wondering which bus (mobile / cloud /..) to take. As a lover of CS and a passionate programmer, I'd always want to wet my hands & feet with every major technology. Ofcourse I want to write mobile apps and ofcourse I want to get much more involved with the cloud but IMHO the cloud will last longer than the mobile. The cloud will be the base and power much more than the mobile world. So why is the cloud growing in power ??? simple coz it has the data. I am getting reminded of deep throat advising Bob Woodward "Follow the money"... For us its "Follow the data"

Voice powered Google search in iPhone

Google has just released a new version of its app in iPhone with voice capabilities. You can open the app, lift the phone to your ear and talk to search. This is a really cool feature and is something that integrates voice to search to vision (as results are displayed in the screen). This should hopefully kick start the generation of voice based apps .
I just upgraded to this new version of Google mobile app and it was good. It is not perfect, atleast the app didnt really recognize my accent correctly. But the idea of integrating voice with search is very impressive and hopefully the app should learn my accent and voice soon.

The FCC Auction

FCC (Federal Communications Commisson) announced the results of the wireless spectrum auction last week. Several large mobile service providers participated in the auction and Verizon bagged the much coveted block C. This article from Technology review gives a good big picture of what this auction is about and why it matters.

Will Phone be the Next Computer ?

MS envisions that Phone will replace computers in the future. I would agree with them. Phones are really getting smarter and has good industry and research backing. Maybe Web 3.0 might be Phone 1.0 ?? wherein people would migrate over to using their phones for some of the common functions like mail, word processing, browsing, ecommerce and more. The main issue I see with Phones are the User interface. Even if we have smart keypads and total LCD based display, it is still inconvenient to view pages and work on a phone. If we could integrate virtual reality with the phone, maybe it would become easy to visualize data in phones.