Adam Balkin, Your Technology

"Mobile" in the world of technology means taking it with you, whatever “it” happens to be, whether it’s music, pictures, movies, or anything else. Some manufacturers are constantly churning out new devices for toting your content all over the globe, like Samsung's RTA 1100.

“Basically, it's a complete home media center,” says Jermain Anderson of Samsung. “It’s got a built-in hard drive that allows you store music, videos, mp3s, photos directly on the actual player – download them straight from your actual PC and what you're going to do is move it anywhere you want to and store that media there and be mobile from there.”

Other manufacturers are instead taking smaller devices that already do that kind of thing, like iPods, and making the content easier to enjoy. Get set to start seeing these types of devices from a few developers, such as one from a company called Microvision, called the Show Pocket Projector.

“It projects a high-definition image onto any surface from the signal received from an iPod, cell phone, or any other mobile device,” says Alex Tokman of Microvision. “The beauty of this device, you can generate an image as small as a computer screen or as large as a 60-inch plasma television.”

The ultimate goal for developers of these projectors is to eventually get manufacturers to just build them right into the iPods, cell phones and other mobile devices.

The third strategy in trying to quench our collective thirst to be more mobile is to make the devices we already have just do more. Sling Media, for one, is working on software for Blackberries so that soon they'll be able to access Slingboxes to watch, from anywhere in the world, the cable box or DVD player that sits under your TV at home.

At a time when your cell phone can play video games, your digital music player and GPS unit can make phone calls, Sony decided it was time for its PSP PlayStation portable to do a little bit more.

“We just released Firmware update 3.8, which allows you to do streaming internet radio at no charge other than your wireless service, whatever that might be,” says Christian Cardona of Sony Computer Entertainment.

“We've also just announced Skype, which will be available for the PSP 2000 model, and you'll be able to use the Skype service to be able to talk to friends who are on PCs, on Skype, on other PSPs on Skype, and even be able to call phone lines and other lines," continued Cardona.

The scary thing is, we're almost to the point where any device that fits in your pocket that doesn’t do all those things is kind of thought of as low-tech.

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