We're ready for wireless. Is it ready for us?

I showed up at last week's Wireless Innovations, the Dow Jones wireless venture capital event, expecting to see and hear more of the same tired themes:

• "technology as panacea"
• "angst and confusion about delayed adoption"
• "wireless+venture capital=ugly lovechild"

What I heard was different. For the first time in years. I was impressed.

The talking heads just may be starting to get it. Three new themes - ones you've known about for years - got more air time than Reverend Wright on YouTube:

• The mobile end-user experience sucks.
• That is what has delayed adoption.
• Handhelds will become our primary computing devices when mobile applications become context-aware.

Excellent points. Reiterated by carriers like T-Mobile (Joe Sims, VP and GM, Broadband and New Business), hardware manufacturers like RIM (Nedim Fresko, Director of Strategic Platform Initiatives), and infrastructure players like Qualcomm (Sayeed Choudhury, Product Manager for System Software) during the two-day event.

Mobile devices won't just become the dominant computing environment. They'll be better than PCs because they'll do everything we need to do, nothing we don't, and they'll layer intelligence on top of traditional apps like voice to text, location-based services, and collaboration tools that give the flat, tethered computing experience of the past richness and depth it never had.

I sat in on about 30 product demos from early-stage companies. Many showed real promise. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• Ribbit: voice meets Web 2.0 - a platform for building telephony applications. The example shown incorporated visual voicemail into Salesforce.com using a soft VoIP keypad.
• Foneshow: radio on your phone - on-demand news and programs delivered as voice calls to standard phones.
• Ontela: iPhone camera features meet every phone - take, manage, offload, and send camera phone pictures with ordinary devices as if they were high-end smartphones.

Wireless data isn't mainstream. Handhelds aren't our primary computing devices. But both will be soon. What is clear as day is that social and cultural barriers aren't the culprit. When the mobile user experience is truly better than the PC experience, it's game over for anyone in the software industry who slept through the shift. And by the way, a bunch of smart entrepreneurs are almost there.

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tags: Aeroprise |  BlackBerry |  Blackberry |  Remedy |  Remedy AR System |  wireless