Data connectivity is more of a pain than the industry would have you believe. Mobile data is expensive, connectivity is often spotty, data speeds vary wildly and most robust mobile data connections will drain your battery. And if you're a frequently connected business traveler, you can generally expect astronomical mobile data bills. While virtually all popular mobile applications rely on web connectivity, we in turn have gradually opened our wallets while draining our batteries and increasing our frustrations, one byte at a time.
Windows Phone looks to be heading in the right direction in this regard. And it's a VERY welcome direction.
The latest Bing app for Windows Phone offers what appears to be a fairly robust translation engine, and unlike their predecessors, Windows looks to be addressing our data-limited reality. While their "on-the-fly" augmented reality translator looks remarkably similar to other we have seen in the past, Windows is offering mobile travelers the ability to download a language pack.
Windows looks to finally be recognizing our real mobile realities - we have massive amounts of storage and incredible computing power on hand. It is a shame that so many of our mobile experiences rely so heavily on expensive, jittery and occasionally unreliable data connections.
To hell with the carriers, here's to a better, only occasionally connected mobile experience.
