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My Treo 650 cell phone has a keyboard.  I’m pretty sure whatever I buy after my Treo 650 will also have a keyboard.  It’s just so useful for email, looking up websites, and writing reminders to myself.

If my cell phone had perfect voice recognition or a perfect touch screen, I might be able to do without a keyboard.  While that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime in the next few years, a clever company called Jott has come up with something almost as good for sending yourself reminders.

You register at their website (http://www.jott.com), then whenever you call their special 800 number, the message you leave in the voicemail at that number is automatically emailed to you in both voice and text formats.

One night in 1991, John Ellenby and his son Thomas were sailing off the coast of Mexico. To compensate for John Ellenby’s poor sense of direction, they tied together a compass, a Global Positioning System receiver and binoculars. That made it possible for them to simply to point at an object or a navigational landmark to identify it. The Ellenby’s, to their credit, didn’t stop there. They formed a company, GeoVector, that developed software that allows a user of a wireless device to simply point at an item in the real world and click to obtain information about the item. Japanese wireless carriers are the first to deploy this innovation.

As the New York Times states:

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. …. Think of it as a divining rod for the information age.

This is a particularly interesting form of geographically based search. Click here for the rest of the article.

What will the here web, the mobile, in your pocket web be like in a year? Today a graphics chip maker announced an all in one computer chip, on sale by the end of the year, that would provide the chip based processing for screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 (equal to many desktop monitors) and capable of taking up to 10 megapixel photos (Nvidia’s new graphics chip). And a hard drive manufacturer has introduced a 1 inch hard drive that stores 12 gigabytes (Seagate’s 12GB 1″ hard drive). With such advances, the need for robust broadband wireless access grows more acute.