Research firm Gartner has identified eight mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2009 and 2010, impacting short-term mobile strategies and policies.

"All mobile strategies embed assumptions about technology evolution so it's important to identify the technologies that will evolve quickly in the life span of each strategy," said Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner. "The eight mobile technologies that we have pinpointed as ones to watch in 2009 and 2010 will have broad effects and, as such, are likely to pose issues to be addressed by short-term strategies and policies."

Here are the eight mobile technologies to watch for in future.

Bluetooth 3.0

Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released in 2009 (at which point its feature set will be frozen), with devices starting to arrive around 2010. Bluetooth 3.0 will likely include features such as ultra-low-power mode that will enable new devices, such as peripherals and sensors, and new applications, such as health monitoring.

Bluetooth originated as a set of protocols operating over a single wireless bearer technology. Bluetooth 3.0 is intended to support three bearers: 'classic' Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ultrawideband (UWB). It's possible that more bearers will be supported in the future. Wi-Fi is likely to be a more important supplementary bearer than UWB in the short term, because of its broad availability. Wi-Fi will allow high-end phones to rapidly transfer large volumes of data.

Mobile User Interfaces (UIs)

UIs have a major effect on device usability and supportability. They will also be an area of intense competition in 2009 and 2010, with manufacturers using UIs to differentiate their handsets and platforms. New and more-diverse UIs will complicate the development and support of business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.

Organisations should expect more user demands for support of specific device models driven by interface preferences. Companies should also expect consumer interfaces to drive new expectations of application behavior and performance. Better interfaces will make the mobile Web more accessible on small devices, and will be a better channel to customers and employees.

Location sensing

Location awareness makes mobile applications more powerful and useful; in the future, location will be a key component of contextual applications. Location sensing will also enhance systems, such as mobile presence and mobile social networking.

The growing maturity of on-campus location sensing using Wi-Fi opens up a range of new applications exploiting the location of equipment or people. Organisations delivering business or consumer applications should explore the potential of location sensing; however, exploiting it may create new privacy and security challenges.

802.11n

802.11n boosts Wi-Fi data rates to between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps, and the multiple-input, multiple-output technology used by 802.11n offers the potential for better coverage in some situations. 802.11n is likely to be a long-lived standard that will define Wi-Fi performance for several years.

High-speed Wi-Fi is desirable to stream media around the home and office. From an organisational perspective, 802.11n is disruptive; it's complex to configure, and is a "rip and replace" technology that requires new access points, new client wireless interfaces, new backbone networks and a new power over Ethernet standard.

However, 802.11n is the first Wi-Fi technology to offer performance on a par with the 100 Mbps Ethernet commonly used for wired connections to office PCs. It is, therefore, an enabler for the all-wireless office, and should be considered by companies equipping new offices or replacing older 802.11a/b/g systems in 2009 and 2010.