Comment: Who wants fun and games by the pool?

The amount of "games on phones" stuff to be seen at the 3GSM mobile phone show has been exaggerated.

But it hasn't been exaggerated much. Games are the new spreadsheets: everybody seems to think that the whole world wants to sit by a swimming pool with a phone that burns its battery to death playing imitation Gameboy software.

These fashions come and go: what can't be avoided is the hard truth that they go more than they come. I remember when SF was the new news-stand redeemer - every magazine and book-stall seemed to have four times as many shelves for half-baked imitation Tolkien and Asimov, as they did for real books. Today, the SF has nearly all gone. Shortly, there will also be fewer games; on the PC, games are a minority interest.

Business isn't. So I am pleased to report that a new pressure group - Mobile Enterprise Alliance - has been started up. It isn't ready to "come out" yet, but it is avidly recruiting anybody and everybody involved in mobile IT, starting with Palm and Citrix and HP, and moving across from PDAs to phones with Symbian and Nokia.

The process of recruiting proceeds apace; my guess is that by the time it launches at the Hanover Cebit show next month, the group will be able to boast at least half a dozen phone companies as well as PDA people.

The presence of Citrix as a founding member does at least guarantee that this really is a business IT matter, and not just another mobile phone boondoggle.

What it does not have, yet, are any conspicuous names from the wireless LAN arena. Let's hope that the other half of the wireless world is persuaded to join. If this is left as only a GSM club, it can't succeed.

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