What You Think About the Future

As an editor, I've always been a little leery of magazine feature articles that rank the “best of” or “top” anything. To me, they raise questions about methodology and motivation and the perception of exclusivity in what is supposed to be objective coverage — not to mention the questionable role that editors of any ilk should take in bestowing entities with those kinds of labels.

On Wireless Review and its sister publication, Telephony, we take a different approach. We rely on the reporting of our editorial staff, and especially on the feedback from our sources and our readers, to determine how and why we cover various wireless industry categories. We also take a very forward-looking view of the trends that we cover. Rather than just looking back at what companies and technology platforms already have made their marks, we look ahead at what our industry sources are saying about their potential for the future of mobility. In short, we reflect the industry's collective thinking and doing, and we try to shed some light on the potential results of it all.

The cover story of this month's issue is a good example. Rather than ranking the wireless industry's “top” companies or technologies, we've tried to provide our readers with a broad and balanced look at why certain technology sectors have the potential to alter the mobile future — and how the efforts of some of the companies backing those technologies are helping to sculpt that future. We're certainly not trying to create a hierarchy of importance, pass judgment on technology developments that don't fall in the areas we've chosen or tacitly disparage sectors or companies that don't happen to be part of our report.

Our specific choices in the feature support that reasoning: We've tried to cover the gamut of wireless, from enhanced voice applications (push-to-talk) to broadband wireless (WiMAX and EV-DO) to data transmission capabilities (content platforms) to future-generation mobile networks (4G).

Most important, our content selections are based on the feedback that we get from you. Our decisions about what to — and what not to — cover in a report like this are shaped by what we hear from our readers in the wireless service provider community, as well as our observations about what's happening in the technology developer community.

We hope you'll let us know how you think we fared with our report, and that you will continue to communicate your observations and expertise to our editorial staff. It's that kind of readership feedback that we believe makes our editorial efforts the most relevant to the wireless business.