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Traveling across some of the more rural parts of America has given me a healthy dose of reality when it comes to national coverage of U.S. mobile carriers. While the movement towards national mobile coverage has been around since Craig McCaw in the early 80s, I still found pockets of emptiness on my travels.

Kentucky and some of its neighboring states have far greater challenges facing them than a lack of broadband. But can broadband play a small role in helping to revitalize the state?

I went shopping for prepaid phones and found the market can be quite confusing at times. The era of The Wire's burner phone is long gone.

MWC19 is upon us and it’s poised to be an exciting show thanks to the hype around 5G and revolutionary hardware innovations, such as foldable displays. While 5G will be the buzz word of MWC19, we are unlikely to see many consumer-oriented 5G device/service unveilings because of the premature state of the technology in terms of network deployments and device hardware developments. Nevertheless, there will still be a lot to get excited about at the show.

Apple caused a stir this week with the warning that it was going to miss smartphone sales expectations for the past quarter. While much of the focus was placed on the Chinese market, there’s far more to digest here. Fundamentally, consumers are not upgrading their iPhones as frequently as Apple had expected, but this should hardly be a surprise. And there are greater concerns looking forward.

The smartphone market has become rather boring over the past few years. But that may be about to change as we enter the era of foldable screens, potentially giving consumers a reason to lust after the next smartphone innovation.

Huawei launched its latest smartphones today, the Mate 20 and the Mate 20 Pro; and while we don’t usually focus on a single product launch in a blog, this one is worth the attention for a couple of reasons. Huawei has managed to upstage the typical flagship smartphones with this latest launch; and the U.S. market will probably not even notice, despite the fact that this is a major smartphone launch from the second largest smartphone manufacturer worldwide.

We’ve entered the time of year when the latest and greatest smartphones are revealed, just in time for the upcoming holiday season. And, as usual, we’re going to be seeing some pretty neat enhancements in power management and camera specs. But… we’ve all been saying that for years.

Last week, under the shadow of a dozen new Echo devices, Amazon continued their pursuit to redefine TV. The latest product launch expanded the Echo device ecosystem deeper into the home with new speakers, a plug, clock, microwave, and other voice-enabled gadgets. Further, the all new Fire TV Recast device is aimed at routing a larger portion of consumers TV viewing time through Amazon’s ecosystem of hardware and services.

The technology ecosystem is evolving and the smartphone may no longer be the dominant consumer product. Welcome to the Age of Voice and Artificial Intelligence (AI).