Mobile Devices

Kicking like a 20-year-old baby, the Internet may finally be entering its long-awaited young-adult phase. It's about time: Folks have awaited "Web 2.0" since at least 1999. Part of Web 2.0 is what some call "The Apps Revolution," app being short for application , a small program you can download into your mobile phone. In Web 1.0, you sat at a desk, looked at a screen, visited search engines and sites on something called "the Web," and looked at what they had. In Web 2.0, people are less tethered to desks and moving toward, among other things, the mobile phone to make a customized, self-created universe of Internet uses.

LOS ANGELES - President Obama will soon be able to send any cellphone in the United States a text-message warning of impending danger, from a tornado to a terrorist, under a new emergency alert system. The system - PLAN, for Personal Localized Alerting Network - is an expansion of the Federal Communications Commission's emergency alert system, now broadcast over radio and TV. PLAN will be rolled out in New York City by the end of 2011, with the rest of the country to follow about mid-2012, the FCC said in a statement.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Internet & American Life Project released a 23-page report Monday: "How mobile devices are changing community information environments. " The findings, based on a 26-question telephone survey conducted during two weeks in January with 2,251 adults, can be summarized in fewer words than your average Twitter feed: Not much. To expand (but in the spirit of the subject, only a little), the public's attitude toward palm-of-the-hand media is: Give us the weather, not the news.

Last month, my husband and I bought a cell phone for our daughter. She is 9 years old. Our daughter is among the 22 percent of the country's grade-school kids who own a cell phone, according to C&R Research. By the time she reaches middle school, 60 percent or more of her friends will have caught up. And these numbers are going up by the minute. In her first few hours of cell-phone ownership, our daughter exchanged more than 80 text messages with her best friend. We advised her friend's parents to change their plan.

Kimoiyah Valdez was crossing Broad Street at a leisurely pace on a recent afternoon. She didn't notice that the light had turned or that opposing traffic had started to drive through the intersection. "I almost got hit," she said. The 20-year-old Olney woman was seriously distracted: Valdez was busy sending text messages from her cell phone to her friends as she ambled through Center City. OMG. Texting can be a hazardous occupation. All those multitaskers who tap furiously on keypads of mobile devices - often while walking, biking, blading, driving - are suffering crashes and burns, not to mention assaults to the ego. LOL?

The Nevada Gaming Commission approved rules yesterday that will permit casinos to offer wireless handheld gambling devices to people who want to gamble away from the casino floor. The 5-0 vote means that the devices will now be tested in various casinos here and in the commission's technology lab over the next three to six months. Once the testing is complete, makers of wireless gambling devices can seek approval of their products for use in a casino's public areas, such as restaurants or the pool area.