Interesting things are happening in the mobile market. It isn't just that notebooks are getting cheaper and more capable, or that phones are morphing into handheld camera-carrying computers. Here are five technologies to look out for. Some are evolutionary, others more radical. But the next few years will see a raft of developments that can affect how and where we work.

Mobile processors

Intel's Centrino mobile technology, introduced in March, effectively packages a new processor family with integrated wireless networking. The Pentium M is designed to work faster while drawing less power than an existing Pentium 4 rated at apparently the same speed

That means better battery life. And less power means less heat, with commensurately less need for cooling inside the box. Combine that with low-profile chips, and you have the potential for very slim laptop designs. Samsung's X10, one of the neatest Centrino examples, is less than 30mm thick and weighs 1.8kg; Toshiba's Port¿g¿ R100 (one of five Centrino models from Tosh) is a slim 1.1kg.

In a totally coincidental move, Intel's main rival AMD launched a dozen new mobile versions of its Athlon XP processor on the same date. The XP-M processors don't seem as radical as the Pentium M, but there's a lot more choice for the notebook manufacturers and much the same claims about low power consumption and super-flat designs.

Hardware geeks like the Centrino package. It might take a while for the notebook manufacturers to come up with designs that make the most of it, however. For instance, none of the early Centrinos have spectacular battery performance: reviewers are finding it hard to get better than two hours per charge.

Wi-fi

Wi-fi itself is emerging as the hot technology for notebooks. Also called 802.11 after the relevant industry standard, it's a short-range technology (up to 550 metres between you and a base station) that provides broadband performance at 512Kbps or more. All you need is a transmitter/receiver in your computer, some software that recognises what's happening on your behalf, and the availability of a base station.

With discreet transceiver boxes around the place, you can run a small business network without wired connections. Or you can turn up at an airport or a caf¿, switch on, and access your email - no need to plug into your mobile, no compromise on access speeds.

Wi-fi will be big - one day. Right now there aren't enough public-access "hotspots", and we aren't using them very much yet. Pricing and awareness seem the big drawbacks.

But the other high-potential area is the boondocks. In many rural parts, cable or ADSL simply aren't available. The options for high speed internet access come down to satellite and local wi-fi networks. With more of us moving into the countryside and working from home, anything that beats the cost and performance of ISDN looks really attractive.

But wi-fi itself is a moving target. Most implementations follow the 802.11b specification (including Centrino). The more recently available 802.11a and 802.11g are both faster and work at different wavelengths. Most hotspots use 802.11b right now, but they are expected to move over to 802.11g in the next year or so. For maximum flexibility, users need wi-fi transceivers that can automatically select the right speed and the best frequency for connection. It's all way too techie at the moment.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth has been around for a while now, having been announced in early 1998 by Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba. Bluetooth enabled devices can exchange information without a wired connection; and they don't need line-of-sight connections between the two.

Basically Bluetooth is for short range connections, up to 10 metres - though there is a high-power version that will go to 100m. The original idea was a simple, low-cost, low-power way to connect headsets to cell phones, but it has developed from that. So it looks good for connecting your mouse or a keyboard to your PC, your PC or your PDA to your printer, or your laptop to a projector. It's basically a matter of replacing cables, though the 3,000 or more vendors who signed up to the Bluetooth idea have been talking about everything from CD players to washing machines and refrigerators that could automatically order more food from online grocers.

A lot of the early hype is fading, especially as the United States seems to have become obsessed with wi-fi, which can communicate at speeds of up to 54Mbps against Bluetooth's 1Mbps and over ranges up to 500m rather than 10m. The Bluetooth developers are responding with version 2.0, due to be rolled out in the next year or so. This will permit higher speeds - up to 12Mbps - but sticks to the 10m range. There's a price to pay in power consumption, and the components will also cost more.

Bluetooth looks a good bet for universal, cheap, power-friendly wireless communications that can mix voice and data. It's great for wire-free printing and cableless headsets. Maybe it should stick to those limited horizons.

3G

3G is supposed to be the Third Generation of mobile telephony. It's a portmanteau term for an alphabet soup of internationally-specified technologies including WCDMA, CDMA2000, UMTS and EDGE. They should make cellphone communications both faster and broader, so more information can be sent to your phone with minimum delay.

If 3G really delivers, we can expect broadband speeds (2.4Mbps is promised) on our multi-function phone/PDA/camera devices. So 3G devices will be able to offer good-quality video images from built-in cameras, downloadable video on demand, high-speed data transfer for accessing the company network and full-speed internet.

We don't yet have 3G services, but we're already seeing 3G-style devices that mix PDA functions like email and addressbooks with built-in still or video cameras - and of course conventional voice telephony. The fly in the ointment is the price. Famously, the 3G operators paid huge amounts of money - around £22 billion in the UK - to use the required bits of the radio spectrum. It's not at all clear whether enough of us will be prepared to pay the substantial costs.

Killer applications aren't immediately obvious. There will be messaging services that combine email, voicemail, fax and text into a single application. Video and image services might provide videoconferencing and movie viewing. Real-time access to e-cash functions and information services like ticket reservations should be simple. And businesses can certainly see merit in simple remote access to company databases for centrally-held information.

Mesh networks

This is one for the far-distant future, which in IT terms means three or four years hence. Mesh networking turns nearly any wireless device into a router, creating an ad hoc network in which the information hops from one user's gadget to another until it gets where it's going. So each connected PC, phone, PDA, or laptop contributes a little of the routing, forming a kind of spontaneous, temporary wireless cooperative.

Sounds daft? Well, it should work - it will be cheap, fast and effectively without geographic limitation. It certainly looks feasible to mesh a neighbourhood or a campus, and it would be ideal for rural areas. Mesh networks will probably use existing 802.11 wi-fi technology, with an eye to wi-fi's proposed successor - another short-range protocol called UltraWideBand - which could deliver 400Mbps by 2005.

Already US startup MeshNetworks and Germany's Moteran Networks are developing competing commercial versions of mesh networking. Other research leaders include Intel, which is working on mesh systems that can figure out the best way to link all devices on the network and route the data the devices are swapping. This will require a little more intelligence in the wireless components - but not much.