One of my favorite movies is "Dave," the Kevin Kline vehicle in which the owner of a small temporary-employment agency is pressed into duty impersonating the president. For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about that film lately. Perhaps it's all the election shenanigans; as I write this we still don't have a president-elect. Whatever the reason, I keep thinking about a scene in the film in which Vice President Nance, played by Ben Kingsley, comes back from a diplomatic tour of Africa loaded down with cultural artifacts from every country on the continent.

Then again, perhaps it's Fall Comdex. As our intrepid Senior Editor Phil Davies came back with all kinds of tech trinkets and a serious case of sensory overload from five days at the show, I couldn't help but see a fuzzy version of Kingsley's visage in our British editor. And as I sat on the bus next to Phil shortly after his return, I laughed out loud at the thought, to which he inquired about my sanity.

"I was just thinking that I sent you out to that jungle, and you suffered through it and returned with a serious look on your face, as though Comdex is just part of the normal course of your duties--it made me laugh," I said.

"Thanks a lot," he said with his BBC4 accent. "It went OK, there weren't any whiz-bang releases, but there also weren't any hookers posing as PR flacks either. All in all, much more boring than you warned me it would be.

"I saw a lot of stuff in three rough categories," he continued. "Wireless Web, ASPs [Application Service Providers], and Linux. The one product I was most impressed with that combines the first two phenomena is a voice product called IVAN Online, which allows users to search the Web through a natural-language voice interface. The application can be delivered through an ASP to Web-enabled handheld devices, as well as through traditional means to standard interfaces. If they can make this concept work as well as the demo, it strikes me as a killer app."

As the bus pulled onto the interstate toward home, I smiled as I thought about one of my first articles for ComputerUser. Back in 1996, when I was a contributing editor and the Palm Pilot was first released, I did a futuristic piece in which I imagined hiking down a portage trail with a Pilot in my shirt pocket and a canoe on my back, dictating data from the Web into a database on my PC back at the office. It always makes me smile when a past prediction seems to be imminent.

As Phil stated in last month's Year in Preview feature, it is easy to foretell the distant future: No one will remember when you get it wrong. It's much tougher to get the salient predictions right--those that help your business in the near term. As I talked about my past prediction, I expressed the skepticism that it will be a pipe dream for a few years to come.

"That sounds cool," I said, "But a lot of stuff needs to happen before it's feasible for anyone but the early adopters. For one thing, WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] is way overblown and will never live up to people's expectations of what the Web is like.

"Second, wireless bandwidth still has a long way to go before we see something like streaming video delivered to palm-tops, contrary to the popular Nortel commercial," I continued. "And when you're talking about delivering the entire voice-recognition application from an ASP via the wireless Internet, which is slower than commercial dial-up, delays would kill necessary timing involved. It would be more like speak and hope for the best.

"Third, I wonder how strong the market really is," I said. "My little futuristic fantasy critically underestimates that many people don't want to be plugged in when away from the office. After pounding the Web for a full day, the last thing I want to do is strain my eyes with a tiny screen to access the Web. I'd rather read print and wait the half-hour until I get home."

As the geek in front of us turned around as if to ask, "Who are these guys?" we just went right along with our data dump. "Yeah," Phil said. "People expect full-screen video when they go on the Web and are disappointed when all they get is four lines of text on their WAP phones. That was the crux of one of the seminars I attended. But what about the power of voice? Everyone admits a major limitation to palm computing is the interface."

"I guess I'm jaded by speech technologies," I said. "I've seen so many faked demos and false promises that it's hard for me to get too excited about it. I suppose it has its niche, especially in technologies for the disabled. But not as the sole means for searching the Web. You're still going to want manual intervention at some point, and then you're limited by the interface. Those folding Palm keyboards could help, though."

"Thanks for squelching my enthusiasm for the one killer app I saw," Phil said sardonically. "I still think voice could have a place in wireless business."

"Don't get me wrong, there is a place for voice, both speech-to-text and text-to-speech, as in unified messaging through the WAP phone," I stuttered. "But its usage will be limited and won't really make productivity contributions until wireless bandwidth improves and our culture becomes more mobile."

As the bus lurched through its route, dropping off passengers on its way to our neighborhood, Phil recalled a keynote at the show by Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, which foretold of the coming wireless "Renaissance."

"Carly thinks those cultural changes are just around the corner," he said. "I suppose you're skeptical about this as well."

"You know me too well," I quipped. "Yes, I wrote a ReleVents column on this. One of the reasons we're so far behind Europe and Asia in wireless is our rugged individualism. We need to get away from it all and feel free from the fetters of our business communities for periods of time. This contributes to what I call wireless aversion. Generation Y has shown less of this, so I suppose the culture will change, but not as fast as Carly predicts."

Almost in mid-sentence, we came to my stop and agreed to continue the conversation back at the office. The discussion certainly did not demand flipping open our cell phones and continuing it as we walked to our homes from the bus, however. That's part of my point: few topics are so important they can't wait until the next business day.

James Mathewson is editorial director of ComputerUser.com.