It's almost always well out of my purview, I'm 'here' to keep networking, clients and servers, firewalls and other security measures working. But there's a 45 degree upward slope in the number of times someone asks me to do something for them on their mobile device.

Primarily this sucks because I don't have any such devices myself and don't know right where to go to accomplish something. I come off as all thumbs. Secondly, I have exactly one user that needs their wireless portable device to access the home office, the rest of them are personal use devices. I often spend up to an hour figuring something out for a customer that I can't really charge them for.

Bad all around. The only solution I can see is that I get a couple devices and get familiar with them, which I'd rather not so. (I spend enough time on my current work load)

I'd just about be compelled to get a blackberry, iphone and some android device, which would be a lot of $$$ I'm not in the best position to spend.

As for blowing out dust, basic network maintenance and related, I love that stuff, it feels a natural niche for me, it took me a lot of years to migrate into the position I'm in and I love my work.

For reasons behind the stated purpose of smart phones and the like, I'm not too excited about what mobile is becoming. Seems to me the people gathering information about the user behind the curtains are getting far more out of the devices than any user.

For one thing, having a mobile device probably increases your risk of dying in an automobile accident. My biggest beef on the road is people yakking away absent minded behind the wheel. I've seen a lot of near misses that the perpetrator was completely oblivious of.

The other 'big use' for these devices seems to be games. The first ten ipads I saw didn't even have any productivity software installed beyond a default calendar, which no one was using. Of course comment to them all was "angry birds," followed by a chess game you can play remotely at any time, the players need not be logged in at the same time. Big whup. Sounds like beta testing of time and location tracking software to me.

Unfortunately mobile is where a lot of people are going, like it or not, useful or not I imagine I'm going to end up doing a lot of that kind of support in the future.