Rich Tong reports that T-Mobile has nearly completed their Edge Network, which will be four times faster than GPRS.

As a user of T-mobile’s unlimited data plan on the Blackberry, I’m excited about this. It will make the Blackberry much more effective both for mobile data apps and as a tethered modem.

I don’t believe anyone has really created a decent browser based spreadsheet For example, Jotspot Tracker has table editing functionality, but with some significant limitations. (No formulas (!), no horizontal scrolling, no rectangular selections, etc.)

Part of the problem is that implementing a great spreadsheet using the standard browser text widgets is virtually impossible.

Rather than forcing a Flash or Java based approach, why not standardize a spreadsheet input field and build it into browsers?

It’s seems not difficult to specify or use:

Something like this would define the spreadsheet in markup:

<input type=”spreadsheet” name=”sheet”/>

When submitted, the spreadsheet values would be posted as a set of values such as “sheet[0][2]=hello”.

Naturally the spreadsheet field would be scriptable, allowing for things like formula computation, sorting, etc.

This seems simple and obvious enough that standardization and implementation in a range of browsers is achievable.

Om Malik confirms that Google has purchased Upstartle, the parent company of Writely.

I am a fan of Writely. The benefits of documents that I can access anywhere and edit collaboratively in many cases outweigh the loss of richness associated with browser based applications.

As you look at Om’s “Google Office” chart below, the obvious gaps are spreadsheets and presentations. More on that latter.