How often have you heard someone ask you – just after you pulled out your Treo or Blackberry or any other PDA phone. “Do you like your phone? I am thinking of getting one of these..” I have a Treo and have carried a blackberry in the recent past. If I go back far enough, I have carried a Apple Newton with an EMBARC ( Electronic Mail Broadcast to A Roaming Computer) wireless receiver card, briefly considered a “SIMON” personal communicator from Bellsouth/IBM. I gave up on the Simon since I would need to do some weight training to handle it right but the Apple Newton was great for making new friends on the plane. Had a Palm VII connected to a wireless network for a while, carried around a Metricom Richochet attached to my laptop until that service was discontinued. Toyed around with the Nokia 9000 (monochrome version) for a while, during my time in Europe and Asia – but wasn’t satisfied. The quest for the ideal personal communicator device continues – and I for one after nearly fifteen years, haven’t found the ideal device yet.PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) have become faster, have more memory and have smart operating systems. Most of them can run a limited version of your desktop applications and/or provide a way to read your document files. The support for email has gotten better and blackberry has earned its “crackberry” nickname. Miniaturization has worked great for components but not for usability when it comes to keyboards or small screens. We need a lighter, faster, powerful, small device (with large screen and large keyboard), with a long battery life (using a light battery of course), with support for WiFi, Bluetooth and probably VOIP (Voice Over IP) support.
My ideal “personal communicator” would have a large screen but in a small form factor, extremely light (would like a clamshell design), long battery life, powerful enough to view, edit my desktop files, browse the internet, check and respond to email and a full keyboard. Enable me to synchronize my calendar with my desktop or network calendar. Biometric security would be nice to have and if I could also use my phone as a payment device at restaurants, vending machines that would be a big plus.
Are we there yet? Large screen in a small factor is a bit difficult to implement physically but the phone can project a screen and a keyboard (virtual keyboard – VKB). VKBs have reached the European market and companies such as Canesta have made “typing in thin air” a reality. Based on the few demos I have seen, projection screens are still a few years away – but you get the picture. Future cellphones will be lighter but still project a full keyboard (when you need one) and of course, project a full desktop screen. That would be very handy probably replace my laptop.
As we add more power to the cellphone and more features, battery life becomes critical. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells are the standard on phones today, but rarely last more than a few hours of talk-time. Nearly five years ago, Motorola announced a milestone in miniaturizing fuel cell technology to power cell phones. More recently Toshiba announced a miniaturized fuel cell and pictures of this fuel cell can be found on the web. Expectation is that these fuel-cells will have a life that is at least be double that of the current lithium battery life. There’s a catch – you still cannot take a fuel-cell powered device on a plane. But it does look like the power problem will get resolved in the future.
More powerful chips from AMD and Intel will make these “personal communicators” more powerful. With powerful operating systems such as Symbian, Palm or that of Microsoft – we should expect a near desktop experience on these phones in the future. There are several phones (Authentec, PanTech, Willcom) already on the market that support fingerprint based biometric authentication on the phone. More than 20m Koreans make payments using their cellphone – it’s only a matter of time before cell-phone based payments make their way to North America.
In short, the phone of the future may meet our expectations. For now, I am going to get a second phone for voice only and relegate the Treo to calendar, email and browsing – this may also decrease my likelihood of swerving off I-70 while trying to find a phone number sans a scroll wheel on the Treo at exactly 70mph (no more- no less)
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: phone, Technology, treo
