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Phones, dreams, and the mobile Internet

Tags:
Nokia,
Ericsson,
Motorola,
Wireless

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Jan 2001 17:37 GMT

Right now, all the mobile phone network operators are staring ruin in the face. They all want to be part of the universal mobile telephone system, UMTS, now known as Third Generation or G3; but the price of a ticket for that runs into billions of dollars. And if you buy the ticket, the only way of getting the money back is to sell billions of dollars worth of G3 services.

That's not easy if you have to pay your subscribers to take one of your G3 phones. It's even less easy if people who were paying 15p a minute last year are expecting to pay 2p a minute this year. And somehow, somewhere, you have to find resources to put up all the new wireless masts and all the new backbone networks to support them.

And the land where you're allowed to, by panicking public health alarmists who think that cellphone masts will make children's noses bleed.

Enter Microsoft; purveyor of the Pocket PC. It has spotted something which its big rival, Palm, still hasn't quite twigged: that communications are key to the future of the PDA. And, because Microsoft's centre of excellence for PDAs is in Scandinavia, not California or Seattle, it knows that mobile data really does work, the way it works in Europe and the rest of the world, and the way it doesn't work in the US.

So it's doing the obvious thing, and designing smartphones which are phones with Windows CE inside them. Have a look at Trium's Mondo, launched earlier this month; a phone that uses GSM (voice) and GPRS (data) to provide something which is actually too big for a phone, and not big enough to be a really good PDA, but all the same, gives you some idea of where we're headed.

Where are we headed? That's not hard! -- we're going to see the modularisation of the portable Internet access device. It will have a display unit, a power unit, a wireless access unit, and a processor unit; and you'll connect them together.

There's just one snag about all that; wires -- and if you doubt me, try spending a couple of weeks with one of these "hands-free" devices, and see how much of your time you spend untangling knots. There's just one solution to that: Bluetooth.

Alas; Bluetooth wireless devices in production today still don't work reliably, and are expensive. But far worse than either of those, they chew batteries up. If you had a wireless headset for hands-free speech, it would need a new battery every half hour, or it would weigh so much you'd have to build it into a special cap.

This time 2003, that is, in 24 months' time, every little phone will be equipped with Bluetooth that is both reliable and light-weight and miserly with your battery; and you'll have the batteries built into your belt, the earpiece built into your sun-glasses, and the display will be a full colour organic LCD screen.

That sort of product would absolutely save the phone network providers today.

But you can't built such a device today; and the result is that they are all panicking. Where will they get their revenue from? Data traffic, they say. Build data-enabled devices into phones, they say.

Ericsson has done the smart thing. It's going to be a horrible mess; the data devices are horrible, the networks don't know how to charge for data, and the applications you might need, don't work yet. The only people who will be laughing will be those who are selling new backbone equipment to the panicking phone network providers.

That is to say, Ericsson, Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. And, I predict, Nokia, when it finds its way out of the maze. And maybe even Motorola, but let's not get carried away, here. I'm not promising anything. Some things are beyond the imagination...

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