NEW YORK-Cellular terminals have come a long way in the quarter century since Motorola introduced its handheld Dyna
TAC mobile phone, a clunky device that weighed nearly 0.9 kilograms and measured 0.09 cubic meters (35 cubic inches). To be sure, the days of weighty loads and short talk times are long gone.
But the future for terminals is largely uncertain. In the new millennium, the cell phone handset that emerges from the fledgling convergence of voice, data and image is still a hazy affair, with no single standard or format on the horizon.
Before the industry settles on a single handset format, users will likely be flooded with a diverse array of terminal choices designed to suit the needs of multiple market niches, agreed executives at the top three manufacturers, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia.
“With increased capacity and speed we will be able to send data, voice and pictures, and there will probably be multimedia devices that can send live and still pictures, data and voice at the same time,” said Bo Albertson, Ericsson’s marketing director. “I think before we get to that point, you will see different devices-voice-centric and data-centric devices-for different purposes.”
Driving the coming market divisions that handset manufacturers are forecasting will be the Internet and its estimated 300 million users worldwide.
“The Internet is going to go mobile, and with it all kinds of new services, and we’ll start to see that in the next year,” said Paul Chellgren, vice president of new business development and product management at Nokia Mobile Phones in Dallas. “What you’ll start to see is a wider segmentation of phones. You might have just plain old voice phones, but also phones that are small but with big displays. You’ll see phones with different keypads and different input methods.”
Data enabling
Further fueling handset diversity will be the entrance of traditional consumer electronics and computing companies into the communications fray. Each will have its own ideas about what shapes future handsets will take.
Ovum, a London market research firm, predicted “considerable experimentation” in handset development by manufacturers. In addition, manufacturers are aligning with different groups, such as Symbian, Wireless Knowledge, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum and Bluetooth, each vying for the top spot as a dominant standard or initiative.
Bluetooth and WAP are gaining significant ground. All top three handset manufacturers said they are incorporating WAP technology, which enables the display of Web data on phones. And Ovum strongly endorsed the Bluetooth initiative, which is backed by Microsoft, among others, and enables connectivity between cell phone terminals and other electronics.
“The success of Bluetooth makes incorporating the technology a recommended strategy for all terminal vendors,” Ovum analyst Eden Zoller said in a report. “By putting Bluetooth inside, vendors will be able to provide operational integration between devices and enable a range of communications, computing and consumer electronic devices to communicate with each other.”
With data blending into the mix, manufacturers agree they are facing an increasing need to enable cell phone terminals to connect to devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other handheld computers. Infrared connectivity, which is beginning to appear on the market, will gain a stronger foothold, but could be shunted aside by the radio signal connectivity that Bluetooth supports.
In any case, users could see an increasing number of connectivity ports on their handsets and other portable electronics to accommodate the data and voice convergence.
Some recent product releases provide hints of what the future could bring. Ericsson’s recently launched MC218 PDA, for example, can connect to a phone and is a precursor to laptop computers that will “probably include a radio module inside so you won’t need a mobile phone; you’ll dial directly from the laptop,” said Albertson.
Perhaps more important, the Symbian consortium-developed EPOC operating system on which the MC218 functions will be able to interact with other operating systems, Albertson said.
Albertson said Ericsson’s recent falling profits would not impede the company’s progress in developing next-generation phones. “We have a number of new products lined up that we haven’t even announced yet for the next year, and we are really going to get into launching products for these different segments, so we feel we are indeed prepared for the next millennium,” he said. The company is slated to release its WAP-enabled dual-band R380, for GSM 900 and GSM 1800-with a built-in modem, full graphic display and touch screen-early next year.
Functionality
In the future, ports on handsets could be required to accommodate larger displays-some of which will be detachable-that users will want for still and, some say, video images. After years of research and design on shrinking phones, handset manufacturers are doing an about-face in some cases to make room for such larger components.
Fitting that bill is a credit-card sized clip-on organizer that Motorola recently began selling.
“You snap on a big display for your mobile phone, and when you don’t need to use the big display you clip it off. I think you will see more of that,” said Mark Powell, director of global portfolio planning for Motorola’s personal communications sector.
If the site of hundreds of people glued to cell phones in public is unnerving, consider the image of those same people seemingly talking to themselves. “There will be products with clips to give speaker phone capability, for example, or you might clip on a headset that is part of a modular phone,” Powell said. “Perhaps you might wear the main part of your phone on your belt, and you may have a headset that has a wireless transmitter in it that communicates with the cellular phone on your belt to make the call for you. You’ll be walking around with permanent hands-free.”
The way users input phone numbers and other data will change in other ways. Voice recognition technology, already incorporated into phones, will yield to other input technologies, such as “predictive” keypads that anticipate and minimize the words that a user types. Nokia, for instance, has recently released in Europe its model 7110, its first WAP-enabled phone with a predictive keypad and a feature that makes it easier to scroll Internet content on what Chellgren termed the phone’s “big display.”
Video
With the trend toward larger displays, Nokia is also pushing for the use of video on cell phones. The company is doing “a lot of work” on video compression, Chellgren said, adding that next-generation cellular “can have as much as 2 Megabits of data, and that would certainly allow for very good quality video conferencing. The better we can develop compression technologies, the slower the speeds we need to give good videoconferencing.”
Motorola’s Powell said his company is also developing a video phone. But Ericsson’s Albertson is not so sure video will take off in cellular terminals that quickly.
“In the minds of many people, the next-generation systems have become synonymous with video. It will happen, but I’m not sure whether it will happen as quickly as some people expect. Our feeling is they will be more for sending postcards and other still pictures.”
