How much do you want your smartphone to know? As long as the information doesn’t leave the phone, are you OK with your sidekick device knowing where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with? Qualcomm (QCOM), designer of the chips that power most smartphones, has been right about a lot of technologies in wireless, and now it’s betting on mobile devices with built-in intelligence.
This week Qualcomm shipped a software development kit that will enable programmers to integrate the data from various parts of a device: the GPS, the camera, the calendar, the contact list, etc. The platform is called Gimbal, a word which the encyclopedia defines as a “pivoted support that allows the rotation of an object about a single axis.” So perhaps that axis would be your phone and you would be the object in constant rotation.
Example: You land in an unfamiliar city for a business meeting and rent a car. Your phone knows you have two hours before the meeting and while you’re driving it tells you you’re approaching a bookstore if you want to stop. (You used your phone earlier to search for reviews of a book you want to read.) While you’re getting the book, your phone spots a work colleague, in town for the same meeting. The phone knows that you and this person frequently work together on your laptops, so it lets you know that your colleague is nearby, and that the bookstore has a Wi-Fi hotspot if you want to get online.
Helpful or annoying? Probably some of both, but definitely a game changer. “The idea is that we want to make your smartphone smarter,” says Margaret Johnson, Qualcomm’s President of global market development. “Developers will be able to build apps that utilize (contextual) information.”
“We have had a history of nurturing the developers’ world,” says Johnson, who was part of the team that developed Qualcomm’s Brew, one of the first mass market wireless application solutions. “We don’t want to just say ‘here it is’ to developers. Instead we give them good software development kits; we like to help it all along the way, and bridge the gap all the way to the consumer, so when the consumer has this device, they know what they’ve got.”
We consumers will definitely have a sense of what we’ve got if our phones start telling us what to do. Now if someone can just develop the apps to get it all done for us…
Margaret Johnson is one of the RCR Wireless Top 10 Women in Wireless for 2012. Look for the complete list in our upcoming feature report.
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