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July 15, 2002 Newsletter.
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The devices that have enabled the 'mobile' side of today's mobile Internet generally fall into one of four categories: 1) internet-enabled cellphones, 2) wireless PDAs, 3) two-way pagers, and 4) wireless handheld PCs. These devices have quite different origins, and have carried forth the distinct personalities of their ancestors in terms of form factor, user interface, and core capabilities.
The devices with cellphone origins emphasize voice communications, the devices with PDA origins emphasize personal information management, the devices with paging origins emphasize notification and coverage, and the devices of PC origins emphasize office applications.
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This is the year of the "convergent" device - devices which, for the first time, effectively integrate the essential capabilities of all categories. Although each can trace their origins back to one of the original categories, their ancestry is less obvious, and their form factors and personalities are now more similar than not.
The underlying technical trends which have enabled these convergent devices to be developed will continue. Silicon will continue to become smaller, more powerful, more efficient and less expensive, enabling each generation to carry another level of processing power and memory. The wireless networks will continue to expand to provide progressively greater bandwidth, coverage and building penetration at lower costs. The software at all levels will continue to provide more useful, intuitive and personally-relevant information.
All of which hints that the wireless internet device of the future has been revealed to us by the latest generation of convergent devices, only they will be more so: more powerful, more access to useful information, and more cost effective to use.
As enticing as this sounds, we believe that the future is different and vastly more exciting, and that the future will be defined by some fundamentally new types of capabilities.
The mobile device of the future will communicate in even more ways - with nationwide and worldwide wide-area networks, with local high-bandwidth data networks, with short-range peripheral devices, and with plug-in peripherals. The alphabet soup that describes these technologies (GSM, GPRS, EMS, EDGE, 802.11, IRDA, and so on) don't provide many clues to how they compare or relate to each other, or which will ultimately win in the marketplace.
In any case, this device will be able to switch in the background between wide-area and local-area networks as it continuously seeks to optimize communications availability, speed and cost.
In this view of the future, the peripherals will be increasingly decoupled from the "mobile communications hub". This will have two profound effects on the design of future mobile devices:
1) the mobile communications hub, no longer constrained in physical dimension and form factor by user-interface requirements, will be far more optimized for portability and communications.
2) the peripherals, no longer constrained by physical attachment to the communicator, will be far more optimized for usability.
Let's explore these new dimensions of future devices.
User Interface: The type of mobile peripheral with perhaps the most interesting innovations are the user-interface peripheral. Wireless headsets are already available, and keypads can now be folded up, rolled out, or even projected onto a tabletop. Technologies for displays and voice recognition are also evolving rapidly, as are innovations related to the integration of these UI peripherals into our clothing and other personal items.
Mobile Peripherals: In addition to the 'conventional' areas of user interface, the integration of other types of mobile peripherals is evolving quickly. Mobile cameras are being used to snap pictures that can be immediately sent to other users or personal databases. Integrated GPS or other location-detection technologies are enabling a variety of new location-based mobile services. Integrated metrology peripherals such as glucometers and sphygmomanometers enable continuous, real-time monitoring of patients and athletes. Integrated bar-code readers can enable real-time shipping, physical inventories, or even price shopping by consumers. Basically, if it can be measured or monitored, real-time updates and interactions with other users or databases can be enabled.
Home and Office Peripherals: New types of interfaces with the home and office are being enabled by some of the above technologies. With the integration of broadband wireless, high-resolution mobile displays, and fixed cameras, it will soon be practical and popular to use ones' communicator as a real-time 'window' into the home, the office, the factory, the highway, the seashore, and many other places. It will also be practical to monitor and interact with home and office appliances and systems, such as thermostats and security systems. And given the rate of progress of silicon and media which is being designed for the mobile user, it is not hard to visualize the day in which the mobile communications hub is no longer subordinate to the desktop CPU .. it can be the user's primary computer. It will contain the user's important files and contacts, and upon entering the office, monitors, keyboards and printers will detect the presence of the mobile communications hub and begin interacting with it.
eCommerce: With the evolution of ID and financial systems, the mobile communications hub can become even more personal. It may replace the ATM card, the credit card, the debit card, and the phone card. It could replace the ID badge and even the passport. In short, it could essentially replace currency, ID cards. With the additional integration of security systems and product 'tags', standing in line at bank tellers, ATM machines, ticket counters and checkout lines could someday be a thing of the past.
Internet: Last but certainly not least is the evolving interaction between the user (via 'mobile communications hub') and the rest of the Internet. This is the conventional view of the 'mobile Internet', i.e. making accessible the vast resources of general, personal and enterprise information which have been opened up by the Internet. The landscape of this mobile Internet becomes far more interesting now, with additional dimensions like metrology, location-based services, eCommerce, and dynamically-switched wireless networking.
To summarize, the core of this view of the future is 1) a mobile communications hub which is optimized for communications and portability, surrounded by 2) a wide variety of peripherals, together enabling new types of capabilities well beyond today's convergent devices.
The peripherals will be highly interchangeable, replaceable and even disposable. For example, the user may select different UI devices depending upon whether she is in the office, on a business trip, or going on a bike ride.
However, the mobile communications hub now becomes one of the most indispensable and personal items a person can own.
For the most part the technologies that will enable this vision are simply predictable evolutions of today's technologies, but integrated in ways that will require significant advances in logistics, information systems and security systems. Some of these can only be enabled through major initiatives across established enterprises and institutions, but many others will be created by entrepreneurs in startup companies.
The business opportunities on this complex, evolving landscape are many, and some are vast, and they will belong to those who now move most quickly to claim them.
As wireless software developers, we at Outr.Net believe it will be great fun to be part of it.
Written by:
Kim Spitznagel
President
Outr.Net, Inc.
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