__ What's really driving the wireless future? The cell phone. __
While telematics promises to turn the car into a rolling content platform, that's only one direction the future of mobile computing will take. In fact, the cell phone is driving the data stream, making information more portable in every sense of the word. Soon you'll be able to see - not just hear - the 411 on everything from driving directions to shopping lists.
"We estimate that by 2004 to 2005, there will be more cell phones connected to the Net than PCs," claims Haroon Alvi, US director of business development at Nokia, the cell phone manufacturer that outsells all others. And according to Alvi, the 300 million-plus people worldwide using "dumb" cell phones are about to smarten up.
Consider the features on Nokia's 9000il, a product already in the middle of the road: It has a mini QWERTY keyboard, monochrome graphics, and palmtop features such as calendar, address book, and scheduler; the unit also offers voicemail and paging, links with a PC via cable or infrared, sends and receives email and faxes, and browses the Web. Not bad for $700. The Qualcomm pdQ has similar features; likewise the Mitsubishi SmartPhone.
As of April, getting your wireless node on the Net will run you a flat-rate $24.95 a month from Bell Atlantic, or $54.95 from AT&T, which claims greater national coverage. Your connection, in the US at least, comes courtesy of the Cellular Digital Packet Data protocol (CDPD). Offered in parallel with the old analog service from existing base stations and operating at 19.2 Kbps (one-third the speed of a 56K modem), CDPD is available in most cities, but not many rural areas yet.
Next-generation digital services will use spread-spectrum technology, allowing much faster connections that are also more secure from interception. Roderick Nelson, chief technology officer at AT&T Wireless Services, predicts that in two years we will see "better wireless data transfer rates than voiceband modems, and better than ISDN, at an attractive value." His goal is 384 Kbps in continuous wide-area mobile coverage, with T1 speeds available from fixed locations at a fraction of the price your local phone company would charge for a wired connection. Since AT&T already owns the necessary radio spectrum, it can market high-speed services as soon as the equipment has been deployed.
In other words, your desktop PC soon won't need a modem or phone line anymore. Via serial cable or radio link, it will talk to your smart phone, which will maintain faster Web access than your local telco can provide, and at lower cost.
On the move, your connection will follow you through radio shadows and from one cell to the next, thanks to a fault-tolerant version of Internet Protocol called Wireless Markup Language. WML will link your phone with a proxy server; the server hooks into the Net using regular IP. As smart phones become ubiquitous - thanks in part to the efforts of the Wireless Applications Protocol Forum, an industry consortium of about 100 companies - webmasters will be forced to duplicate their HTML-coded pages in WML, simplifying text and graphics so that they'll display legibly on tiny phone screens.
So what's the killer app? "It's hard to say yet," says Michael Wise, technology manager at Mitsubishi Wireless Communications. "But as higher data rates are deployed, services will increase in value - not necessarily in cost. This will make them an easier sell."
Early adopters, predictably, will be business travelers, according to a 1998 Nokia study. Users polled placed remote access to banking highest on their wish list, followed by email, city navigation, weather information, and news.
Meanwhile, blue-collar uses include scanning FedEx bar codes, reading utility meters, and logging the status of vending machines, courtesy of customized phones that feed the data directly to a company via the Net.
As mobile online access trickles down sometime during 2001, everyday consumers will get OnStar-like concierge services in a package that doesn't require its own parking place. You'll be able to compare motels, restaurants, and gas stations while you're on the road, using online resources that sense your location. The fast-food franchise nearest you will transmit its menu to your phone, along with tempting JPEGs of steaming food. You'll key in your order, and by the time you reach the restaurant, dinner will be ready to go. Similarly, when you visit your local supermarket it'll offer you cookies in more ways than one, as its server recognizes your phone's IP address, checks your buying habits, and emails you some appropriate special-offer coupons.
Matthew Piette, chair of the WAP Forum's Marketing and Communications Experts Group, foresees more pedestrian applications. You could hunt down the nearest taxi via a graphics display - and hail the cab via keyboard. Your kid might be equipped with a radio beacon that lets you track his location in the shopping mall from your phone screen.
So will everyone know everywhere you go on the Net? Alain Briançon, who serves on WAP's board of directors, sees exactly that as a selling point. "My social preferences, eating preferences, and the kind of movie I want to see, I am willing to diffuse freely to a wide audience," he says, believing that free access to data will enrich personal relationships. "Consider the human being as the center of a sphere about 30 feet in diameter," he suggests. "Within it, devices will communicate at very high speed, up to 10 Mbits per second. I would like to walk into a room, and my device will tell me who all the people are, and which of them share interests with me." Online chat, in other words, will cross over to create a new kind of meet market in restaurants and bars.
One barrier is purely mechanical: the QWERTY keyboard. "In the long run voice recognition will prevail," says Richard Lynch, chief technology officer of Bell Atlantic Mobile. "In the interim, a touchscreen is not far off."
Any device with all this computing power needs an operating system. Naturally, Microsoft would like to see some version of WinCE in everything portable, but two strong competitors exist. Symbian is an alliance between Psion and Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola, while Geoworks Corporation has its own OS in phones by Nokia, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba. Geoworks CTO Adam de Boor calls Symbian "a preemptive strike against Microsoft."
According to de Boor, today's smartest phones contain 2 megs of RAM. About a quarter of that is used by the OS, the rest for application software. The Geoworks OS enables fancy graphics and preemptive multitasking. In the near future, de Boor says, it will support real-time video. Phones will have cameras built in, making the videophone a reality.
The snag, of course, is that a complex operating system is more likely to suffer catastrophic failures. A "car crash," for example, could slam the brakes on your online trading, locking you out of the loop during a market correction.
Smart phones will be password-protected - but even if everything runs perfectly, your dataspace will inevitably be invaded by uninvited guests, from password prowlers to telemarketers. The dark side of the all-in-one-to-one future? A steady stream of in-phone-mercials.
