The one thing it definitely points to is reduction or elimination
of chunky MTDF style keypads and disambiguated keypad entry.
What I find particularly interesting is the fact the the futurists
have been proven wrong in their predictions, which run something
along the lines of "increased portable processing power will
bring about speech recognition and eventually natural language
processing"; when, in fact, access to historical data sets
spanning *years* of sampled human speech (by demographic region,
language and many other factors than I can possibly count) was
the actual limiting factor. I guess that's one of those "peace
dividend" aspect of SIGINT surveillance that nobody is talking about.
I think a telco service called "wildfire" introduced in the 80s
was the first harbinger of things to come.
Interestingly enough, the number of devices beginning to hit the
market that are using undersized keyboard layouts is alarming:
http://www.danger.com/products.html
http://www.sharpplace.com/product.asp?sku=1865193
http://www.handspring.com/products/treo/details.jhtml?sub_nav_section=Details&prod_cat_name=Treo
I would have thought some smart cookie(s) would have come up
with a one handed (or even two handed limited form factor)
key input standard similar to qwerty (which, of course is a
sub-optimal standard that became entrenched). Any device which
make SMS/e-mail easier to use is going to get support from
both the users and telcos.
Maybe the twiddler folks should add bluetooth to their product
and start to set "docking standards" for things like steering
wheels, stick-shifts, joysticks, bicycle handlebars, PDAs,
gameboys, etc.
At any rate, voice recognition will begin to highlight what
an abject failure things like Palm's Graffiti and Apple's
handwriting recognition have become (witness handspring's use
an undersized keyboard or their own product!).
Personally? I don't like anything that samples my voice
off-device and uses it for input across multiple disposable
units (multiple disposable units... that in and of itself
seems like a backwards idea). I'm still waiting for my RF
bodyheat powered fingernail tracking gule-ons with old-style
typing input space-frame.
Marc Printz wrote:
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if this approach had a huge impact on the global
> phone market and how it will develop. Perhaps a bigger influence than the
> invention of prepaid. Could also have a great influence on voice services,
> too - a yet totally underdeveloped area. A guess: the more market share
> these simple phones will get the more voice services will become feasible.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Conrad Buck [mailto:conradbuck@sympatico.ca]
> >
> > Continuing on from previous thread on disposable cellphones
> > This company is about to launch in the US
> >
> > http://www.hop-on.com/
> >
> >
>
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Received on Sun Dec 2 12:14:00 2001