Cell phone morphs into chat board, film at 11 (funny, I haven't seen
anything like this in Japan... could be subtitled: "cell phone
makers grope about to establish a single hand/small form factor
large symbol set key input standard... and fail miserably):
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=954329
If targeted designs become all the rage, I foresee (and I wouldn't
be surprised to be told this already exists) a low cost "cell
phone" for the Philippines that consists of nothing but a small
2 line display and a blackberry style keyboard that ditches voice
capability all together (and that, in and of itself, would say
some pretty interesting things about globalization, micro vs.
macro economic, wealth extraction and corporate strategy).
Now... for a quick shift in thinking (from dumbing down to smarting up)
Wired 10.02 (does anyone still read the dead tree edition?) had an
interesting blurb (titled "Download Your Cell Phone!" in the Must Read
section) about Vanu Bose and his company Vanu Inc. If he has his way,
I believe the US may be able to leapfrog the entire world, making *all*
existing 3G roll outs obsolete or at a minimum irrelevant.
Several problems keep this from becoming a reality:
The FCC
Rapidly getting expensive handsets in the hands of as many
consumers a possible in the shortest amount of time while
having the consumer tied economically to the handset
producer rather than being exclusively tied to a carrier.
Separating the user interface (application layer) from the
data carrying layer(s) (layer 1-3)... TCP/IP should help
quite a bit here.
And a bunch of other problems I don't have the time to go over
in detail.
The fundamental question the Ultra wideband reconfigurable transceivers
raise in my mind is: Is it possible to develop a meta-carrier that
can register their handsets for use across all carrier networks,
allowing users of their phones to pick and choose depending on
coverage and cost? ...would you be willing to "rent" a handset
for $50 a month (and realize that you would still be paying for
call air-time) if you could roam completely transparently anywhere
in the world, automatically choose the lowest cost connection and
have high speed wireless data access in addition to having a cell
phone that acted as your PAN hub?
Received on Sun Jan 27 06:02:21 2002