Smart Phones to Outsell Laptops in 12- to 18-Months
22 February 2008- Future of the Internet Is Mobile
- Mobile Web Won’t Be Second Class
- Single Function Portable Devices Converging into Handsets
Sales of smartphones are expected to surpass laptops sales in the next 12 to 18 months, according to the BBC’s excellent article on the near term advances in mobile phone technology.
The thrust of the report is that the mobile phone, like a tiny but powerful vacuum cleaner, is sucking up all the functions now found in single use devices such as digital cameras and MP3 players.
Convergence is the operative word. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo defines it as, “Converged devices are always with you and always connected.”
Mobile phones, the BBC piece says, are about to complete the “transition from voice communications devices to multi-function multimedia computers. It reports that in 2006 Nokia sold almost 200 million camera phones and about 146 million music phones. Those numbers made Nokia the world’s largest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players. That’s more digital cameras than Canon or Sony sold, more MP3 players than Apple.
Looking ahead, Nokia says it expects to sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation gets converged into the mobile phone.
After GPS, video gaming will be converged into mobile phones, according to Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford.
The article quotes Clifford as saying, “All of those single use devices - MP3 players, digital camera, GPS - are collapsing onto the phone. We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things.” Of the 188 million mobile phones that were sold with the Symbian operating system, one third of them had GPS.
Luis Pineda, VP of marketing and product management for Qualcomm’s CDMA technologies division told the BBC, “We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging.”
Better, faster, more robust and specific function chips such as Qualcomm makes are and will enable mobile phones to do more - while remaining small and perhaps use even less battery power. The next Qualcomm chips run at 1Ghz, have a dedicated application processor, can handle 12-megapixel digital photos and up to 720p high definition video.
Symbian’s Clifford said consumers’ expectations are set by the performance of single use devices such as digital cameras. As a result they won’t accept anything less than the best functions and optimal results.
Ian Drew, VP of segment marketing at ARM, which licenses technology to companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom that make chips for mobile devices, said, “The future of the Internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it’s going to be mobile.”
Clifford said the most powerful mobile phones such as Nokia’s N96 and NTTDoCoMo’s 905 series have the same power as a laptop from 2000.
ARM’s Drew said people now expect full Web 2.0 functionality on their mobile phone such as social networking and video sharing, both of which require a lot of “horsepower.” And the next generation of mobile phones will need to be able to have high performance antennas (radios in cellular parlance) so they can receive data at high speeds.
Symbian’s Clifford said it’s working on technology called Freeway that’ll give mobile phones the ability for users to move between wireless networks like Wi-Fi and cellular networks such as 3G and 4G without a hitch. “We don’t want people to feel the mobile Web is a second class experience,” he said.
As Google has discovered, according to the BusinessWeek article “Japan: Google’s Real-Life Lab,” the many different operating systems on cell phones and their dissimilarities makes life difficult even for Web-based applications such as Google’s search.
One of Google’s executives in Japan told BusinessWeek that Google’s hopes of making information availability on a phone nearly as easy as on a PC faces the biggest hurdle in the complexity of handsets. Instead of just two dominant operating systems as with PCs, the article says, there are hundreds of versions of phone software. That causes differences in the buttons in the handset and what they do. For example, some models have buttons that let users jump around a Web page while others rely on a jog dial or a pointer like a mouse.
Oddly, the iPhone was not mentioned in the article.
No comments yet