The wireless handheld device still has a way to evolve to realize the vision of “anywhere, any time” multimedia Internet connection, wireless experts say.
Today’s devices, like Motorola’s Timeport cellphone-Web browser, the Palm Pilot and Samsung’s Uproar cellphone-MP3 player, are generations removed from the first fuzzy-voiced and often unreliably linked cellphones.
But even the newest handhelds still don’t have the text input, voice capability, display quality and user-friendly interface to make them the pervasive devices we can’t do without, says Philip Greenspun, a global expert in Web-based collaboration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“When you take away the user’s 104-key keyboard, big mousing surface and 17-inch display, the Web becomes a painful place,” Greenspun says.
Pete Garrett, vice-president of Nortel Networks’ wireless access development division in Calgary, says the big challenge of wireless is a paradigm shift from voice-only applications to seamlessly combining voice and high-speed data.
That requires faster speeds between the mobile terminal and the core network. And the network needs to be transformed from a circuit-switched, electrical-based system into fibre-optic lines.
“We’re very much moving forward with a vision where optical is revolutionizing the backbone of the Internet, while wireless is in parallel revolutionizing the access part of the Internet,” Garrett says.
Within three years, third-generation or 3G networks will boost speeds to the 144 kilobits-per-second range and, with 4G, to 356 Kbps from the current 9.6 to 14.4 Kbps. That will enable the PDA (personal digital assistant) user to access a whole range of applications, such as downloading large music files and streaming video, that are slow and error-prone with current devices.
In three years, “you’ll see that there are actually more PDA-type devices or PDA combined with mobile phone-type devices being used to access the Internet than there will be personal computers,” Garrett predicts.
“I see the convergence of the Internet and wireless,” agrees Norman Beaulieu, iCORE research chair at the University of Alberta. University researchers and the private sector are fast developing technology that packs more bits of data per second into finite slices of the broadband radio frequency, he says.
The problem of signal interference also needs to be overcome, with more than one billion mobile phone subscribers predicted by 2003.
“It’s like you’ve got 12 TV channels and you’ve got to put 2,000 (in that space),” says Beaulieu, who’s assembling a research team to tackle the challenge.
Charles Brown, vice-president of sales and marketing for WaveRider Communications, doesn’t expect that one handheld device will be able to do everything. Browsing graphics-laden Web sites or watching videos on a cellphone-sized display screen “is just not going to be a fulfilling experience.”
Brown thinks there’ll be handhelds for specific applications like voice, e-mail and messaging that can be plugged into larger, tablet-sized devices for such things as watching movies.
Gary Kovacs, president of Calgary-based Zi Corporation, a developer of interfaces for wireless and consumer electronics, says the value of a PDA will be in personalization: how well it catches, captures and presents services based on the individual user. “Colour screen, good sound, good roaming, those will be table steaks,” he said.
Wireless will revolutionize the way we do business, the experts predict.
It’s unheard of now for a company not to have a fax machine and it’s quickly becoming the same for a Web site, Brown notes.
“Two or three years from now, it’s going to be: ‘What do you mean, you don’t have mobile applications? You must be some sort of dinosaur!’ ”
