Admit it. You love your cell phone. And iPod. And BlackBerry. But no one loves the clutter of all those devices.
That’s about to change.
Soon, your entire digital world will fit in your pocket. Make pocket room for a slice of your soul. And leave space for headphones.
Diane Gardner of Atlanta, for one, has already uploaded her life into a fistful of access, entertainment and sentiment. And she’s barely tasted what’s coming.
More Top Picks Buying Advice
“It’s coordinated my home and my life; it all merges together,” said Gardner, already enamored of her “smart phone,” which stores everything from school schedules to vacation photos. “It’s one irreplaceable device that does all of it. It’s absolutely liberating.”
This liberation requires a recharge.
At an almost unnerving pace, the components that make up life’s details are folding into one device that resembles your electronic DNA.
That treasured cell phone is being blended with a PDA, an iPod, an Xbox, a MasterCard, TiVo and OnStar. With a BlackBerry on top.
The wireless phone is poised for omnipotence.
“The only thing you wear more often on you is underwear. For some people, even that’s optional,” said telecom analyst Roger Entner at Ovum Research in Boston.
Wireless phones are morphing into credit cards. Parking meters in certain cities can be paid with the punch of a key. Some phones have video games whose graphics rival a PlayStation’s. Location tracking can shadow each step.
Formal identification such as a driver’s license is a code away from being the next element.
And, of course, there’s music, e-mail, TV and photography.
With high-speed wireless data networks launching within weeks, e-mails, messages, video and music downloads will be jetting into phones at never-before-seen speeds.
This is the long-awaited 3G, third-generation, convergence that has been promised for years, wherein phones and multimedia finally mate in the U.S. as they have in Europe and Japan.
The Boston-based Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting agency, predicts that next year, feature phones with cameras and music players will gobble up 92 percent of the mobile phone market.
So-called smart phones, with Internet connectivity and other advanced features, will make up almost 20 percent by 2009.
At that point, it’s predicted, the basic, no-frills wireless phone will be buried.
Ultimate tech toy may look like this
A team from the Georgia Electronic Design Center at Georgia Tech in Atlanta jumped at the chance to design a prototype merging several applications into one master wireless device. Their biggest obstacle was keeping such a busy toy juiced.
The team christened the device 4G. Considering that 3G, or third-generation, mobile devices are just now emerging in the U.S., the design aims to enable a society seemingly fated to be dependent on wireless.
“No one knows what 4G is going to be like,” said Christopher Evans, director of operations at GEDC.
The prototype (left) features a touch-screen keyboard and icons that can be used to access a credit card or change TV channels. It also offers real-time videoconferencing.
“It would be like a Dick Tracy phone,” Evans said.
———-
More Top Picks Sewing Kit
Edited by Curt Wagner ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])