Will the handset end up being the terminator to all other mobile devices?
[+] Yesterday's science fiction proves to be what life is today.
Black Jack is one of the master pieces by Tezuka Osamu, the most famous Japanese comic artist in 1973. For many people, it is also a memory of their childhood. The book was so classical that it was made into TV series in October 2004.
I watched a few episodes at the home of a friend, which brought me back to my life as a little boy. However, some of the scenes were set in contemporary life and I did not know if that's because the TV series were made 30 years later or not. For example, in one episode, a teacher who was concerned about a student injured in a car accident called the hospital with a handset.
It was not until the 1990s when mobile communication technologies started their commercial use. The first users had to suffer from high prices and the clumsiness of the handset. 30 years ago, when most of those technologies were still in military or university laboratories, a teacher could hardly afford a handset even with the salary of his entire life.
Yet it is not an issue only about the price. A scene of "making phone calls anywhere, anytime" in a cartoon series 30 years ago could be nothing but a science fiction, for there was not such a concept in the real life, and it was not so common to allow a teacher to own a handset.
Today, everybody is accustomed to carrying a handset. Or, even if not, people also have been accustomed to see others carrying one. Handsets have turned into fashion items, with people replacing their mobile phones every year. For manufacturers, however, it is a time of thin profit margin, which seems to be the doom for all high-tech products that become well-infiltrating.
[+] The pressure of the cross-industry integration
The pressure for handset manufacturers is obvious. With the global communication market getting more saturated each year, the time of high-speed growth is gone. The only hope left is the sale growth in emerging markets (e.g., mainland China) and the development of new functions to enter new application fields.
One of the challenges in emerging markets is consumers' demand for lower prices. Entering new application fields, on the other hand, requires changing consumers' user experience and introducing the cross-industry integration. Particularly, new functions mean bigger challenges, as they require not only upgraded hardware, but also related communication and content services.
One of the first proposals for the cross-industry integration is the camera phone, which has been marketed along with the MMS service for years. With the increase of the pixel amount, the built-in camera has become one of the basic functions of the handset.
Smart Phone, which appears a little later, attempts to integrate the personal calendar, business card management and other functions into a single handset. In addition, it allows software installation for diversified function extension through an opened operating system.
The business market-oriented smart phone has its limits. Manufacturers know that the next hot topic is entertainment. Perhaps out of the inspiration of the hot sale of iPOD, a lot more handsets made this year offer the built-in MP3 player, which has become another most concerned function after the digital camera for handset buyers.
[+] All-in-one terminal as a portable pet
For entertainment, of course, there's movie in addition to music. With the advent of the 3G mobile communication time, the video phone is becoming a basic function. As a result, every 3G handset would have a built-in video camera and recording videos would seem to be a natural function of the handset.
And there will be video players too. Handsets are taking a road toward the portable multimedia player for playing pictures, music and movies. Maybe the current popular Portable Media Player (PMP) would be integrated into the handset one day.
Another heavy-weight component of entertainment is gaming. Manufacturers started to provide built-in mini-games as early as in the black-and-white handset years to allow time-killing. Today, color handsets enable direct Java game downloading from the websites of telecom operators. Will the handheld game console become the next integrated target?
We have plenty of other imaginations for handset functions, for example, air conditioner/refrigerator remote control, or satellite-based positioning/navigation. One day, when the artificial intelligence is mature enough, we might talk with our handsets when we feel lonely, because they would have become our electronic pets.
Maybe there are many other science fiction whims waiting to be realized decades later. For manufacturers caught in the turmoil currently, however, a common question is: will an all-in-one ultimate handset be the expectation of the future consumer, or, will the handset end up being the terminator to all other mobile devices?
2005/06/19 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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