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10 Ways CNET is Still Clueless
Marguerite Reardon, reporter for CNET, recently itemized
ten things your phone
will do by 2010. Remarkably, she's dead wrong on almost all her predictions. Cellphones will
change, but not in the way predicted by this collection of eager, lightly-edited press releases.
1. Cellphones for Wireless Electronic Cash - This makes great sense except for an important problem: the
incredibly gigantic infrastructure already present for money to change hands at close range. Paper and coin
money still have terrific utility, since they are not dependent on software and even work when only one party has
greenbacks. Even still, there are millions upon millions of vending machines, ticket dispensers, public gambling
devices, coin-operated postage printers, arcade games and change machines in the world. These aren't even
standardized by currency type. No one will make a dent in paper money any time soon.
The real threat, however, is the countless infinity of magnetic stripe card readers that conform
to an international standard. It took half a century to design, develop and deploy all of these machines
at unthinkable costs. Cellphones today let you buy sodas in a few places in Japan today, but we've got a long way to go
before regular cash and magstripe cards become history.
2. Pocket-sized Web Browsing - You will never be able to surf the web of today on a screen the size of a
potato chip. This has nothing to do with technology, but biology. Human beings don't need high resolutions
to be able to consume information, they need moderate resolution over large areas. Big displays are always better
than higher density ones. Get close enough to smell a billboard or wrap-around printing on a promotional vehicle.
It's low-res but high impact. Big is better than small.
3. Location tracking and GPS mapping - The article is half right here---cellphone technology plus basic
triangulation mathematics any honors kid can do for fun is all you need for your phone to know your coordinates.
An improved electronic mapping experience, though, will require larger screens. Furthermore, virtually all of
the need for fancy GPS technology is when we are driving, not sitting at our desks. I predict cellphones will
finally speak enough Bluetooth so that when you hop into your ride, the phone will be responsible for determining
your position, but a beautiful screen and some serious processing power within the car will handle navigation
and full-color interactive mapping.
4. Mobile Search - This might be a reasonable premise, if search was going to be important in three years
as it is today. As internet penetration grows, people are learning the sites they frequent and only need to use
search when they want to find something new. The idea of combing the entire web for information will become
antiquated: if we want facts of any kind about history, current events, movie times or restaurant reviews,
we'll turn to a Wikipedia-like product that aggregates content for us. The process of "searching the web" will be
replaced by "checking". You will be able to do this on a phone, but it won't be scrolling deep into Google results at
3.5 square inches.
5. Mobile TV - The smaller the screen, the harder it is for your brain and eyes to concentrate on the
action and ignore outside stimulus. You can't make out subtle changes in facial expressions if the head is
tinier than a slice of a pea. However, we might see dramatic changes in content specific for the small screen,
mostly talking heads, action shots without individual details, and short segments tuned to those rare periods of time in
life where have nothing to do but stare at your phone and a bigger, better screen is not available. Why watch the
whole Lord of the Rings trilogy on your miniscule Motorola when you can enjoy it on your panoramic Panasonic?
6. Easier web surfing - Since web surfing can't get much worse on today's phones, I have to begrudgingly
agree it can only improve. But, web pages are designed for screens about the width of a piece of paper, not one scaled
down to fit on a coaster and scrolled about. This creates the typewriter effect; you can read a large screen
using a small one by following a line, but then you have to return both the viewfinder and your eyes back to the
left to keep reading. This won't win many converts and there's just way too much content on the web to have any hope
for a semantic overhaul to make alternative browsing methods be sufficiently easy to use.
7. Better radios - We are on the cutting edge of being able to build digital signal processors that can operate
fast enough to drive what's called a "software-defined radio" (a term curiously absent from Reardon's piece).
This will finally kill the stupidity that is the WiFi/Bluetooth/CDMA/TDMA/WiMax/GSM battle. This will make cellphones
smaller and cheaper, since they will only need one radio, and permit them to navigate through whatever networks are
available for the cheapest possible cost. Hopefully, a manufacturer will eventually break free from the carriers
and sell a phone that can use free hotspots to make free calls. As cities have ubiquitous, free wireless access, the
carriers will have to focus on rural and highways services, where they have the worst coverage now anyhow. But this
is all ten years, not three years away.
8. Personal Cell Towers - We almost all have personal tower in our homes and business today---they are called
WiFi routers. If the cellphone companies didn't charge so much for call forwarding (typically at least 0.15 cents a minute)
someone would have built a Bluetooth application that detects when you are in the house and forwards your cellphone calls
to a local phone or a WiFi Skype line. Please don't ask me to install CDMA at home.
9. Improved Cameras - Sure, cellphones will have imagers of ridiculously high resolution by 2010, and support
streaming video and all. However, as any digital camera enthuisast will tell you, megapixels aren't everything. There's
no way around the laws of physics that enable the kind of clarity and range you get with optics that take up inches of space.
People aren't going to give up on having either a solid, dedicated camera device with these optical functions or going
to professionals for annual family photos. Hopefully, camera cellphones will become less common as the desire for smaller,
simpler, less expensive phones grows, especially in the third world.
As for reading bar codes, it's an awful waste of technology to use a camera and some incredibly powerful software to
achieve this goal. If cameras should be able to read in coded material printed on the page, install a barcode scanner.
This is cheaper and smaller and more effective overall.
10. Mobile Music - By 2010, the public backlash against pay-for-play will have broiled up again into
producing enough free content to make costly downloadable music for phones and other music players a joke. Phones
with FM or XM radios will allow for direct recording of songs, meaning that there will be no reason to buy anything.
Peer-to-peer song sharing between phones over Bluetooth will be monitored at first by the carriers via the network,
but the Supreme Court will strike this down as an invasion of privacy. Music will be on phones, but free.
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