The Japanese telecom giant DoCoMo is trying to come up with a winner all-in-one device. According to a recent report in BusinessWeek:
Takeshi Natsuno, a vice-president at NTT DoCoMo (DCM), Japan’s No. 1 wireless carrier, is on a mission to create the ultimate, all-purpose, mobile device. His strategy is to give consumers just about every technology imaginable in a palm-sized phone. “There’s no single killer application. Some will want games, others music,” he says. “That’s why you have to offer as much as possible.”
Natsuno was behind DoCoMo’s groundbreaking i-mode data service for cell phones, which has been licensed to telcos in 16 countries. It was Natsuno who pressed Sony (SNE) to make its FeliCa technology—a tiny radio on a chip—available for phones.
That has turned handsets in Japan into contact-free commuter passes, credit cards, and even keys to open the front door at home. In the not-too-distant future, projectors for virtual displays and keyboards could replace the real thing, making for a more compact package. “I’m trying to make the phone into the almighty tool,” he says.
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) would agree. They envision a future in which we rely on a handful of devices that each do one thing well, not an all-in-one solution. The key is what Philip McKinney calls a “personal wireless gateway device.” About the size of a thin stack of business cards, the gateway would contain every radio and antenna you would need to connect to any short- or long-range wireless network found around the globe. And it would fit easily into a pocket.
The upshot: “If I take radios out of devices I can get PCs and laptops to be unbelievably small because I take a huge amount of complexity out of it and I get much longer battery life,” says McKinney, who is vice-president and chief technical officer of HP’s personal-systems group. The same goes for other devices such as flexible displays for watching movies or playing games and e-checkbooks for paying bills and storing grocery lists.
How many devices are consumers willing to carry? In HP’s scenario, the magic number is three. In DoCoMo’s, that’s two too many. For those who don’t gab much, there are alternatives such as Sony’s mylo, a Wi-Fi device that can do instant messaging, Web browsing, and VOIP (minus the phone bill); or the company’s PlayStation Portable gaming console, which uses a wireless link so users can surf the Net, play online games, and even locate other PSPs in the vicinity. Microsoft’s new Zune music player also relies on wireless connectivity to allow users to swap songs and data with each other.
That’s a lot messier than tech oracle Natsuno would like. “My dream is to travel abroad with only my phone—no PC, no wallet, no plastic credit cards,” he says. With the world still divided between competing cellular technologies, Natsuno’s dream doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.
