Coming soon to your cellphone: Everything!

Wireless phones are the hot platform as providers seach for applications that will attract, and keep, customers.

Call them the Ginsu Knives of personal technology.

In just a few years, cellphones have gone from being just telephones to incorporating the functions of a steadily growing number of other devices. As the daytime UHF television announcer might say: They take pictures. They calculate restaurant tips. They get e-mail. They play video games and music. But wait — there’s more!

By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 2/2/2004

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2004/02/02/coming_soon_to_your_cellphone_everything/

With phones that work as camcorders and TV sets now beginning to hit the US market, however, manufacturers and wireless carriers struggle to envision what could be the next quantum leap for wireless handsets, whose global sales could exceed 500 million devices this year.

For an industry that has grown explosively by a willingness to throw the equivalent of high-tech plates of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, the near future may be defined mainly by developing software and services that catch up with and exploit the possibilities of the video, sound, messaging, and color-screen technology breakthroughs achieved so far. One long-awaited and heavily hyped innovation — wireless phones that work like digital wallets, letting people make purchases from vending machines, gas pumps, and convenience stores — has advanced only fitfully in the United States.

Companies like Nokia Inc., Motorola Inc., Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Corp.’s Sprint PCS still have huge potential to get consumers to move up to snazzier phones and advanced services. But in the near term, consumers accustomed to hoping for "the next big thing" in wireless may instead see only the next several incremental improvements.

"You will certainly continue to see innovation on the hardware, but that is less significant than the innovation that needs to be enabled by software," said John Jackson, a wireless equipment analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston.

Brian Tucker, director of handset and accessories product management for Cingular Wireless LLC, said, "If you think back to what cellphones were a couple of years ago and where they’ve progressed, it’s a huge leap. They’re now little computers that fit right in the palm of your hand. Look at this from the standpoint of `What do we want to do in our PC today that we’d want to do on our handset?’ There’s not a lot left that you can’t do."

Not that there is any shortage of innovation efforts. South Korea’s SK Telecom recently rolled out ring tones that it claims can work as inaudible mosquito repellers. Two Romanian inventors are seeking a Canadian patent for a handset that would have a built-in sensor to detect smoke or toxic gases. Japanese inventors last summer unveiled an ultraviolet light sensor the size of a grain of rice that could be built into handsets for wireless subscribers looking to avoid sunburns.

This month, Hong Kong-based Legend Group Ltd. plans to begin selling a "smartphone" that can enable users to change the channels on their TV sets by voice command, an early example of what could be widespread future use of phones to control home electronics, garage-door openers, and security systems.

Closer to home, most of the immediate focus is on rolling out new software that will take advantage of phones that have color screens and music- and video-playing capability. At Verizon Wireless, the largest US cellphone carrier, an estimated 20 percent of the carrier’s 37.5 million subscribers now carry phones with color screens. They are downloading 5 million games, ringtones, and specialized software applications every month through Verizon’s "Get It Now" service, which offers more than 300 features.

Verizon applications include Italian flash cards, Scholastic Aptitude Test practice drills, a phone-based metronome for musicians, and a handset version of the Etch-A-Sketch child’s art toy. As soon as this spring Verizon expects to add a tide clock program for boaters and fishermen developed by Newburyport inventor Christopher Frosk.

Paul Palmieri, director of business development and programming for Verizon Wireless, said Verizon’s main focus now is on making Get It Now "work like a virtual Wal-Mart."

"We look at consumers and where they’re spending their entertainment dollars," Palmieri said. "If we’re doing our job right, the mobile device becomes a utility that’s indispensable to consumers for their own personal productivity, for their management of their intake of information, and for the provision of entertainment that’s available to them anytime, anywhere, even if they have only a few minutes to enjoy it."

Data services now represent just 2 percent of Verizon Wireless’s $20 billion annual revenues.

Two months ago, Sprint PCS began rolling out a $10-a-month service that delivers TV programs, digitally compressed for tiny phone screens, from channels including CNBC and The Learning Channel. That launch followed a summer deployment of video clips from major networks and sports channels.

One continuing brake on innovation will be the enormous strains new applications can put on the limited battery power capacity of cellphones, which may be able to support two hours of gaming or video-watching at a stretch.

"Battery consumption will be a huge problem, but the technology will continue to evolve," said David Aldrich, chief executive of Skyworks Solutions Inc., a Woburn company that manufactures most of the chipsets and radio innards of cellphones.

"We get better and better, and the industry gets better and better. And it’s not the end of the world if certain times you have to plug it into an outlet."

Despite the growing number of phones that have complete keyboards built in, having to use a phone keypad and mouse-like movement buttons can also crimp the functionality of phones. In the next several months, VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. of Woburn, which sells systems for dial-by-name services on Samsung phones, expects to roll out several major advances in a tiny speech recognition system for handsets that would let people use spoken commands to move quickly through on-screen menus to call up content and services.

"It’s the Holy Grail for the industry: How do you overcome the input problem?" said Richard J. Geruson, a former top Nokia executive who became Voice Signal’s chief executive in October. "We’re finally at an inflection point where embedded speech recognition is going to take off on the most plentiful consumer device in the world."

Where all the capabilities take wireless users next, however, remains a mystery even to the world’s biggest cellphone maker, Nokia.

"Now that you have cameras and color screens and all the other features, the basis is there for the killer application going forward," said Nokia spokesman Keith Nowak. "What that will be, we don’t know."

Peter J. Howe can be reached at [email protected].
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.