I am in Seoul, Korea this week, on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Samsung HQ, manufacturing plant and design center. Samsung was nice, and generous, enough to fly me and a select group of journalists to Seoul, and they have been quite forthcoming with their mobile phones. On the first day of my trip, I played catch-up with some of the phones I hadn't previously seen in person, namely, the B&O co-branded Serenata, the Ultra Smart F700, the new Armani phone, and some new Symbian S60 devices that you'll be hearing about soon.
Living with WiMAX
I have also been privy to some interesting demonstrations and discussions about WiMAX, which will be rolling out in early '08 if Sprint gets its way. I got to see WiMAX in action at a demonstration center in the Samsung HQ called the "Ubiquitous Zone/" Basically, the UZ, as Samsungers call it, is a model of a flat with wired everything. The refrigerator talks to your phone. Your computer controls the gas valve in your kitchen (a Korean thing, you wouldn't understand). Your curtains are voice activated, and a small, adorable robot patrols your flat while you are away, scanning for intruders and broadcasting its survey over the internet using a Web cam. The house of the future, this time in a working model.
I was impressed. A colleague noted that you can hear about all of these ideas, but to see them in person is very different. It was the subtle touches and new ideas that impressed me the most. Your refrigerator, using RFID, will read tags off of Tupperware containers or commercial RFID tags, and will tell you, over your mobile device, what to buy at the store. When you get home, the fridge will analyze what you have and suggest some recipes using what's in your pantry.
Your television can recognize faces and determine what's going on in the program your watching. The PVR-like device I saw cut highlights out of a soccer match automatically. It looked for excitement: crowds cheering, players hugging each other, a ball going into a goal. It was quite impressive.
So when will we live in the future?
WiMAX was an impressive technology as well, and I saw some demonstrations of IPTV over WiMAX as well as standard uploading and downloading. It was not the WiMAX that impressed me most, though, as WiMAX is simply a faster way to deliver data. It was the implementations of the wireless network, along with new technologies like RFID and facial recognition, that create an entire experience. Samsung is right to think of the technology in this way, as Sprint is also touting the eventual ubiquity of WiMAX, or at least high-speed wireless networking.
Our biggest questions are practical. How will Sprint and Samsung (and the other WiMAX partners) propagate the technology? How will we pay for it? What about competing networks? Sprint has some ideas, but even with a launch around the corner in early 2008, these have yet to be hammered out. Also, recent shake-ups of C-level executives at Sprint leave already-announced plans in question. Still, there is no doubt that some form of high-speed networking will be the future of wireless. And at least we've found a cool place to live.
Read on in Part 2 of this feature series.
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