Surveying the mobile landscape: The road ahead

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	Home / Cell phones / Multimedia smartphones

	Surveying the mobile landscape: The road ahead	By Philip Berne, 2 January 2008

The trends emerging in 2008 are not what you'd expect. We look beyond touchscreens and gPhones at the real trends that will shape the year ahead.

Let's get the most obvious predictions out of the way first. There will be a boatload of iPhone competitors released in the next year. If you thought you had seen some iPhone competition before, hold onto your hat, because any phone that was designed in the wake of the iPhone won't come to market until the middle of 2008, at the earliest. So, just in time for back to school, get ready for touchscreen multimedia smartphones landing on our shores like an invading army.

A few of these phones will run Google's Android OS, and they will get plenty of media buzz, mainly from technology journalists. The rest of the world will notice the word Google is somehow stuck, officially enough, into the names of the phones, which will be wordy concoctions like "The Dream on Sprint by HTC running Google Android." These phones will be exciting and better than some other phones on the market, notable for their interface design and horrible battery life. They will be both favorably and negatively compared to the iPhone, which will be declared dead, buried, then resurrected in the form of an iPhone nano and exploding sales.

Putting GPS on the map

Okay, so there's the obvious stuff. But we also see a few other trends bubbling under the surface that will be just as important. Foremost, we think that location-based services will explode in the next year or so. As more users realize that they have GPS radios on their phones, carriers will also realize that they can earn extra revenue per subscriber by offering interesting services that utilize the GPS service. Helio's Buddy Beacon and upcoming Tellme service are early examples of this, but the sky is literally the limit for these ideas.

Mobile television won't catch on in the next year, and will certainly be declared DOA, but we think the technology has a few more years to reach maturity. Once we get even more channels and DVR capabilities into phones, as we're already seeing in foreign markets, we think mobile TV will catch on. Still, it won't be as popular in the U.S. because the U.S. is not a train and bus culture. We don't sit on trains for long hours or wait in lines at bus terminals, so we're not as interested in watching our mobile devices. But we drive, and in the car, GPS is king. Just as we couldn't imagine being without our cell phone today, in the very near future we'll be thinking the same about our GPS device, perhaps even more so.

Bigger than a phone, smaller than a UMPC

For the times when we're not driving, however, there is a new experience in store for mobile users, and by mobile users, we mean pretty much everyone who leaves the house. We think that the Mobile Internet Device could be game-changing, because in many ways the form makes more sense than what already exists. We need a larger screen for better internet browsing and better navigation, but not so large that we can't fit it into a coat pocket. We need better battery life for more media playback, but we won't be using it to make phone calls.

Ubiquitous access

Most importantly, though, we need network access everywhere, and that is what the MID promises. Our cell phones are too small to be useful for the tasks at hand, but that's where our wireless network access resides. We use wireless cards and tethered modems for our laptops, but there are drawbacks even to a device as diminutive as a subnotebook. We think that MIDs will change the way people think about internet access and wireless networking. Even if the products themselves don't deliver, this change in the way the market will buy access is even more important, and will do more to shape the future than any device could.