The Present, Future of the Development of Mobile Phone Functions
Yu-Hsuan Chen 03/17/2009
The Trend in the Development of Mobile Phone Functions
This is the second paper for my term project that aims to examine past, present phone functions and to explore the potential functionalities in future mobile phones. After reviewing the past development of mobile telephony in the first paper, let’s turn our focus back to the present status of mobile phone functionalities. The mobile phone has exhibited amazing and remarkable innovation on its functionalities since 1990s. Most people think that the bloom of transistorized and digital technologies triggers these speedy and extensive innovation processes on the phone. Yes, I agree with the viewpoint, but I will more carefully check how the technological progress as well as other factors intertwined contributes to the success in mobile industry. Another highlight of this paper is to examine developing technologies that are promising to be implemented on the next-generation mobile phone platforms. Furthermore, Nokia, the leading company in the mobile industry, will be used as a case study to see its roadmap of mobile products as an indicator of future mobile development.
1. The development of mobile phone functions: The Present
According to Lee’s statistics (2008), the number of mobile phone subscribers around the world reached 3.3 billion or 50% of the world’s population in 2007. This number will definitely go up because mobile phones are such great devices that with them people are able to reach anyone in this world from anywhere, anytime. Moreover, owing to the rapid technological advancement, today’s mobile phones provide people an array of features far beyond people could imagine 20 years ago. People can use their mobile phones to store large amount of information, exchange information via text messaging and e-mail services, play simple games, and wake up people as alarm clocks. Mobile phones integrated with MP3 players, digital cameras, PDAs and GPS systems are also widely available. All these functions are not ready in the beginning but have undergone a series of transformation driven by the intricately interactive effects between technological progress and human culture. Although a multitude of features on the mobile is available right now, this paper will place emphasis on several milestone functions created on the mobile device. Firstly, I will review the technological advancement in modern mobile communications, which underlies current mobile patterns. Then the camera phones, music/video phones and smart phones will be examined sequentially.
1.1 The Rise of Cell Phones
Before the rise of cellular network, the available frequency spectrum granted by the FCC for commercial use was limited and the demand for mobile telephones continued to exceed the abilities of IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone System). Hence, the capacity of mobile telephony systems in 1960s was rather insufficient. For example, 2,000 subscribers in New York City shared just 12 channels, and typically waited 30 minutes to place a call (AT&T, 2009). To work out the problem of spectrum deficiency, AT&T submitted a technical proposal to the FCC in late 1971. The proposal not only introduced the technology of a cellular system, but also covered advanced wireless service features, system capacity, coverage, and costs as well. This proposal referred to as Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) laid the ground of modern wireless communications.
The philosophy of cellular networks is to separate a city into many smaller geographic regions, which are named cells, and the available frequency spectrum is divided into a number of narrower and non-overlapped frequency spectrums as well. The smaller frequency spectrums are then allocated to these cells and the frequency used in one cell is distinct from those used by its neighbor cells. In doing so, the problem of radio interference is reduced to a minimum and wireless operators can reuse these divided frequency spectrums very efficiently to serve more consumers. The cell concept that separates an area into smaller cells enables millions of people to use the mobile phones simultaneously.
While the Bell laboratory scientist D.H. Ring conceived the notion of cellular network in 1947, the system was too elaborate to be implemented at that time. AT&T left this great idea aside, because the requirement of high computing power to implement this technology didn’t exist and the frequencies needed were not available. The cellular system was not possible to become into reality until the advent of microprocessor technology in the early 1970s (AT&T, 2009). Since then, AT&T started to research and develop cellular systems and finally got approval by FCC to commercialize the most widespread and far-reaching technology in the modern world.
The modern mobile age began at 1979, eight years after the AT&T proposal, when the Japanese company NTT launched the first commercial cellular network in Tokyo. The second mobile phone system was established in 1981 in United States. The first systems to be launched were based on analog technology. These early phones were very large and could certainly not be placed in a pocket like the phones of today. This led to that the initial installation of the cell phones was limited to cars. With the transistor size getting smaller, in 1985, the DynaTAC, a nearly two-and-a-half pound cell phone designed by Motorola, revolutionized the way people carry cell phones. (Goggin, 2006) It was the watershed in human mobile life – people can communicate on the move without the limitation on mobile technology.
AT&T launched AMPS in Chicago. Without advertising, people, especially businessmen, salespersons, and real estate agents, showed huge interests in subscribing for this service, even the paid for using this service was quite high. The analog systems were very successful and the inquiries for joining into the program greatly exceeded the capacity of AMPS could provide. In Anytime, Anywhere, the authors describe how hot the AMPS was at that time. “I have been on your mobile telephone list for four years,” the president of a manufacturing company wrote “and would appreciate anything you can do to arrange this for me.” (Galambos & Abrahamson, 2002). With the rapid growth of wireless subscribers, the spectrum was insufficient to support the quality of mobile services, since the analog cellular systems could not efficiently assign the available channels to their users. Insufficient spectrum aside, the cell phones for analog systems were relatively large size, short battery life, unstable quality, and low functionality. The strong demand for better mobile services propelled the second-generation systems coming into existence only 10 years later after the launch of analog systems. By converting into a digital system, the quality and reliability of mobile services were significantly improved and considerable savings in digital cellular infrastructure could be made. A number of second-generation systems based on digital technologies arose from this initiative. Among them, GSM is the most successful standard that has been adopted worldwide. GSM is the acronym for Global System for Mobile Communications. Twenty-six European companies worked together to develop this digital cellular system that originally aimed to provide a pan-European mobile infrastructure with which each subscriber can use the same mobile phone wherever they go in Europe. GSM commenced in 1991 and now is used over 200 countries and territories to serve more than three billion people and provide travelers with access to mobile services in any location where GSM covered (Hamill & Lasen, 2005).
The process of digitization also involved cell phones. The cell phones for GSM are needed to digitally encode and compress people’s voice before transmission and transform received digital signals into clear voice as well. The novel digital cellular standard not only enhances the capacity and quality of mobile telecommunications networks but also enables new possibilities in the handsets. Reminiscent of mobile telephony before being digitalized, the main function only revolved around voice transmission and reception. However, digital technologies change people’s understanding of how a mobile phone could function for us. In digital world, all kinds of information are represented as the combination of 0’s and 1’s. With the help of transistors, information including voice can easily and efficiently be stored, transmitted and reproduced. The storage function greatly augments the practicability of cell phones. For example, most cell phones have address books allowing phone numbers as well as other details of contacts to be stored in the phones. This is especially useful for keeping track of your business contacts. Furthermore, microprocessors embedded in cell phones allow the digitalized data being processed, manipulated and computed to provide a great range of features. Goggin (2006) showed these features such as the clock, alarm function, calendar, and calculator. Meanwhile another disruptive innovation, liquid crystal display (LCD), was also integrated into digital cell phones. Sharp and Seiko initially commercialized this new technology in the products of watches and calculators in 1970s, but soon mobile manufacturers also realized the display function on cell phones (Funk, 2004). The powerful digital technologies combined with transistors, microprocessors and LCDs not only added the storage, display and computation functions to our handsets but also have started a variety of new mobile services or applications coming into existence from then on.
One of the most prominent of these new dimensions of digital mobile communications is Short Messaging Service (SMS). SMS is a kind of data transmission service enabled by the GSM cellular network, which allows phone users to input characters via the alphanumeric keyboard of their handsets, compose short messages, and send these to other phone subscribers. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data service in the world. According to Mobile World (Hamill & Lasen, 2005), there were 16 billion messages sent each month in 2004 that contributed to a 16% of total revenue for the UK mobile telecommunications industry. Mobile Marketing Watch also showed that in the U.S roughly 300 billion text messages were sent in 2007 (Michael, 2008). Up to date, SMS is the data service with the fastest growth experience in mobile industry. However, in the initial stage, wireless operators didn’t expect too much of this service. The SMS protocol was originally designed for the purpose of network administration but not for a business service on the mobile phone. It was just used to check and monitor on the cellular networks and then report network status to network administrators (Hamill & Lasen, 2005). At that time, mobile companies tried to look for new services they could provide other than voice service on digital cellular networks. Hence, mobile operators utilized this simple and almost cost-free function to start off the text messaging service. In the beginning, wireless industry didn’t pay too much attention on this service because they thought the restrictions of SMS, such as only 160 characters to compose and poor key-in methods with the keyboards of mobile device would greatly prohibit users from using SMS. Nonetheless the result surprised everyone. It gets quite popular within teens community. Beside the cheap rate of using SMS, Hamill and Lasen (2005) indicated the reason of getting popularity is that teenagers see these messages as treasured gifts. Unlike talking over the air, they can keep touching or interesting messages in their phones. This greatly increases the value of SMS in youth minds. The SMS experience offers important lessons for those looking for new services and applications on mobile networks.
A successful business model doesn’t hinge on the adoption and promotion of promising technologies. It is a complex interplay existing within a market. In this case, human emotion, economic value and efforts from mobile industry are intermingled to decide the fate of SMS. We can hear similar stories reiteratively in the mobile development history.
1.2 Entertainment-Centric Device
The upsurge of SMS motivated mobile industry to seek another potential data service, which might become a second gold mine, and mobile leaders started to reconsider the role that a mobile phone can play in human life. Obviously, what came to their minds was to extend the texts into images. Phone manufacturers and mobile network operators worked together to promote the picture messaging service. To enable this service, mobile phones are equipped with digital camera phones. The innovative technology that can capture photos digitally turned up in the 1990s. Based on the silicon technology, Dr. Eric Fossum and his team developed active pixel image sensors, which can implement cameras on silicon chips. (Laura, 1995) This innovation provides people not only an alternative way to record their memory, but is also disruptive to the conventional camera industry using film as recording medium. Although, in terms of image quality, the digital recording technique is not comparable to the traditional film, the image quality is acceptable for the general people who don’t require their pictures with high resolution as professional photographers do. With pictures being digitized, users can process, manipulate, and produce photos much easily and conveniently. They don’t need to go to shop to develop their photos and can easily edit and print their images with their own computers. Moreover, the storage size of a digital camera far overwhelms than that of a conventional camera. These features offered by digital recording techniques appeal to the public greatly and therefore digital cameras become the first choice for the general consumers. This technology also offers mobile manufacturer to be able to build a small and lower power camera in mobile phones. Sharp, a leading mobile company in Japan released the first commercial camera phone in November 2000. The camera phone is truly revolutionizing the way people taking photos. It is providing people with the ability to instantly capture every moment in their daily life. Camera phones are the potent inventions for mobile manufacturers. It is the first affordable device for the pubic that can snapshoot and then share with others through networks instantaneously. “In 2004, it was not a camera company but a cell phone manufacturer (Nokia) that sold the most cameras in the world. In 2006 half of the world’s mobile phones had a built-in digital camera.” (Bedell, 2001). The camera phone is the consequence of converging and enabling technologies and brings a new wave in mobile business.
However, the wide popularity of camera phones isn’t equivalent to a success in picture messaging service. “In 2004, Network operators still gain 99 per cent of their data revenue from plain old text messaging.” (Andrew, 2004) The reason for why the picture messaging service doesn’t grow synchronously with the boost of camera phones doesn’t come to a final conclusion till now. Hamill and Lasen gave many possible explanations including the high service rate, poor interoperability and bad image quality. All these issues have been solved today but we still don’t observe a prosperous future of this service. Perhaps, a camera value might not lie in sending image but using the captured images for other activities. People like to store memory and print photos out like the old days they used traditional cameras rather than actively send them through wireless networks to others.
Another important function integrated into cell phones is the music player. In October 1999, Samsung, a leading electronic company in Korea, announced the world’s first mp3 mobile phone. Albeit, this music phone disappeared soon after its announcement, it set the tone that mobile phones have become an entertainment-centric device in our daily life. Cell phones are all about multimedia these days, and many new models coming after music phone. There are now video-camera phone that can record and play videos on the go. Mobile phones furnished with multimedia functions enabled many new wireless services. For instance, people now can directly download songs online and play them when you are on the go. The online digital music market seems like a huge business in the future, especially for the mobile industry. In Japan, mobile network operators launched mobile TV services in 2004. People can receive TV signals on the air and watch programs on their mobiles instantaneously. Other entertaining services like reading books and playing games on mobile are also available in some countries. Although these new services are not widely getting popularized in these days due to different social cultures or wireless infrastructures, providing multimedia and entertaining services on the mobile is a trend in the mainstream market (Funk, 2004).
1.3 Information-Processing Center
The other trend for mobile development is to make the mobile phone becoming an information-processing center. Mobile industry creates a new category of multi-use devices called smart phones with the abilities of letting people access data, actively providing people useful information and further allowing people to process them whenever people need and wherever people go. Information from weather reports, latest news, stock prices etc. can all be gathered from small mobile phones. However, the attempt to realize the mobile phone as an information-processing center is not easy with today’s cellular network, because the initial goal of the network was to provide wireless voice service but with less capacity in data communications. To achieve this attempt, mobile manufacturers look for other advanced communications techniques suitable for being implemented on the small gadget. Among them, three communication techniques – Bluetooth, wireless local network (WLAN) and global positioning system (GPS) are now integrated into smart phones. Each function provides people different wireless experience in access information.
Bluetooth is a short-range personal communication technique that enables people to connect every device in their neighborhood without wires. Hence, with a Bluetooth cell phone, people can transfer data such files, music or videos from their printers, headsets, personal computers and so on without cable connection. Bluetooth provides users to use the mobile phone much easier and convenience. In 2000, Ericsson unveiled the first mobile phone, T36, with a built-in Bluetooth wireless technology. (Laura, 2000)
WLAN also called Wi-Fi is the widely used wireless technology to access the Internet. Before mobile industry completely breaks through the channel between the Internet and users on cellular networks, Wi-Fi is used an intermedium solution to allow users to surf the Internet by finding somewhere where the Wi-Fi service is provided. “By 2007 over 798 million people around the world accessed the internet or equivalent mobile internet services such as WAP and i-Mode at least occasionally using a mobile phone rather than a personal computer” (Funk, 2004). I believe more and more people will browse web pages through the Wi-Fi function on their mobiles.
GPS is the newest function added on smart phones. Probably, people may be thinking, “it is just another luxury feature added for the heck of it”, but I think this function turning mobile phones into navigation devices would bring the next wave in the mobile world. GPS is a system mostly used in vehicles with the basic function to give the information of a user’s location and direct a user to his/her destination. In addition, GPS-enabled phones can now provide people more about the information in their vicinity. For instance, while people go to somewhere, their GPS-enabled phone will show the information of all the stores around them. Therefore, people can easily find a favor restaurant; preview its menu, and even review users’ assessment. GPS phone could also inform people what is happening around them instantly to help them avoid danger or benefit from such real-time information. The smart phone with built-in GPS is just in its infancy. Especially, after the launch of Apple iPhone, location-awareness services and applications are booming and looking forward to revolutionizing our living fashion.
What’s Next?
Will a mobile phone become a handy computing device? The answer definitely is yes and the mobile phone will have even much better and more functions than a computer has. However, the death wound of the mobile phone is its small screen and short battery life. The mobile phone must get over this destiny with the help of innovative technologies in the future. A potential solution is to build projectors into mobile phones and users can project the images onto any flat surface to display. Solar power technology can also aid to alleviate the problem of short life battery and extend the power in any daytime. What else is the computer can do but mobile phone could not, like videoconferencing? This will be possible in the near future as well because the mobile industry is preparing to propose the next-generation cellular networks, which can transmit data up to hundred mega hertz. If the day is coming, people can talk to their friends face by face like they are just in front of each other. Furthermore, the future mobile phone can bring more to human life than computers could offer, such as, healthy measurement and personal safety tool. For instance, future mobile phone will have health care function and through it people can monitor their body temperature, heartbeats, blood pressure etc. In addition, the mobile phone can act as a remote controller that helps you manage your electric equipments like air conditioner or heater. Future mobile phone will definitely make life more convenient and much easier.
Conclusion
The history of the mobile phone has taken pace over a comparatively short time, but cellular technology has been seen to develop at a tremendous rate. It took just over 20 years to migrate from the first analog systems to the third-generation (3G) broadband systems capable of transferring higher data rate. Although the great success of the digital GSM cellular network in mobile history is truly remarkable, its next-generation 3G system seems not brilliant as GSM did. We stay in the GSM system for a long time, even though the third generation (3G) wireless system was ready in several years ago. The adoption of new applications often not follows original plans or expectations upon them. This seems that the law of suppression is braking our advance in mobile communications. Because of no killer applications or services for this advanced system, wireless subscribers show no strong desire to transfer to 3G networks. On the other hand, the licensing from governments for the frequency spectrum required to operate the 3G systems is extremely expensive. Such huge cost for the deployment of 3G systems hinders wireless operators from upgrading their existing GSM networks toward 3G systems. Both issues stop the progress of the mobile industry. From Christensen’s view of this disruptive technology, at this moment, the 3G network might be too good and expensive for current consumers to adopt. Mobile companies might need to find a way to modify the 3G network such that it can provide a compromised performance and transmission data rate but with much less cost. If doing so, with a higher probability, people will transfer to this intermedium solution and these pioneering users are willing to experience new applications and service. Once the population of pioneering users reach to a critical mass, the 3G communications could really come into our life. We’ll see what is next in the mobile industry and keep our eyes on how the positive supervening social necessities and the negative suppression law interactively affect the adoption of 3G cellular networks.
The pace at which the mobile phone function has evolved over the latest 10 years is truly more stupendous than the development of cellular networks. The mobile phone has become a promising wireless platform through which people can easily access the Internet, exchange data at a higher transmission speed and enjoy their wireless experience. Today every new mobile phone is much lighter, but with more powerful functions on it. They are not cell phones any more. They are also all-in-one devices. Mobile phones have exhibited amazing and remarkable innovation on the functionality. In the beginning, mobile phone was just only a tool to talk. As time goes by, the functions of mobile phones are getting stronger. People can text messaging through digital cellular networks and take photos by an embedded digital camera as well. Moreover, with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies included, people can access the Internet more easily, exchange data more conveniently and enjoy their wireless life much happily. Now the global positioning system (GPS) is also integrated within the mobile phone to enrich its connecting capability. Especially after the announcement of Apple iPhone, people re-examined the role of the smart phones could play in their life. It’s uncertain to make sure what is next in mobile functions. Various disruptive technologies emerging in these days or near future might reshape our understanding of mobile phones. However, the short messaging and picture messaging services gave us two examples that technological progress or improvement is not the dominant factor to decide the adoption of disruptive innovation by consumers. Social culture, economical press, and government intervention are also essential forces that are weaved together to affect every step of mobile development.
After reviewing the development history of mobile phone functions, one question comes to my mind, which will be answered over time: Is packing all this novel functions into your handset too much? Do consumers really want that much functionality in their cell phones? It’s likely that teenagers may say yes, but how about the rest of us? No matter how good your cell phones are able to function, there will always be users who simply want them for their original and simple purpose to talk and those consumers are overshot.
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