.Dust

On this blog we have been writ­ing a lot of posts on mobile phones, and, some­times, about other kinds of con­sumer elec­tronic devices.

We have seen the func­tion­al­ity of mobile phone evolve over time, offer­ing to the cus­tomer always new functionality.

Blue­tooth, WiFi, bet­ter cam­era lens, Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem, motion sen­sors and so on. From this point of view we have seen these devices grow from sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices to multi-​functional devices. Some of them are more spe­cial­ized than oth­ers (just look at the Nokia N93), while some other are more gen­eral pur­pose devices (Nokia N73, just to cite one).

A result of this is that it is quite dif­fi­cult to define what is a mobile phone any­more. It changes it’s shape while you are using it.

The sec­ond effect of this trend is that you are bring­ing with you a num­ber of dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies all inte­grated in the same device.

On the other side we need to observe that con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices are also changing.

A few exam­ples to clar­ify the concept:

• Nav­man N60i inte­grates a cam­era than allow you to take pho­tos and auto­mat­i­cally geo­tag them.
• WiFi mem­ory card are com­ing to DSLRs cam­eras.

These are only two exam­ples but you can under­stand the point.

We could cre­ate a map of what tech­nol­ogy goes into what con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices. That will show up some inter­est­ing findings.

You will notice a lot of repli­ca­tion in this kind of map.
We will end up bring­ing with us two GPSs, three WiFi cards and so on.

I think there are some inter­est­ing ques­tions that will need to be answered:

• Is there any chance to have some har­mo­niza­tion in this?
• Which device is going to play a cen­tral role?

My per­sonal opin­ion is that the mobile phone will have to play a cen­tral role. Between all of the devices the mobile phone is prob­a­bly the only one we will have with us every time.

Here is the sce­nario that I would like to become a real­ity in the near future:

• The phone will offer inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity to all the satel­lite devices the user will bring with him. (Cam­era, GPS, etc. etc.)
• The phone will offer posi­tion­ing infor­ma­tion to satel­lite devices.
• Devices will com­mu­ni­cate with some PAN (Per­sonal Area Net­work) tech­nol­ogy. (e.g. bluetooth)

As you can see all the tech­nol­ogy is already there.

Accord­ing to my opin­ion some devices are too spe­cial­ized to end up being inte­grated in a mobile phone. Just to make an exam­ple: a DSLr cam­era will always have bet­ter per­for­mance that a mobile phone cam­era and a ded­i­cated GPS device will always work bet­ter than the same appli­ca­tion on a mobile phone.

Why do I blog this? I think that the mobile phone has to become an enabling device for other con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices offer­ing ser­vices and connectivity.

Related posts:

1. Cam­era Phones vs. Cameras
2. Device mor­ph­ing
3. Con­sumer behaviour
4. Con­trol your home from your mobile phone
5. Do You Still Make Voice Calls?