A Smart-Phone Odyssey

Dave: "Call Customer Service."

Dave's phone: "Sorry Dave, I can't let you call that number."

Smart phones are next in the natural evolution of wireless user devices. Apple Computer killed the Newton personal digital assistant (PDA), but the heavenly vision first propounded by Apple CEO John Sculley lives on. Smart phone "haves" will enjoy ubiquitous access to information they don't yet realize they need. Smart phone "have-nots" will become an endangered species -- at least within the competitive jungle.

Evolution -- both biological and technological -- is a creative process. Large, entrenched vendors participate in virtually every new-product category, but small start-ups often are first to discover the winning formula. In essence, entrenched vendors flood the market with random mutations, hoping corporate spendthrifts ("early adopters") will stumble upon the killer application. Start-ups rarely can afford but one chance, so they throw everything behind a vision. One hopes to win by brute force, the other by inventive genius.

MARKET DRIVERS Predicting that smart phones will succeed is easy. The costs of processing power and memory continue to decline, so phones are certain to get smarter. Defining how smart phones will succeed is much more difficult. New evidence suggests PCS carriers, rather than end users, will drive adoption. Rather than giving customers what they think they want, these unconscious supply-siders hope to generate demand for smart phones.

One of the biggest challenges confronting new wireless carriers is customer service. Subscribers calling toll-free customer-service lines often encounter long delays. Smart phones will help PCS operators automate handling of many types of queries, such as subscribers who want to know how many free minutes they have left. Smart phones also will help operators invent more features to give away -- the latest rage in this highly competitive, if not-yet-profitable, business segment.

But if carriers drive the adoption of smart phones, then carriers surely will dictate who will use them, when they will use them and what they will use them for. So don't be surprised when a voice that sounds like HAL from the classic sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey says, "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that." Such is the price of carrier-driven (and subsidized) smart phones.

FORM FACTOR What will these wireless smart phones be like? We now are fairly certain the successful smart phone must, first and foremost, look and feel like a phone. Wireless phone subscribers are not clamoring forwireless computers. Nor is there much interest in an electronic answer to the Sw iss Army knife. The main thing most wireless phone users want to do is talk, but they appreciate a device that helps them do it safely, efficiently and affordably.

The successful smart phone does not have to be a Cray supercomputer in disguise. In fact, it just has to be a bit smarter than today's wireless phones. Mainly, that means it will be better at accepting input and presenting output. What will distinguish smart phones from ordinary phones will be their superior user interface.

DATA ENTRY The ability to enter data and messages is in desperate need of improvement. In order to enter a brief text message on one of today's phones, you must press more buttons than George Jetson pushes during an 8-hour work shift. But help is on the way. Samsung Electronics is developing handsets with built-in speech recognition. At first, speech recognition will be used exclusively for dialing and perhaps navigating menus. As the technology advances, it should become possible to dictate text messages.

For now, text messages will have to be entered via the phone's keypad or a screen capable of accepting stylus (pen) input. Tegic Communications has developed a fast and reliable method for entering text messages on a numeric keypad. Instead of hitting the No. 2 (ABC) key three times to select the letter C, the user presses the key once. After all of the letters have been entered, Tegic's T9 software guesses the complete word -- reportedly with 95% accuracy.

For phones accepting stylus entry, 3COM's Graffiti software (as used on the popular PalmPilot) performs nearly flawless handwriting recognition. Most users don't seem to mind learning Graffiti's proprietary, single-stroke character set. (3COM claims it can be learned within minutes.) Alternatively, phones accepting stylus entry can employ pop-up, on-screen, phone keypads in combination with Tegic's T9 software.

DISPLAY Better output is delivered using slightly larger, higher resolution LCDs. This is good enough for most applications. More demanding applications can use "virtual displays" developed by companies such as Reflection Technology. Virtual displays are essentially tiny viewers that, when held close to the eye, present the equivalent of a full-size computer display.

Another new technology may help ordinary or slightly smarter phones perform like geniuses. Ericsson, IBM, Intel and Toshiba have teamed up to develop a low-cost, short-range radio solution for exchanging data between cell phones, portable PCs and fixed devices. Code-named BlueTooth, this short-range radio technology will permit smart phones to upload and download information to and from nearby desktop PCs or other devices. In many cases, this may be done just to "borrow" a larger keyboard or monitor.

But improved data input and output is not enough. End-to-end solutions are needed to make this stuff truly useful. There needs to be content matching the smart phone's display capabilities, communications protocols that make efficient use of digital cellular and PCS air interfaces, and hosts that recognize commands and queries written in smart-phone shorthand.

Unwired Planet has performed yeoman's work toward enabling wireless handsets to access the Internet and corporate intranets. This includes persuading popular web sites to publish special pages containing information specially-formatted for portable devices. It also has spurred leading vendors to develop open standards that may make such applications widespread.

It looks like carriers will kick-start the smart-phone market, with customer service the initial application. But users should take control from there. The ultimate promise of smart phones is what they can do for smart users.

If market growth for smart phones is, indeed, a given, then it follows that the embedded software market will grow right along with it. Beduin Communications has designed its Impact Browser to that end. The Java-based web browser is small, 260K, and has a robust memory-management model so that it will not crash when a large web page is loaded. Because its market is the mobile professional, the software was designed to resume a file transfer automatically after a dropped connection. The interface also has been designed for smart phones' small screens, and the browser allows the user to zoom out to see a whole web page and zoom in for details. Impact also is upgradeable so that new functions can be added as necessary.