Has any new technology ever spread as rapidly and insid- iously as the mobile phone? Ten years ago, there were 3.25 million handsets in use in the United Kingdom. Today there are around 50 million. And tomorrow is coming fast.
The mobile phone of the future will bear as little relation to the one you now carry as a Mondeo does to a Ford Model T. You’ll still be able to make phone calls on it, but it will also be your contact book, camera, credit card and personal entertainment centre.
Last month T-Mobile gave a taste of this when it launched NewsExpress, a constantly updated news service based on Macromedia’s Flash technology. News and weather are likely to be followed on to the service by other useful information, including train timetables, journey planners and road maps.
RSS is another web-based application heading to your phone. Short for Really Simple Syndication, this is a news reader program that automatically updates whenever a new story is posted. No longer will you have to check in for the latest news — now it will be sent to you automatically.
But it’s not just news services that are going to change the way we use our mobile phones. The latest digital camera phones are more powerful than ever before, with Samsung and other manufacturers announcing 2 and 3 megapixel models, meaning that the phones now have the same definition as the stand-alone digital cameras of two years ago. The way we take pictures is going to change. In fact, printer companies such as Epson, HP and Kodak are already planning on this, and all three manufacturers have launched printers that support wireless technology and print directly from a mobile phone without the need for a PC. Now you can hold the pictures that you’ve taken rather than just sending them to friends after a night in the pub. A night you might soon be financing with your mobile phone. It seems unlikely now, but it’s already an everyday occurrence in Japan. Simply text a bar, drinks machine, or railway ticket office and the charge will be added to your mobile phone bill at the end of the month.
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Not content with turning your phone into a mini cash machine, some companies are planning to transform it into an entertainment hub. Mobile download games are big business, as too will be listening to music on your phone. Toshiba has just developed a hard disk drive about the size of a pound coin that can store around 1,000 songs encoded in MP3 format — the same as an iPod mini. Mobiles already offer radio, and some are even promising television or movie playback.
We’ve already come a long way in the 100 years since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but the journey may only just have begun.