The ever evolving mobile phone…

location based services

The mobile phone “revolution” is quite a recent phenomenon. While the growth of the mobile phone adoption is a record in itself in the sense that it is the fastest growing consumer electronic in the history of mankind. The phone essentially conjures up images of “Hello, Hello” and communication, it is interesting to see how the mobile phone has diversified into the domain of features reserved for other gadgets. This truly is an example of convergence.
Compare the features in the above diagram to that of a simple phone or even just the walkie/talkie from the last decades. Probably the common node would be the one to do voice calling and that also a subset of the functionality that is present in the mobiles of today. So, does it look saturated ? Has all the innovations that could be part of the mobile phone , already in there ?
There are a slew of new areas that can me made possible to do with the mobile phone and that are just waiting to hit the critical mass with mass adoption of 3G(read faster) networks. While the possibilities are endless, some of one that I can think of now( and some of these already have been tried as pilot projects in some countries in Europe and in Japan) are TV broadcasting to the phone, Location based services(there is a whole gamut of services like ‘provide me directions/map to the nearest Macdonald’s restaurant from here’ that you could provide under this umbrella), Navigational services, Remote computing( using your mobile phone as a client computer to the office network and work from anywhere) and many more. It would be interesting to see the whether in the next few years, each of the new features that has already converged into the mobile phone, like, the camera , would become more and more powerful( higher megapixel, optical zoom, sophisticated features) or a completely new set of features would make it’s way through, or both. Nevertheless, one important factor for the success of the mobile phone is it’s mobility and which has also led to it become a personal device. On the other hand, as you try to pack in more and more features into this tiny device, the size also becomes one of the limiting factors. Lets wait and watch.