Monday April 27, 2009 – Stewart Wolpin
MP3 player. PND. digital camera. PMP. camcorder. E-book reader. mobile phone. All popular 21st Century gadgets. And all may be gone, at least in individual form, in five years.
Where will they go? We'll get the first hint sometime in late June/early July when the third generation iPhone appears. If the varying reports are accurate, the new iPhone will have 32 GB of memory, a 3.2 MP camera and video recording capability, along with all the other promised iPhone OS 3.0 improvements and the functionality brought by the nearly 30,000 third-party iPhone apps.
For years, the mobile phone has been absorbing other devices' capabilities, a digital version of the TV show Heroes' power-stealing character Sylar. First, they were just phones. Then they were PDA phones. Then they were camera phones. Then they were text messaging and email phones. Then they were music phones. Then they were Web browsing phones. Then they were multimedia viewing phones. Then they were GPS phones.
Some say the iPhone maybe have been the first cellphone to be the true sum of these disparate capabilities that has conquered the market, but phones running Android, Palm's coming webOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile "open" cell OSs are not far behind.
Aside from the usual technological advancements and SoC developments, two trends are pushing us closer to one device to rule them all – cheap more copious flash memory and faster mobile networks.
On a gut level you probably realize how cheap flash memory is. But nothing is as dramatic as cold, hard statistics.
Kingston, which makes both flash memory cards and thumb drives, supplied me with its retail SD card pricing over the last few years:
Source: Kingston
You read right. You can now buy a 16 GB high-capacity SD card for nearly half the price of a 2 GB SD card just three years ago.
Memory built into devices also is getting cheaper. Nothing exemplifies this more storage/less money than the Apple iPod Classic. See how prices have remained nearly constant over the last five years while storage capacity has increased six fold:
iPOD CLASSIC 20 GB 30 GB 40 GB 60 GB 80 GB 120 GB 2004 $299 $399 2005 $299 $399 2006 $249 $349 2007 $249 2008 $249 So much more storage for so little money could soon make the hard drive extinct, which means cheaper, lighter, more reliable and less power-hungry laptop PCs in five years – or even sooner – and enable a continued condensing of capabilities into fewer portable devices. Then there's the coming of LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G network technology providing wireless mobile broadband speeds of 6-8 Mbps, 10 times faster than current 3G EV-DO and HSPA networks. Verizon will start offering LTE service sometime in the middle of next year in around a dozen or more markets, with AT&T likely to follow in 2011. Faster networks aren't just for faster uploads or downloads, although that will be an obvious way to transmit high-resolution geo-tagged photos and videos from cellcams and maybe juice up the early efforts to improve video telephony. Verizon is actually funding a program seeking innovative ways of talking advantage of the LTE's speedier and roomier wireless broadband Autobahn. What about Sprint's XOHM-branded WiMAX 4G service? After a year, it's available in only two markets, Baltimore and Portland, OR, and Nokia has discontinued the N810, its lone WiMAX handset. Only one new WiMAX handset, the Windows 6.1-powered Samsung Mondi, due in the next few months from Sprint, was announced at CTIA earlier this month. Five years from now, we may view today’s phones to be as quaint as an 8-track cassette. Future phones may operate on 4G LTE networks, have bright and power-efficient OLED screens, 120 GB flash drives, 8 MP cameras, HD video capture, geo-tagging, video GPS, video telephony and access to thousands of downloadable applications – all for less than $200 (with that pesky 2 year contract). If consumers want all those functions in one place, this will truly be one device to rule them all.
