Mobile future lies in multiple devices

Mr Dominic Strowbridge, director of Motorola Applications Global Network (MAGNET), is sitting at a table with half a dozen latest-model mobile phones spread before him, of various shapes, colours and degrees of impressiveness.

Having just delivered a talk entitled "Future Mobile Devices and Applications" for a cutting-edge technology conference in Dublin - joining a speakers list that included some high-powered names from the telecommunications and digital media industry - you'd expect him to gush over specifications and technical capabilities.

But he doesn't. "At the end of the day it's the end-user experience that counts. Technology is just a tool. Everyone is so focused on `How fast is it? What's the bandwidth?' " He pushes a phone around on the table. "Basically, size doesn't matter - which may sound very male," he laughs.

Yet as WAP-wary consumers already know, the future of mobile communications does rely on speed and bandwidth. Existing networks are fine for speech, text messaging and some basic WAP services, but both businesses and consumers - end-users all - want the speed and bandwidth to do more.

Mr Strowbridge is confident that they'll get it, beginning with intermediary 2.5G networks - which will launch late this year in the Republic - and, eventually, 3G. But, he argues, the main use of 3G will not be sending and receiving multimedia files or accessing Web content, although that will be possible.

"3G is still going to be about just talking. 3G is still about voice, and I think mobile commerce will be about that too. 3G gives you the opportunity for enhancing the speaking experience." He offers the examples of video telephony, which would enable expanded customer service, and stereo sound, which would help enable conference call participants to distinguish between speakers.

He also does not think people will use just one, integrated device for all purposes. "We seem to be going for this holy grail of one phone that does everything," but he is dismissive. "We see a future where people have multiple devices." To this end, he says, Motorola is working to make it easier to remove a phone's SIM card - the card that identifies a mobile user and enables the phone to access a network - so that it can be swapped in and out of a range of phone devices, depending on which one is most appropriate for the user.

But multiple devices, he says, will require "magical things to make all that possible", such as the ability to easily synchronise to exchange information. Doesn't that require standards - and aren't handset manufacturers often at loggerheads over which set of standards they want to adopt? "I wouldn't necessarily agree that people should have all the same standards," he says. "But they should have inter-operability. If you concentrate on the end-user experience, it's inter-operability that counts."

Inter-operability is an immediate issue for 3G handsets, since not all geographic regions will have 3G, and networks will go live gradually. For example, "a video call needs to drop down to just a voice call on 2G", he says.

At the same time, people shouldn't expect mobile devices to be mini-PCs that struggle to reproduce a large-screen, computer experience. Devices can instead slot in to do useful tasks when someone is away from a PC. He notes that Motorola has developed a "personal assistant" application that watches incoming e-mail for important messages (as defined by the user) and forwards them on to the user. If an attachment is part of the e-mail, the phone user can dial in to view a WAP version of the document on the server, rather than taking the time to download it, slowly, to the device.

He also says that mobile gaming should be seen as a specialised form of gaming, not a truncated duplication of an online game. "You'll never recreate that whole, all-encompassing experience on a device," he says. But a device could, for example, download a single character from a PlayStation game and "train" it so that the user could upload a more skilled character later on.

But how all that happens shouldn't be an issue for device users, nor should the type of device, or which operating system a given device uses. In other words, Mr Strowbridge says, developers of mobile applications shouldn't be planning for a "lower common denominator" experience on one device and a better experience on another. The consumer also shouldn't have to fiddle with settings.

"It's using technology to do the legwork, rather than making the consumer do all the legwork," says Mr Strowbridge.