Technofile: Fast forward five years. Your mobile phone buzzes as you wait for your flight at the airport. It's your partner, who appears in full video, wishing you well on your business trip. After hanging up, you check your e-mail and stock quotes, watch a little TV and switch over to instant messaging to check in with your work colleagues before boarding the aircraft.
That's the introduction to an article I might have written a couple of years ago, but just this once, the future appears to have come early. This year will see a horde of new mobile handsets on the market which promise to do everything but shine your shoes.
Two of the all-singing, all-dancing phones will be the Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox T810 and T830 handsets. These pack a built-in Qwerty keyboard, fast 3G access, GPS satellite navigation, Wi-Fi wireless internet access - all in a compact device. The T830 will have a two-megapixel camera, while the T810 is camera-less for companies which ban them on the premises. Also sporting an Intel PXA270 processor of 416 MHz, and built-in Bluetooth, the phone has more in common with a a Swiss army knife than a phone. (see www.fujitsu-siemens.com/
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At this year's 3GSM conference BT, Microsoft and Virgin Mobile launched a new handset called the Trilogy. It will incorporate Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer.
It will be used by BT and Virgin Mobile in the UK for the BT Movio service. Instead of using DVB-H (digital video broadcast-handheld), it will use digital audio broadcast technology to send TV to the phone. In theory, this means the broadcast should be pretty robust.
Sony Ericsson launched a new Walkman phone in the form of the 3G-enabled W950 which has a 4GB hard-drive and a touch screen. This should be plenty of room for the average music buff - 4,000 songs in fact.
The new Walkman phone is thin and compact. Supported music file formats are MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, Wav and m4a. Sony Ericsson claims that it is the first handset that will display cover art.
It also sports an FM radio with RDS, graphical equalizer, mega bass, speaker phone, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and a web browser. Watch out for its consumer launch this summer.
Watch out also for more music phones from Motorola. But this time there will be no iPod phones as it has signed a deal with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Windows Media Player with Motorola's music handsets. Goodbye iTunes.
And if you were unimpressed with 3G, then around the corner are even faster phones. Little known BenQ - which bought Siemens' mobile handset division last year - plans to launch the world's first HSDPA mobile phone in time for the soccer World Cup in Germany in June. HSDPA is a technical standard which claims to be six times faster than normal 3G networks - similar to broadband on a PC.
Samsung will be a close second to HSDPA with a two-megapixel camera phone which is only 16mm thick and promises to pack a lot more widgets inside.
You may not even need this technology, as Nokia has launched its new 6136 phone which sports old-fashioned GSM with wireless internet. So cut your bills by switching to a "voice over internet" connection when you happen to walk past one or if you have a network in the office or at home.
And of course it has a 1.3-megapixel camera and FM radio.
So the message is, the future arrives in the summer - if not before.
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