Wacky or Not? Three Scenarios for the Future of the Smartphone
by Sam Dean - Aug. 28, 2009Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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Are you old enough to remember black and white TV, vinyl records and 8-track tapes? What about the Pet Rock? If you are old enough, you're acutely aware of how limited and almost laughable old-school technology can seem--even technologies that are not so old in relative terms. The market for smartphones and applications for them is raging, and, whenever I'm out in public I notice how tightly integrated with people's lives their smartphones are.
Open source, is, of course, going to be a huge part of the future of smartphones, and I don't doubt that application contributions from the open source community could shift their future dramatically. This week, I noticed a number of developments that made me think of some seemingly far-out but entirely doable scenarios for the smartphone future. They could make today's phones seem like stripped down novelties, and might even qualify as revolutions.
One OS? That's Sooo 2009. This week, Wyse Technology released its $29.99 PocketCloud technology, which will be demonstrated at the VMWorld 2009 trade show--a show focused primarily on virtualization. PocketCloud lets users connect to via their iPhones to physical or virtual desktop environments in remote locations, including data centers, desktops in the cloud, or a desktop at home or in the office (it works with the iPod Touch too). It features both remote control and virtualization features, and those features make me wonder if, just as many of us run multiple operating systems and environments on a single computer, we might run them concurrently on smartphones and remotely connect to foreign environments with them on a widespread basis.
If you think about this scenario carefully, it could radically change smartphone competition, how applications are developed, and more. Open source mobile platform developers, unencumbered by the moat-building that goes on on proprietary platforms, should especially give careful thought to how virtualization and remote connections could play into their long-term strategies.
The Pocket Doctor. I've written a couple of times before about the concept of the smartphone as Pocket Doctor. Because smartphones are always with us, unlike doctors, they have potential as constant medical diagnostic devices. There are already very interesting efforts going on to develop this kind of future.
At the demonstration of the iPhone 3.0 operating system earlier this year, Apple demonstrated two new applications for the iPhone that monitor the glucose levels of the owners and monitor blood pressure. The idea is that iPhone owners who have diabetes or high blood pressure could have data on their physical status collected, and even automatically sent at regular intervals to a doctor.
Recently, the Lemelson-M.I.T. program awarded $100,000 to Dr. Joel Selanikio for his development and deployment of EpiSurveyor (in use at left), an open source platform for gathering and sharing medical data using mobile phones. It's in wide use in Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere, curbing diseases, helping investigators track their spread, and more.
It's very important to realize that this scenario for the smartphone future does not necessarily have to stay limited to the phone being a static receptacle for data that you input. For example, Boris Rubinsky, U.C. Berkeley professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering has developed a method of medical imaging from mobile phones that could particularly be meaningful in third-world countries where access to ultrasounds, X-rays, MRIs and other technologies is limited or absent.
Rubinsky's technology doesn't cost much, and it could also be used by you someday to provide early detection of cancer and much more. Look down the page here for a very striking image of a simulated breast tumor being shown on a Palm Treo. Can the smartphone be the diagnostic device and the data collection device and the device that sends data automatically to a remote doctor? Yes.
Carriers? We Don't Need No Steenkin' Carriers. In a recent post on GigaOm called "Meet Google, Your Phone Company," Om Malik discussed the arrival of Google Voice for mobile phones. "Can Google be your phone company?" he asked. "The answer is yes," he concluded, after watching a demo of Google Voice for a number of different mobile platforms, including Android. Also note these thoughts from him on the broad implications of being able to go completely around carriers with mobile phones:
"The Google Voice app essentially reduces the cell phone carrier to a dumb pipe. While the BlackBerry application is interesting, it’s the Android application that shows that Google has bigger designs. I have been playing around with the Android App for about an hour or so and I can see the broader implications. When I was setting up the app, one of the options I was given: to make all calls through Google Voice. And that’s when I thought to myself: Oh! OH!"
Google Voice isn't the only application out there that conjures up this carrier-be-damned scenario for the smartphone future. A way to work around carriers would not only be devastating news for them, but it could radically change the price structure of the smartphone market, the ubiquity of smartphones and more. We may already be witnessing carrier paranoia on this front, in the form of the recent Apple/AT&T/Google brouhaha over Apple's rejection of (or careful consideration of, if you listen to Apple) the Google Voice application. Here again, open source platforms and communities are ideal springboards for taking smartphones toward new frontiers.
Will these scenarios actually play out? It looks to me like they already are.
