Mobile phones with ultra-high-speed Internet connection promise a lot, are we there yet?
Imagine opening your mobile phone and being able to check your bank account balance, find the latest results from your favorite sports team, if you’re on a diet find out what your daily calorie intake is, find out what your tofu lasagna is just a 600 calories, download the coolest ringtone, find out which space station is about to fly over your hometown, and finally find a great restaurant where you and a friend can have dinner.
eBay CEO Meg Whitman says: “Explore the possibilities of what could happen when high-speed broadband services are widely adopted elsewhere as well.” More and more mobile phone customers will want to stream music on their mobile phone. An innovative company called Amp’D mobile wireless has leased service packages from Verizon Wireless. Very soon, the 18-35 year old market will be able to bundle whatever media they want onto their cell phones before they are shipped to their homes. They will be able to select the version of their favorite sitcom, a new ringtone, the games they would like to play on their Amp’d mobile phone.
One country where three quarters of the population own cell phones is Korea. Back in the 1960s, there was one television for every 300 inhabitants in that country. See how far technology has influenced Koreans. In fact, if you are a Korean couple looking for an apartment, a sign will appear at the bottom of the rental sign showing the internet connection speed for that particular apartment block. This is very important to many young Korean couples and can be a deciding factor in whether or not to rent that particular apartment.
New cellular technology is just around the corner, but when you get there expect to pay
The Ministry of Information and Communication or MIC in Korea says that people will be able to surf the Internet while traveling in their vehicle at 60 kph. This service is called WiBro. MIC has leased the following three Korean telecommunications companies: SK telecom, KT and Hanaro in order to provide wireless high-speed Internet access. You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Americans. There will come a time when your cell phone will be able to read radio frequency identification tags, the barcode you see on every item in a grocery store. Imagine having a MIC cell phone that can read the expiration date on: milk, cheese, yogurt, fresh meats, baked goods, and seafood at your local grocery store. Imagine that your MIC cell phone can pick up a signal from an advertisement asking you to download a preview of a new movie. You never thought that your cell phone could do so many things, right? The predicted success of this wireless Internet service is overwhelming. WiBro estimates that there will be more than 9 million new subscribers between now and 2011.
The promise of watching DVD videos on your Windows smartphone
Many Japanese commuters are already watching videos on their mobile phones as they commute long distances from home to work on the subway. Well, if you have a Windows smartphone, you can convert a new DVD movie on your computer to watch on your Windows mobile device. No matter how old you are, people of all generations enjoy movies of all kinds. I don’t know about you, but I’m a Film Festival addict. When the Vancouver Film Festival comes to town, I buy the Visa Gold Express ticket that allows me to sneak into a movie 5 minutes before the curtains open. There are 5-10 reserved seats in each theater for Visa Gold Express Pass holders. The most popular and well-received films from the film festival are then converted to DVD and that’s what I look forward to seeing. A very popular software called Pocket DVD studio 3.5 allows you to convert any DVD movie you watch at home to the following formats: wmv,avi,mpg,mpeg,pm,rmvb,tivo2go. The good news is that you won’t have to spend an entire afternoon converting a single movie. Diane Dumas, a Pocket PC editor, took five hours to convert a DVD movie to Windows Media Video format. However, with Pocket DVD Studio 3.5, she was able to convert her movie to DVD in less than an hour.
What happens after converting it?
1. Save the converted DVD to a storage card or your desktop hard drive
2. Sync the converted DVD with your Windows mobile device using ActiveSync
3. Now sit in your favorite WiFi hotspot, lazy chair or park and watch your DVD movie on your smartphone
Another interesting development happening in Spain at the moment is a service called Sim pay. What is Sim payment?
This service already exists in Spain and has the ability to use your mobile phone to facilitate mobile payments. The goal of Sim pay, which is also a non-profit organization, is to have the entire network of European mobile users, all 70 million of them, can select on their mobile phone, “shop with Sim pay”. An equivalent Sim Pay service can be adapted to the United States. Pay pal now has more than 60 million account holders in the world. Maybe pay pal will look at this model and take note.
What is Sim pay real life application?
If you frequently travel to Seoul, the capital of Korea, you may come across an experimental cafe where you can order an Asian version of cappuccino and be able to pay for it with your cell phone. In fact, you may not even have to interact with a human being, just order your cappuccinos on your cell phone screen and then pay electronically and receive your receipt electronically as well. But how does cappuccino prepared by a Korean robot taste?
Source: The Economist April 2-6, 2005, Special Report, The Mobile Phone Is Man’s Best Friend, Pocket PC, November 2005