I was recently looking around my house and made a mental note of all the electronic devices that I possess. There was a telephone to make calls; Digital Camera to click pictures; Audio Recorder to record some conversation in meetings; Video Camera to bring out the Speilberg in me; My ever faithful companion, the Computer for emailing, web surfing, word processing; A Video Game box for those fun interactive games; A Music player for music; TV for watching the news etc.
As I made a mental note of all these items, in walked a friend with the latest mobile phone. You know the ones, also called Cellular phones. In the year 2004 alone there was 675 million phones bought and the figures are only set to increase in the coming years. Where fixed landline phones took years to achieve some degree of market penetration, mobile phones gained acceptability in a fraction of the time. In some countries mobile phones outnumber the landline phones!
So coming back to my house and my friend, it didn't take much to get him singing adulations about his new phone. A cursory comment to the effect of “Is that a new phone” got him started. Of course I knew that mobile phones today can do many things, but his list had me gasping. The features in the phone were:
Digital Camera: And not just those namesake ones. This one had a reasonable quality level of 2 Mega pixels along with storage space.
Audio Recorder: With many minutes of recording time, this could come in handy when a pen and paper were hard to find.
Video Recorder: Why stop at pictures and audio, when you can take a short film.
Multimedia Messaging: Of course what you record and click you should be able to share with others. Multimedia messaging allows you to send non-text messages to other compatible phone users or emails.
If the desktop PC took computers to the ordinary home, then the mobile phone will take the computer to the villages and rural areas. The new phones come with a web client for surfing the Internet. Email clients can be used to download emails on to your phones and respond using the phone. Games can be played on the phone and some with other users. A document viewer will allow you to view and edit some documents in popular formats such as .DOC .XLS.
A built-in blue tooth and infrared ports allow you to wirelessly connect the phone to other devices having similar ports.
A built in music player allows you to store and listen to hours of digital music and the FM player allows you to tune to your favorite FM stations.
As the phone is EDGE compatible, a next generation network, it is possible to watch streaming television provided the operator supports the feature.
The phone could also be used to make purchases by acting as a credit/debit card.
They are already being used as rudimentary GPS systems and can tell you in which locality you are. Very soon they would be able to tell you your exact location.
And these features are the advanced features. The regular features of using the phone as a watch, alarm clock, calculator, torch are a given.
If I were to carry all those features with me, I'd need a truck. And here were all those devices, in one unit, that could literally fit into your pocket. And this is hardly the end of the road. With technological innovations taking place almost on a daily basis, it remains to be seen what else can the phone do for you. And also, whether people will still use them to make voice calls?
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site by: DWM 
