Old way: You pack your music and maybe even a video on your digital media player before you hit the road.
New way: Download -- and upload -- all types of media on all types of mobile devices wherever you are.
Music on dedicated mobile devices like iPods is old news, and television on your cell phone has been all the buzz for the last year. The real emerging trend is all types of media coming and going from phones and other mobile devices whenever and wherever you want.
In the last year, the most talked-about type of mobile media has been television, but there's doubt about how successful TV delivered to cell phones will be. So far, it hasn't been a huge success in Japan, where these types of trends often get an early foothold. "Since April, all the major carriers in Japan have offered a handset model or two that can receive that kind of television, and they're selling pretty well," said NTT DoCoMo's Karen Lurker.
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• Pay By Phone • Commanding Presence • Internet Everywhere, In Everything • Ubiquitous Media • Remote Health Monitoring • People Tracking |
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Lurker noted, too, that music downloading via the cellular network is starting to take off in both Japan and the U.S. In addition, several vendors are offering downloadable movies to PCs, a trend that surely will be extended directly to mobile devices in the near future.
But Doug Neal, a research fellow for global systems integration firm Computer Sciences Corporation's Leading Edge Forum Executive Programme, said the real story may well be making media transmissions a two-way street. That means you could, for instance, send live videocasts of your vacation to family and friends.
There is also an obvious business use for this sort of technology. "The use of two-way videophones will be important," Neal said. "If I'm doing business with you, I want to look you in the eye." This is another area in which NTT DoCoMo has taken a lead, and many hardware vendors have long been at work developing the chipsets and other technologies to make mobile videoconferencing common.
When it comes to ubiquitous mobile entertainment, though, Smith, the futurist for Social Technologies, added a note of caution. While the technology is readily available, he said that cellular operators have to get more realistic about their media offerings, which he said are currently too expensive and too limited.
"So far, the cost of getting on the Internet and downloading media [to mobile devices] -- well, it costs a lot and isn't that great an experience," Smith said. "The operators are going to have to give up some control, open it up and charge less." Today, he explained, cellular carriers want to sell you media but don't want you downloading media from sources they don't control -- but that will change, he added, when users reject the current offerings and as competitive technologies such as mobile WiMAX start becoming available.
