Will the Palm devices of tomorrow skip the middleman, wirelessly sending stock quotes, sports scores and e-mail from Mom directly to microchips implanted in the brain?
Well, some things are still science fiction, but experts who track wireless technology expect that over the next few years a slew of new devices and services will make life safer, easier and more efficient.
The technology includes lightweight wearable computers the size of paperback books, with headpieces serving as small screens; a new standard called Bluetooth that lets cellular telephones, laptops and personal digital assistants share information wirelessly at short range; and engineered clothing with embedded sensors that feed a person’s vital signs back to the doctor’s office.
Wireless technologies will eventually supplant desktop computers as the primary access to the Internet most of the time, said Rich Howard, vice president for wireless research at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs.
He expects this to cause some fundamental changes in how society uses the technology. “In some sense we’ve created these large marvelous tools and we’re still learning how to use them,” Howard said.
The Massachusetts technology research firm IDC estimates that the number of Americans using wireless devices capable of sending and receiving calls, e-mail and data will increase more than eightfold, from 7.4 million in 1999 to 61.5 million, by 2003.
Smaller, faster computer chips and components will enable a lot of the new technologies to emerge, but it will still be a while before truly exotic, molecular-level components will be produced through advances in the nanotechnology field, said Juri Matisoo, vice president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
But before wireless technology becomes widely adopted it also needs to become easier to use, experts said.
The applications need to be better thought out to prevent consumer backlashes, because it’s still difficult to get the desired information and services when and how a user wants it, they said.
“A lot of vendors have set expectations too high,” said Carl Zetie, an analyst with Giga Information Group, based in Silicon Valley.
“A lot of the marketing would have you believe you could pick up a phone, get connected to your [service] provider, and the whole Internet is there waiting for you, on a 1-inch-by-1-inch display,” he said. “And that’s just not the reality.”
He said companies need to think more about what they provide. For example, tracking stocks on the Internet through a cell phone may seem like a neat idea, but it isn’t very useful for most people.
What would be more useful is to have the technology take advantage of immediacy in other ways, such as checking movie times and buying a ticket online, which Zetie recently did using his cell phone. This let him skip a long line at the show, where he simply picked up his ticket and went in.
Tickets, he points out, are useful immediately and are something for which the phone is ideal. Using the phone for most general online purchasing is not, because most purchases are delivered days later, he said.
“What we’ve seen so far, especially in the U.S., is the companies providing the services are trying to figure out what people want to have,” he said. “And what they are doing is [taking existing] services and putting them on the phone. They’re not thinking of the tasks you want to do.”
One person who has thought a lot about them is Thad Starner, an assistant professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worn his wearable computer, with its lightweight processor wired to an eyeglass attachment, every day since he was a graduate student in 1993.
He said the whole point of wearable computers is to make computing useful in common situations. Instead of online stock trading, which can be done more comfortably at a desktop computer, a wearable computer could scan the faces at a cocktail party, business meeting or political convention, he said.
The computer could then pull up names and backgrounds of people, and feed the information to the user so the person never has to suffer the embarrassment of forgetting a name, or important details about someone’s position in a company or political campaign.
The system would have to do this quickly, in two seconds or less, a sort of unspoken limit beyond which people don’t want to wait for information, Starner said.
He has even spent time looking at the battery life problem, showing that the energy to power a computer could be harnessed from simple tasks such as walking.
“Why would you use your desktop computer when you could interface, at any time, a terabyte of information?” he said. “That’s like a Library of Congress stored in your clothing.”
But he acknowledged that wearable computing is still in its early stages and will not become ubiquitous anytime soon. Most of the uses for wearables are being developed for military and industrial customers, or serious computing hobbyists.
Nearer on the horizon, the emerging Bluetooth specification is expected to be the next big thing in wireless technology. Devices made using the Bluetooth technology could talk to each other at distances of less than 33 feet, meaning cell phones would be able to send information into car navigation systems or personal digital assistants, which in turn could upload schedule updates to desktop computers, or devices yet to be invented.
The standard was developed by some of the biggest names in wireless technology, including 3Com, Ericsson, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Toshiba. More than 1,800 companies are developing devices or uses for it.
But what about a device that provides it all–Internet access, telephone and paging services, schedule keeping, phone and address lists, two-way video communication, music and more?
Manufacturers such as Ericsson already promise to roll out cell phones that access the Internet wirelessly and act as a PDA, too. Other devices using various combinations of features are expected in the years to come.
But people want different things in their personal technologies, and Zetie said they sometimes want contradictory things, such as devices that are small and light, but still have keyboards, which need to take up a certain amount of space to be comfortable and functional.
He said no one device will fit all for everyone. In fact, he said, some Europeans are already adapting to wireless technology by using high-powered cell phones with lots of features during the day, and then sleeker, lighter cell phones when they go out at night.
