‘Mobile’ is the future, but the smartphone will be relegated to the sidelines, which, incidentally, might just prove to be good news for developing countries.

By Wim Jansen

It was difficult to discover a trend at this year’s CES, the trade fair for consumer electronics in the  'gambling' city of Las Vegas, in the United States. It was not at all easy to separate the wheat from the chaff in the chaos and confusion created by 113,000 manufacturers, dealers, retailers, industrial spies, trend watchers, bloggers and journalists. There was an abundance of interesting gadgets, but will they sell? Consumers are fickle and certainly not guaranteed to buy anything.

Skype TV
3D television? We still have to fiddle around with those 3D glasses, and manufacturers have yet to agree on an industry-wide standard. Last year saw the breakthrough of the e-reader, electronic tablets enabling consumers to read and digitally store hundreds of books. However, there was no sign of that one superior design which would set a standard simply by relegating all its competitors to the shadows. Maybe making phone calls via television has a future: three manufacturers of large television screens have announced their new products will feature Skype, the programme which enables free video telephone via the internet.

Wireless internet
In the halls, corridors and backrooms of the huge trade fair, all the talk has been about the bigger issues: new platforms, mobile networks and, above all, about LTE. The acronym stands for Long Term Evolution*, a new standard for wireless internet. The current lightning-fast mobile network 3G was mainly designed for state-of-the-art mobile phones.

Mobile cameras
LTE, the fourth generation mobile broadband technology, transcends the telephone. Even a car can be regarded as a mobile device hooked up to this network: while the driver is listening to the Arab-language broadcasts of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, passengers in the back can watch Chinese television or one of the thousands of other video streams that can be found on the worldwide web.

Take, for example, the camera of a professional photographer, who via LTE has a direct link to the production process at his editorial office on the other side of the planet. The same camera allows him to monitor developments at the stock exchange and, moreover, to make phone calls.

Seismic shift
Derek Kuhn, responsible for new technology at global multinational Alcatel Lucent, says developments are taking place at breakneck speed.

“We have seen an overwhelming shift for, let’s say, the last ten months from the carrier community throughout the world, especially central Europe and even developing countries that are now believing in LTE as the go-forward technology for mobile. That affords a ton of different types of applications and services.”

Mobile broadband
In many Western counties as well as in China, Alcatel Lucent and other companies are already working on the new network. On 14 December the first European LTE networks went into service in Stockholm and Oslo. Derek Kuhn expects that the industrialised world will ‘convert’ to LTE within a year, followed by the rest of the world two years later. The Alcatel Lucent executive says he is convinced poor countries will follow suit quickly this time round, as they have the advantage of lagging behind:

“Developing countries can have tremendous benefits because they don’t need the in-ground or on-pole infrastructure of cable technology, they can benefit from mobile broadband and have access from anything the developed nations have on connecting to devices, whether it’s a smart phone, a laptop with a data card or devices that have embedded mobile in them. It’s a sea change for us all.”

Swiss army knife
Even though the thousands of new gadgets presented at the CES seem relatively unimportant when placed against the backdrop of these major developments, allow me to put the spotlight on two of them. Victorinox has produced an electronic variant of its famous Swiss army knife, which in addition to various types of knives and a pair of scissors also includes an 8 Gb USB stick secured by the owner’s fingerprint, as well as Bluetooth software to remotely control an old-fashioned PowerPoint presentation and a laser beam to point out the details.

Intestinal travels
And, last but not least, a synthetic camera the size of a marble, the prototype of which we could only look at from a distance. When swallowed, it will wirelessly transmit the images of its 12-hour journey through the digestive tract. It can also be used at home.

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* LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the project name of a new high performance air interface, the 4th generation (4G) of radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile networks. On August 18, 2009, the European Commission announced it will invest a total of €18 million into researching the deployment of LTE and 4G candidate system LTE Advanced.

(Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution)

Photos: RNW

RNW translation (gsh)