Cellphones becoming ‘laptop in your pocket'

Cellphones becoming ‘laptop in your pocket'

By MATHEW INGRAM

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 Updated at 9:10 PM EDT

Another company with a growing interest in the future of the cellphone — not to mention a vast research budget — is Microsoft Corp. Like Nokia, the U.S.-based software colossus has been spending a lot of time and money on a specific vision: the cellphone as computer. Not just a gadget to play music, but a fully functional replacement for your laptop — a “remote control for your life,” as an analyst describes it.

Microsoft, which dominates software for desktop personal computers, sees the phone as the new frontier of computing, and it clearly wants a major stake. “Everything someone uses the PC for today, we're trying to extend that to the phone,” says Alex Nanos, mobility solutions manager with Microsoft Canada. “We want to be the one providing the functions and services that people can access wherever and whenever they want.”

The question is not what the phone can do now, but more “what will the phone become over time,” Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates told on-line technology site Engadget recently. The phone, he said, “sort of trumps everything. It trumps media players, it trumps cameras, it trumps GPS-mapping devices, digital wallets, and even entertainment.”

And technology is making it easier for the phone to become what telecom guru George Gilder calls a “teleputer” — a wireless device capable of performing all of the functions we associate with a computer. “Devices are getting cheaper, but you're also seeing bigger screens and more storage,” says British-based Gartner analyst Benjamin Wood.

The phone is increasingly becoming the “ubiquitous converged device” at the centre of our lives, says Lawrence Surtees of IDC Canada. “It's becoming a small laptop in your pocket.”

Some industry experts see such phones turning into “thin clients” or network computers that can access your data wherever it might be — stored on a server at the office or on a PC at home — a model that e-mail-centric devices such as RIM's BlackBerry and palmOne Inc.'s Treo have already made popular.

“It's still early days yet,” Mr. Wood said, but “we're at the beginning of something really interesting.”