So will we be wearing our next mobile phone?

The excitement over the summer has been about wearables when it comes to mobile technology.  Will our next device be in the form of smartglasses or smartwatches or even a smartsuit?

To be honest having got into some of the futurology that saw mobile phones becoming just a piece of jewellery in the form of a single earring I have a bad track record. I thought that we would be living in smart houses that sensed everything that went on and the handset would become the ultimate remote controller. I saw the mobile network morphing into a service provider that would be trusted to hold and manage all your personal data.  To be honest these were forecasts back in 20th century and Google and Facebook had not become the cornerstones of many lives and we did not thing the NSA would read all our data.  The Mobile Network was going to become everyones personal assistant and we would all have exemplary concierge levels of service.

What I do think that is that we will not live with a single connected device rather we will have a number of devices which will have a personal network connection to a modem that offers highspeed broadband and voice services. Some people who are happy with "popular" music can live with Spotify and YouTube whilst others will want a music device that plays back their musical collection. The same can be said for e-reader, camera, media consumption screen. Some are happy to map their run using an app on a phone whilst others have a more detailed record tanks to a Garmin Watch, in future the Watch will connect to the web via your personal modem.

As Augmented Reality develops we might expect the specialist glasses to become contact lenses or a protection device as seen with fighter pilots head up displays.

As healthcare gets involved we could start to see a number of devices that are warn to sense vital signs and mobility.  We can expect to these developed for the Defence and Old Aged markets before they become mainstream.  We might also be able to see tags used to enable smart seats, beds or toilets in connecting them to a mobile device and using proximity it will allow differentiation of different people within a building. These devices are likely to be manufactured thanks to 3D printing development rather than Samsung/Apple/Google design labs and Chinese factories.

The big issue will be that the deployment of smart buildings and thus smart cities is going to be the ability to get political buy in and consumer uptake.  Very many of the senior executives I meet alongside senior politicians and very rich individuals do not carry a phone and have no wish to do so. Thus in areas of New York, Switzerland, London, Paris and Berlin now can to build the infrastructure needed to mesh new services together?  

I think that we will see a number of prototypes come to market when it comes to wearables most of which will fail because we would be embarrassed to wear them and be seen as some form of cyborg. If the wearables could be made to look like "normal" products then fear that you are being "stalked" would force social pressure to stop use. Would you want someone with a wearable to share the changing facilities with you at your gym?

My advice to Mobile Networks invest in building the fastest best quality network, develop tools to manage ID, offer storage and form federations to innovate service fail to that and expect to fall.

Thinking about Mobile Handsets

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at upgrading the handsets of my three daughters and so have reviewed what is on the market and what they wish to do with there phones.

This will be the fourth handset that my Twins have owned. At the moment they are happy users of a Blackberry Bold which are starting to show signs of age. They are not heavy users of either text or voice but they use BBM and Facebook with a little email. They are thus happy with the QWERTY form factor and when asked if they wanted a Blackberry Touch they declined as the find the lack of keyboard slows them down. They are looking for something that is robust enough to live with the knocks of life in a teenage girl’s pocket and bag that means it has to bounce before it breaks.

The youngest wants her second mobile phone to have a few more features that the basic candy bar she currently has. She does not want an iPhone as “the girls who have one at school are bullies and they all seem to be broken within a few weeks.” I have been looking at a number of Android handsets but she seems to like the Nokia Lumina 800 I have been playing with because it does not look girlie, has a good camera and the battery lasts.

When you look at the shelves in a phone retailer at the moment if you take the Blackberries away what you see is a Smartphone format that is almost uniform. It reminds me of the mid 1990s just as the industry was about to under go massive expansion and all you could have was a black brick, then Nokia launched the 5110i with snap on covers and Motorola and Samsung decided that we might like silver clamshells.

Perhaps we can pause for breath on the development of Operating systems and start to look at form factors? For a number of years I have thought that mobile users are unlikely to carry just one mobile phone when they are able to purchase devices and looking at fellow travellers on the train it does now seem that time has come. Not everyone wishes to carry a device with a 3½ to 4½ inch screen as a phone, so why not have some devices that don’t have a touch screen but rather a simple keyboard?

The interesting thing is that none of the three seem to be demanding a wide range of Apps with which to “personalize” their handset. The number of people they “chat” with on Facebook is a subset of their “Friends” with whom they are social both in the real and virtual world. They do want a device that gives access to YouTube. A VPN which would give access to catch up TV from both the UK and US would be very welcomed. But if that was not available no problem as they can do so via Laptop or Tablet.

When it comes to an upgrade of my handset, something that I can quickly synchronise with my car, laptop and headset would make life easy. As I tend to use my phone whilst driving something with very good voice command would be welcomed. I would love to get rid of the touch screen as too often I put my current phone in my pocket after use and the discover that because it was still active I have played audio books, surfed the web and changed the keyboard, theme etc. . Over the last 14 months my favorite handset has been my Vertu Ascent because it does what I want it to do and when I need something I just use the Concierge service.