* Ericsson, HP, Intel, Nokia share insights
Mobile executives participating in a panel Tuesday in San Jose shared their visions of the future of mobility.
Officials from Ericsson, HP, Intel and Nokia discussed the prospects of mobile device form factors and interfaces, service pricing models, emerging markets and other issues at a packed meeting of The Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum.
The mobile phone evolution
A few of the perspectives they offered:
* Mobile pricing. The execs discussed two issues here. First, they said they thought it likely that mobile operators would move from a one-subscription-per-device model to a one-subscription-per-user model.
“We pay an aggregate electricity bill each month, not a separate fee for every light bulb” and appliance using power throughout the house, observed Hakan Eriksson, CTO and head of Ericsson Silicon Valley.
Second, panelists thought it was fair for very heavy bandwidth consumers to pay a service premium over the average subscriber. Again, Eriksson pointed to the power industry, noting that in the early days of power distribution systems, electricity customers all paid an equal flat rate. Then “an aluminum company probably came to town, and people decided that [entities] using power to melt aluminum everyday should probably pay more” than the average resident.
* How many personal devices will users eventually carry? The consensus was two to three. “I don’t ever see doing autoCAD on a smartphone,” quipped Mike Bell, VP in the Ultra Mobility Group at Intel. He added that he sees the smartphone evolving to become more of an “aid” that delivers customized data proactively to users rather than users having to hunt for it.
* What’s the prognosis for app stores? The panelists agreed that proprietary app stores seem to run counter to the open nature of mobile computing. Bell suggested that forthcoming open Web APIs such as WebGL and HTML5 might be promising alternatives to today’s islands of platform-specific app stores.
* What will be sold in emerging markets? “Seventy-five percent of the world has never used a PC, so there’s no learned input method” such as a keyboard or mouse that must be supported in new markets, said Phil McKinney, VP and CTO in the Personal Systems Group at HP.
He said his company has conducted research in remote parts of the world that involved asking people to figure out how to expand an image on a touch screen. Most didn’t think of using a pinching touch gesture, he said, but tried all kinds of other creative ways of using their fingers to “pull” on corners and the sides of images.
