WORLD IN MY POCKET

The Times of India (Delhi edition)

It’s hard to believe that desktop computers have only been around for 25 years or so, and the World Wide Web for even less time than that. But just as the personal computer (PC) changed the way we organised and accessed information, the cellphone is transforming the ways in which we can find and use information. In the last decade, mobile phones have become more than just instruments to make and receive telephone calls. A new breed of mobiles, called smartphones, have features that were once the exclusive domain of PCs, such as spreadsheets, e-mail, word processing and Web browsing. These smartphones carry our personal information and provide access to the Internet, while increasingly being used to navigate the real world.

Even in these tough economic times, smartphones have continued to sell. A recently released study indicates that about 23 per cent of all handset sales in the US during the fourth quarter of 2008 were of smartphones. This figure is only expected to rise. As the computing power of these phones increases, the sort of tasks they will be able to perform will also become more complex. Already, smartphones are an amalgam of various other devices — they are phones, media players, cameras and even navigation systems.

New software applications have made it possible for such phones to act as GPS devices. Not only can users view maps on their phones to figure out where they are, or to find a restaurant or the nearest petrol station, new software lets people locate other people. This has privacy implications, sure, but it also has the potential to change the way people think about space. Location-aware phones will let consumers ‘look’ behind buildings and around the corners to find little shops and cafes they might have otherwise overlooked.

There are four billion cellphones in use around the world. India has 280 million of them. The mobile phone market in this country continues to grow in defiance of global trends. Not all of these phones are smartphones — indeed, most are not. But as time passes, the technology will get cheaper. For instance, colour screens in mobiles was high technology just a few years ago, but is now a standard feature, while more and more phones ship with cameras. Future generations of smartphones could become the Swiss army knives of portable electronics. They’ll be able to handle everything from our communication to our entertainment needs. And, just about everyone will have one.