The Hindu Business Line : A new song every day

... but it doesn't keep buyers away. You pay the earth to buy the latest gadget and see it get outdated in a jiffy, but buy you must. Tune in to these changes in the mobile phone scene.

CHOOSING a cell-phone is a real tough decision to make, isn't it? There is a mind-boggling array of phones in the market, and the worst part is that even the latest gadget, for which you paid the earth, becomes outdated in no time.

Blame it on the march of technology. Mobile phone manufacturers are leaving no stone unturned in their quest to add newer features to keep ahead of rivals in a brutally-competitive marketplace. The result: metamorphosis of mobile phones into mini-computers.

It has already started happening. The latest proof of phones acquiring computer-like capabilities is the Samsung SPH-V 5400 phone that the company announced recently. Samsung claims that this is the first mobile phone in the world to have a hard drive that can store 1.5 gigabytes. The phone also features a one-megapixel digital camera, a high-resolution crystal display, an MP3 player, and software for e-book and Korean-English dictionary. It will be priced around $800 in Korea.

Compared to the memory that most phones today have, this is indeed a big leap in storage. Yes, 1.5 gigabytes is no way near the storage of a personal computer but it is still quite voluminous for a mobile phone. For instance, this level of capacity is sufficient to store over 400 songs in your phone. Suddenly you don't feel like having a separate digital music player.

This kind of increase of storage in the cell-phone is taking it closer to a PDA (personal digital assistant), to the status of a portable multimedia gadget. Since mobile phone service providers are desperately trying to boost revenues from data services, they will be only too happy to see such phones hitting the market. And soon they will be enhancing their service offerings to suit these phones. If you think the current price is a bit too high, well, we know that the only way the price of a mobile phone can go is down. Remember camera phones? Who doesn't have one these days?

One phone: two networks

WHEN Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom rolled out the CDMA networks in India, one reason why many existing cell-phone users did not go for the new service was that their GSM phones would not work on a CDMA network. They had to buy new CDMA phones if they were to go for the new service. Now Japan's leading mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, and handset operator Motorola have announced that they will develop a new phone that is compatible with both the W-CDMA network in Japan and GSM networks elsewhere.

The new broadband phones, to be launched by 2005, are targeted at frequent travellers. The price of this handset is yet to be announced. Now that we have both the GSM and CDMA operators firmly established, such a phone has a market in India too.

TV on mobile

IF you are having to make do with cricket statistics in your mobile, that day is not far off when you can watch the live telecast on the phone. Handset makers Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson have announced that they will cooperate for the development of mobile broadcast services. They will `specify the enablers needed to bring broadcast services to mobile devices.'

In mobile broadcasting, television content can be streamed onto the mobile phone. This service will give rise to the proliferation of new, feature-rich, broadcast-enabled phones. NEC says it developed, last year, the world's first prototype of a mobile phone that can receive terrestrial digital TV signals. Nokia says it will introduce a mobile broadcast solution. The mobile phone TV services are now getting launched in Japan.

Picture by Sampath Kumar G.P.

vipin@thehindu.co.in

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