Mobile Phone – The Next Platform for Innovation

One lesson I’ve learned in working with emerging technologies is that you can never stop innovating. In the following article there’s a quote that I like,

“Technology only continues to be successful when it looks to the future. “

This certainly holds true for the mobile phone which in my opinion has now overtaken the PC in terms of “innovation attention” and for the future will be the platform of choice. Innovation can be found on all fronts with the mobile phone.

In the memory department, 8 Gb is now the standard memory space for a mobile phone. The iPhone comes with that amount of memory. (I’m holding out for the 32 Gb version myself.) Samsung just announced an 8 Gb SD memory card for its phones.

ARM just announced a 1 GHz processor for the mobile phone. Going forward, multicore processors from Intel will be targeted at the mobile device with an eye towards cost.

In the camera department, the camera on the mobile phone has grown from 100K resolution to 3 mega pixels today. In fact mobile phones are on the verge of invading the digital still camera space. Check out this whitepaper on the topic.

The number of mobile phones with GPS capability will increase 10x in less than five years according to this article.

The use of Web services will be extended to the mobile phone in a much tighter synchronization taking into account a user’s personal set of preferences.

Inside the mobile handsets, the power amplifier will be integrated into a single silicon chip and will use a silicon-on-insular substrate for signal isolation.

Research at Georgia Tech predicts wireless data transfer rate at the 1 meter distance will reach 15 Gb/sec.

If Clayton Christensen were writing the “Innovators Dilemma" today he could use the shift from PCs to mobile phones as his example case rather than the shift from the mainframe to minicomputers to PCs which he did in the first version.

Best regards,
Hall T.