Hotspot @ home: restrictions and possibilities

One of the new things in cell phone industry is cell phone over internet technology. The most influencial one is T-Mobile’s hotspot @ home.I have not had a chance to test it but it seems from my research that people are not so satisfied.

With the vast coverage of wireless internet in public places, houses, and work places, the idea is very charming. It would be somehow stupid if a company is not investing in this area.

The way I see it is that cell phone over the internet is like the thrill for internet addicts at the advent of ISDN. You can call and use the internet at the same time! In due time, TV, landline phone, cell phone, home internet will all be integrated with the signal transported through one medium. Above all, the this is what the industry wants too to lower their fixed cost.

At the present time however, the cell phone internet idea is far from real usefulness because your wireless router even barely keeps your computer connected. Cell phones are way less strong in wireless internet handling than laptops, so if people are still yelling about stability of wireless internet, how can your little cell phone predominate the limited resource. Especially if you are just a home user who knows nothing about tweaking, setting priority, blah blah. Furthermore, the security system of wireless internet system is complicated. The cell phones are still kind of naive to use security systems where you need to log in over the wireless internet etc.

But in the near future, the technology is only going to get better. Opera Mini on the phone and built in Wi-Fi card will be able to work as fine as the ones on computer. (Some work for hardware and software engineers to do I guess. And we really like things that work ! ) Then at a hotspot, it’s not only the matter of calling for free, you should be able to have the whole internet at hand. Battery life will be a practical problem. It is still true with some of the laptops when using wireless internet, the battery goes down pretty fast and exhaust within a few hours. I don’t think I need to stress what it means to have the internet at hand: you get your mails, you can instant chat, video chat etc, etc (I wonder how Research in Motion is going to react losing its blackberry “special features” to the internet.).

A little bit of my philosophy here: things that are compatible and open (in certain ways) develop faster. Like the dominance of microsoft: it’s not because it’s how user-friendly or advanced technology-wise, it’s just that it made itself a platform that program runs on. Similarly, in the war of push-email and wireless internet, when every other company is investing in the spread and develop of Wi-Fi internet, RIM cannot survive just with its older technologies. My advice is: RIM or any other company excels by offering the best integration cell phones with wireless internet.

The process is not simple however. At the bottom line we need a browser, an email client, a video conference software (like skype? or Gizmo?). They have to stand out. Technology has gone a little bit out of control considering how complicated it’s getting. I’m glad that we have all these things we can configure, but I think the success lays at the point of balance where you can get something to basically work in 5 mins. then slowly discover “oh, cool, I can do this and this”.(Or you can have your engineers setup everything but the cost and the practice is another story.) And this is a point that many things have missed.

So the standard I set for a cell phone: good battery life like blackberry phones usually offer, a good interface with good control (definitely touch screen and qwert keyboard for good reasons), the 3 sorts of internet softwares I mentioned and extension ability to add little things like a stock market report receiver etc, which should not halt the system in anyway, excellent integration with the internet (which the phone does but the user doesn’t have to be part of, and this is where the innovations can/should be done). And I think that should be a perfect cell phone in 50 years time.