Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Phone as Home Computer?
theodp writes "Citing millions of Japanese consumers as proof it can work, MIT's Philip Greenspun hasissued a call for comments on his hypothesis that the mobile phone can function as a home computer for a substantial number of consumers if it's paired up with an appliance that drives the phone from a full-size keyboard and display."
Perhaps I'm just being thick, but this seems like another variation on the "make the PC an appliance" theme. The idea certainly has some appeal, but past efforts toward this sort of goal (e.g., the MailStation, WebTV) have had only modest success, if that.
One other thing: I am slightly skeptical of the use of Japan as a demonstration that a Cell phone can catch on as a general-purpose computing device. The Japanese writing system is complicated: two different sets of ideograms plus a set of phonetic symbols. I think this may mean that the difference in input speed between a regular keyboard and the phone keypad is considerably less in Japanese than in a language that uses the [Western] alphabet. (If you have ever seen a Japanese word processor, I think you'll understand what I'm getting at.)
Prefer Linux? Well, maybe check out the Nokia 770 internet tablet. Despite the "Nokia" label, it's not a phone, but a compact internet tablet that you can use with a compatible Bluetooth phone or a WiFi connection. The screen is 800 pixels wide, which is pretty good for web browsing. I'm pretty sure that they'll be a keyboard available for it in 2006 when it gets its first software update. The Nokia 770 should be hitting the streets very soon for a rumoured $300 or so.
Of these two competing products, the Nokia is perhaps the more interesting as it has a modular approach and it means that you don't have to lug a half-pound handset around just to make calls. Just how much access to get to the Linux innards is unknown, but really it's just an appliance rather than a full blown computer. You can betcha that I'm going to get one though!
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I have heard that it's actually faster to type japanese words on a cell than english words on a keyboard. Can someone confirm or refute this?
Not true. Typing is always faster on a keyboard. Anyway, typing Japanese on a cell phone is WAY faster than typing English (or other roman-alphabet language).
I'm Spanish, living in Japan, and I have a Spanish friend who's living here too. When we send email to each other from our phones we mostly use Japanese instead of Spanish (even though Spanish is our mother tongue) because it's so fast to type.
The reason is that when you type Japanese on a phone's keypad you type syllabes (or phonemes) instead of individual letters. And most words are composed by 2-3 phonemes, so typing a full sentence in Japanese often takes as few keystrokes as a single word in English.
However, when typing Japanese on a keyboard you actually type the letters that compose each individual phoneme. Or at least on the standard input method that most people use. In Windows and many X-Windows input methods it is possible to switch to a mode where each key is assigned a phoneme instead of a single letter. In theory you should be able to type VERY fast in that mode, but in practice you have to learn another keyboard layout, so nobody cares.
My site
Seems to me the main problem is the number of problems. You have the input method problem, the screen size problem, the compatable periferal problem, the external storage problem and the performance problems.
None of which apparently affect Japan, where mobile phones are the primary method of accessing the internet and personal data.
It's really difficult to understate how much more advanced the Japanese mobile phone industry is than that of any other country (and especially the United States). The problem for the rest of the world that's trying to catch up is that the mobile phone culture has grown in Japan around the idea of the phone as a central hub, whereas it's the opposite in other countries. Learning to use a mobile phone as hub for those of us in the US is like learning a second language. It's not intuitive for us like it is for them.
But if you want to look at some of the solutions they've come up with for the problems you've listed, they're easily apparent for all to see. The input issue is something that's both better and worse in Japan... typing on a computer keyboard is hardly all that fast to begin with there (you need to type the hiragana, then select kanji combinations from long lists for every word), so mobile phones are not really much different. Screen sizes there are simply bigger than they are here, as is screen quality. 3.2" QVGA screens are pretty much standard. Phones sell based on speed and interface so that's not an issue either (phones with poor interfaces - such as those from Motorola and Nokia - simply don't sell). And external storage is handled in the same way it's handled here - offsite or on a separate PC.
People do use computers in Japan. But for most people, mobile phones handle 90% of everything they could want to do with a PC. Email, web browsing (via high-speed networks), game playing, etc. There are a huge number of mobile-oriented web sites in Japan - in fact, you really can't design a site in Japan without having a mobile version these days that duplicates all of the functions and most of the look and feel of the real thing. And I'm not just talking single HTML pages, I'm talking about sites that offer real web services via mobile. So there's no dearth of content. Many phones also have TV tuners, almost all phones have java, and most phones have 3D graphics capabilities.
One other thing, which I think is both interesting and important: their cell phones often do more than most "smart" phones in the US, yet they both cost less than US market cell phones and they are not PDA-based. Their smart-phones grew from the cell phone form factor, whereas ours have grown from the PDA. So we pay more and our phones are less stylish - and style is a huge deal in Japan. (I also think it's a bigger deal here than manufacturers seem to think, and it's one reason why smart-phones here don't sell as well as they could. Put smart-phone type capabilities in a RAZR-like package with a QVGA screen and a 3 megapixel camera and sell it for $300-$400 and you'll sell a crazy number of units. That's what the Japanese industry does.)
It's still debateable whether it works better to have one big laptop that does 100% of what you want, or whether it's better to have a PC at home to act as a storage and sync device and then to have a bunch of smaller devices (phone, iPod, Game Boy or PSP) to do everything else. In Japan, it's kind of important to have a very small device that you can use on the train to do things like check email and browse the web. You really can't use a laptop, nor do most people want to lug one around. And as an extension of that, over time the carriers and phone manufacturers have added other entertainment-related functions to help people get through those down times.
I don't know that the culture is ever going to change here, and I don't know that it should either. There are fewer things people really need to use cell phones for here - the train situation, where you've got about one square foot of standing space
1. Many high profile sites and publications (like Popular Science) gave step-by-step instructions on unlocking your hiptop/Sidekick and where to get third-party apps.
2. An application called Hiptones allowed you to add your own ringtones and circumvent T-Mobile's catalog cash cow. T-Mobile is (or was) the only provider to intentionally disable loading external ringtones via email, so the only other way to get them was to purchase them. The author of Hiptones began selling it, and this made Danger and T-Mobile very unhappy. The author and Danger quickly reached an "agreement" where Hiptones would no longer be sold or available at all, and shortly thereafter, Danger was no longer freely giving out developer keys.
I'm really tempted to blame T-Mobile and the other carriers here. From my experiences with the Danger crew, it seems like they'd really like the hiptop to be as open as possible, but the carriers are insisting that they lock it down to pad their precious pockets.
Take a look at Dasher
the words just sort of flow in from the right of the screen and you pick the letter that you want... it makes guesses at what word you want next, and those letters appear bigger making it easier to catch them...
it sounds strange but it's really amazingly easy to use.