What will tomorrow's smart phones look like?

The next-generation smart phone will project HD movies, replace digital still cameras, pack more than 100GB memory and be more user-friendly. That was the prediction of Marcelo Vieira, general manager of the smart phone business at Texas Instruments Inc.
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Vieira, who oversees TI's OMAP applications processor group, was speaking at Wireless Ventures. Just down the road at its Cupertino headquarters, Apple Inc. gave a more short term picture of the smart phone's future as it previewed its iPhone 3.0 software.

Smart phones remain the fastest growing segment of the cell phone business, but the downturn has revised the definition of what that means.

"A year ago I would have said more than half a billion (50 crore) smart phones will ship in 2011," said Vieira. "Now the reality is at the close of 2008 about 160 million (16 crore) smart phones shipped, and we may see that double by 2012," he said.

Asked to describe the smart phone of 2012, Vieira said TI's recently announced 45nm application processor could power such devices. The OMAP4 will support 1080-progressive video encode and decode at 30fps, 20Mpixel still images and graphics an order of magnitude better than what's available today.

He also demonstrated TI's miniature digital light processing module that lets a mobile device project a half VGA image at 6- to 7lumens. Samsung has said it will ship a cell phone in Korea this year using the component. TI was one of a handful of companies showing mobile projectors at Consumer Electronics Show.

"As we pack more and more features in these handheld devices, you are still limited by the small screen, so I predict this [projector] will appear in a majority of phones over time," he said.

The roll out of mobile projectors will parallel the earlier integration of still cameras into cell phones, he added. "Today, I still carry a digital camera, but a few years from now I will not," he added, referring to some phones that are already including 12Mpixel cameras with one-second shot-to-shot delays.

iPhone 3.0
The Apple iPhone has pointed the way for tomorrow's smart phones in two ways, Vieira said. Desktop-class browsing experiences and ease of use will also become common in future handsets, he said.

"To use a smart phone today, you have to be pretty smart but that will change as the level of intuitiveness grows. Apple has set the bar," he said.

Raising that bar a few inches, Apple released to registered developers a beta version of its iPhone OS 3.0 March 17.

The new version includes a global clipboard to cut and paste information between applications, just like a desktop computer. It also sports an ability to let applications create paid services within their software, leveraging Apple's App Store. In addition, developers can now create global notifications so users can be informed of changes in one app while running another one.

The version 3.0 includes more than 100 new features and 1,000 new applications programming interfaces. The software will be available in iPhones and iPod Touch devices this summer.

Other new features include support for stereo Bluetooth, parental controls for TV shows, automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots and shake-to-shuffle—a feature for mobile games that leverages the product's built-in accelerometer.

Apple said its App Store has more than 25,000 applications now available in 77 countries. The company said it has sold more than 3 crore iPhone and iPod touch devices to date.

"Apple has done it well, but their focus has been on a couple of devices and one OS," said TI's Vieira. "One of the biggest challenges for the industry is how do you build an app not limited to one device, or OS and still deliver a high quality experience," he said.

TI rolled out a new version of its developers system recently that can run Symbian, Windows, Android and other versions of Linux. It aims to help developers quickly test apps across a range of software environment.

Earlier in the day, a T-Mobile executive said the carrier ideally wants to limit the number of runtime environments it has to support to Android, the Blackberry environment and maybe one other. To date, the Android environment has about 2,300 mobile apps, less than ten per cent of what's available for the iPhone.

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BY Rick Merritt
Source：EE Times

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