The Hindu : National : Tomorrow’s mobile technology? How ‘touching’

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Sunday, Jun 24, 2007
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Tomorrow’s mobile technology? How ‘touching’

Anand Parthasarathy

Screens with ’touch’, instant business card readers coming soon

BANGALORE:

Bangalore: A hungry foreigner, in a fix about what to order in a Beijing restaurant, points his mobile phone at the menu, printed in Chinese. The built-in camera, grabs a snap of the text; processes it in seconds and displays it on the phone screen — after translation into English. It uses an 8000-dish menu dictionary that works for both Chinese and Japanese.

A journalist flips on a ‘Mobile Publishing’ cellphone, specially created for media professionals. It can be used for recording interviews; turning the spoken words into text; grabbing still and video pictures, integrating them into the story he types on a full-sized clip-on keyboard, and transmitting the whole package to the news desk by high-speed Internet. If he is an online publisher, he can also do a full layout of the story and load it on a Web page.

Searchable directories

Another mobile phone user has just exchanged business cards with a visitor. She switches on the scanner built into the phone. It focusses on the card, grabs a picture and turns the information into text that can be read on the screen. It then files the name, address, telephone number and email address into searchable directories.

These are just three ideas among dozens, being pursued by researchers at the various global development centres of the biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia — and unveiled at its annual technology showcase in Singapore last week. This correspondent got to try out yet another technology still in an advanced state of development at the mobile major’s Helsinki (Finland) base.

Called “Haptikos” (after the Greek ‘haptos,’ ‘to touch’), it enables a ‘virtual’ keyboard, the kind one taps on the flat liquid crystal screen of a mobile phone, to provide an amazingly realistic sensation of a physical key depression. It holds out the hope that tomorrow’s phones can do away with mechanical keys — the screen will double up as a very ‘touching’ keypad.

“The mobile is the Internet,” explained Nokia’s Finland-based Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera at a briefing for The Hindu on the sidelines of the two-day event. “We have to help the world’s two b illion who own phones reach out to the four billion who don’t. We have to take the Internet to new places... to people who have never had the chance to own or use a personal computer.”

In China, Nokia just launched a mobile education programme — to teach English via cellphones. In India, it tied up with Infomedia to provide search capability with local content to mobile phones.

Meanwhile, technology already available has enabled a Korean company, InziSoft, to build on Nokia’s S60 software platform to create a business card reader that almost all camera-phones, not just Nokia models, can deploy. The BizReader was a big draw at the Singapore showcase.

Other new releases last week, in Nokia’s N Series, featured a built-in Global Positioning System capability for satellite-based location and direction finding: now you no longer require investing in costly GPS receivers. Also unveiled were phones, compatible with the new Digital Video Broadcast-Hand-held or DVB-H standard.

This allows them to receive mobile TV broadcasts which have commenced recently in four Asian countries: Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and from Doordarshan in India.

“Internet Tablet”

Nokia also launched the N 800 “Internet Tablet” — a hand-held Net access device that can latch on to a WiFi network.

But it will have no phone capability — unless one harnesses Internet telephony also known as Voice over Internet Protocol.

The world’s number one mobile phone maker, offering a device that can’t make calls without help from the Internet? That’s the ultimate irony of the Net era!

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