Better innovate than never

Looking at the Smartphone, you have to be struck by one thing: it's a phone. It has to be; people know how to buy and sell phones. But is that really the right way to design it?

Inventions, first time around, are always unsuitable things. They tend to replace an earlier device or system simply by changing one component, sometimes trivially, sometimes in a brilliant breakthrough.

The rest of the system remains as it was; it's hardly revolutionary.

Examples of this are all too easy to find, historically. The first cars, for example, replaced the horse with an engine. The driver stayed out front in an open box, while the passengers, as was right and proper, sat in comfort in a room with curtains.

Or you can go up to Bronte country and look at the old mill museums, and see a room full of antiquated spinning machinery.

Every part of it is exactly as it was before the machinery replaced the human who pulled the thread out and then walked back, winding it up; the person has been replaced by a spindle on a wheel.

There's a good reason for this. If you're innovating and you create a product with five new features, it's almost guaranteed that one of them will be a dud.

The Apple Newton was the first handheld computer. It was too big (nobody had a pocket that size) and it tried handwriting recognition which, mostly, failed.

Two dud features, and all of its other wonderful innovations were for nothing. One step at a time seems to be the way to go.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that the result is what people will want. Just as, eventually, I doubt whether people will want a phone.

What you need from a personal data appliance is something that's compact and lightweight, with a good clear display, an easy control interface, an audio channel, and data storage - plus connectivity and, above all, electric power.

It's been obvious since the first days of the Bluetooth wireless technology that you don't have to put all these features in one box.

In fact, it was obvious long before Bluetooth. I can remember IBM releasing a technology which used human skin as a conductor to send high-frequency transmissions from one device to another.

The inventor used them to monitor athletes on inline skates, which contained the electronics to pick up their heart and breathing rates and so on, before transmitting the data to a monitor.

If you want to see the sort of thing I mean, a visit to www.ixi.com will tell you all you need to know.

Ixi is a company in Israel that is trying to take phone design to the next stage, by taking each of the individual functions out and building a separate device.

We already have the Bluetooth headset, of course, which frees you from having to hold the phone up to your ear. But this makes it pretty hard to read the display, or push the buttons.

But it goes further: you can have a much lighter 'phone' if it doesn't have to have a battery big enough to power a GSM phone and an Xscale Arm processor.

And if the battery is just a battery and a wireless transceiver with a processor in it, you could hide it out of sight. You could clip it to your belt or a shoulder holster, or perhaps it could even be your belt.

A typical cellphone battery weighs a few grammes, but you could have a battery weighing almost a pound if it was spread around your waist.

Then, it would be able to include GSM and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless transceivers, plus a computing engine capable of quite fierce processing; and the device you held in your hand would only need enough battery power to illuminate the display and record key presses.

But the question then arises: would you carry that battery with you everywhere? Or should the phone have some ability to operate, as a phone at least, without being near the big power source?

Probably, yes. How big a display should it have? What features should be left off? These are questions everybody can answer; and no two answers will be the same.

Only when everybody does answer, and we see which way the mass market votes, will we know. For that to happen, there has to be a choice of different designs. Some will be integrated, others modular; some modules will be combined, others separate. Some will become part of your household network; others will be part of the GSM network.

Full-sized keyboards may work with some of these devices, when they are near each other, while some full-sized displays will pick up transmissions, and switch. Some will even become credit cards, with the SIM card being used to pay bills at vending machines.

What we can be sure of is that the phone of the future won't look like the current Smartphone design. The Stinger project has given us something much, much better than the early Nokia 9210 bricks.

But it still isn't what we'll take for granted in the year 2010, any more than today's PC looks like the mainframes of the 1960s.

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