Viewpoints

About This Technology

Portable electronic devices are transforming people's relationships with technology. Some 2 billion people carry cell phones with them, typically during most waking hours. Cell phones have become platforms for more than just voice and text communications. They also deliver an increasingly broad set of benefits, presenting entertainment and information, enhancing productivity, executing transactions, and supporting personal logistics by means of location-based applications. Yet at the same time, markets for noncellular handheld devices are growing rapidly. Hundreds of millions of people use portable music players and portable games—apparently carrying these devices wherever they go. Digital cameras and camcorders are extremely popular (despite the fact that so many cell phones include a camera). Portable navigation systems are experiencing rapid market growth. Some people have experienced emerging e-book readers and handheld "ultramobile" PCs; such niche products promise improved price-performance ratios and mass-market adoption in coming years. And other niche products could experience growth, including wearable computers, smart remote controls, and application-specific enterprise handhelds such as bar-code readers. And like smart phones that deliver increasingly broad sets of applications, noncellular handheld devices are expanding their roles, with portable music players playing games, global-positioning receivers carrying portable games, portable navigation devices playing multimedia, and so on. Thus, at the same time that booming markets for smart phones are delivering increasing benefits, remarkable growth is occurring in markets for noncellular handheld platforms, whose scope of benefits is also expanding.

Users, manufacturers, service providers, and content providers want to know how markets and technologies will develop in the future. In fact, technologies affect markets, and markets affect the types of technologies that develop. Some people believe that the typical future user will rely on a single convergent, multifunctional cellular device that delivers almost any application that a person could want. Other people believe that the typical future user will take advantage of several specialized handheld devices. Probably, different kinds of customers will adopt different collections of portable devices. Outcomes depend on individual preferences, technology progress, competition, the value propositions that suppliers offer, and other factors. Stakeholders can gain insight and reduce uncertainty by monitoring advanced R&D activities as well as business models and application trends. Competition among major brands in portable electronics—including Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Samsung, and Sony—drives technology developments and creates barriers to entry for other companies. Strategies of major mobile-services brands—including AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SK Telecom, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone, to name a few—strongly influence the selection of handsets that appear in retail outlets. The direction of progress depends on the way suppliers face key challenges, including inadequate batteries, awkward user interfaces, security vulnerabilities, high prices for cutting-edge gadgets, and performance that lags that of high-power electronics. Even regulatory developments have important effects on outcomes: The ways that governments assign spectrum, establish rules for consumer protection, and enforce intellectual-property rights affect technology developments such as network interfaces, operating systems, application-programmer interfaces, and digital-rights management. Although external forces influence technology evolution, stakeholders can never forget that technology-driven laboratory developments are the key enablers of innovation and that the devices we hold in our hands today were, not so long ago, engineering prototypes and R&D visions. These devices are the result of progress in key technologies such as antennas, batteries, communications protocols, displays, embedded systems, memory chips, radios, sensors, and software-development platforms.

Portable electronic devices will likely to continue disrupt business and social trends. Despite the relative maturity of cell-phone, portable-game, and other markets, ongoing developments drive the need to monitor potential disruptions and their implications for the future. Technology advances such as location capability, voice over Wi-Fi, mobile TV, embedded RFID readers, and 3-D graphics chips promise to expand the scope of applications for portable electronic devices. Growth in customer activities such as social networking, user-created content, business collaboration, massively multiplayer games, virtual worlds, and elearning promise to change the ways that people use portable electronic devices. Competitive developments—such as embedded Linux, Google's entry into cellular markets, Apple's entry into portable video, and the battle to establish market share among BlackBerry, Microsoft, Symbian, and other brands of software—promise to affect R&D priorities and change business rules for users and suppliers. And sooner or later, users may experience a number of more speculative developments—such as the emergence of wearable "life recorders" and personal black boxes, displays that roll up into a package the size of a pen or are embedded in eyeglasses, portable fuel cells that last for weeks without recharging, free-form spoken natural-language queries for information, and machine-vision software that recognizes people, places, and things and delivers annotated information about them. R&D planners, business developers, government organizations, and others need to prepare for the range of possible outcomes and their implications to set timely research agendas, select appropriate partners, and understand the type of future that may unfold as portable-electronics developments progress through the pipeline.