krug3r
26-10-2003, 12:52
Solomon Trujillo punched a button on his mobile phone. The display showed an e-mail inbox. Another button, and there was a calendar.
Coming soon, he said, will be a one-click gateway to the schedule for the high-speed Eurorail trains that run between London and Paris, where he spends most of his time. And he was looking forward to a day, not too far in the future, when voice-recognition technology would help him handle his e-mail while he's driving.
Trujillo, who once ran US West, a regional local phone giant, is now chief executive of Orange, one of the world's biggest mobile communications companies. Orange, a unit of France Telecom, is one of several companies around the world now selling devices that begin to validate the notion of the overpromised and, to date, underdelivered "smart phone," several models of which he brought to the European Technology Roundtable Exhibition in Berlin.
Orange, with some 45 million customers around the world, and its competitors are betting heavily on smart phones. As markets get saturated, they need to keep existing customers, for one thing.
And they have to justify the billions of dollars they paid for airwave rights to deploy third-generation, or 3G, mobile services. Even though they could lose their bet, they're helping to define tomorrow's communications style.
The key feature of these new phones is how they become almost a hybrid of the two major communications devices of the late 20th century, voice phones and personal computers. They're phones plus computing platforms, taking advantage of specialized network services, but not so complex as devices that they become as unwieldy as PCs or so simple that they can't be adapted to other uses.
For Trujillo, the mantra is simplicity. It has to be easy to use, intuitive and so compelling that customers will spend more time online - on today's and tomorrow's digital mobile networks. A wide range of applications will be available, but customers will choose a relatively small set that are specific to their own needs.
No longer will mobile carriers have to create large market segments that put people with differing needs into a single category, he said in an interview. Each customer will be "a segment of one."
It's a fairly compelling notion as far as it goes, and the phones he and others brought were early evidence that it could work. One was running Microsoft's latest handheld operating system, and it was a dramatic advance over earlier systems from the world's dominant software company, which has stumbled in this arena. Another, the just-released Treo 600, was from Palm. Still another, coming soon, will run the Symbian operating system from Europe.
All have to meet certain design specifications from Orange. There's a certain look and feel, and ease of use is a requirement.
Coming soon, he said, will be a one-click gateway to the schedule for the high-speed Eurorail trains that run between London and Paris, where he spends most of his time. And he was looking forward to a day, not too far in the future, when voice-recognition technology would help him handle his e-mail while he's driving.
Trujillo, who once ran US West, a regional local phone giant, is now chief executive of Orange, one of the world's biggest mobile communications companies. Orange, a unit of France Telecom, is one of several companies around the world now selling devices that begin to validate the notion of the overpromised and, to date, underdelivered "smart phone," several models of which he brought to the European Technology Roundtable Exhibition in Berlin.
Orange, with some 45 million customers around the world, and its competitors are betting heavily on smart phones. As markets get saturated, they need to keep existing customers, for one thing.
And they have to justify the billions of dollars they paid for airwave rights to deploy third-generation, or 3G, mobile services. Even though they could lose their bet, they're helping to define tomorrow's communications style.
The key feature of these new phones is how they become almost a hybrid of the two major communications devices of the late 20th century, voice phones and personal computers. They're phones plus computing platforms, taking advantage of specialized network services, but not so complex as devices that they become as unwieldy as PCs or so simple that they can't be adapted to other uses.
For Trujillo, the mantra is simplicity. It has to be easy to use, intuitive and so compelling that customers will spend more time online - on today's and tomorrow's digital mobile networks. A wide range of applications will be available, but customers will choose a relatively small set that are specific to their own needs.
No longer will mobile carriers have to create large market segments that put people with differing needs into a single category, he said in an interview. Each customer will be "a segment of one."
It's a fairly compelling notion as far as it goes, and the phones he and others brought were early evidence that it could work. One was running Microsoft's latest handheld operating system, and it was a dramatic advance over earlier systems from the world's dominant software company, which has stumbled in this arena. Another, the just-released Treo 600, was from Palm. Still another, coming soon, will run the Symbian operating system from Europe.
All have to meet certain design specifications from Orange. There's a certain look and feel, and ease of use is a requirement.