Mobile Youth- The Perfect MobileOk, so enough about my bickering towards the carriers. Time to get into what I want this site to be about: the mobile youth and what it is we want to see. I hope for enough comments to shed light on what the masses think but I’ll start off by describing what I hope the market to offer in the next year or less.
First off I love my iPod and the digital music revolution that is has started. Most people don’t know that their phone can play mp3’s (if you’ve bought a phone in the last year it most likely does) but the problem here is memory. It’s great that my RAZR plays MP3’s and I can use that ability for ring tones but I’m looking for a full library of most of my music. Although I now have over 100 Gigabytes (GB) of music I really only need about 40GB, but 60 would be nice. Everyone in the mobile press has been rumoring about the iPhone for over a year now and it’s about time for it to come around. I’ll expect that by summer ‘07 we’ll see a 20GB (and hopefully 40GB) iPhone.
I also touched on my preference for digital photography in a previous post. People always talk to me about how 3 Mega Pixel (MP) is their minimum quality because that’s the quality you need to create good physical photos. I’ll agree with that if print was what you were taking pictures for. I used Ofoto (to create physical prints) a couple times because I was also attached to that medium of sharing pictures. Now I’ve moved onto a combination of mobile devices (a little bit) and (mostly) viewing them and sharing them on my laptop. My laptop has a nice GeForce graphics card which scales up to 1600×1200. To support these sizes I’ve found that a really good lens at 4MP or a decent 5MP camera does the trick.
We’re currently at the 2MP quality in high end phones, with 3MP cropping up here and there. By the end of the year most the VCAST phones will have 3MP quality and (hopefully) the very specialized camera centric phones will have 4MP by the summer of ‘07.
The last requirement for my perfect device is a decent network connection. The standard GPRS connections of late have been virtually unacceptable for any kind of real data traffic. The recent 3G service offered by Verizon’s VCAST is decent but certainly not enough for full web integration. I keep reading about the exciting combination of HSPDA (a high bandwidth, cell reach network) and city wide WiFi (San Francisco is coming…) If a phone is capable of one or both of these technologies, then we’ll finally be able to have the internet while mobile! This is extremely exciting and I’m not even going to try and guess the implications. Even Google, who is a partner in the SF deal, has said they would rather get the technology up, look at the traffic where possible and figure out how this is used.
If a device like this existed by next summer I’m sure it would run into the several hundreds, if not $1,000. Would I buy it? Probably not. But in reality I would expect that a device with at least two of the above and a part of the third to exist at a reasonable price by the Christmas of next year. Please feel free to use the comments page and tell me what I’m missing from your perfect device.
