DECEMBER 12, 2006
Info Tech
By Kenji Hall
DoCoMo's Betting on the All-in-One Gizmo
The telecom's VP, Takeshi Natsuno, wants to build a single wireless device to fill a consumer's every need. HP and others call that unrealistic
Packing every possible whiz-bang feature into an ultra-thin, portable, electronic device seems to be the standard business model for cell phone makers (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/4/06, "Upward Mobility").
These days your handset can do everything from sending e-mail and surfing the Web to watching videos and pinpointing your location on the planet. And yet it's hardly the ideal all-in-one gizmo, and some say it never will be.
Don't mention that notion around Takeshi Natsuno. The 41-year-old vice-president at NTT DoCoMo (DCM), Japan's No. 1 wireless carrier, is on a mission to create the ultimate, all-purpose, mobile device. His strategy is to give consumers just about every technology imaginable in a palm-sized phone. "There's no single killer application. Some will want games, others music," he says. "That's why you have to offer as much as possible."
The Almighty Tool It's hard to dismiss Natsuno. He was behind DoCoMo's groundbreaking i-mode data service for cell phones, which has been licensed to telcos in 16 countries. It was Natsuno who pressed Sony (SNE) to make its FeliCa technology—a tiny radio on a chip—available for phones.
That has turned handsets in Japan into contact-free commuter passes, credit cards, and even keys to open the front door at home. In the not-too-distant future, projectors for virtual displays and keyboards could replace the real thing, making for a more compact package. "I'm trying to make the phone into the almighty tool," he says.
In the tech world, those are fighting words. Most tech makers will tell you that there's no way to create one portable device that doesn't cut corners. In fact, most people are used to toting around more than one —a cell phone or PDA, a music player, and maybe a laptop. That's not likely to change, says Pieter Knook, Microsoft's (MSFT) senior vice-president in charge of mobile and embedded devices. "The single device that does it all will always have a compromise in its capabilities," he says.
Staying Specialized Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) would agree. They envision a future in which we rely on a handful of devices that each do one thing well, not an all-in-one solution. The key is what Philip McKinney calls a "personal wireless gateway device." About the size of a thin stack of business cards, the gateway would contain every radio and antenna you would need to connect to any short- or long-range wireless network found around the globe. And it would fit easily into a pocket.
The upshot: "If I take radios out of devices I can get PCs and laptops to be unbelievably small because I take a huge amount of complexity out of it and I get much longer battery life," says McKinney, who is vice-president and chief technical officer of HP's personal-systems group. The same goes for other devices such as flexible displays for watching movies or playing games and e-checkbooks for paying bills and storing grocery lists.
How many devices are consumers willing to carry? In HP's scenario, the magic number is three. In DoCoMo's, that's two too many. "I want to consolidate everything into one. If you have three things, five things, you'll forget something," Natsuno says.
A Multitude of Designs Of course, the debate rages on. Look no further than your neighborhood electronics store for evidence of tech makers' divergent views. Cell phones, for instance, already come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, from the ultra slim, bare-bones phone, which would require a user to carry many more devices, to chunky minicomputers with keyboards, which dare to challenge the PC.
Recently, Japan's NEC (NIPNY) has been showing off its "P-ism," a prototype device comprised of five pen-shaped units that work individually or together as phone, virtual keyboard, projector, camera, and credit card.
There's more variety on the way. By next year, Samsung Electronics (SSNGY) plans to release a handset in Korea that can switch between cellular frequencies, Wi-Fi, and WiMax, a long-range, broadband network. Consumers will be able to use it to talk over their cellular network or change to Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology.
Don't Hold Your Breath For those who don't gab much, there are alternatives such as Sony's mylo, a Wi-Fi device that can do instant messaging, Web browsing, and VOIP (minus the phone bill); or the company's PlayStation Portable gaming console, which uses a wireless link so users can surf the Net, play online games, and even locate other PSPs in the vicinity. Microsoft's new Zune music player also relies on wireless connectivity to allow users to swap songs and data with each other.
That's a lot messier than tech oracle Natsuno would like. "My dream is to travel abroad with only my phone—no PC, no wallet, no plastic credit cards," he says. With the world still divided between competing cellular technologies, Natsuno's dream doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. There's also the more pressing problem of sinking profits at home.
By the March, 2007, end of the fiscal year, the company's operating income is forecast to fall 2.7% to around $6.9 billion on a 0.7% uptick in sales to $41 billion. But in the long term, Natsuno's grand ideas could help DoCoMo make the transition from a telco to a "lifestyle service provider." "If we succeed, DoCoMo won't be a telecom company anymore," he says. And it all hinges on his hope that the one-gadget-does-all idea wins.
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