You can throw away your bluetooth dongles and data cables connecting mobile with PCs, because I just had a neat idea. We should develop a 'Mobile Phone Anywhere' kind of application that will give access to your mobile phone (and its applications) over any net connected PC (and maybe TV as well, why not?) and let you use those applications. The connection between your cell phone and the PC will be over Internet connection (cell phone connected through GPRS or EDGE or Wifi to the public Internet) to the PC (or indeed to a TV connected to net). This is like PC Anywhere application of early Internet days whereby you accessed your net connected PC over a telnet connection.
You might ask whey we require such an application when our mobile phone is with us all the time. Correct, it is with you all the time. But every time you need to use stuff installed or saved on your cell phone you have to connect it via your data cable or through your bluetooth dongle. You are not going to carry dongles with you everywhere ... are you? And you certainly will not have a PC machine at an airport let you install a bluetooth dongle just so that you could synchronize your cell phone with the PC.
With this ‘Mobile Mobile’ application, you have a device that is mobile in real world as well in virtual world (cyberspace).
This cellphone anywhere application will seamlessly synchronize stuff between your mobile phone and PCs/TVs. This sort of application could have a major impact on FMC as well. Imagine if I am on an IM session (or even a voice call) with someone on my mobile. I turn on my PC and continue the session/call. The call/session is simply extended from mobile to PC (additional IP leg) and that should not create any substantial overheads. If the gsm-to-gsm call is further extended from cell phone to PC, it is over IP and you have a flat per month data plan. So there won’t be any further costs attached. This can potentially also save you from investing in handover technologies like UMA and VCC. The key however is to enable all applications including voice to be accessed remotely. I have come across technologies that let you extend a gsm-to-gsm call over to gprs dynamically, but that would be too complicated. The easiest thing to do is to look at the PC Anywhere architecture and work with the handset vendors for the appropriate APIs.
Mobile Mobile will be like working on two computers on the same LAN sharing files and applications. I guess data and other multimedia Internet applications would be more suitable rather than voice itself because voice is still largely a legacy technology not open to third party developers. If however you develop this application, you will have all handset makers want to bundle your application with their handsets.
Other interesting stuff you could do with Mobile Mobile:
- You could have multiple users per cell phone using its applications from PCs, TVs, and the device itself. You could have multiple ‘individual personal accounts’ on the same mobile device.
- If you forget your cell phone at home and you have some important data on it you want share with your boss, do not worry …. you can access your cell phone from your office. No need to get paranoid about having your mobile phone with you all the time.
- And I am now getting late for a wedding I have to attend. So will revisit this again next time.