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The Age of the Smart Cell Phone
12/29/2005
As text messaging overtakes cell networks, converged devices emerge and e-mail moves to the keypad.
Less than 10 years after becoming a critical workday tool for most of us, college e-mail may be on the verge of becoming yesterday’s technology. In fact, in the business world, analysts and others predict that the use of instant messaging will surpass e-mail sometime next year—if not sooner. The push will come faster on college campuses, where new consumer-side technologies often find their first footholds. Any college administrator can attest to the popularity of IM-ing.
Text Messaging Changes Everything
But an even more compelling next communications wave is text messaging, now hugely popular with junior high and high school students. Although instant messaging can be conducted over cell phones, it’s more commonly accomplished between computers. With its clever shorthand for just about everything, however, text messaging was born to exploit cell phones. As any parent of a teen will tell you, a cell phone’s tiny 10-key pad is no communication obstacle to an adept text messenger. In Europe and Asia, text messaging has been rampant for years. That’s partly because the cost structure encourages it: Texting in Europe is usually cheaper than making a phone call. In the US, cell phone plans that sell huge buckets of voice minutes erase that benefit.
Despite that, text messaging is starting to move onto US college campuses, where seniors don’t tend to use it as much as first-year students do. And as text messaging rolls across college campuses, the importance of cell phones can hardly be overstated. Worldwide sales of mobile phones just passed the two-billion-phone mark, headed for three billion by 2009. Actually, that number will probably be reached earlier, since the two-billion mark was achieved well before previous predictions.
The Devices Converge
Not surprisingly (given Steve Job’s ability to drive trends of late), Apple’s cellphone/iPod combo points to a growing reality: the convergence of small wireless devices and big computing power. As processing chips and memory get smaller, faster, and cheaper, more and more, cell phones turn into full-fledged computers.
Schools like Wake Forest University (NC) are finding ways to embrace this trend. The private liberal arts institution is currently trying out converged Pocket PC devices in a pilot project involving 120 students and staff. Each student was given a Pocket PC this past fall, with the option of cell phone service. Pocket PCs, made by companies such as Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, essentially combine high-end wireless PDA functions and cell phones in a single device. The pilot devices come with instant and text messaging, plus software.
According to Wake Forest CIO Jay Dominick, the study is beginning to suggest that a PDA-plus-phone is a far more compelling device for students than a mere e-mail account or standard PDA device.
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