Michael Platt's WebLog

I hate phones. I find it difficult to communicate on them so have never liked them and mobile phones even more so (“are you there? Sorry you’re breaking up”). Here at Microsoft in the UK we are issued with company mobiles and so I have had to use one. The standard issue is the Orange SPV E200 which, whilst being large enough to hold open a door J, actually has a mind numbing selection of features. Again I am not very interested in gadgetry but one of the advantages of the British public transport system is it gives you plenty of opportunity to investigate your phone’s features and I have to say I have been really impressed with some of the things that you can usefully do.

First of all there was email (In the beginning.. ). Whilst it is not practicable to reply to email on the phone (unlike a PDA) it allows you to delete the stuff you are not interested in and to have a quick look at anything that looks important. Sad git that I am I actually sleep with the phone on my pillow and when I wake up check my email in the middle of the night!

When synching email it also synchs contacts and diary entries from outlook which is really great, I just ensure outlook is kept up to date and then the information is always correct in the phone. It means I am getting very careful about putting addresses and phone contacts correctly in outlook so I don’t have to have a piece of paper with details on as they are in the phone.

Then there is the camera. The one in the SPV is not desperately good quality but there are a number of phones coming on the market which have 3M pixels, quite as good as digital cameras. In fact forecasts for next year show phone cameras outselling digital cameras. I must admit I take my phone with me when out walking etc and quite often take snaps of interesting things I see.

Next there is the internet / browser capability. Whilst this works on a PDA (I have booked a plane flight on the train before!) it is only really useful for wap sites on the phone, but these can be very valuable.

The phone also has the ability to give you your location by triangulation from the cell base stations; this is then displayed on a map. Very handy when lost and, using the Microsoft Location Service, handy for finding out which traffic jam your colleagues are stuck in. Of course there are all sorts of privacy implications but one of the people here in the office is on the beta and it was quite impressive. The actual accuracy can be a bit spotty depending on reception but in areas where there are a lot of stations it can be remarkably accurate.

I had a Garmin phone and GPS system in the US which was incredibly accurate and you could phone it up and ask it where it was. I used to leave it in the car so that if the car was stolen I could phone up the phone and find out where the car was! It was an incredibly valuable tool when hiking in the wilderness, I used to just leave the GPS on in my backpack on the way out and it plots a “breadcrumb” path on the display. On the way back if I was lost I could just get it out and look for the breadcrumbs. It was also nice to know that if I was overdue due to an accident then someone could just phone up the phone and find out where I was. It was remarkable where the analogue cell signals covered too (unlike the digital which was pathetic). I notice that most of the accidents on places like Mount Rainer are now called in by mobile phone.

I look forward to the day when GPS is installed as standard in phones, I thought that this would take up too much real estate but someone pointed out to me a phone that just had a very basic receiver and actually sent the data back to a web service on the internet to do the processing and location which meant the hardware could be very simple. Very neat.

Bluetooth is another up and coming technologies on the phones and seems to have some interesting community possibilities, not that I have tried them myself!

There are now a number of really useful programs that you can download onto the phone too, a couple I really like are the RAC Trafficmaster which shows the real time speeds on major roads (it looks like a red rash on London in the rush hour!) and the Tube program which tells you which route to take and most importantly how long it will take on the Underground. Finally there is of course the pocket streets from MS which provides full mapping capability

So phones now have a huge amount of functionality and are also decreasing in size; Orange have just announced a new, much smaller version of the SPV, the C500. Whilst all this functionality is impressive the really interesting thing is what happens when you start combining the functions together.

For instance it would be great to have the appointment location from outlook download into pocket streets showing where you were going to. Similarly if the location service updated pocket streets then you would know where you were.

Some of this cross functionality combination is already happening, MMS allows you to integrate and send a picture and text as a MMS message or email allowing you to take a picture, select the recipients from your address book and send it to them with just a few button presses. Similarly the location service does integrate with the internet to give you your local restaurants, banks, petrol stations ect.

Suffice to say that the possibilities are very broad and interesting so I got hold of the local Mobile phone expert Paul Foster and he gave me a quick overview of how it all hung together in the phone. I have loaded down the relevant SDK’s and am going to have a go at joining up some of these pieces of functionality. I will let you know how I get on.