News

Carry your own GSM cell around in your pocket!

The personal mobile gateway - a pico-cell - can give the world a whole new generation of internet-linked devices when it ships late next year. We spent an hour with the inventors of the concept ...

Fancy a digital camera, Internet connected, for twenty quid? Or a jogging monitor, connected to your personal trainer who is monitoring you and 30 other fitness maniacs online - forty quid? A mobile cellphone for a tenner, or maybe, a phone which was just made as a souvenir from the Lord of the Rings premiere you went to?

It's all possible with a PMG - a personal mobile gateway; and thanks to startup software company Ixi, the PMG has now been designed, and will be on display early next year.

The trick is new technology. You have to throw away your normal GSM cellphone. In its place, you're going to have a little box, which controls all your other high-tech devices, but is tucked away out of sight in your pocket. It controls them without cables, naturally.

The link that turns all these components into a working system is the wireless technology called Bluetooth. Normally, Bluetooth is described as "just a cable replacement." It's more than that. This is a breakthrough in thinking.

"We don't just replace cables; it's the wrong approach; you have to look for ideas, for things which couldn't exist otherwise," said marketing VP, Edgar Auslander from startup software firm Ixi. "Take an example like the jogger with that Finnish belt which picks up your heart-beat; instead of just recording it, it transmits to your PMG, your personal mobile gateway, and that connects to your trainer."

Auslander isn't selling phones, or cameras, however. He's selling software.

His vision is one designed to appeal to the people who run mobile phone networks. They desperately need ways to persuade people like you and me to spend more money on mobile phone calls. But mobile phone calls are getting cheaper and cheaper; and the only way they can make more money, is to get us to use mobile Internet.

The trouble is, today's phones are just awful at Internet stuff.

The most popular phones are tiny, light weight, with small mono displays. They have to be. People don't like big, heavy phones, and they like the batteries to last as long as possible. But Internet devices need to have powerful, heavy batteries, to power their large, clear, colour displays and their always-on Internet connections. Otherwise, you can't read the data on their screens, or it takes forever to connect.

The PMG is, essentially, just a GSM phone, with a big battery, and nothing else. You don't carry it; you wear it. It can be a buckle on your belt, or a holster or anything like that which is capable of powering a GSM radio. It has no display, no microphone; no keyboard, no special features; just the ability to connect itself to the phone network, and the Internet. And to your other devices - message units, cameras, phones.

It either uses GSM data, or it uses GPRS. Maybe, one day, it will use third-generation UMTS networks. Or maybe some other technology. It doesn't matter where it picks up its Internet feed from - it is technology agnostic.

And your phone, isn't a phone at all. It's a throwaway audio device

which is not much more than a microphone, earpiece, and dial. To most people, there would be no way of telling that it wasn't a phone - until you moved it away from whoever had the PMG in their pocket.

You could have a pocket digital camera on your key-ring

- indistinguishable from a micro-Maglite, with virtually no storage (ram) in it at all. Instead, every time you took a picture, it would be transmitted to your PMG. Then, you could examine the picture on your message unit, and either transmit it to someone else, or delete it, or leave it in the PMG for later.

Auslander's company calls all these peripheral devices "sleeks" - low price, single function, very small, light. Also, very easy to design a new one.

"It takes a long time to develop a new mobile phone," Auslander says. "It's of the order of two years from first spec to final production. By contrast, you could produce a new 'sleek' in a few months. If a new movie gets popular, you can design a theme phone before the film goes on general release."

It's easy to design a 'sleek' because there's virtually nothing in it. Just a bluetooth link. There's no GSM phone module, with its powerful computer converting analogue signals into digital form, and back; no need to shelter the electronics from the pulsing "buzz" of GSM interference.

Also, if someone designs a new, improved GSM system - like, GPRS for always-on data - you don't have to throw the whole design away. Just the module which has become obsolete. If someone invents a new display technology, you just replace the display, not the whole phone.

The problem with most modern phone designers is that they are trying to design a universal phone, which does everything.

The result: huge phones like Nokia's 9210 or like Microsoft's Stinger design; the size of a personal digital assistant like a Compaq iPaq. You can't hold them up to your ear without getting tennis elbow. Alternatively, you get things with miniature displays, which you're supposed to be able to use to read whole Web pages off.

And because they can't be everything, they always leave something out. You can have an MP3 player phone, or a digital camera add-on, or an FM radio module component - but if you want something with all those, it becomes the size of a house. You'd never take it with you even if you were packing for a week - you'd leave it behind.

But if you camera is actually your key-ring, you'd always have it with you.

That's the Ixi vision; one in which the phone operators will be able to sponsor the cost of some of these items, in exchange for extra traffic.

One objection to their dream is that Bluetooth is necessary; and a lot of people have lost faith in Bluetooth. But the phone builders haven't; they're building Bluetooth phones like mad - and Ixi's devices aren't going to appear on the market for another year. Auslander says "October 2002" is when to expect the first. By then, there will be lots of Bluetooth devices around, not just phones.

The PMG and some sample sleeks will be on show in Cannes on February 19th at the 3GSM show. We'll see who goes for the idea. My money is on people like Orange and Vodafone and MMO2, but we'll find out soon enough.

The background: on Ixi's site.