Why Bill Gates is right, for once

THE MOST exciting technology being pumped out today is not coming out of Apple nor any of the PC manufacturers - not that PC manufacturers have had anything really exciting since the original Pentium boxes hit the street with USB 1.0 onboard. Since then, chips have become faster and now they've gone dual-core and/or power lean, but there's nothing of a gasping breakthrough. Sure, there's a group of people that are ga-ga over 64 bits, but those tend to be the IT server slaves and the eXtreme gamers.

Let's consider that the most "exciting" news of the last year was Apple shipping machines with dual-core Intel chips. Exciting for Apple worshippers because they have to accept The Devil (Intel) in their machines in order to get a speed boost. Exciting for Intel because it has managed to secure a vendor for the next three years until Steven Jobs wakes up one day in the future and says "Well, Intel just doesn't do it for me." Anyone want to start a pool on when Apple switches to AMD processors or an ARM-derivative?

Instead, the leading edge of high-tech is being played out in rapid evolutionary fashion in the cellular phone world. In Korea, the expected lifetime of a phone is anywhere from six to nine months and consumers aren't shy to shell out up to $600 for the latest models. Here in the ever-so-slow States, 18 months was the expected lifetime, but that's going down to 12 to 14 months, depending on who you talk to.

Further, cell phone service providers want you to have the latest and greatest phones with all the whistles on them, like multi-megapixel cameras for still and video delivery, web browsers, and broadband connectivity to link it all together. Data-heavy services translate into new ways they can make money because the market for making coin from ring tones will ultimately level off.

Next-generation cell phones also provide another advantage to carriers they don't talk about much in front of their customers. Faster processing and "special sauce" firmware code can squeeze better performance out of existing radio spectrum, translating to more users out of each cell tower and less cash needed on network upgrades.

For example, take a look at the $250 list price Samsung MM-A920 sold by Sprint. It's got an embedded MP3 (OK, no big deal), a 262K-color screen (very nice), a built-in 1.3-megapixel camera that can also do video clip capture, EV-DO capability, Bluetooth (OK, no big deal, but still nice), a TransFlash slot that can hold a tiny chap capable of holding up to 512MB, and a USB 2.0 connector for data transfers when I don't want to use Bluetooth (i.e. all the time).

Compare those specs to my first digital camera - a 1 MP Kodak that listed at $1,000 brand new with some sad amount of memory or anything prior to my first Pentium boxes - the 2006 phone smokes them in spades. While flash-based MP3 players may be cheaper, you can do a heck of a lot more with a phone and some phones are already threatening to catch up with the storage capacities of MP3 players by incorporating sub-inch hard drives. Plus the device has nearly as much broadband capability as my first generation cable service. Heck, it's nearly as cheap as the $100 I paid for my first cable modem.

Power is another area where the cell phone has most other devices beat hands-down, since you can easily recharge it out of a wall outlet, a car outlet, off a relatively small piece of solar panel, and in a pinch off an AA battery. When you move to the Third World, recharging such a device - already optimised to conserve power to begin with - doesn't require 12 volt car batteries or turning a crank a couple of hundred times for an hour of compute time.

And speaking of the Third World, a low-cost cell phone is cheap enough and durable enough already to handle most extremes, having been hardened to operate in environments around the world. Already cell phones have ended up generating new jobs and markets throughout Africa, ranging from giving fishermen a better way to sell their catch to innovative chaps that have set up "tree houses" in areas where cell phone coverage is marginal. You pay a small fee and climb up on a platform a couple of stories above the ground so you can get better coverage. The owner makes money, the customer has the money to spend because he has some work riding on the phone call, everyone is happy.

Bill Gates said that cell phones were a better way to go to introduce technology into low-income environments around the globe than the (still-mythical) $100 PC. Since he's got a multi-billion dollar foundation that's been studying how to help out the impoverished, he's not shooting from the hip. Of course, he might wish those phones all ran Windows Mobile, but that's an argument for another day. µ