Qualcomm will reduce information overload with smarter smartphones

MOBILE CHIP DESIGNER Qualcomm's VP for EMEA, Colm Healy doesn't want to know what the weather is like during work hours. He says that what he wants from his phone is intelligence about what he needs at any given moment. This is the future, he claims, and it will help us be more productive with our time.

Healy says that what most people call 'information overload' should actually be called 'filter failure'. The way he explains it, the amount of information we have to wade through isn't going to go away, so the emphasis has to be on your handset to present relevant things to you, automatically, and Qualcomm is working on this.

"When you pick up your phone, what you want to do is context sensitive," he said. Although he doesn't care about weekday weather, that changes when he's off-duty. He said, "On a Saturday morning when I wake up, I want to know the weather, I want to know three or four things I can do with the kids and the weather in a very specific location."

So Qualcomm is working on software that will eventually be sold to firms likes HTC or Apple that can provide information based on your location, the day of the week and time of day, along with what your phone has learned about you and your habits since the first time you switched it on. It sounds like a bit of a privacy concern, but there's little doubt that busy people will live with the trade-off to get a more personalised phone experience.

And when asked if he thought Facebook would play a part, Healy said that Facebook uses a 'social graph'. It's very useful for relationships and helping you discover what your friends are doing and where they have been. Qualcomm, however, is working on an 'interest cube' that takes its cues from the time of day and your location.

Such interest and context sensitive applications are likely to interest the likes of Google, which could easily push information to your Android phone. This data could be a mix of search information, services it already provides and, of course, things advertisers have paid it to deliver.

We look forward to the day when our phone can tell us what the train network is like when we wake up and what lunch offers there are in our area at 1pm. And we're also excited by the inevitable uprising that will come when our phones realise what mundane bunch of boring sods we all are and decide to put a stop to it. µ